UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Squatting out in the dry lake bed of a desert wasteland in the Mojave Desert near Landers, California, is a massive solid granite rock that looms over the parched earth around it like some monolith from a lost civilization. Rather aptly named simply “Giant Rock,” the immense boulder is seven stories high and covering 5,800 square feet of land, making it one of the largest free standing rocks in the world. It is a formidable sight, and it is perhaps fitting that this place has long been held as sacred by the Native American tribes of the region, often seen as the heart of the Mother Earth, the people of this land once convening here to celebrate the changing of the seasons and shamans coming out across the forbidding desert to draw from its power. In more modern times, Giant Rock is also the scene of a strange tale that involves secret underground cities, aliens, a mad prophet, and a time machine.

During World War II, a German immigrant and desert prospector by the name of Frank Critzer became rather fascinated with Giant Rock, and went about tunneling beneath it looking to mine any riches he could find buried in the earth there, and he would eventually carve out rooms to use as a full time subterranean residence there. He became known as the eccentric mad loner who lived out under the rock, and he didn’t really have any friends until he met a former pilot, aircraft mechanic and flight inspector named George Van Tassel while in town pumping gas at a garage. The two got along well, becoming quick friends, and that was when Critzer began to tell him of the strange things he had experienced while living out in the desert under that mystical sacred rock.

Giant Rock

According to Critzer, his mining had uncovered strange tunnels down there in the gloom, which seemed to have completely smooth sides as if fashioned from glass and which plummeted down into the sheer blackness of the earth below to the unknown. Critzer claimed that these mysterious tunnels often emanated a strange buzzing sound somewhat akin to static, which had become so insistent that he had even built a special radio in an effort to distinguish the frequency of the constant drone. Critzer was certain that these were no normal naturally formed tunnels, and expressed his desire to explore them further, but he would never get a chance. In 1942, he fell under suspicion of being a German spy, and was confronted by authorities determined to take him in for questioning. The stubborn old loner refused to budge, and at some point during the tense standoff the police used a gas grenade to flush him out, which unintentionally ignited some mining dynamite that was lying around and erupted into a huge explosion that killed Critzer but left the rock itself relatively unfazed. The siege had ended in tragedy for Critzer, but for Van Tassel it had opened up an opportunity.

In 1947, Van Tassel moved with his family from his home in Barstow, California in order to start a new simple life out in the desert, and remembering the odd mysteries he had heard from Critzer he decided to move to Giant Rock. He moved in to Critzer’s cave home under the rock and leased the small nearby derelict airport from the Bureau of Land Management. He fixed up the airstrip and built a diner, shop, guest ranch and gas station there, turning it into a proper airport once again and the rock into a minor tourist attraction, and in the meantime he also held meditation sessions at Giant Rock to capitalize on the New Age idea that it was a sort of natural Earth power point. He also spent his free time poking around in the caves and tunnels under the rock, and it was these excursions that would take his life in a bizarre new direction.

There’s no way to really ease into it, so we’ll just come out and say it- it was aliens. Van Tassel claimed that he had not only found the strange tunnels mentioned by Critzer, but also that they were made by extraterrestrials, and through their crystalline structure he had managed to pick up messages from aliens from the planet Venus. Sometimes these incidents were just telepathic messages, but at other times he said that he had somehow astrally projected to meet the aliens themselves and ride aboard their ships. On one such occasion, an alien named Solganda brought him aboard their ship and taught him various advanced secrets on how to extend human life and heal any disease or ailment, and they also allegedly gave him blueprints for how to make a building that would serve as a “time machine for basic research on rejuvenation, anti-gravity, and time travel” that would “recharge energy into living cell structures, to bring about longer life with youthful energy.” He called this device the “Integratron,” and became absolutely obsessed with making it a reality, starting construction in 1954.

The Integratron

Van Tassel gathered together others who he told about his alien encounters and began work on what was to be a domed structure made up of non-ferromagnetic materials: wood, concrete, glass, and fiberglass, lacking any metal pieces whatsoever except a spinning copper wire core and a rotating metal structure on the outside he called an “electrostatic dirod.” As construction was going on, Van Tassel began holding annual UFO conventions in order to raise money for the project, with some of these gatherings attracting thousands of people, at its peak drawing in over 10,000 attendees. These conventions brought in many famous UFO contactees, and made Van Tassel so well known that he started The Ministry of Universal Wisdom and The College of Universal Wisdom in order to share the telepathic messages he was constantly receiving from the aliens, and he also wrote four books over the years, I Rode A Flying Saucer (1952, 1955) Into This World and Out Again (1956), The Council of Seven Lights (1958), Religion and Science Merged, and When Stars Look Down.

This would go one for over two decades, with Van Tassel devoting all of his time to these conventions and the building of the Integratron, but he would sadly never see it in its completed form. In 1978, just a few weeks before the machine was to be officially unveiled, Van Tassel would die from a heart attack, having never seen the fruits of all of his hard work or whether his Integratron would even work at all. To this day curiosity seekers and New Agers make pilgrimages to this desolate place, wanting to see the structure themselves or perhaps hoping to see UFOs and aliens. Whether any of Van Tassel’s visions were true or whether his machine ever had any hope of actually working, it is all a very curious tale and historical oddity that still serves to spark the imagination.

There have been UFO and alien encounters of all types over the years, from beings and craft of all shapes and sizes, but every once in a while there will be a spate of encounters and sightings that truly stick out as something truly odd. Whether it is because of some bizarre details or behavior, these cases certainly manage to lodge themselves firmly into the weirdest of the weird. One such series of events apparently happened in the country of Malaysia in the 1970s and 80s, and involves an intense wave of grumpy, action figure sized aliens and their tiny, toy-like spaceships.

