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:
“The giant was hairy, the giant was horrid,
He had one eye in the middle of his forehead.”
—Ogden Nash (1902–1971)
“So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can’t even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.”
—Russell Baker (b. 1925)