Mass Effect

Sasha Archibald
Spring 2014

A meeting place for flying objects, identified and unidentified. Undated

postcard of Giant Rock during the Van Tassel family’s occupancy of the
site. The café sign features an image of a UFO.

Two hours east of Los Angeles, three hours west of Las Vegas, and many
miles from the nearest traffic light or roadside diner lies a single boulder in
the Mojave Desert claimed to be the largest rock in the world—at least until
2000, when a large chunk broke off, neatly and without provocation. Now
split in two, it is still called Giant Rock. Graffiti blackens the lower surface
and ATVs roar nearby. There is an occasional tourist.

For two eccentric Californians, Frank Critzer and George Van Tassel, the
immense girth of Giant Rock was not simple geological happenstance but a
sign portending mystical significance. In the hands of these two men, Giant
Rock became the locus of a strange episode in the twentieth-century
history of the American West. Like all Western heroes, Critzer and Van
Tassel felt themselves poised between worlds, and at the threshold of
civilization. Both felt vitalized and validated by the rock, and both saw it as
a natural hub, laboring for decades to make it a gathering place. Absolutely
inert and yet fecund, Giant Rock was less a rock than a destiny.

There is little trace of this history at the rock itself, except for a dusty slab
of concrete. The concrete conceals a cavern, built by Critzer as a home, and
later used by Van Tassel for telecommunication sessions with aliens. No
one knows how Critzer stumbled on Giant Rock in the 1930s, or why he
decided to move there, but he was obviously clever and resourceful. Critzer
saw that the rock’s immense shadow offered succor from the heat and,
following the lead of desert tortoises that dig holes in the sand in which to
cool themselves, he used dynamite to blast out an abode beneath its north
face. Engineering a rainwater-collection system and a narrow tunnel for
ventilation, the home he excavated was never warmer than eighty degrees
Fahrenheit and never cooler than fifty-five. Perfectly suited to its site,
Critzer’s abode refuted the paradigmatic inhospitality of the desert.

The area surrounding Giant Rock at the time was untrammeled,

uninhabited government land, marked on maps as “unsurveyed.”1 Critzer
was a squatter, and his closest neighbor, Charles Reche, a long five miles
away.2 No more than half a dozen men had seen Giant Rock in the last two
decades, Reche told Critzer, and Critzer, motivated by entrepreneurial
ambition, loneliness, or the pioneer’s sense of duty to domesticate the
landscape, took that as a challenge. Giant Rock sits beside an ancient
lakebed, flat and firm, which Critzer transformed into an airplane runway,
dragging a leveler behind his 1917 automobile. Tacking up a windsock and
whitewashing a nearby boulder—Giant Rock is only the largest of many
towering rocks in the vicinity—Critzer opened Giant Rock Airport for
business. Then he turned to the terrain, using his car to clear thirty-three
miles of road that eventually connected Giant Rock to two mines, Reche’s
home, and, finally, the nearest paved street. A 1937 article about Critzer in
the Los Angeles Times admiringly described these homemade roads as “the
straightest desert road that anybody ever saw,” reckoning that Critzer held
the world record for one-man road building.3

By 1941, Critzer’s Giant Rock Airport averaged a plane a day, flown mainly
by amateur pilots who also kept Critzer supplied with food and company.
As legend goes, his visitors ate German pancakes at his kitchen table, their
legs propped up on spare boxes of dynamite. Critzer hoped to spur
investment in the area, and fantasized about opening a winter resort. His
plans came to naught. On 25 July 1942, during a police visit gone awry,
Critzer’s stash of dynamite exploded and he was killed. His exit from Giant
Rock is as shrouded in mystery as his entrance; according to various
accounts, the three officers were inquiring about missing dynamite, or
gasoline theft, or the antennae Critzer used to attract a radio signal. Some
speculated that the combination of a German name and isolated airfield
during World War II justified a visit. Perhaps the explosion was an
accident, or perhaps it happened exactly as the officers claimed, with
Critzer shrieking, “You’re not taking me out of here alive! I’m going, but
another way, and you’re going with me!” before he blew himself up.4

One man was particularly intrigued by these events, and made his way out
to Giant Rock from Los Angeles as soon as he could.5 Thirty-two-year-old
George Van Tassel noted that when he arrived, Critzer’s cavern was
stripped of belongings and the car gone. The only trace of Giant Rock’s
tenant was a bit of blood splattered on the walls of his cave. The United
States still had several laws in place that rewarded intrepid settlers with
free land, such that Critzer’s industriousness at Giant Rock almost
certainly would have guaranteed him legal ownership. At his death,
however, the land reverted back to the government’s newly created Bureau
of Land Management (BLM). Van Tassel was not deterred, and began
brewing a plan to relocate. Five years later, in 1947, he managed to lease
the property from the BLM and left Los Angeles for good, bringing along
his wife, Eva, and their three young daughters.
Giant Rock today. Photo Sasha Archibald.

