Secrets of the desert dome that Van Tassel took to the grave

It’s a familiar story: eccentric inventor in excellent health mysteriously suffers a fatal heart attack or unusual drug overdose; the body is cremated by authorities without the family’s knowledge and, more often than you’d expect, without an autopsy taking place.

I’m sure you’ve heard this scenario described on many occasions… and not just after the demise of ground-breaking scientists but also government whistleblowers and outspoken public figures.

The king of rock and roll Elvis Presley, Doors frontman Jim Morrison and sex bomb Marilyn Monroe are three classic examples, with conspiracy theories surrounding their deaths taking on lives of their own.

On the scientific plane the instances are publicly less familiar but the cases are no less baffling: mysterious circumstances surrounding deaths that are often followed by visits by “men in black” and tales of confiscated papers and inventions.

If you also factor in the cases involving other unusual causes of death – such as car accidents, assassinations and disappearances – you’ll find the list grows exponentially. Now, of course, the wise and wonderful are as prone to untimely misfortune as anyone else but it’s the circumstances, timing and relief it causes for those in power that leads to the intrigue surrounding many such cases.

Within the scientific realm it’s hard to find a more controversial tale than the demise of Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla on 7 January 1943, not so much the death itself but the speed with which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice's Alien Asset Custody Office descended on Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker to confiscate his notebooks, technical documents and several trunks of equipment.

The verdict of the medical examiner who attended to the body was that the cause of death had been coronary thrombosis (yeah, a type of heart attack) but at the age of 86 that was not particularly unusual, especially since Tesla’s health had not been good for the previous few years.

But the plot thickens when you consider why Tesla’s health had rapidly deteriorated during that period. The catalyst? Yeah, one of those previously-mentioned untoward occurrences… a road accident.

Aged 81, in the autumn of 1937, Tesla left his room at the Hotel New Yorker after midnight to make a regular trip to the cathedral and library to feed the pigeons. While crossing a street a few blocks from the hotel he was hit by a taxicab and knocked to the ground.

Now, after midnight the streets of New York can’t have been that busy and it was a route Tesla regularly traversed, so the circumstances have to be viewed as somewhat suspicious. The accident left him with back injuries and several broken ribs, but the full extent of his injuries were never assessed as Tesla did not consult a doctor.

So, nothing really definitive to suggest foul play in either incident, but the way his room was ransacked in 1943 indicates his work was of great interest to the authorities and could have been an integral factor in both events.

Another intriguing case is that of 57-year-old inventor Stanley Meyer. Sat down at an Ohio Cracker Barrel restaurant in March 1998 with his brother and two potential investors in his revolutionary “water-powered engine”, Meyer took a slug of cranberry juice and immediately rose to his feet, his hands clutching his neck.

He rushed out into the parking lot vomiting violently, collapsed to the floor and gasped: “They poisoned me.” It took three months for the police investigation, led by detective Steve Robinette, to determine Meyer’s death was the result of a cerebral aneurysm, the toxicology test carried out by the Franklin County coroner indicating no significant results.

But his brother Stephen, who was at the table along with the two Belgian investors interested in buying into Meyer’s concept for “free energy”, was far from convinced by the coroner’s findings. The only drugs detected in Meyer’s body were lidocaine and phenytoin used for seizure treatment, which he was taking due to previous episodes of hypertension... possibly caused by the attention his revolutionary research was attracting from a host of mysterious strangers who allegedly included corporate and government espionage agents.

While the Grove City, Ohio, police investigation included recorded interviews with more than a dozen witnesses, those of the two Belgians, Phillippe Vandemoortele and Marc Vancraeyenest, were missing. According to Robinette it was possible they were not recorded and, without proof of foul play, the investigation ended in accordance with the coroner’s report.

And, while there is no concrete evidence to suggest there was anything untoward about Meyer’s death, there is little doubt it was a cruel twist of fate that effectively robbed the world of what was potentially a revolutionary source of cheap energy.

