The Brief

Last August, Axel Pecero was in Burbank for a conference. He traveled frequently for his work as a foster youth advocate.

He was walking back to his hotel from a concert when Burbank Police stopped him and ran his ID.

A warrant he had for driving with a suspended license from several years ago popped up. It listed a $10 bail amount.

“They took me to the station because of that ten-dollar warrant,” Pecero said.

Burbank police released him hours later with a citation to appear in court later that month, a department spokesperson said. Pecero never made it — when he exited the jail, he said, immigration agents were waiting for him.

“As soon as I opened the door, Department of Homeland Security is literally right at the door. It was three of them. They were, like, blocking the entrance completely,” he said.

They arrested him, took him to the federal building in Los Angeles, and then to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County. Pecero began pursuing legal options to be released.

His case had urgency: Pecero has a 4-year-old — Ajay, short for Axel Junior.

“I could be deported. But I'm fighting my case,” he told LAist from Adelanto. “I have a son here that I'm fighting to stay with and be able to stay to help and support and raise.”

Pecero is one of tens of thousands of parents that have been detained under the current Trump administration. A new analysis by the Brookings Institution estimates that more than 200,000 children in the U.S. have been separated through detention under President Trump.

Pecero shares custody of Ajay with the boy’s mom. Ajay would frequently stay over with Pecero in his apartment near downtown L.A. — they’d go out to the park, or to eat, or play sports. They’d also hang out with Pecero’s younger brother, Isaac, who lived with Pecero.

Axel said Ajay would frequently hang out at his house near downtown L.A.

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Courtesy Axel Pecero

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Isaac Pecero said he was stunned when he had found out his brother had been detained.

“How would they try to deport him if he's been here way before he could, before he even remembered coming to this country? I found it unbelievable,” he said.

Isaac Pecero said after his brother was detained at Adelanto, he tried to make up for his older brother’s absence by taking Ajay on outings to the park and elsewhere.

“But we were missing something and that was my brother. It was sad when I had to tell [Ajay] like, ’Oh, I'm sorry, you can't see your dad.’ I didn't even know what to tell him when he was asking me where his dad was. I didn’t know what to say,” he said. “It was just heartbreaking because, you know, my nephew, me and my brother — we were the trio. Wherever we were at or whatever we were doing, as long as we were together, it was always fun, you know? We were the family.”

A former foster youth

Axel Pecero said he was brought to the U.S. from Mexico by his grandmother when he was three years old, and grew up around Los Angeles and the South Bay with various relatives. As a teen, he lived with his aunt. At 18, he left to live on his own.

“ It was rough. Six months later I had spent through all of my savings and then I was broke, and then couldn't pay for my apartment no more, so I ended up homeless,” he said.

He said he was arrested for trespassing; when it was time to renew his DACA status in 2019, he was denied, according to his immigration attorney.

Axel (right) with California state senator Caroline Menjivar. He said he wanted to work in policy.

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Courtesy Axel Pecero

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“I was young, I was dumb, I was just trying to survive out here by myself,” he said. “It was a journey trying to get all my life in order.”

A spokesperson for DHS said Pecero has pending charges including for drug possession, larceny and burglary. LAist could not locate court records in Los Angeles related to the burglary charge (court records show a drug possession charge was dismissed in 2020; misdemeanor charges related to a joyriding case were dismissed in January). When asked for more details, the DHS spokesperson said they didn’t have information about what jurisdiction the burglary charge was in.

Like the majority of people detained by ICE, Pecero has not been convicted of a crime.

Axel Pecero said his life changed after his son was born. He started attending Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, where a program for former foster youth connected him to resources and housing support. He joined a network of foster youth advocates, landing work with California Youth Connection and other organizations. Pecero traveled around the state and to Washington D.C. to testify on behalf of kids who’ve been in the foster care system.

He said at the time he was detained, he wanted to get his bachelor’s.

“I was doing policy work and I wanted to do policy work — that was the plan,” he said.