There is little record of Van Tassel’s life other than his own words. He
dropped out of high school in Ohio and emigrated to southern California,
joining the World War II-era aeronautics industry at a time of unparalleled
growth and expansion. Though he later glorified his career, describing
himself as a flight test engineer, test pilot, or even personal pilot to Howard
Hughes, he told the 1940 census-takers he was a tradesman, a tool and die
maker. At the time, he was working for the Douglas Aircraft Company in
Santa Monica and living in a modest home with his wife and children, as
well as his mother-in-law and his wife’s three younger siblings. He moved
from Douglas to Hughes Aircraft, and then to Lockheed, leaving the
factories for good in 1947, a year of massive layoffs as aeronautics
production recalibrated to peacetime. The vacancy of Giant Rock must
have presented itself as a golden opportunity.

Relieved of his nine-to-five job and invigorated by the desert environs, Van
Tassel began a flurry of activity—writing, meditating, publishing, and
building. He founded a religious non-profit, the Ministry of Universal
Wisdom, and an associated college, and began mass mailing its official
organ, the Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom. In a few short
years, Van Tassel emerged as a central figure in atomic-era ufology. His
first book, I Rode a Flying Saucer (1952), was a diary of alien messages
“radioned” by otherworldly intelligences to Van Tassel’s telepathic mind;
shortly after, he met aliens in the flesh, whom he described as “white
people with a good healthy tan,” all measuring exactly five feet six inches.6
The leader, Solganda, spoke excellent English “equivalent to [actor] Ronald
Colman,” and through thought transference conveyed to Van Tassel
directions for building a time machine, the Integratron.7 The Integratron
was to become Van Tassel’s lasting monument.
Van Tassel’s boulder, crowned with a car hoisted using a windlass and
cable, was featured as a “Picture of the Week” in the 15 October 1951 issue
of Life. Photo Larry Frank.

Like an automatic car wash, the Integratron was an amalgam of

architecture and machine. Its purpose was not to transport a fixed body to
a different time, as time machines typically do, but to eliminate time’s
effect on a body; the machine produced time, rather than suck it away. An
architect drafted plans for the building’s distinctive dome-shaped design—
two stories high, supported by arched fir beams brought in from
Washington state, constructed without any metal, and painted a brilliant
white—and Van Tassel broke ground in 1954, on a plot of land three miles
south of Giant Rock. Construction proceeded in piecemeal fashion for
twenty-four years, up until Van Tassel’s death in 1978. Van Tassel never
pronounced his time machine complete, perhaps because he couldn’t
achieve the promised effect, or perhaps because funds solicited to complete
the Integratron constituted a crucial source of income. It still stands,
carefully maintained and fantastically incongruous with the contorted
Joshua trees and endless-shades-of-beige shrubbery.

Devotees claim that Van Tassel’s plans for completing the design were
stolen, but he may have had no plans. He alternately described the device
as very complicated and very simple, and was always inscrutable when
pressed about mechanical details. During one television interview, he
boasted vaguely that the Integratron was built following the directives of a
seventeen-page equation given to him by aliens and tested by specialists in
Chicago; elsewhere he said the formula was very simple and made known
to him by alien thought transference: f=1/t where (f) is frequency and (t) is
time.

In truth, the Integratron was an elaboration of the research of George

Lakhovsky, an iconoclastic Russian scientist whose writings circulated
among anti-establishment types in southern California. Lakhovsky
understood bodies not as factories or battlefields, but as electrical
conductors, an analogy that reached back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century studies in bioelectricity.8 Individual cells, Lakhovsky argued in his
1925 book, The Secret of Life: Cosmic Rays and Radiations of Living
Beings, are designed to receive and transmit electric impulses, with each of
the microscopic components of a cell analogous to a component in an
electrical battery. Electromagnetic energy causes cells to infinitesimally
move back and forth, and the rate of these movements directly corresponds
to the health of the living creature. When cells do not receive enough, or
the wrong sort of, electromagnetic stimulation, their vibrations slow; a
man dies when his cells cease to oscillate.
1957 Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention at Giant Rock. The fifth
gathering of this annual meeting was photographed by Ralph Crane for
Life’s 27 May 1957 issue. The image above depicts the cavern blasted out of
the rock by Critzer.