Although most reports on the case refer to the Belgians as being investors, strangely Meyer's autopsy report refers to them as “NATO officials”… while a further twist to the encounter that day was that the participants chose cranberry juice to toast the development of a research centre Vandemoortele was planning to establish after finalising the purchase of a plot of land in Grove City.

But one factor that becomes immediately apparent if you research possible causes of poisoning is that ethylene glycol, better known as radiator fluid, is one of the least detectable methods of carrying this out. Colourless, odourless and slightly sweet, it is capable of killing a person in about an hour and would go undetected by a routine autopsy... a lethal dose of the liquid being as little as 100 ml for a 70 kg adult. As actor William Shatner might say: “Weird or what?”

So far this article has taken a rather circuitous route into the story of retired aircraft mechanic George Van Tassel, who died in Santa Ana, California, in 1978.

In classic conspiracy fashion, the healthy 67-year-old entrepreneur’s death was listed as a heart attack, but his body was cremated before his family was advised of it and, according to his wife, government agents entered his home during his funeral and took away his papers and equipment.

But why would the “men in black” be interested in the contents of a retired mechanic’s home? Well, you see, Van Tassel was no ordinary “grease monkey”… he was also a visionary allegedly on the verge of unveiling his Integratron to the world.

And, why might that be of interest to the authorities? Could it be something to do with Van Tassel’s claims about the capabilities of the wooden dome, 13 metres high and 17 metres in diameter, that he’d constructed 20 miles north of Joshua Tree National Park in the Mojave Desert?

According to Van Tassel, the Integratron – located a stone’s throw from the Giant Rock monolith in Landers, California – was “a time machine for basic research on rejuvenation, anti-gravity and time travel”. Bold claims indeed… his death mysteriously coming shortly before he was supposedly about to demonstrate its capabilities to the world.

After his death work on the Integratron ceased, the building remaining abandoned and unused for a decade until, at the end of the 1980s, it was bought by Emile Canning, who renovated it in 1991 as a centre for research into new technologies for physical and mental rejuvenation.

Canning sold the site in 2000 to its current owners, the Karl sisters (Patty, Joanne and Nancy), who have turned it into an "acoustically perfect” relaxation and rejuvenation centre open to the public.

So, although never completed by Van Tassel himself, the attraction does offer a taste of the incredible healing power the visionary mechanic believed it would one day provide.

Van Tassel’s incredible story is set in motion in 1947 when he and his wife, Dorris, moved with their three daughters to the Mojave Desert, settling near Landers and the massive Giant Rock monolith sacred to Native American tribes.

There Van Tassel later invested in a petrol station, cafe, store, ranch and a small airstrip, which was to change his life inextricably when, at 2am on 24 August 1953, a craft landed on the airstrip, 17 miles north of Yucca Valley.

Asleep, Van Tassel was awakened by the sound and went to investigate, claiming to encounter a human-like Venusian, named Soganda, who ushered him to a bell-shaped craft that was hovering several feet above the airstrip.

According to Van Tassel he was taken aboard the craft by an anti-gravity beam and encountered three more beings on the vessel, which had “vertical instruments like fluorescent tubes with marks on them” similar to hieroglyphics.

Soganda, who appeared to be in his late 20s, conveyed to Van Tassel he was more than 700 years old and during their interaction Van Tassel learned about a design for a “time machine” that also had rejuvenation and anti-gravity capabilities.

And so began his obsession with the Integratron that occupied him for the rest of his life, leading him to the writings of Tesla and years of research. According to Van Tassel the location at Giant Rock was pivotal to the functionality of the dome due to the intersection of powerful geomagnetic forces at the site that the unique geometry of the building could amplify into an electrostatic generator allowing time travel and offering incredible healing powers.

Now I confess to being no expert on electromagnetism, ley lines or frequency but I know enough to realise there is so much knowledge that has been lost to us down the ages rendering us barely able to scratch the surface regarding incredible forces our ancestors harnessed at megalithic sites across the planet.

Sound, vibration, frequency, magnetism… how have we lost the understanding of these forces that offer such incredible opportunities for our world? I cannot believe this knowledge has disappeared completely but someone, somewhere is sure as hell ready to kill to keep it a secret!