The Giant Rock contactees
The two doctors, DAVID CLARKE and Tom Clark (no relation), spent a week on the road in Southern California seeking out UFO contactee cults, quirky museums and modern ghost-hunters.
Most people visit Southern California for the sunlit white beaches and Hollywood celebrities. But with a population of well over four million, it’s not surprising that there’s a whole host of options to interest the fortean traveller. We set off with our host, Professor Chris Bader – author of Paranormal America
– to investigate a number of infamous alien visitations, hauntings and as much weird Southern California as we could fit into a week.
We set up a base camp near Professor Bader’s office at Chapman University in a quirky little guesthouse called Ruta’s Olde Town Inn. With three rooms, as much breakfast as we could eat, and an interesting display of vintage children’s toys and ephemera, it was located in something of a ghost hotspot, with a number of haunted houses nearby. On the edge of Anaheim, in Orange County, it was a perfect base to begin to explore SoCal.
And there’s the thing. Los Angeles is huge. Its freeways are like spaghetti, its intersections constant and choked with traffic. It has flyovers that frequently soar into the sky before slamming you down into a NASCAR-like race to the next turn-off. It is also rightly notorious for its poor public transport, so it’s worth taking the time to understand both the Amtrak and Metro systems. Before you plan your schedule, consider whether you’d be better off hiring a car – and steady yourself for a whiteknuckle ride.
But once you’ve gained your bearings, SoCal is hugely rewarding. After a brief visit to the Church of Scientology bookshop in Santa Ana, we began our trip by visiting The Unarius Academy of Science in El Cajon, a suburb of San Diego and a two hour drive south out of Los Angeles. Unarius is an acronym for the ‘Universal Articulate Interdimensional Understanding of Science’. It was founded in 1954 as a kind of galactic consulate by Ernest and Ruth Norman who had built up a small following through their psychic readings and channelled messages from space people (see FT158:28-33, 271:51-53). Its purpose is “to advance awareness of the interdimensional science of life as based upon principles of fourthdimensional physics”.
Ruth styled herself the Archangel Uriel and after the death of Ernest in 1971 she became the public face of Unarius. Her channelling work stepped up a gear, as did the production of her gowns, and she predicted a mass landing of flying saucers in 2001 on a piece of scrubland near the Unarius headquarters. When this failed to happen, the Unarians concentrated on their past-life channelling, which continued after Ruth’s death in 1993. With colourful murals adorning its walls, the World Teaching Centre hosts ongoing workshops designed to help its students
understand the continuity of consciousness. In pioneering a new science of reincarnation, the Unarians use ‘past life therapy’ to translate those lives into the written word: the likes of Napoleon, Yamamoto, and “the last Inca, Atahualpa” have all been channelled into biographies that can be purchased from the bookstore. But not all past lives are as memorable. When we asked our guide who he had been he said, “Yeah, I was a Russian painter – what’s his name? Hell, it doesn’t matter!”
For a different sort of religious experience, just a few blocks away in Santee, is the Creation and Earth History Museum. Originally opened by the Institute for Creation Research, its exhibits are largely aimed at proving that the Earth is, in fact, only around 10,000 years old. Among other claims, it provides ‘evidence’ to suggest that the world was indeed created in just six days, that the Grand Canyon was formed in a matter of weeks, and, perhaps most surprisingly, that dinosaurs were present on Noah’s Ark (but, given their size, only young ones were allowed on board). Without any hint of irony, it is suggested that over a number of generations the dinosaurs later died out because they weren’t well adapted to the world after the flood. There’s also a surprising assertion that Karl Marx was “(according to some) a Satanist in college”, and a diorama that encourages children to sit with a fluffy sacrificial lamb and “reflect on the ultimate sacrifice – Jesus the Lamb of God” in front of a scene that does indeed depict the sacrifice of a lamb.
To continue with our contactee theme, we ventured out into the searing heat of the Mojave Desert to visit The Integratron near the tiny town of Landers, California. This unique circular structure was built by George Van Tassel, a former aircraft mechanic who lived in a house under the Giant Rock
– a massive seven story granite boulder – three miles drive away. The subterranean ‘house’ beneath the rock was excavated by his buddy, German immigrant and prospector Franz Critzer. But during World War II Critzer was suspected of working for the Nazis and was blown up when the dynamite store exploded during a police siege.Van Tassel bought the property in 1947 and opened a café but few people ventured out to this remote
place before the flying saucer craze arrived in SoCal.
Early in 1953, George Adamski stunned the world with his account of a meeting with the angelic pilot of a ‘scout ship’ from Venus that landed near Desert Center. Soon afterwards, whilst meditating, Van Tassel began to channel messages from space people and was ‘astrally transported’ to meet the Council of Seven Lights. From 1953 he hosted annual ‘Spacecraft Conventions’ in the shade of the Giant Rock that attracted up to 10,000 saucer fans eager to hear the latest wisdom from Ashtar and legions of other entities with unpronounceable names. Adamski and all those who followed him to create what Greg Bishop and Adam Gorightly call the ‘Golden Age of Contactees’ spoke here at one time or another. During the 1960s, the LSD-soaked desert scene attracted Keith Richards and Gram Parsons, who reportedly tripped out on mushrooms while skywatching at nearby Joshua Tree National Park. But the only evidence of visitors that we could find was UFO graffiti on the remains of an airstrip and some nearby rocks.
Van Tassel claimed the space people taught him a method to rejuvenate the human body; using his new-found knowledge and funds provided by Howard Hughes, he designed and built a cupola-shaped structure that could harness the EMF energy necessary to effectively recharge the cells in our bodies as if they were an electric battery. Unfortunately for Van Tassel, this was not enough to save him from a heart attack in 1978. But his Integratron survived plans
to turn it into a disco and today it is a listed building in the US National Register of Historic Places. Its new owners adapted it to offer ‘sound baths’ to locals and passing tourists, and the small gift shop stocks a range of flying saucer-themed clothing and trinkets. The ground floor of the Integratron has wall displays on local history and the saucer conventions, plus a small library of UFO books. The leader of the sound bath ceremony makes a number of large quartz drums ‘sing’ so that they reverberate around the dome-like structure until it produces an all-encompassing sound. We were invited to climb into the roof space and relax on mats arranged in circles facing the curving walls. Fellow pilgrims were a mixture of young yogis and older dudes and, given the New Age vibe, we were surprised to hear a potted history of 1950s contactee stories before the auditory experience began. We found it impossible not to feel immediately relaxed, so much so that a warning was issued to those prone to snore not to spoil the moment for everyone else. Within seconds of the first low G there was some very loud snoring from an unidentified source, but the ambience was ruined only temporarily. Sound baths are popular, so if you want to experience the delights of the Integratron we recommend you book ahead at: https:// www.integratron.com/soundbath/. (For more on Van Tassel and Giant Rock see FT109:50, 118:28-31, 135:14, 238:38-40)
For those who prefer fortean adventures of the ghostlier kind, SoCal is also home to a large number of haunted houses. Perhaps the most unusual is the RMS Queen Mary ,now permanently docked at Long Beach. Once the flagship of the Cunard and White Star Line, and a former holder of the Blue Riband, the cruise liner took her maiden voyage in 1936 and remained in service through WWII until 1967, when she was converted into a floating hotel. With such a distinguished past – and 50 people reported to have died on board – perhaps it’s not surprising that the vessel has picked up a few ghosts along
Van Tassel channelled messages from space