I was sitting in the middle back seat of an SUV-sandwiched between my two eldest daughters-playing table tennis between the windows, scanning the Mojave Desert in California for a boulder, not any boulder , Boulders.

The boulder is claimed to be the largest freestanding boulder in the world. It is seven stories high, weighs 30,000 tons, and covers an area of ​​5,800 square feet. It may not actually be the largest — there are other competitors in western Mongolia and South Africa — but it certainly competes on a global scale.

It shouldn’t be difficult to find it, except that the last three miles to the boulder are through real dust clouds on unpaved sand trails, which pass through the desert from a million different directions-it’s hard to tell where we are on a map, more Needless to say, on a cell phone with an unstable Internet connection.

For the first time we saw the boulders in Landers, California in the distance.

We finally chose the correct spider leg, bends around a moderately ridged curve 16 miles north of Joshua Tree in Landes, California, and finally spotted it in the distance. From a distance, it looks like a large enough rock, but as we get closer and closer, it will never stop growing until I get close enough that it even covers a part of my peripheral vision.

We parked the car a few hundred feet away from it, and got out of the car into a quiet desert landscape. All you can hear is the sound of the Mojave breeze blowing through your eardrums.

"I can feel the alien breath in the air," my 9-year-old daughter said.

You can see the part where it split in 2000 very well here.

It's hard to say when the story of Boulder began.

There are countless theories about how it ended in the desert. There is an often repeated statement that it is an "unstable" (a rock that does not belong to its surroundings), which arrived here after the end of the last ice age (this is wrong-there are no traces of glaciers in the desert). Others assume it is an erosion residue (basically the tip of a large mountain, weathered and surrounded by sediment-this is also unreliable because of how crack-free the boulder is). Then, the number of books on this subject is staggering, and I believe it was left by aliens ("Boulders: The Greatest UFO Story Never Told" is my personal favorite, but unfortunately, this is also a mistake of).

No, this huge garnet granite ball from the Cretaceous period almost certainly just rolled down from the small outcrop next to it. Said Richard Hazlett, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Analysis and Geology at Pomona College. If anyone can believe it, it is him.

This is my tour around the ridge.

Hazlett has been studying the geology of the Joshua Tree area for many years and co-authored a book called "Geology of Joshua Tree National Park". After a magnitude 7.3 earthquake occurred in Landers in 1992, Hazlet studied the impact on the landscape in the high-altitude desert and made major discoveries.

"After the earthquake, we immediately drove into the valley north of Landes, trying to find some cracks in the desert floor. The earthquake shook many cracked, weathered rocks high above the mountain, and these rocks rolled and fell into the desert," he Say. "They are actually the size of a house — well, the size of a cabin — and they descend so fast that they not only roll on the beach, but also bounce quite far from the shooting range — in some cases It can reach hundreds of feet.

"I effortlessly imagined the boulder as part of the mountain range. The only thing that can remove it is a real big earthquake in the past. Any traces of its impact when it hits the foot of the mountain range have been obscured by sediments. But I can’t think of other theories, and based on what I’ve seen elsewhere in the desert, it makes sense to me.”

Unfortunately, Hazlett did not share this conclusion in the middle of the last century.

Giant Rock first really attracted national attention in the 1930s, when prospector Frank Critzer used explosives to blast a hole under the rock, and then built a small underground apartment under it. The Popular Science magazine published in 1940 claimed that his apartment was a spacious 24 feet x 36 feet, and the temperature remained between 55 and 80 degrees throughout the year. Critzer also built a temporary airport runway on the dry lake bed next to the boulder. He dragged wood and iron blocks behind his car and placed the radio antenna on the boulder—along with his surname and wartime hysteria. Aroused speculation about becoming a German spy.

Men who participated in the 5th Starship Conference held in California in 1957.

But as confirmed by the census report and his draft World War I registration card, Kritzer was born in Waynesboro, Virginia in 1886, despite numerous Internet reports calling him a German national. According to an Associated Press report in 1984, which included an interview with George Knepp-a Landers resident who knew Klitzer-he was not a spy, but "an ordinary ,lonely person".

Nevertheless, the FBI continued to follow him closely through local law enforcement agencies. Riverside County deputy Harold Simpson told the Associated Press that he regularly visits Creezel and submits a report to the FBI after each visit to Boulder. On July 24, 1942, during Simpson's last visit, after delegates tried to bring him in for questioning, Kritzer was killed in an explosive explosion that allegedly exploded outside his apartment. Despite the explosion, no officer was killed. After 217 pounds of unexploded explosives were found in his underground home, it turned out to be luck.