Axel, who was a delegate with the National Foster Youth Institute, would travel across the state and to D.C., to advocate for foster youth.

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Courtesy Axel Pecero

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Few legal options

In February, an immigration judge denied Axel Pecero’s bond to be released, citing him as a flight risk, according to his attorney. After seven months in detention, Pecero faced a choice: Leave the country and have a chance to come back to see his son in a few years. Or face deportation, and get barred from returning to the United States for 10 or 20 years, he said, even to visit.

By March, “ looking at at my circumstances, I opted for the voluntary departure,” Axel said. A judge granted it.

A week later, DHS put him on a bus to Tijuana, then he got a flight to Cancun, where his mother lives. He hadn’t seen her for 18 years.

A report by the Vera Institute found that voluntary departures among people who are detained have increased more than 10-fold under the Trump administration.

Before he left the U.S., Pecero saw his son Ajay one last time in an Adelanto visiting room.

“As soon as he saw me, he was crying. He ran into my arms. I picked him up, and he was crying, and I was crying too, you know? And he just said, ‘Dada,’ and he just came and he ran up to me, and I told him I missed him. He said he missed me, too. And I was like, "I love you, son’,” he said.

Starting over in Mexico 

Pecero is still getting used to his new surroundings in Mexico.

“ It's not like anything that I'm used to in the United States. So that’s a big change for me that I have to kind of get used to,” he said. “I’m leaving everything, my life, everything I had went to school for. My son, my friends, my family that I had out there.”

He said he’s been able to talk with Ajay more frequently now on Facetime, but it’s hard to explain where he is or what will happen next.

 ”He was telling me, like, ‘Dada, come home.’ And I was like, I was like, ‘I can't, son. Like, I'm in Mexico.’ And he's like, ‘Why?’ And I'm like, ‘It's because, like, I'm too far. I'm really far away.'"

For now, Pecero is searching for a job in the tourism industry, and he’s not sure if he’ll apply to school. He said he feels like he’s torn on moving ahead.

“It’s complicated because I’m trying to be present in where I’m at, but at the same time it’s hard because I’m like, OK, I don’t really know how long I want to be here just because I’m thinking of Ajay,” he said.

He fears making roots too deep in his new home, because it might create more distance between him and his son.

“It’s frightening because these are the years that he needs me the most,” he said. “Not being able to be there stresses me out because I can’t raise him how I would want to raise him.”

Goodbye and good riddance to the beach read. At least for this year, we can stop pretending that baking on the sand in the hot sun or tilted awkwardly on a damp plastic lounge chair by the pool is the ideal setting for reading. Now, with the fall equinox behind us, we can look forward and embrace the one true ideal season for reading: autumn.

Or we can not be so dramatic about it and just say that there are a lot of books coming out between now and the holidays. A few we've included in our round up are long-awaited follow ups to stunning entrances onto the literary scene. Others are big, ambitious projects. Others yet are versions of older works only now being translated into English. There are obviously some high-profile titles that we missed in the name of brevity but, hopefully, there are a few titles here that weren't on your radar before.

FICTION

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Mariner Books

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The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw (Sept. 29)

Philyaw's 2020 short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies felt like a discovery. Published by a small university press, the book was brave and honest in its handling of sexuality and religion. It became such a sensation in certain corners of the literary world that you really had to wonder — what the heck has Philyaw been up to? Well, we find out soon in her first full-length novel about, well, sex, religion, gossip and marriage.

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Harper

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Partita by Barbara Kingsolver (Oct. 6)

It's Kingsolver's 19th novel. Fresh off her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Demon Copperhead, one of the most prominent voices in Appalachian writing comes out with a book about a pianist on her way to classical music stardom, until that path gets knocked off kilter. Kingsolver herself originally went to college to study classical music but never truly showed her love for it in her fiction — until now.

