In the wee hours of Aug. 24, 1953, George Van Tassel, a 43-year-old former aviation engineer, was awakened by a man from outer space. The spaceman looked like a human. He informed Van Tassel that his name was Solganda and that he was 700 years old. (He looked no older than 28, Van Tassel said.) Van Tassel was ushered onto the spacecraft where he was told that Earthlings' reliance on metal building materials was interfering with radio frequencies and disrupting interplanetary thought transfers." Solganda also divulged a secret: a formula that Van Tassel could use to build a remarkable machine, a device that would generate electrostatic energy to suspend the laws of gravity, extend human life and facilitate high-speed time travel. A circular, dome-topped building, 38 feet tall and 55 feet in diameter, [was] constructed by Van Tassel over the course of nearly two decades in accordance with the instructions of his extraterrestrial architectural patron. The name that Van Tassel gave to his time machine: the Integratron. It ... was constructed without nails, screws, flashing or weather stripping. But it's not the way the Integratron looks that draws thousands to Landers each year. It's how the place sounds. You may not subscribe to Van Tassel's [beliefs], but an Integratron sound bath will startle your ears, and, perhaps, awaken your imagination. Beneath the wooden dome, it seems at moments that you're not listening to sound so much as inhabiting it. It is, aesthetically speaking, extraterrestrial: a transportative encounter with music, an experience of pure sound not quite of this earth.