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?
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