The Integratron: Visiting George Van Tassel's Dome
Starting in the late 1940s, George Van Tassel ran the airport and cafe at Giant Rock in the Mojave. By his account, in 1953 a visitor from Venus woke him up and handed him instructions for a machine that would rejuvenate living cells. Over the next years he built it a few miles away, near Landers, and called it the Integratron. Construction began in 1956. It's a two-story wooden dome, and the main structure is held together without nails or screws. Van Tassel placed it where, he said, magnetic forces came together.
Van Tassel died in 1978, before the dome was finished the way he planned. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2018. It changed hands a few times, and in 2000 three sisters, the Karl family, bought it and restored it. The curved wood gives the upper room unusual acoustics, and the sisters started offering "sound baths": quartz bowls played while visitors lie on mats.
Visiting the Integratron
You need a reservation to visit, and the dome is on private land. Most of the road from Yucca Valley is paved. Giant Rock, where Van Tassel held UFO conventions in the 1950s and 60s, is a rough drive to the north.
George Van Tassel and Frank Critzer of Giant Rock both have chapters in Desert Eccentric.
Sources: The Integratron (integratron.com/history); National Register of Historic Places, Integratron, ref. 100002317 (2018); California Office of Historic Preservation, "2018 Actions Taken."
Illustration: AI-generated, artistic interpretation.