Elderbear is subverting the dominant paradigm.

at an incredible impressionist art exhibit. Standing inches away from van Gogh, Renoir, Monet was just an exciting experience.

is phenomenal. We got to tour his gallery and stand inches away from Picassos, Warhols, and a delightful Vermeer. Wynn narrated the tour and it was obvious that he had quite a passion for his paintings.

I understand he’s had to sell some off and that the gallery is now closed.

Without that, the Wynn isn’t as interesting.

when he had a quad bypass in 2000 – the careful diagnostics caught him hours before what would have been a fatal heart attack – just as he was about to leave for The Dominican Republic and Malawi for a month.

The careful and caring doctors here also helped figure out a very perplexing medical condition with my wife that frequently goes improperly diagnosed for decades. Not only that, but they hooked her up with one of the world experts for treatment.

I want to bag the peak as part of the Sierra Club’s Hundred Peaks Section. I also want to climb it and operate during the ARRL’s VHF and UHF contests.

Scoffed at by some as a Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) pork barrel boondoggle, feared by some as a giant mind control conspiracy, and used by some as a scientific research station for studying the auroral zone ionosphere and related phenomena.

I’ve been there many times over the years.

A friend of my dad’s flew us out here in his Cessna. The people (and I think we met Van Tassel, himself) were very sincere and handed us brochures about the Integratron they were building.

I hope to return someday – perhaps I’ll drive my daughter out one of these weekends. The marker on the map is at the N. end of the old airstrip, very close to the Giant Rock itself. Going southwest on Giant Rock Road will bring you to the integretron site at 2477 Belfield “Blvd.”

So when I started making a list of airports I’d visited, I wanted to hunt this one down. It took a few hours of digging (especially since I was looking for “Big Rock Airstrip”), but it was worth it to find the place. Really, almost more thrilling than being a 10-year-old on his first small aircraft ride!

To UFO researchers, Giant Rock is significant for many reasons, for starters it was the home and workplace of the enigmatic George Van Tassel. Van Tassel allegedly made contact with extraterrestrials in the 1950’s and was tutored by them on a variety of subjects, including human, cellular rejuvenation. And that led to the building of a structure called the Integratron.

labyrinthina.com

The Integratron is the creation of George Van Tassel, and is based on the design of Moses’ Tabernacle, the writings of Nikola Tesla and telepathic directions from extraterrestrials. This one-of-a-kind building is a 38-foot high, 55-foot diameter, non-metallic structure originally designed by Van Tassel as a rejuvenation and time machine. Today, it is the only all-wood, acoustically perfect sound chamber in the U.S.

Integratron.com

George Van Tassel went to visit a friend, Critzer, who had settled at Great Rock. Van Tassel was surprised to find that Critzer had dug under the Great Rock in order to have a place to live, creating a kind of cave for himself.

In the summer the maximum temperature under the Rock is 80 degrees F. In the winter, the temperature is a minimum of 50 degrees F. In contrast, the temperature outside the cave swings between 25 degrees F to 115 degrees F.

The Giant Rock covers 5800 Sq. ft. of ground and is 7 stories high. The rooms that Critzer dug were no more than a total of 400 sq. ft.

During WWII, Critzer was accused of stealing dynamite and being a Nazi spy (he lived in a desolate place and had served in the German Navy during WWI). A confrontation with the police resulted in his death in August of 1942, when police tear gas grenades set off a case of dynamite.

Van Tassel retired to Giant Rock and built an airstrip. He meditated under the rock and believed that he was at the site of an energy vortex. He was an early UFO researcher and constructed a large, non-metallic dome according to plans he received while meditating.

I was probably about 10 and one of my dad’s friends took us up in his Cessna for a day. This was our point of origin. Like the other abandoned airfields in the area, it’s been redeveloped now. Instead of flight enthusiasts, it’s strip malls, box stores, and office parks.

Bleah.

Seriously. In the movie Contact, where she’s at the observatory. The love scene with Matthew McConnehey, that bed. Of course, Jodie was nowhere to be found. They added the headboard for the movie, too.

But I can honestly say that I’ve slept in Jodie Foster’s bed.

I’ve also been under the dish (a scene well described in Where Is Joe Merchant? A Novel Tale) and up to the platform above the dish (I was guilty of joining a gang of hoodlum scientists who flew paper airplanes for about an hour one muggy dawn).

AO was originally built as a radar – Bill Gordon championed it – to study the ionosphere.