"Calling All Earthlings" to Stay Indoors
Life’s a beach. Or, it was for Californians before social distancing- defined for the first time this month by Merriam’s Webster as “the practice of maintaining a greater than usual physical distance from other people or of avoiding direct contact with people or objects in public places during the outbreak of a contagious disease in order to minimize exposure and reduce the transmission of infection.” The Great Self Quarantine caused Mayor Eric Garcetti to put a pause on the great outdoors for Angelenos.
Garcetti announced the closure of beach parking lots; which was followed by the closure of “vehicle access at all 280 state parks, and fully closing others,” according to Parks.CA.Gov, which also includes a complete list of the closed parks and trails with updates up to March 29.
In the early days of the quarantine, outdoor recreation became an escape for those forced otherwise inside for the COVID-19 quarantines, but Garcetti was blunt about his feelings on the crowds ignoring social distancing queues, saying in his pandemic announcement to the city on March 22, “We saw too many images of too many people crowding beaches or canyons beyond their capacity. Too many people, too close together, too often...The longer we do that, the more people will get sick, and the more people will die. There’s no way to sugarcoat that.”
The Los Angeles beach closures squeezed crowds out to desert parks and recreation. Joshua Tree Park saw a huge and, sometimes, unwelcomed spike in activity. According to the Palm Sun Daily Press, folks flocked out to Joshua Tree and even camped on yards of those with two or three acre properties unknowingly.
Joshua Tree has long attracted people to experience its vast desert ether and its trees with magical properties. The website for National Park Service notes that the tree, thought to be given its namesake from lore of Mormon immigrants who thought it looked like a person in prayer, has “tough leaves [that] were worked into baskets and sandals, and flower buds and raw or roasted seeds [that make] a healthy addition to the diet.”
Filmmaker Jonathan Berman captured the history and sci-fi past of the infamous white dome in Landers, CA. “Calling All Earthlings,” a current streaming option for the self-quarantined via Amazon Prime, is a 2018 documentary that focuses on the Integratron, which, according to its late aeronautic creator George Van Tassel, was built according to celestial instruction by extraterrestrials from Venus. The site for the “Earthlings” film tags it as “the true story of Howard Hughes, the Postwar avant-garde, and a mad genius named George who took off from the California desert in a flying saucer.” And that he does.
According to Joshuatree.guide, the massive, cathedral-like dome located in Landers, California, 37 miles outside Joshua Tree, was noted by Van Tassel to be “capable of rejuvenation, anti-gravity and time travel.” With the blueprint for the 38-feet-tall building coming from space, the funds to complete it were provided by grants. The famous aeronaut Howard Hughes had a financial hand in the Integratron’s completion in 1959, and was an employer and friend of Van Tassel.
Today, the dome’s curated acoustics, made possible by its seemingly-miraculous, metal-less construction of only wood and fiberglass, are used to give sound baths that book months out in advance. A “60 minute sonic healing session” is offered via the site, wherein crystal singing bowls are struck to douse bathers in sound. While the dome has grown locally famous for this purpose, they are currently on hiatus per COVID-19, with their reopening to be determined.
Former SMC student Natalie Flores is a fan of the dome. As a gardener, healer, and mother of her two-year-old daughter Iris, she credits places like these and the community they cultivate as being essential to human healing.
“All my friends are ‘healers’...they grow food and medicine. And most have also studied various other practices throughout the world.” Having studied massage therapy and herbology in addition to extensive experience gardening both pot and produce, Flores is a fountain of healing knowledge. Though she fosters her connection with Mother Earth, Flores is humble enough to give acceptance to the idea of aliens.
Ancient literature has painted the desert as a place of magic for some time, as Dr. Kevin Starr, history professor of USC states in the documentary, “[the] desert in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures is where you go for a mystical encounter...where you go to see visions and dream dreams.”
Via black and white interview footage of Tassel from a nighttime television show that aired when “children should be in bed, so it’s safe to talk about flying saucers and people from outer space” he recollects his alien encounter.
“This man awakened you?” the eager television host asks Van Tassel from offscreen, skepticism intact. “Something awakened me,” Van Tassel answered on the screen, unperturbed. Van Tassel's son-in-law, Daniel Boone, who is mentioned in the 1950s talk show footage as an eye witness to the encounter, maintains in modern footage what he saw during the encounters, and that he had been woken up in the still of night by something that “sounded like a pulse.” Van Tassel also notes that these are the very visitors from Venus who instructed him how to build his famed Integratron.
Van Tassel’s beliefs in the unbelievable and his willingness to put himself out there for his personal truth made him fast friends for somebody like Frank Critzer, who, not unlike Patrick Star of “Spongebob”, kept home underneath a giant rock. Critzer’s own seemingly-wild claims were based around his inclination that he had found glass tunnels near where Big Rock, a long-visited mysterious mass of seven-story-high rock in Landers, lay.
Critzer was blasted by his own dynamite in a standoff with cops who used a gas grenade in hopes to smoke the pariah out like a rat, killing him on July 24, 1942. Critzer was under legal suspicion that is now widely believed to be due to discrimination against Germans during WWII. The rock saw a fully operating cafe underneath it and a popular desert airport beside it before they both eventually came to their close.
Before the belief in celestial visitors was a taboo one, there were the Morongo Indians. Tribal historian Ernest Siva tells of the Oasis of Mara, where the lore of indigenous peoples tell of humans first landing on the earth in Twentynine Palms.
The mission to this desert oasis has always been one aimed at healing. “There’s a reason why George had contacted this time. There’s a reason why there’s these extraterrestrial happenings all over the planet. It’s because the planet is going through changes” says Dr. Desiree Hurtak, social scientist and futurist. Van Tassel thought his dome was able to extend human life by way of electrostatic energy. The electromagnetic field of the building was Tesla-caliber technology that threatened the steadily-growing business of nuclear energy.
Van Tassel spent close to two decades testing and developing the technology, and then mysteriously died in 1978, right before he was set to show the technology off for national television. Van Tassel’s legacy, apart from an epitaph that read, “Birth through induction, death through short circuit,” was a new kind of healing and alternative group of believers. While the world may still be shy of receiving bioelectromagnetics, sonic healing and the power of music are long welcome by the guests of the Integratron.
“Integratron is amazing, but I prefer Garth’s Boulder Gardens,” Flores says, comparing the big dome to the outdoor desert museum in San Bernardino county. For a self-proclaimed guerilla gardener with plans to plant wildflower seeds to make blooms out of vacant lots, for the community to heal from the social and biological effects of COVID-19, Flores feels the answer still lies in fostering community the best ways one can, and getting back in touch with nature.
“The cure is actually what they’re telling us not to do. It’s your community. It’s sharing and cultivating your art and gifts. It’s kindness. It’s spiritual. The blessing is that people are getting humbled and realizing all work and no play sucks. Spending time with one another is awesome; we should do it more and not focus so much on making money. Focus more on making community, because community is what’s going to get you through tough times. Love thy neighbor. All your neighbors, no matter how poor or crazy. Love them,” says Flores, who has not slowed down her gardening or followed social distancing protocols since the safer inside order went into effect.
While “Earthlings” is set to inspire quarantining streamers to head to the desert once they are free to play outside again, it also should come with a warning that it may cause viewers to love the golden state for even its roughest terrain and most shadowy mysteries, a fixation the film calls “California Syndrome” for which there may be no cure.
