Van Tassel begins conducting weekly meditation sessions at Giant Rock during which he claims to communicate telepathically with extraterrestrials, channeling their messages through his vocal chords.
One night, he says he’s awoken by a being from Venus who levitates him aboard a spacecraft and gives him a formula to build an antigravity time machine that can inhibit aging.
A 1954 Times story didn’t take George Van Tassel’s claims very seriously. One paragraph reads: “The space people, Van Tassel says, talk through him and give messages about life levels, architecture and other matters. One is named Noot. Another is Numa.”
(Los Angeles Times Archive / Newspapers.com)
He founds the College of Universal Wisdom, which at one point maintained a list of some 17,000 space beings who’d been in communication with humans, and begins to hold yearly spacecraft conventions at Giant Rock.
The Times reported of one such convention, in 1955:
“Joining [Van Tassel] as sponsors were a number of men and women who have written books about spaceships or are going to do so as quickly as possible. They nearly all sounded some dire warnings for earthlings, but threw in a little hope, too, if we wake up and listen to what friendly space beings are telling us to do.”
“… One man who was going around with a Geiger counter said that even the air around Giant Rock was jumping with cosmic rays of leftover clouds from the Nevada atom blast, or backwash from space ships. Anyway, everybody was on the lookout for a space craft to come in and land.”
In later years, the convention featured, interspersed with speakers, parachute jumping and stuntmen doing acrobatics on rope ladders beneath airplanes, according to The Times.