Van Tassel begins holding weekly meditation sessions at Giant Rock during which he claims to communicate telepathically with aliens, channeling their messages through his vocal cords.
One night, he says he is awakened by a being from Venus who levitates him aboard a spaceship and gives him a formula to build an anti-gravity time machine that can inhibit aging.
A 1954 Times article did not take George Van Tassel's claims very seriously. One paragraph reads: “The people of space, says Van Tassel, speak through him and give messages about living standards, architecture and other matters. One is called Noot. Another is Numa.”
(Los Angeles Times Archive/Newspapers.com)
He founds the College of Universal Wisdom, which at one time maintained a list of some 17,000 space beings who had been in communication with humans, and begins holding annual spaceship conventions at Giant Rock.
The Times reported on one such convention, in 1955:
“Union [Van Tassel] As sponsors there were several men and women who have written books about spaceships or who are going to do so as soon as possible. “Almost all of them issued some dire warnings for Earthlings, but they also shed some hope if we wake up and listen to what the friendly space beings are telling us to do.”
“…A man walking around with a Geiger counter said that even the air around Giant Rock was popping with cosmic rays from clouds left over from the Nevada atomic explosion or from space ships. “Anyway, everyone was watching for the arrival and landing of a spaceship.”
In later years, the convention featured speakers, skydiving and stuntmen doing stunts on rope ladders under airplanes, according to The Times.