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Scholastic Press

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It's Only Dancing by Jasmine Guillory (Oc.t 6)

Every now and then I come across a video of a cute couple doing (or attempting to do) the Dirty Dancing lift. It's a bold move with a high-risk factor for completely eating it. Well, now Jasmine Guillory's showing similar boldness. Her upcoming book — her first YA novel — is a take on Dirty Dancing. It follows a young girl and her charming dance instructor, as they try to figure out their dance steps — and each other.

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Little, Brown and Company

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The Brightness by Chad Harbach (Oct. 27)

This is the long-awaited sequel to Harbach's acclaimed 2011 baseball/campus novel The Art of Fielding. We return to Westish College — but we put down the bats and balls and, instead, focus on sexual assault, feminism, campus politics and the high costs of speaking out.

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New Directions

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Behind the Gate & Other Stories by Amparo Dávila, translated by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson (Nov. 3)

With her 2018 short story collection The Houseguest, Mexican author Amparo Dávila became a fixture in the English-speaking cult canon of weird-girl literature. Dávila died at age 92 in 2020 but a new collection of her creepy, unsettling and odd stories are coming in English this fall.

NONFICTION

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Drawn and Quarterly

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I Can't Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex by Lisa Hanawalt (Oct. 20)

A graphic memoir from Tuca & Bertie creator Lisa Hanawalt that tells you exactly what it's about in the title. And the horses bit isn't a metaphor for life or whatever, there's actually a lot in here about riding horses, taking care of horses, and how loving horses is both silly/ridiculous/expensive and, also, one of the best things in the world. OK, maybe it is a bit of a metaphor.

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New Directions

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Celeste, Daughter of the Earth and Other Early Poems by Enrique Lihn, translated by Jonathan Cohen and David Unger (Oct. 20)

This book collects translated early works of the celebrated Chilean poet Enrique Lihn. And they have the full-hearted verve and drive of a younger poet. In the poem "Steadfast," the narrator speaks to the subject angrily and bitterly but ends with the lines, "I will live secretly by your side / like the corpse I've been since loving you."

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Simon Six

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Look at Me by Dustin Hoffman with Ariel Levy (Nov. 10)

Dustin Hoffman is 89 years old now. In his lifetime, he's been at the center of some of the most enduring images seared into the minds of American culture. You can picture it, can't you? Him on the bus in The Graduate. Him at the office in All The President's Men. Him and the big crocodile thing in Hook. It's a sure bet his memoir will cover at least two of those movies in depth.

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Weird Era: How Pitchfork Changed Music Forever: A Memoir by Ryan Schreiber (Dec. 1)

As the founder of the music website Pitchfork, Schreiber had a front-row seat to the changing tides of music, music distribution, music criticism, the Internet, snobbery, taste, stardom, obscurity and rating art on a scale of 1-10. The book goes into the origins of Pitchfork and offers insight into its eventual sale to Condé Nast, reminding readers that there is a real person behind that review you hated.

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Penguin Press

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The Co-Creation: How Earth Made Life and Life Made Earth by Olivia Judson (Dec. 13)

You have to give props to the big swings, and explaining the origins of life on Earth is maybe one of the biggest swings you could take. Judson is an evolutionary biologist but has spent most of her career as a science writer, explaining the world and all its inhabitants to the rest of us.

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Long Beach Unified announced Thursday it expects to close Gompers and Edison elementary schools at the end of the school year, saying the campuses are underenrolled.

It’s the district’s latest effort to consolidate resources as enrollment continues to fall districtwide. LBUSD enrollment dipped below 60,000 students this year, the first time it crossed that threshold since the early 1980s.

Why the district wants to close schools

As enrollment declines, so does school funding, and LBUSD is taking drastic measures as operating costs exceed revenue. In a recent budget report, the district said it expects to draw nearly $45 million from its reserves this school year — the third year of deficit spending. Already, the district has reduced library support, mental health resources, and certificated and classified staff. Hoover Middle School closed last year due to low enrollment, the district said. Both LBUSD and the school board have signaled that more tough cuts are on the horizon; some are already here.

