What do you think about this?
Out in the California desert, in the vast emptiness of the Mojave, sits one of the largest free standing boulders on Earth, a seven story rock simply called Giant Rock. For the native Serrano people it was sacred ground, a place only a chief could stand. In the twentieth century it became the center of one of the strangest chapters in American history.
In the 1940s a man named George Van Tassel moved his family beneath the rock, living in rooms he dug out under it. He claimed that in 1953 a visitor from Venus landed beside Giant Rock, woke him in the night, and gave him a formula for a machine to slow aging and extend human life. Van Tassel spent the rest of his years building that machine, a white domed structure called the Integratron, which still stands nearby. Each year he drew thousands of people into the desert for spacecraft conventions, all watching the skies over the Mojave.
The desert has always attracted this. Strange lights, vanished hikers, stories that gather around its silence and its scale.
Makes you wonder whether the Mojave simply drives people to invent, or whether something about that empty, ancient place really does draw visitors, earthly and otherwise.
A charismatic dreamer and a lot of open sky, or a desert that has genuinely seen things land? What do you think keeps happening out at Giant Rock?
What do you think about this? Scans of Gunung Padang in Indonesia show hidden chambers deep inside the hill, and one team dated its oldest layers to 25,000 years ago. The study was retracted in 2024. The chambers have never been opened. Natural hill, or the oldest pyramid on Earth?
What do you think about this? Edgar Cayce gave over 14,000 trance readings, all written down and still on file. He said proof of Atlantis would rise near Bimini in 1968. That year divers found a half mile road of giant stone blocks there. True seer, or lucky guess?
What do you think about this? Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky built a 500 foot tunnel just to move its dead out of sight of the living. It closed in 1961. Visitors still report a boy rolling a ball across empty floors. Restless spirits, or a dark building playing tricks on the mind?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? Puma Punku’s H-shaped stone blocks, cut from andesite by a culture dating to roughly 600 CE, are flat to within a couple millimeters, with no known metal tools hard enough to do it. Lost technique, or something we haven’t caught up to yet?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
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