If we were to consider southern California to be Earth’s spiritual centre for all things woo-woo, there is one place in the Mojave Desert, about 20 miles north of Joshua Tree National Park, that we could treat as its mothership.
The Integratron, a gleaming white, 38ft-tall circular structure with a dome-shaped top and 64 red-tipped protruding aluminium rods, has stood in a patch of desert scrub in Landers, California, for more than two-thirds of a century. It was built by a man who claimed to have been given the designs not by some midcentury modernist or avant-garde architect but – bear with me – a 700-year-old visitor from Venus.
Inside the parabolic dome © Robert Lang
The structure is said to sit directly on a “spiritual vortex” of multiple converging energetic ley lines and electromagnetic forces, meaning it is believed to be a psychically significant site – and that’s before we get to the aliens or emotional healing. It is, as Anthony Bourdain put it when he visited in 2011, “a special place where an inexplicable confluence of people, magnetic forces, extraterrestrials and otherwise strange shit came together”.
It all started in the middle of the night on 24 August 1953, when George Van Tassel, a former aircraft engineer and UFOlogist, claimed to have been awoken by an alien named Solganda, the captain of a “scout ship” from Venus. Van Tassel had been sleeping below Giant Rock, an enormous freestanding boulder three miles north of where The Integratron now stands, and had been holding weekly meditation and “channelling” sessions there.