“It feels like a big loss,” said school board member Juan Benitez, whose district includes Edison Elementary. Yet he added that low birth rates will continue pushing enrollment down. The district and board have a fiscal responsibility to take action — not only to balance the budget, but to ensure students receive the best learning environment possible, which is difficult to maintain at schools with low capacity, he said.

Where students and teachers would go

If the school closures are approved by the board of education, the Gompers attendance boundary will be consolidated with three nearby Lakewood elementary schools: Cleveland, Holmes and MacArthur, according to a letter the district sent to families. Edison students would attend Chavez and Oropeza elementary schools, both within a mile of Edison’s downtown campus.

If families wish to send their children to different schools, they will receive priority in the school choice process, the letters added.

The campuses will not remain vacant, Benitez said. Edison may be used as a temporary site while other schools undergo modernization projects, and additional uses will be proposed for Gompers, he said. The Child Development Center currently housed at Edison will remain there for at least the next several years, he said.

Teachers on permanent contracts at Gompers and Edison will keep their jobs in the district, said Peder Larsen, president of the teachers union, and they will get precedence in school reassignments. But they may not learn their new school sites until April, once the school transfer and assignment process is underway, he said.

Families push back

The news has hit hard for families. Ashlee Napalan, an LBUSD teacher and a parent of three children at Gompers Elementary, said the news was “heartbreaking” and surprising, especially because Gompers underwent a significant remodel last year, including the installation of a new HVAC system, as well as fresh paint and new playground equipment, she said.

She described a tight-knit community at Gompers and said her children walk to school and play with other kids at the park across the street. When she told her son, a kindergartener, the news, she said he cried all night. “We’ve been really heavily involved with the school for seven years,” she said. “It’s a huge part of our lives.”

What happens next

Some parents have already begun organizing to oppose the move. A petition to keep Gompers open accrued more than 600 signatures in one day. Some parents said they plan to speak at the school board meeting on Oct. 7 when the issue will be presented to the board as an information item. The board is expected to vote on Oct. 21. Parents at each school have been invited to informational meetings in the coming month, according to the letters sent by the district.

Benitez said he is pushing for “ongoing, constant, clear responsive communication” to the families affected by these proposed changes. “The recommendation is not being taken lightly,” he said, adding that he — and the district — will be listening closely to students’ and families’ concerns.

Ahead of the midterm elections, Congress is scrambling to show that it understands voter concerns about AI data centers and their potential impact on electricity rates. But answering the question of how much of those costs will be shouldered by residential utility customers is surprisingly difficult to answer.

That uncertainty is at the heart of a growing fight on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers advance competing proposals aimed at protecting ratepayers in a debate that often belies the complexity of the underlying economics.

On Capitol Hill this week, Republicans have been trying to push through the Ratepayer Protection Act, sponsored by Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted. The bill would have state utilities consider holding "large-load" customers responsible for the increased costs.

Husted is in a heated reelection campaign against Democrat Sherrod Brown, who lost his Senate seat in 2024. Brown has made Husted's past support of data centers in Ohio a major campaign issue. The bill easily passed the House in September with strong bipartisan support.

Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer opposes the measure, saying its protections for ratepayers are voluntary. Instead, Schumer is promoting the GRID Savings Act, a similar bill authored by New Mexico Democrat Sen. Martin Heinrich, which he says has more teeth.

Several other data center and AI-related bills are at various stages in the legislative process.

The cost of AI is showing up in customers' bills

The question of how much of the energy and grid costs are being borne by ratepayers is a complicated one and has no universal answer, experts tell NPR. They say it varies by utility and state, but that in the end residential electricity customers will pay for a share of the AI buildout.

By one estimate, Maryland customers, for example, pay somewhere around $168 to $216 more per year on their electricity bills primarily due to the data center boom.

"We're talking tens to hundreds of millions of dollars [of infrastructure] that are being built by these local utilities," says Connor Waldoch, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Grid Status, which focuses on making electricity-market data easier to access and understand. "In many cases, it is just ultimately going to end up in customers' bills."

