Campers. Off-roaders. Ufologists.
Seekers of all stripes have long flocked to Giant Rock, in the Mojave Desert just north of Landers.
“I just know there’s something majestic about that rock and that land, and it draws people there,” said Michelle Anderson, an Orange County radio show host who recently hosted a tour of Giant Rock for visitors to Contact in the Desert, a UFO. convention.
“Think of everything that rock has endured in terms of human history. They say ‘if these walls could talk.’ If these rocks could talk, what would they tell us?
Here are some highlights.
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1932: Making a home from a stone
With squatter rights and a mining claim, prospector Frank Critzer moves to Giant Rock, where he reportedly uses dynamite to dig out a living room and bedroom and build a wall of windows under the overhanging rock. The 20-meter-thick granite roof regulates the temperature, so that the house remains cool in summer and warm in winter.
Critzer gets to work digging roads and building an airport.
The Times reports that the eccentric, self-described recluse also had “a standing offer to charge the batteries of flashlights by putting them under his pillow at night: ‘I’m so full of electricity you might as well throw your flashlights for nothing can have it charged,” he said. say,” according to a report published in 1942.
1937: Development continues
The Times sends outdoor editor Lynn J. Rogers to visit Critzer at Giant Rock.
“If you travel by car instead of by plane, you can easily visit him, because he has built thirty-three miles of the straightest desert road that anyone has ever seen,” Rogers reports. ‘Not a hobby for rich people either, because Frank accomplished it all in five years with an original capital of five dollars, and as tools a twenty-year-old car, a digging hoe, a shovel, a pair of binoculars and three wooden poles. ”
Critzer tells Rogers that he dreams of one day opening “a little winter resort” there.
1938: Officials become skeptical
Critzer Airport is under scrutiny. Although it is well known in the area, The Times reports that federal authorities are investigating it “as a carefully hidden mysterious airport.”
“Reports were that the airport, hidden in a valley in the desert mountains, had underground living quarters for pilots and a hidden hangar in a cave in a cliff. The airport would be camouflaged to hide it from flyers and from residents of the region.”
A Times report written several years later notes that in 1942, “when the United States was being ravaged by both Japan and Germany, the military was nervous about isolated landing fields.”
“Rumours were circulating that somewhere in the desert the Japanese might try to refuel submarine suicide planes in the Gulf of California and bomb the power plant at Hoover Dam, thus crippling Southern California’s aircraft industry.”
1942: Violence at Giant Rock
Critzer dies at age 57 in an explosion at Giant Rock that injures three Riverside County sheriff’s deputies.
The Times reports that officers attempted to question Critzer in connection with the theft of gasoline or explosives from locations in Garnet, Banning and Palm Springs. As they enter his cave, he shouts, “You’re not getting me out of here alive. I’m going, just another way, and you’re coming with me,” and detonates a supply of dynamite, according to that report. .
Others would later speculate that the dynamite was ignited when the officers threw smoke canisters under the rock in an attempt to flush Critzer out.
Later reports, including those published in The Times, indicate that Critzer may have come under scrutiny because, amid the panic of World War II, authorities suspected him as a spy – he had a German name, he had an isolated landing field built. , and he had installed a large antenna on top of the rock that brought in radio stations from all over the world.
1947: A new resident
George Van Tassel, aeronautical engineer and test pilot, moves to Giant Rock with his wife and children. He had met Critzer and visited him at Giant Rock when he was alive.
Van Tassel takes over the operation of the airport. He and his wife open a small café, the Come On Inn, where Eva Van Tassel cooks hamburgers and bakes cakes.
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1953: An alien visitor
Van Tassel begins teaching weekly meditation sessions at Giant Rock, during which he claims to communicate telepathically with aliens and channel their messages through his vocal cords.
One night he says he is awakened by a being from Venus who floats him aboard a spacecraft and gives him a formula to build an anti-gravity time machine that can reverse aging.
He establishes the College of Universal Wisdom, which at one point maintained a list of some 17,000 space aliens who communicated with humans, and begins holding annual spacecraft conventions at Giant Rock.
The Times reported on such a conference in 1955:
“Participate [Van Tassel] as sponsors were a number of men and women who have written books about spaceships or will do so soon. Almost all of them sounded dire warnings for Earthlings, but also offered a little hope as we wake up and listen to what friendly space aliens tell us to do.”
“…A man walking around with a Geiger counter said that even the air around Giant Rock was bursting with cosmic rays from leftover clouds from the Nevada atomic explosion, or spaceship recoil. Anyway, everyone was looking for a spacecraft to come in and land.
In later years, the convention featured loudspeakers, skydiving and stuntmen doing acrobatics on rope ladders under planes, according to The Times.
1957: The beginning of the Integratron
Van Tassel begins building the machine he says the aliens commissioned him to build, which he also describes as a research laboratory. (The Times reports that one of its goals is to “generate enough electricity to power the entire world from the ubiquitous light that is sometimes mistaken by us mortals for mere cosmic energy.”)
The domed building of laminated plywood is designed to contain no metal – no screws, no nails – and a cement ring called the oculus that holds the arches that form the structure.
A Los Angeles architect who drew the plans told The Times in 1954 that he was unsure whether he received inspiration from aliens. “I can’t say whether some of the original ideas I incorporated were strictly mine or ‘inspired’ as some people say,” says Howard P. Hess. “The universe is too big for me to pretend I know everything.”
The construction is funded by donations solicited in newsletters distributed at Van Tassels’ annual spacecraft conventions.
1978: Second resident dies
Van Tassel dies unexpectedly. Work on the Integratron is incomplete: although the dome has been built, the machine itself is not yet finished. Van Tassel’s widow later puts it up for sale.
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2000: Gravity and Prophecy
A piece of Giant Rock splits off from the main rock due to an event with no known witnesses and no certain cause. Some have speculated that heat stress due to bonfires that often burn underneath them could be the cause.
In the days before the split, a group had visited the rock to perform a lengthy dance ceremony led by Shri Naath Devi, a spiritual healer from South Los Angeles also known as Mataji. Devi reportedly passed on a prophecy of unknown origin: the rock would fall apart in two ways: in the middle, humanity was threatened with extinction. By his side, people still had a chance.
“What Mataji told me was that her understanding of the prophecy was that humanity would face a choice,” says Anderson, who met the healer before her death in 2022. “Are we going to continue to be the beautiful people who are our divine personal blueprint? Or are we going to exterminate ourselves?”
The day after the ceremony ended, a large chunk of Giant Rock split off. It was split on the side.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.