Giant Rock is a large freestanding boulder in the Mojave Desert near Landers, California, that covers 5,800 square feet (540 m2) of ground and is seven stories high.
Native Americans of the Joshua Tree, California, area consider it to be sacred. In the 1950s it was a gathering point for UFO believers. It is located on land which was at that time leased by George Van Tassel, a purported flying-saucer contactee and organizer of UFO conventions. Van Tassel also built the nearby Integratron and a small airport in the vicinity, which he operated from 1947 to 1975. A single large room, which was subsequently filled in, was dug beneath the rock and resided in by a prospector named Frank Critzer during the 1930s and early 1940s. Critzer, a friend of Van Tassel's, perished in a self-detonated dynamite explosion in this room on July 24, 1942, while being investigated by local police. Shortly after the turn of the 21st century, Giant Rock fractured in two, revealing an interior of white granite. The entire exterior surface of the rock is now reportedly covered in graffiti.
Famous quotes containing the words giant and/or rock:
“In frames as large as rooms that face all ways
And block the ends of streets with giant loaves,
Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise
Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon, shine
Perpetually these sharply-pictured groves
Of how life should be.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“Together, we three, until the world crumbles and there is no longer a stone or a rock or a tree or a blade of grass.”
—Griffin Jay, and Harold Young. Mehemet Bey (Turhan Bey)