Dimethyltryptamine, the Jesus Drug

Oh, and that ripping sound? It’s also a feature of UFO experiences.

In 1990, Rick Strassman injected 60 people with 400 doses of the illegal drug dimethyltryptamine. But Strassman wasn’t breaking any law—he was the first federally approved researcher in 20 years to study the effect of a psychedelic on human subjects.

Here is one more weird thing about DMT—you’re on it right now

Dimethyltryptamine—known as ‘DMT’—is surely one of the strangest chemical substances found on our chemically rich planet. It is possibly the strongest of the plant hallucinogens (though Salvia Divinorum is definitely in the running) and even among veteran psychonauts it is spoken of with awe–gonzo drug theorist Terence McKenna used to say that the biggest danger of DMT is that a person could simply ‘die of astonishment’. For one thing, DMT is one of the relatively few drugs that can produce true hallucinations, defined as virtual experiences that are indistinguishable from reality. And DMT is nearly unique in that it consistently delivers one of the strangest experiences humans have—encounters with aliens. In Strassman’s study, 20% of those injected reported clear, detailed encounters with alien beings, all taking place in what the volunteers usually referred to as, ‘another dimension’. That is, after injection with DMT, 1 in 5 of Strassman’s subjects experienced entry into another plane of existence where they met aliens. Less formal ‘trip reports’ suggest that the ratio is much higher for those experimenting at home, and that the experience is even stronger when the drug is smoked rather than injected.

What’s astonishing about the alien encounters is that they are incredibly weird and yet remarkably consistent. Nearly all users report a strange ripping sound and intricate, radially-symmetric visual phenomena as they enter the DMT space. They then report meeting astounding machine-like elves that are able to transform themselves at will, and are also able to modify reality by means of a weird language—in his lectures, McKenna even used to replicate this language.

So what is going on here? Other psychedelics, like LSD or psilocybin, create different trips in different people. But this drug seems to fairly often create the same trip in different people, even in people who are very different from each other. The ayahuasca shamans of South America, for example, have used DMT for thousands of years… and often encounter aliens.

Could it be that these encounters are simply a mental fantasy created by this particular drug? Of course—humans know very little about the way hallucinogens work, largely because governments repress psychedelic studies.

But, could it be that DMT somehow precipitates a genuine trip to another dimension inhabited by self-transforming machine elves? Also of course—we know even less about aliens and other dimensions than we do about hallucinogens and brains.

For such an uncanny substance, DMT is astonishingly widely distributed and deserves the epithet ‘weed’ far more than, you know, weed. It’s found in many plant sources, including Canary Reed Grass… you’re probably within 100 feet of Canary Reed Grass right now. Go nuts.

Here is one more weird thing about DMT—you’re on it right now. Dimethyltryptamine is found in small quantities in all human brains, possibly produced by the pineal gland. Scientists speculate that DMT plays a role in dreams and near death experiences, and possibly in the mystical religious visions that periodically alter humanity’s course—the trip reports found in the Hebrew scriptures, for example, don’t sound all that different from some DMT visions. Damn hippies, as the Pharisees used to say.

All human problems are rooted in human consciousness, and DMT consistently delivers the most radical known expression of human consciousness… maybe we should keep looking into it.

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Tagged as: aliens, drugs, fringe, science