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Giant Rock and the Contactee Conventions

added01 September 2026

A free-standing granite boulder in the Mojave — by some counts the largest in the world, about seven storeys high. From 1947 a former aircraft engineer named George Van Tassel lived beside it, having built a café and an airstrip under the rock. Van Tassel said that in 1953 visitors from Venus arrived and dictated the design of a machine for rejuvenation. He built it seven kilometres away — the wooden dome called the Integratron, which is still standing. From 1954 to 1978 he held annual contactee conventions at the rock; in the best years up to eleven thousand people came. In 2000 a third of the rock split off.

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34.33281, -116.38872

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Desert Center and Adamski's Meeting

On 20 November 1952 the Polish-American author George Adamski drove into the desert near this hamlet with six companions and, by his account, met a man from Venus called Orthon — fair-haired, in a one-piece suit, communicating by gesture and telepathy. His companions, he said, watched from a distance and signed a statement. The book Flying Saucers Have Landed appeared in 1953 and became an international bestseller; the whole contactee genre begins with it. Adamski's photographs of the Venusian craft were later matched against domestic hardware of the period — in particular the hood of a chicken brooder lamp. He maintained the account to the end.

114 km away

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Peter Popoff and the Earpiece

The televangelist Peter Popoff filled arenas by telling strangers their names, addresses and diagnoses — the Lord was telling him. In 1986 James Randi and the engineer Alec Jason came to a service with a radio scanner and recorded a transmission on 39.17 MHz: the preacher's wife Elizabeth, backstage, reading her husband the prayer cards the congregation had filled in at the door. Popoff had a receiver in his ear. The recording was played on Johnny Carson's show, synchronised with the video of the prophecy. A few months later Popoff's organisation filed for bankruptcy.

119 km away

DebunkedWhite

Palomar and Adamski's Venusian Scout Ships

George Adamski ran a hamburger stand at the foot of Palomar Mountain and from 1952 published photographs of a Venusian scout ship — a bell with three spheres underneath and a dome on top. The shape gave it away at once: the spheres match General Electric light bulbs exactly, and the hull matches the cover of a surgical lamp, or the hood of a chicken brooder lamp sold in the same hardware stores. Joe Nickell and others rebuilt the model from period parts and got the same photograph. Adamski maintained until his death in 1965 that he had flown to Saturn.

121 km away

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