The Huntington Library Bought a Pool Contractor's Desert UFO Archive

The McKinney Collection of George W. Van Tassel Papers holds the Integratron's model, six blueprints and about 250 audio recordings.

The papers of a man who said visitors from Venus guided his Mojave Desert dome spent two decades in a pool contractor's house. Now they belong to the Huntington Library in San Marino, which bought them for an undisclosed sum.

The man was George Van Tassel, a onetime aircraft flight inspector who hosted UFO conventions in the desert after World War II. The dome is the Integratron in Landers, today a destination for sound baths. The Huntington announced the purchase on Sept. 1 and named the archive the McKinney Collection of George W. Van Tassel Papers, after Don and Dayle McKinney, the high-desert couple who kept it.

LAist first reported how the archive made that trip, and the route ran through a pool job, a voicemail and a podcast taping.

Van Tassel had quit Southern California's aircraft industry for Landers, where his family ran the Come On Inn cafe beside an airstrip. The Venusians he met, he said in a 1964 TV interview, stood about five foot six and "could have walked in our clothes down any of our streets."

One of them, a being he called Solganda, gave him the idea of soaking people in electromagnetic energy so their cells would recharge and they'd live longer, Van Tassel said. He started building a few miles from home in the late 1950s, paying with book sales, convention money and donations. The dome still wasn't finished when he died of a heart attack in 1978.

Don McKinney was 19 in 1969 when he and some friends turned up at Van Tassel's home beside Giant Rock, a huge boulder, and were shown a room below ground where, Van Tassel said, messages from space came in. McKinney pulled a book with a flying saucer in it off a shelf and asked if such things were real. Van Tassel told him they were.

Three decades later, McKinney was resurfacing pool decks out of Morongo Valley when George Riddle, a Van Tassel associate, asked him for a construction quote. Riddle let slip that he was holding a trove of Van Tassel's things, the Integratron model among them. "I just fainted, practically, and bought as much stuff as I could," McKinney told LAist.

The next link was Daniel Paul, an architectural historian from La Crescenta. Three sisters, Joanne, Nancy and Patty Karl, have owned the Integratron since 2000, and they hired him to get the dome onto the National Register of Historic Places. The National Park Service listed it in 2018. Paul's application credited the design to the architect Howard P. Hess, to Van Tassel and, in parentheses, to Solganda. A stranger left him a voicemail praising that last credit. It was McKinney, who later invited him out to see what he'd saved.

Paul told the story on a May 2025 episode of Otherworld, the paranormal podcast hosted by L.A.-based Jack Wagner. Wagner phoned McKinney after the taping and learned he was sitting on 120 reel-to-reel recordings of Van Tassel's channeling sessions. "They don't have a huge lifespan, and the Eaton fires had just happened," Wagner told LAist. He flew in his two producers to copy the audio at McKinney's house, and the crew turned up Integratron blueprints and records of Van Tassel's aviation years while they were there.

Wagner thought it all belonged in a museum. Paul agreed, and phoned a friend, Anne Blecksmith, an associate director of the Huntington's library. Two curators made the trip to the desert, and an appraisal and a sale followed.

What they hauled back is bigger than a model and a box of tapes. The Huntington's inventory counts roughly 630 photographic prints, negatives and slides and about 250 audiotapes and cassettes. Alongside them sit six blueprints, 8 mm film footage, books and an oil painting, with the catalog dating the material from 1916 to 2020, most of it from 1950 to 1988. One undated print shows more than 50 cars and campers parked among the rocks at Giant Rock.

The library Henry and Arabella Huntington founded in 1919 now also owns issue No. 24 of Flying Saucers International, from July 1966.

The family that runs the Integratron welcomed the move. Kristine Atkinson, who helps her mother, Nancy Karl, and her aunts run the dome, told LAist they've tried to share its history with visitors, but "we cannot be the museum."

The archive isn't open to researchers yet; staff are readying it behind climate controls and tight security. Its first public outing comes at the Huntington's 10th annual Strange Science, an after-hours event on Oct. 30 and 31 from 6 to 10 p.m., with tickets at $90. The Integratron model Van Tassel posed beside in the 1950s will be out both nights, and Paul and Wagner will be on stage to tell his story.

Source: laist.com, retrieved October 4, 2026. Other sources: huntington.org.