Tracking the impact of data center growth on residential bills isn't easy, however. How much of the increase is passed on to residential customers and when, depends on utilities' power-purchasing contracts, retail rates and regulatory decisions about who pays, according to Lucy Qiu, a professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

PJM is a regional transmission organization that coordinates the electricity grid and wholesale power market across 13 states and the District of Columbia. It supplies power to Northern Virginia, home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world. PJM's Independent Market Monitor estimates that data centers have cost their 67 million ratepayers about $29 billion over roughly the past two years.

"Everyone pays those costs," says Ari Peskoe, director of the Harvard Electricity Law Initiative. "They're spread across the region to every business and resident that has an electricity meter."

An Amazon Web Services data center is shown situated near single-family homes in Stone Ridge, Va.

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Nathan Howard

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Getty Images

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How to determine who the grid infrastructure benefits?

Data center growth can push up wholesale costs of energy by increasing demand. This determines how much generating capacity utilities and regional grid operators need to secure, Qiu says. There are also costs with building new power lines, substations and other infrastructure to connect data centers to the grid. Determining how much of that exclusively serves data centers — and how much also benefits other customers — is part of the difficulty in determining who gets the bill, she says.

"It really depends on the scale of the upgrade and also how utilities are doing the accounting of that different share, whether it's being used solely by the data centers or also being shared by other customers," Qiu says.

No "single, clean number"

Even so, "a single, clean number" that applies nationwide is just not possible, Harvard's Peskoe says, because "a lot of the data about how much particular data centers are paying is hidden behind non-disclosure agreements."

Those NDAs have become a major sore spot on the local level, as residents opposed to new data centers call out local officials for the secrecy that has surrounded many deals. A study last year by the University of Mary Washington found that NDAs had been signed in 80% of Virginia localities where there were existing, approved or proposed data centers.

In an email to NPR, Jeremy L. Slayton, a spokesman for Dominion Energy, which serves Loudoun County, Va., home to about 250 data centers, said, "We recover costs for distribution and transmission infrastructure from customers."

"These assets are core to the reliable electric service we provide our customers. All costs we recover from customers are reviewed and approved by the Virginia State Corporation Commission," he said, referring to the independent state agency that regulates public utilities.

Added costs of building out in a hurry

There is still another factor at play, University of Maryland's Qiu says. The data center industry is in a hurry and waiting for new power-generation technologies doesn't seem to be in the cards. As a result, to meet the demand, utility companies will likely need to opt for less efficient power plants and those costs will be passed onto consumers over time, as well.

One other consideration is optics, Waldoch of Grid Status says. Big customers like AI data centers pay less per kilowatt hour for power than residential customers do. Think of it as a volume discount. In the current environment where 70% of Americans are worried that data centers will increase their electricity bills, Waldoch says, "If you're saying, hey, this data center is actually paying a lot less for electricity than you are, even though it matters much less to them ... it's not like that's palatable for a lot of people at this point."

Benefits of the AI buildout

But not all price increases in recent years are linked to data centers, Qiu says.

"The fuel cost ... is a very important factor," she says and some of those new substations and power lines were going to need to be replaced anyway due to things like extreme weather events.

Qiu also notes that the U.S. power grid needs upgrades to accommodate higher demand for things like electric vehicles. The AI boom "can accelerate the upgrade of the grid infrastructure," she says.

There's also evidence, Qui says, that resiliency — the ability to survive high-impact events such as extreme heat and to recover from outages — is better for people living near data centers due to the robust infrastructure those facilities require. "So if there's a data center, it actually helps … improve the local grid reliability [and] reduce the power outages," says Qui.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Long before it drew sound bath seekers from around the world, the Mojave Desert’s Integratron was one man’s bid to extend human life, guided, he said, by beings from Venus.

A collection tracing the history of the white-domed landmark built by George Van Tassel and the postwar UFO movement he helped lead has now found a home at the Huntington.