Lakhovsky believed that the rate of cellular oscillation could be increased

through the body’s proximity to metal conductors. Donning a metal
bracelet or attaching metal plates to the soles of shoes would create an
uptick in cellular vibration and thus improve health. (In Lakhovsky’s
limited experiments, a young woman suffering excessive flatulence was
cured by wearing a heavy metal belt, and a “cancerous” geranium began to
thrive when a coiled wire was attached to its stem.)9 Lakhovsky’s theories
in fact culminated in a device designed to cure cancer, the Multiple Wave
Oscillator. This machine existed in several iterations but the main
components were two large copper coils of wire buzzing with high-
frequency voltage. (Later, Lakhovsky came to believe the coils alone were
sufficient, and far more convenient.) The patient sat between these coils for
healing sessions of varying duration. The copper coils intensified some
cosmic rays and filtered out others, creating a restorative electromagnetic
charge that was received by the body’s two coil-shaped receptors—the wavy
mitochondria inside each cell and the inner cochlea of the ear—and directly
conveyed to individual cells.

Van Tassel made a few inspired changes to Lakhovsky’s invention. He

increased the size of the coil so that it was as large as the building itself,
lining the entire width of the Integratron with thin copper wire that spirals
out from the building’s inner core.10 The building’s current owners, three
sisters who use the space for “sound baths”—sonorous performances of
tonal reverberations made by sweeping the rims of quartz bowls with
rubber mallets—suggest that the healing area of the Integratron is at the
center of this copper spiral, within the building’s circular core. Van Tassel
had originally planned otherwise; subjects would be transformed, he wrote,
as they walked the interior perimeter of the structure, entering one door
and exiting another, in a precise 270-degree arc. In any case, whereas
Lakhovsky sought to cure cancer by placing his subjects between two
spirals, Van Tassel hoped to restore youth by immersing his subject within
a spiral. The other difference, of course, is that while Lakhovsky’s device
was transportable, Van Tassel’s was not. Had the Integratron worked as
promised, it would have been a healing experience bound up in landscape
and pilgrimage. Indeed, even today, it is impossible to disentangle the
various effects of the copper spirals, the domed sanctuary, and the desert
calm.

As he was building the Integratron, Van Tassel continued to host an annual

UFO convention, an event he first convened in 1953. Critzer’s roads were
put to good use as ufologists followed Van Tassel’s hand-drawn map,
camping out nearby, exchanging grainy photographs, and beseeching the
skies for a mass visitation. There were speeches from a podium almost as
tall as Giant Rock and performances by airplane stuntmen; in 1960, Van
Tassel went so far as to use the convention to launch his presidential
campaign. Attendance was reported at anywhere between three hundred
and twelve thousand, depending on the year and source, but it remained a
newsworthy event for well over a decade until, in 1970, the Los Angeles
Times hinted the Van Tassel might cancel for lack of interest. “People see
so many flying saucers, they’re just not a novelty any more,” he lamented.11

The Integratron today. Photo Sasha Archibald.

Van Tassel continued writing, however, eventually publishing four books.12
His later texts are especially scattered and repetitive, and sometimes
degenerate into nonsensical wordplay. Sundry bits of Mesmerism,
Mormonism, Scientology, and the writings of Nikola Tesla are patched
together with Van Tassel’s tendency to megalomania and enthusiasm for
fringe science. He endorses studies proving that a person can tune into the
frequency of another by touching a drop of their blood; a head of cabbage
mourns the death of another head of cabbage; clothes can be cleaned with
sound; breathing patterns will make a man levitate; razors set beneath an
inverted pyramid-shape will never dull; and by encircling the city with
seven pyramids, Los Angeles could eliminate smog. Sprinkled amid such
claims are his biblical interpretations. As a Christian ufologist, Van Tassel
understood the Bible as a literal history of interplanetary visitations. Angel,
he clarified, is just another word for alien, and the Ark of the Covenant is
correctly spelled the Arc of the Covenant.13

