May 9, 200610:56 AMThe Life

UFO@Integratron: Inside

The Retro UFO Space Convention offered tours inside the Integratron, so I signed up, of course. That was a must-see. On the ground floor, they showed us a grainy video presentation which explained these wires wrapped around the underside of the second-floor support beams. Unfortunately, your intrepid reporter was not paying attention. He was too busy watching his aura shrink into the white dot that appears in the upper-right corner of this photo:


Afterwards, there was a Q&A with a guy who claimed to be George Van Tassel, the Integratron builder who supposedly entered another dimension (i.e., died) in 1978. This guy said he was just visiting from the other dimension. I couldn't get a picture of him, and had to settle for this image of the no-expense-spared special effects (blinking Xmas lights and Hefty trash bags on the windows):


Then they took us upstairs, which was a pretty impressive space. A slight, Asian-looking gentleman regaled us with some amazing khoomei harmonic throat singing, while we snapped photos of the ceiling:


He then moved on to play a few notes on this huge Tibetan temple horn:


But our cameras were still going off like gunfire, so I think he got disgusted with us and petulantly decided not to demonstrate the quartz crystal "singing bowls":


When I walked over to look outside, something strange appeared. Holy cow! That black thing in the sky is a UFO!!


Oh, wait. It's just a bug, crawling up the window...

[more UFO@Integratron]