The Mojave Desert became a major hub for UFO contactees after WWII.

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McKinney Collection of George W. Van Tassel Papers

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The Huntington

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How a ufology archive reached an institution best known for its manicured botanical gardens and classical portraits is a story decades in the making, bringing together a pool deck contractor, a historian and a podcaster.

“This isn’t just a UFO collection,” said Jack Wagner, the L.A.-based host of Otherworld, a popular podcast examining the paranormal. “This is connected to the history of the desert, aerospace, and Southern California in general.”

The flight inspector who built a dome in the desert

In the 1950s, the Mojave was becoming an important gathering spot for those who claimed contact with extraterrestrials.

Van Tassel had left a career as a flight inspector in Southern California's burgeoning aeronautics industry for the desert community of Landers where his family operated the Come On Inn cafe by an airstrip, and he organized UFO conventions.

George Van Tassel and his wife Eva ran the Come On Inn cafe in the Mojave Desert.

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McKinney Collection of George W. Van Tassel Papers

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The Huntington

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In a 1964 TV interview, he described a close encounter of his own with a crew of humanoids from Venus.

“They were about five foot six,” Van Tassel said. “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.”

Van Tassel said one of the beings, named Solganda, gave him the idea to bathe people in electromagnetic energy to recharge their cells and live longer.

He began building the Integratron a few miles from his home in the late 1950s, funded by proceeds from his publications and conventions, along with donations. It was rumored that Howard Hughes, for whom he worked as a flight inspector, had contributed $40,000 — worth about half a million in today's money.

The building took its unique shape over the desert but was not fully done by the time Van Tassel died of a heart attack in 1978, said La Crescenta-based architectural historian Daniel Paul.

“I sometimes wondered if he was starting to try certain things on himself, and maybe that messed up his heart a little bit,” Paul said.

Paul dug into Van Tassel’s life after the Integratron’s current owners — sisters Joanne, Nancy and Patty Karl, who transformed the dome into a destination for sound baths — hired him to secure a listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Integratron is known today as a destination for sound baths after it was purchased in 2000 by its current owners including Joanne Karl, seen here.

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Robert Gauthier

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Los Angeles Times

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In his application to the National Park Service, Paul said he credited the Integratron design to the architect Howard P. Hesse, Van Tassel and, in parentheses, Solganda, “because that's what George Van Tassel always said where this guidance came from.”

The Park Service officially listed the Integratron in 2018. Afterward, Paul got a voicemail from a stranger complimenting him for citing Solganda.

A watercolor illustration of the Integratron

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McKinney Collection of George W. Van Tassel Papers

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The Huntington

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How a pool deck contractor ended up with the Van Tassel archive

The caller was Don McKinney, a contractor from Morongo Valley who resurfaced pool decks and, as a side quest, had amassed a vast collection of Van Tassel memorabilia.

Donald McKinney collected the items of Integratron creator George Van Tassel for decades.

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Otherworld Instagram

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“I thought that Van Tassel was the most colorful person that I ever knew,” McKinney said.

McKinney said he met Van Tassel in 1969 when he was 19 and, with friends, visited the older man’s home by a massive boulder called Giant Rock. They went to an underground room where Van Tassel said he received communications from outer space.

“I pulled a book off the shelf and saw a flying saucer in it and asked George if these were real,” McKinney recalled. “And he says, ‘Absolutely.’”

McKinney hasn’t seen a UFO in the years since, but believes those who say they have.

In the early 2000s, a potential pool job brought him back into Van Tassel’s world.

Giant Rock, the boulder by where George Van Tassel worked and lived.

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Jack Wagner

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A Van Tassel associate named George Riddle was seeking construction quotes and, in the course of talking, revealed he had a trove of Van Tassel belongings, everything from a model of the Integratron to a photo McKinney remembered seeing at the Come On Inn cafe.

“I just fainted, practically, and bought as much stuff as I could," McKinney said.

