The Integratron

A time machine built on instructions from Venus, now a sound bath

A white dome 38 feet tall and 55 feet across in the desert at Landers, near Joshua Tree, built by George Van Tassel, a former aircraft mechanic who ran an airport and inn out by Giant Rock. In August 1953, he said, visitors from space made contact, first telepathically and then in person, and gave him a technique for rejuvenating human cells; he said they came from Venus. He raised the structure through the 1950s, paid for partly by nearly 25 years of Giant Rock Spacecraft Conventions and partly by donations that included money from Howard Hughes, and claimed the finished machine would deliver rejuvenation, anti-gravity and time travel. He was still working on it when he died suddenly in 1978. A later plan to turn it into a disco never happened. The Karl sisters bought it in the early 2000s and run sound baths under the dome with 22 quartz crystal bowls. It joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2018.