Chapter

Aircraft, where he came to be good friends with none other than aviation legend, and certifiable loon, Howard Hughes. Just like Adamski, Van Tassel felt compelled to make a move to California. In his case, it was to the small town of Landers, which is situated in the Mojave Desert. On one particular night in August 1953, so Van Tassel claimed, he was overwhelmed by a sense that he had to drive out to a nearby area known as Giant Rock. The locale takes its name from a huge mass of rock, which still stands in the area to this day, albeit now somewhat battered and bruised.

Van Tassel knew that something important was going to happen, but exactly what, he wasn’t too sure. He soon found out, though. Just like the other George, Van Tassel was confronted by a flying saucer that descended from the heavens and delivered several aliens looking just like us. As with Adamski’s initial encounter, Van Tassel was also fed information suggesting that the ETs were communists and wanted our world radically transformed. There are a few indications from what Van Tassel said and wrote that the aliens were somewhat bully-like in nature, too, specifically when it got down to the issue of wanting things to go their way. Then, as mysteriously as they appeared, the aliens were gone, vanished into the dark skies above Giant Rock and the sprawling desert landscape.

Practically overnight, Van Tassel’s life changed dramatically. Whereas Adamski chose to write books about his experiences, Van Tassel decided to hold annual UFO conferences out at Giant Rock, which continued until his death in 1977. At the height of their popularity, the Giant Rock gigs had audiences in excess of ten thousand. No wonder the FBI thought Van Tassel, like Adamski, should be watched—and watched closely, too. The aliens, Van Tassel said, had another task for him: they ordered him to build what became known as the Integratron—a large, white, circular, two-level building that would have the ability to slow the aging process—in Landers, California. At least, that’s how he told it. Unfortunately, Van Tassel passed away before the Integratron was fully completed.

The FBI’s surveillance file on Van Tassel exceeds 300 pages and demonstrates that FBI agents visited Van Tassel on three occasions in the 1950s. While the meetings were quite cordial, the FBI was troubled by