What seems to have been an invasion of sorts carried out by aliens of very diminutive proportions began in the summer of 1970, in the city of Johor Bahru, in the country of Malaysia. On this day four young schoolboys were out in the playground when they spied a silver, disc-like object around the size of a dinner plate land and disgorge a group of five tiny humanoid beings, which each stood only around 5 inches in height and were dressed in some sort of reddish, one-piece outfits. As the kids looked on in astonishment, the miniscule little men reportedly crawled down a hole and the miniature craft they had ridden in just sort of vanished into thin air. When the boys went to investigate, they say they found a small burnt patch of grass, but nothing more. The schoolkids excitedly told their headmaster about the strange encounter, and soon more reports would emerge of similar creatures in the area.

On August 19, 1970, a miniature UFO was seen by schoolkids to land just outside of the playground of the Stowell Primary School in Bukit Mertajam, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia, after which a door opened and a gangplank of sorts extended out of it. There was then seen a procession of little 3-inch tall humanoids with little antennae protruding from their heads and dressed in blue suits, with one of them in bright yellow. These tiny humanoids marched down the plank and mostly ignored the gawking kids as they went about building some sort of antennae like device until one of the boys tried to catch one of them. At that instance, the one in the yellow suit, possibly their leader, reportedly drew out a weapon of some kind and shot the boy in the hand with a laser beam, after which the kids recoiled away and told their teachers to come see it for themselves. However, the craft was gone when they arrived, with no sign of what had happened. Later that same day, the little UFO was seen again by one of the schoolchildren, and yet again one of the humanoids shot at him, this time causing him to black out. When he was found lying in the bushes the UFO was gone, but there was a mysterious red welt on his hand where he claimed the mini-laser gun had hit him.

After these initial reports, many of the children in the area began to report these small UFOs and their enigmatic occupants, with the craft never more than a few feet in diameter and the beings between 3 to 6 inches tall. There were also several other attempts to catch the entities, but they always either managed to escape or shot their attackers with their weapons, sometimes leaving cuts or burn marks upon the skin, including a cut incurred by the son of the local police chief. Reports like this went on throughout the summer of 1970, after which the miniature aliens seemed to have gone away. However, this wasn’t meant to last.

The year 1973 would see a resurgence in cases of miniaturized UFOs and aliens in Malaysia, largely concentrated around schools. The first of these supposedly happened at a schoolyard in Gambang, near Kuantan, where two school boys managed to catch a 3-inch tall humanoid, and on this occasion a teacher would come over and see the little man for himself before it managed to squirm out of captivity and run off. Not long after this, kids playing football at a playground at Bukit Mertajam saw a silvery craft only 2-feet across land near the field, which was enough for the kids to stop their game and go take a look. This seems to be something the tiny aliens did not appreciate, as they promptly fired on the boys with bright “beams of light” to send them scattering before flying away in their craft. Later that same year another of these little UFOs would be seen at a field in Ipoh, and this time it would be seen by some of the teachers as well as it flew off. There was also a sighting at Miri, Sarawak, in which the witnesses, again schoolboys, saw a 6-inch tall little man in a white space suit trying to cut a fence with some sort of welding instrument. As soon as the alien knew it was being watched it ran off and was lost in the brush. Interestingly there would be many other sightings of these creatures in the white suits, by both locals and some people on vacation as well, as a group of the entities was supposedly seen walking along a resort beach in the area of Miri.

After this the sightings would trail off until mini-UFOs hit the news again in 1976. In an article for Flying Saucer Review, Vol. 26, No. 5, Jan. 1981, UFO researcher Ahmad Jamaludin would report that there had been a spectacular sighting of one of the tiny humanoids at the Royal Malaysian Air Force Base, just outside of the town of Kuantan, Malaysia. The first sighting was made by a 9-year-old witness who saw the creature drinking water from a drain on the base. He said of its appearance, “it had two feelers on the head and held a steel-like rod in its hand. A pistol was hanging from its waist. It was brown in color and looked like a man.” The boy said that he went back later that evening with two of his friends and they all managed to see the same being. They then told their teacher about it, and he would oddly say of it, “There was no sign of the creature in the area, but I saw a Red Indian-like wigwam beautifully weaved out of grass. It was partly crushed.”

After this, things would go quiet again until 1979, when once again sightings of these impish aliens would fire up once more. It would seem that the aliens were getting a bit more aggressive than before, as in one report a boy had his whole arm paralyzed by one of the creature’s ray guns and in another report three boys and two adults claimed to have been blinded by a beam fired from one of the diminutive UFOs at a place called Kulim. Reports would then stop again, and the last official sighting of the miniature alien invaders allegedly happened in 1985, when a group of seven 6-inch tall humanoids was spotted by some schoolkids near a stack of wood at a school in Paka, Terengganu. Showing that these kids had learned nothing from previous reports of the little entities firing weapons, one of the boys reached out towards one of the creatures and was promptly shot by a beam of light that made his hand very itchy.

After this, the invasion of little people in Malaysia seems to have subsided, leaving us with many questions. What were these creatures and where did they come from? Why Malaysia, and why did they always seem to land at schools and appear to mostly children? Why were they so aggressive and why did kids keep trying to catch them? Was this all a big ongoing prank or something more? It is very likely we will never have the true answers to any of these questions, and we are left to wonder.