‘Calling All Earthlings’ by Director Jonathan Berman

Review by Peter Belsito at Sedona Illuminate Film Festival

In this film we explore the Integratron, an electromagnetic dome near Joshua Tree in California created by George Van Tassel, a 1940s Howard Hughes confidante and self-taught inventor. Designed in the 1950s, the Integratron combined science and spirit to create a new utopia. Van Tassel designed it to both rejuvenate life and provide free energy. Is he crazy, or does it actually work?

Van Tassel claimed inspiration came through alien contact and Nikola Tesla to create his desert device. Does it really rejuvenate us and transform both time and energy, as he claimed?

The Integratron’s arcing wooden chamber of resonance is still sought and used by sound healers and visionaries worldwide in their work connecting the human spirit to the cosmos. In the end, Van Tassel’s life raft for humanity is a reminder that there is a road map back into the higher realms through resonance.

The film explores opinions, experiences of relatives and neighbors, skeptics and believers, scientists, healers and artists who tell this fascinating story.

Long before the X-Files, the threat of nuclear bombs and stifling social conformity drove artists, inventors, and eccentrics to the desert to experiment with alternative lifestyles and futures.

This is the story of seminal desert UFO contactee George Van Tassel. As Van Tassel’s diverse neighbors tell his fantastical story, a second portrait emerges. The FBI gets involved as the dome nears completion, and Van Tassel’s tale and the Integration meet an unexpected end.

Hear from historians, astronomers and current residents of Joshua Tree, including the stewards of the Integratron, the Karl Sisters, and a galaxy of believers and skeptics alike.

An aspect of the film I found especially fascinating were the multiple — often wildly different — views and experiences related in the film by area residents, travelers, etc. What happened here? Are we visited by space beings? What do they want? How do they manifest their presence?

I think we’ve all thought of many of these things and here we find that in our curiosity we were not alone. Maybe in the universe we’re not alone either.