At dusk at Giant Rock, Van Tassel’s fanaticisms seem benign. To the urban
traveler, the desert landscape feels so still and empty that to entertain an
improbable something is a sympathetic alternative to accepting an
apparent nothing. Van Tassel and Critzer understood the desert void to be
a deception; emptiness was only a disguise for an invisible force field, a
potent thrum of archaic energy. Van Tassel liked to muse on the fact that
his first name, George, contained not one but two combinations of the
letters ge, which he understood to be an acronym for Generate Electricity,
while Critzer, not to be outdone by his successor, is remembered for
boasting that his body was so full of energy he could recharge batteries by
sleeping with them under his pillow. In the midst of a blistering nothing,
Giant Rock was the totemic conductor of a great something.

1. Lynn J. Rogers, “Pioneer Establishes Unique Desert Home,” The Los

Angeles Times, 9 May 1937.
2. Reche was the owner of an original Mojave homestead dating from
the previous century, and also a local hero; he was a former police
sheriff permanently injured during the famous 1909 manhunt for
Willie Boy, a Chemehuevi Indian who kidnapped a girl to whom he
 was engaged, killed her father, and escaped to the backcountry. Led
by a bloodthirsty posse, the manhunt lasted nearly three weeks and
ended in the girl’s murder and Willie Boy’s suicide.
3. Lynn J. Rogers, “Pioneer Establishes Unique Desert Home.”
4. “Dynamite Suicide Climaxes Desert Search,” The Los Angeles Times,
26 July 1942.
5. Van Tassel claimed he knew Critzer from a chance meeting years
previous when Critzer had stopped by an auto repair garage in
Santa Monica owned by Van Tassel’s uncle. According to Van
Tassel’s story, Critzer was down on his luck and needed a car repair;
they fixed the car for free, let Critzer crash on the garage floor, and
sent him off the next day with $30 and a backseat of groceries.
Critzer subsequently mailed Van Tassel a map of his whereabouts
and Van Tassel made the first of many visits to Giant Rock. The story
may be mostly true, but has some inconsistencies. Van Tassel
described the automobile as a 1917 four-cylinder Essex, for instance,
a model that didn’t exist, and the gift of $30—$400 in today’s
currency—seems an extraordinarily generous amount for a young
boy and auto mechanic during the Great Depression.
6. “The Extraordinary Equation of George Van Tassel,” television
interview by Jack Webster for Webster Reports, aired on KVOS, 18
June 1964. Available at www.youtube.com/watch?
v=wZbFsFWk__c.
7. “The Extraordinary Equation of George Van Tassel.”
8. Van Tassel likely encountered Lakhovsky’s work not through
primary texts but through excerpts published by the Borderland
Researchers Foundation. The Foundation also published directions
for a DIY Multiple Wave Oscillator (MWO), no bigger than a
briefcase and under fourteen pounds: “The deluxe MWO
diagrammed here can be built by any intelligent 16-year-old with
readily available electronic parts for under $35.” The instructions
resulted in at least one FDA sting. See Bob Beck, “The Russian
Lakhovsky Rejuventation Machine,” Journal of Borderland Research
(November 1963), reprinted in Thomas Brown, ed., The Lakhovsky
 Multiple Wave Oscillator Handbook (Garberville, CA: Borderland
Sciences Research Foundation, 1988), p. 1.
9. Lakhovsky reported that plants will grow “tumors similar to those of
cancer in animals” when they are inoculated with Bacterium
tumefaciens. See Lakhovsky, “Curing Cancerous Plants with Ultra
Radio Frequencies,” Radio News (February 1925), reprinted in
Thomas Brown, ed., The Lakhovsky Multiple Wave Oscillator
Handbook, pp. 34–37.
10. Aluminum foil was to have lined the interior of the Integratron’s
high, rounded ceiling and intensified the electromagnetic rays.
11. Charles Hillinger, “Flying Saucer Business Not What It Was,” The
Los Angeles Times, 29 March 1970.
12. He also claimed to have given exactly 297 lectures and appeared on
409 radio and TV shows, numbers that cannot be substantiated.
13. Van Tassel’s interpretation of Genesis is particularly disconcerting:
Eve was not a woman but a wild animal, and the original sin to
which Christian doctrine refers was bestiality. Through Eve’s
debased genetic line descend all the horrors of the modern world:
materialism, corruption, nuclear bombs, and even taxes.

Sasha Archibald is a writer and curator in Los Angeles, and a frequent

contributor to Cabinet.