But what is shocking is that Klitzer—a man who built a living room under a 30,000-ton rock and an airport in the middle of the Mojave Desert—is not even the most famous resident of Boulder. This honor will go to his friend George Van Tassel (George Van Tassel).

By 1947, Eva, the wife of Van Tassel, an Ohio man who had moved to California in 1930, and their three daughters had moved to Giant Rock.

According to court records, with the support of the Civil Aviation Administration, he leased the land of the Jushi Airport from the Bureau of Land Management and reopened the airport in Klitzer. He built a small commercial airport facility to sell fuel to airplanes that landed there. In addition, his wife also runs a cafe called Come on Inn, serving burgers and spiced apple pie tens of feet away from the rocks. .

In 1957, people gathered in Boulder to participate in the 5th Starship Conference in the California desert.

Well, you see, Van Tassel learned about himself quite a bit in the 1950s, because according to Van Tassel, he often communicates with aliens. He wrote a book in 1956 about his first encounter with them, where he was awakened by a tall tan alien and taken to their ship, and in about 20 years In Giant Rock, there was a UFO conference with as many as 15,000 participants.

In the 1957 "Life" magazine, Van Tassel said that aliens persuaded him to run for president in 1960 and offered to help his campaign. Disappointingly, this never happened.

In 1957, people gathered in Boulder to participate in the 5th Starship Conference in the California desert.

He went on to build the Integratron-a 16-sided dome that should technically be used to collect "up to 50,000 volts of static electricity from the air to charge the human body"-three miles south of the boulder and his alien friend Under the suggestion. But he never completed it, and when he died in 1978, no one could find any plan to help him complete it. so terrible.

Today, it is mainly just a place where people go to take photos on Instagram, with an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 visitors each year.

"You are here," said the low Waze voice in my pocket. When we first started winding through the sand to reach the boulder, it was already around 2 in the afternoon.

Along the way, I discovered the foundation of Eva Van Tassel's Come on Inn. Even though it has been filled with sand, there are still some remains of the underground house of Krize on the dark side of the boulder. In the shadow of the boulders, the temperature dropped by 20 degrees, and it all began to make sense, how Kriezer (and then Van Tassel) survived the 100-degree heat.

My sister-in-law Audrey Merlone is checking the entrance of Frank Critzer's underground apartment.

I also saw a fairly large piece of rock that broke apart after millions of years of expansion and contraction in the desert heat in 2000.

When we first arrived, there was only one other person in the area, a shirtless, leather-skinned, hairy old man who was camping from his car with a carefully arranged tarp a few hundred feet away from the boulder. If there is only one Van Tassel follower left, my money will be spent on him.

I circled the granite boulder a few times and found that some places were fixed with climbing carabiner, a creepy alien face and "RIP Earthman" painted beside various nonsense graffiti, this is not only part of the boulder, And it is part of the ridge next to it.

The surrounding area has become a kind of crowdsourced art exhibition, everything from RIP labels and immature political statements (with a lot of dicks) to the logo of the Star Wars resistance movement and someone's Twitter handle. My personal favorite is a strangely shaped square rock with a small piece emerging from one end. Someone painted car windows and taillights on it. I decided it was minivan rock.

I hiked through the boulder mountains, and my daughters trek with their uncles to two huge eyes, which drew pictures on three quarters of the ridge. Broken glass everywhere-based on all the cans and shotgun shells full of bullet holes-is likely to be used for target practice after the party.

I call it "minivan rock".

I found a good sitting rock near the color 420 tag and the spray-painted tic-tac-toe game, and then I sat down and stared at the boulder for a while, trying to imagine Professor Hazlett's theory. The temperature fluctuations in and out of the shadow of the rock made my body a little nervous, not sure if it was too hot or too cold, and my thoughts felt similar.

I know that the scientific explanation is totally reasonable, but in this remote place, facing the biggest boulders (many) I have seen in my life, I can't help feeling that an alien is being held invisible by the hand.

One of the many shotguns I found.

The foundation of Eva Van Tessel's Come on Inn.

The area surrounded by boulders is full of some very interesting works of art.

May the force be with you.

UFO George van Tassel speaks to the crowd. A series of photos of people gathered in Boulder at the 5th Interstellar Spacecraft Conference held in the California desert in 1957.

In 1957, people gathered in Boulder to participate in the 5th Starship Conference in the California desert.

UFO enthusiast Mrs. Evelyn Smith purchased a book by author Dana Howard at the Fifth Starship Conference.

Grant Marek is the editor-in-chief of SFGATE. In the past 21 years, he has held various editorial roles for companies such as Thrillist and Yahoo!. Sports, SF Examiner, Desert Sun, Santa Clarita Signal and Sports Illustrated. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and has lived in the Bay Area for 17 years. Email: grant.marek@sfgate.com