Estate of inventor who cited beings from Venus goes to the Huntington Library
A pool renovation contractor kept the estate of George Van Tassel for decades. Van Tassel said he received guidance from beings from Venus for the Integratron, which he built in California's Mojave Desert. The collection has now gone to the Huntington Library, where it will be shown to the general public for the first time on October 30 and 31.
“They were about five foot six, they came about to my eyebrows, and they could have walked in our clothes down any of our streets, and we would not have paid any attention to it,” George Van Tassel said in a 1964 TV interview about the beings he said he had encountered. According to Van Tassel, one of them, a being named Solganda, gave him the idea of rejuvenating human cells with electromagnetic energy, which led to the construction of a dome called the Integratron in the Mojave Desert, near Landers.
Van Tassel, who came from the aviation field, began building the dome in the late 1950s, financing the work with his publications, UFO conventions and donations. Reportedly, his former employer, Howard Hughes, also contributed forty thousand dollars. Van Tassel died of a heart attack in 1978, when the building was not yet fully completed. Since 2000, the Integratron has been run as a sound bath venue by the Karl sisters, Joanne, Nancy and Patty.
How did the estate survive?
Don McKinney, a pool renovation contractor from Morongo Valley, met Van Tassel in 1969, at the age of nineteen, and later, in the early 2000s, through a potential pool job, acquired the estate of George Riddle, a former associate of Van Tassel. McKinney stored the items in his home for more than two decades. The collection became known to Daniel Paul, an architectural historian from La Crescenta, who prepared the Integratron's listing on the National Register of Historic Places; the National Park Service listed the building in 2018, and among the designers Paul named the architect Howard P. Hesse, Van Tassel and, in parentheses, Solganda, citing Van Tassel's own claim.
In May 2025, Paul talked about the Integratron on the podcast Otherworld with host Jack Wagner, who then learned of McKinney's collection, including 120 reel-to-reel tapes of Van Tassel's so-called channelings. Concerned about the condition of the tapes, Wagner, together with producers Theo Schafer and Theo Krantz, visited McKinney to digitize the recordings. On site they also came across blueprints and materials related to Van Tassel's aviation career.
What is known for certain, and what remains uncertain?
What is known for certain is that the Huntington purchased the collection for an undisclosed amount, that it is being prepared for public access under the name McKinney Collection of George W. Van Tassel Papers in climate-controlled, secured storage, and that a selection from it will be shown at the Huntington's Strange Science event on October 30–31, where Paul and Wagner will also speak. According to Erin Chase, the library's curator of architecture and photography, the collection is at once about desert ufology, cultural history and alternative spirituality. Kristine Atkinson, the Integratron's current operator, welcomed the estate's move into an institutional setting, saying that they themselves cannot be a museum.
What is not known: the exact purchase amount, and there is no independent evidence that Van Tassel actually met the beings he described, or that anyone confirmed the name Solganda from any source other than Van Tassel's own accounts. The article presents the story not as investigative material but from the perspective of a desert subculture and its material relics, and takes no position on the reality of the contact.
The sober take
Van Tassel's claims are characteristic elements of the post-World War II American contactee movement and are preserved solely in his own accounts and recordings; the official document approving the Integratron's design mentions the name Solganda only in parentheses, citing Van Tassel's own claim, without independent confirmation.