Archival materials from the postwar ufology movement in the Southern California desert are now part of the Huntington collection.

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McKinney Collection of George W. Van Tassel Papers

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The Huntington

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By the time McKinney called Paul, he had spent a dozen or so years storing the items in the high-desert home he shares with his wife, Dayle. He later invited Paul to come see it all.

“I drove down there and met him, and I thought, 'Oh my gosh,'” Paul said. “I knew right away Don was the real deal.”

A podcast taping and a race to save the tapes

Several years later, Paul brought the story to a new audience.

On a May 2025 episode of the podcast Otherworld, he joined Wagner to talk about the Integratron. When Paul mentioned McKinney’s desert archive, Wagner wanted to know more.

After the taping, he called McKinney and found out that he had 120 reel-to-reel tapes of Van Tassel's channelings. Wagner was instantly worried about their survival.

“They don't have a huge lifespan, and the Eaton fires had just happened,” Wagner said. “I remember thinking, ‘Man, like, there should at least be a digital copy of these tapes.’”

Wagner headed to McKinney’s house to preserve the audio and flew in his producers Theo Schafer from New York and Theo Krantz from New Mexico.

Otherworld producers Theo Krantz and Theo Schafer joined host Jack Wagner at the home of Don McKinney to preserve his reel-to-reel tapes and other recordings owned by George Van Tassel.

The trio discovered much more than tapes. They also found Integratron blueprints and materials from Van Tassel’s career in aeronautics. They document their trip in a video posted on Otherworld's Patreon.

What happens to the collection now

Wagner told Paul the collection belonged in a museum. Paul agreed and reached out to a friend at the Huntington, Anne Blecksmith, associate director of the library, who then told her colleagues.

A pair of Huntington curators went out to the desert to see the collection themselves. An appraisal followed, then a purchase for an undisclosed amount.

Aside from audio recordings, the Otherworld team were floored by the amount of other items chronicling the desert's UFO history.

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Jack Wagner

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Erin Chase, the Huntington's associate curator of architecture and photography, said the collection has strong cross appeal.

“Maybe it's about cultural history. Maybe it's about desert ufology. And maybe it's about alternative spirituality,” Chase said. “The hope is that someone will find something in there that's meaningful to them.”

Huntington's associate curator of architecture and photography Erin Chase (l.) examines the Integratron model with library director Sandra Brooke Gordon.

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Linnea Stephan

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The Huntington

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Today, the newly named McKinney Collection of George W. Van Tassel Papers is housed in climate-controlled rooms under tight security as staff prepares it for public access.

Selections, including the Integratron model, will be spotlighted at the Huntington’s Strange Science event on Oct. 30 and Oct. 31. Paul and Wagner will share the stage on both nights to talk about Van Tassel.

In May, Donald McKinney (bottom right) visited the archive he'd kept in his desert home for more than two decades with historian Daniel Paul, Otherworld podcaster Jack Wagner and his wife Dayle.

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Donald McKinney

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The Integratron’s current operators welcomed the archive’s arrival at the Huntington. They’ve worked to share the landmark’s history with visitors, but “we cannot be the museum,” said Kristine Atkinson, who helps run the Integratron for her mother, Nancy Karl, and aunts.

“We absolutely know that we couldn't possibly be the end-all, be-all about George Van Tassel,” Atkinson said. “It's too much. It's too big.”

As for McKinney, he got to visit the Huntington for the first time in March with his wife, along with Paul and Wagner, whom he now counts as friends.

The collection’s new home brings relief and joy.

The leather band Don McKinney hand-crafted will stay on the Integratron model at the Huntington. He points to the "F = 1/T," the formula he said was behind the Integratron.

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Jack Wagner

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“We can go to the store and not worry that there's going to be a fire or theft,” McKinney said. “It's just a major blessing all the way around because such good people have control over it.”

His own handiwork is now part of that history. A leather band that McKinney, a skilled leatherworker, crafted still wraps around the base of the Integratron model for visitors to see.