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? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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