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The story of Van Tassel’s time-travel dome begins under a rock—yes, an actual rock—where he lived. It was here, a few miles from Landers, that the inventor established an airport which he ran for 29 years on land leased from the U.S. government. It’s also where he incorporated a science philosophy organization called The Ministry of Universal Wisdom, one of many UFO cults that sprouted up in California shortly after the 1947 Roswell incident that brought UFO culture into the mainstream.

The most infamous of these groups is probably Heaven’s Gate—whose members committed suicide in order to ascend to a spaceship following the Hale-Bopp comet—but there’s also Scientology (founded in 1952), the Universal Articulate Interdimensional Understanding of Science (1954), and the Aetherius Society (1955). The organizations held in common the belief that communication with extraterrestrials was possible and that by channeling their messages (many aliens, believers said, were concerned with the earthlings' attempts to develop a hydrogen bomb) the contactee could ultimately help save mankind. “The UFO culture of the 1950s arose after the end of WWII, and rockets, nuclear weapons, and new aircraft were being designed and built based on war effort innovation,” notes Bernard Bates, a professor of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound. “People were afraid death could come out of the sky... and they were seeing all sorts of natural and human made phenomena which they didn’t understand.” It was during this era of increasing distrust among Americans of the U.S. government, the beginnings of the Cold War, with the possibility of nuclear weapons looming and the new-age movement in California blossoming, that Van Tassel rose to local, then national prominence as a charming, well-spoken UFO expert. Much of his notoriety was a result of the annual Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention, which he hosted for more than 20 years.

Seven stories high and many thousands of tons, Giant Rock dominates the desert landscape and became a local landmark due to its size. It was underneath the boulder that a German immigrant named Frank Critzer carved out a 400-square-foot house for himself where Van Tassel would visit him occasionally. The story goes that Critzer also installed a radio antennae on top of the rock and came under suspicion by the authorities for being a German spy shortly after WWII. Accounts vary, but a tear gas canister from a botched FBI raid is said to have somehow ignited Critzer’s store of dynamite and blown him to bits. Van Tassel moved in shortly thereafter with his wife. And on August 24, 1953, it was here that Van Tassel received his instructions regarding what would become his “tabernacle”—the Integratron.

Van Tassel liked to say that both he and Moses were compelled to build their tabernacles via instructions from a man that came out of the sky—in Moses’s case it was God, and in Van Tassel’s, an extraterrestrial. Van Tassel writes in his memoir I Rode a Flying Saucer that he awoke one night to find a man standing at the foot of his bed. “Beyond the man, about a hundred yards away, hovered a glittering, glowing spaceship, seemingly about eight feet off the ground.” The man introduced himself in English as Solganda from the planet Venus and invited Van Tassel aboard his ship, where he divulged the schematics of the Integratron. Its construction would become Van Tassel’s focus for the next 25 years.

Van Tassel’s interest in flying aircraft was borne out by his career choice. Born in 1910 in Ohio, he entered the aviation industry in 1927 after gaining his pilot’s license, and worked for both Howard Hughes at Hughes Aviation and Lockheed Aircraft during his career. Of Hughes he wrote, “One day with Howard was more to me than months I have spent with other men.” The author of four books, Van Tassel claimed to have made exactly 410 radio and TV appearances and gave hundreds of lectures across the U.S. and Canada in his lifetime—many concerning the mysterious dome he was building out in the desert. He was also quoted talking about his UFO visit in Life magazine in 1957—albeit mockingly.