Could This Start-Up Soon Be Contacting Aliens Using DMT?

How a powerful hallucinogen could facilitate contact with extraterrestrial life forms — or not.

I know this sounds like straight out of a Joe Rogan podcast, but hear me out!

A Colorado-based start-up company plans to use the powerful hallucinogen DMT to send people into so-called “hyperspace” in order to find out what’s behind the “alien encounters” that are consistently triggered by the drug.

Yea, right? However, unlike Joe Rogan’s pseudo-intellectual ramblings about “brains as antennae to other dimensions”, the project is actually supposed to proceed according to scientific criteria and has applied for FDA approval.

In this article, I want to share with you the fascinating story behind “DMT aliens” and why it could lead to a scientific breakthrough, even if we don’t end up contacting aliens via a hallucinogenic portal.

But then, that could happen!

(find more info about how to enroll in this experiment at the end of this article).

Wait, What’s DMT Again?

You probably heard of Ayahuasca, the brew made from a mixture of plants, that has been used in South America for centuries, probably for thousands of years, as a spiritual and medicinal agent in shamanic rituals and social gatherings. Its main ingredient is Banisteriopsis caapi, a liana that contains large amounts of a molecule called DMT (Dimethyltryptamine). DMT is structurally related to LSD and is one of the most powerful hallucinogenic drugs known to mankind. Science has found that it is present in a variety of plants and can also be found in the brains of mammals.

DMT Experiences

The shamanistic ceremony of drinking ayahuasca can last hours. Not only because of the ceremony itself but because orally ingested DMT takes up to an hour to kick in. Once they do, trips can last up to six hours including visual hallucinations, euphoria, and sometimes paranoia (often including nausea and vomiting).

However, things change dramatically when DMT is smoked or injected intravenously:

• trips set in within seconds and often peak in under a minute,
• people report being “blasted out of their minds” into a bizarre and completely otherworldly realm,
• the whole experience lasts only a few minutes, although being perceived as hours by users (the reason for this: smoked/injected DMT is metabolized very quickly in the body)

Studies confirm that these intense DMT experiences, while they last, bear some striking resemblance with Near Death Experiences (NDE). Here are some similarities that could be found:

• subjective feeling of transcending one’s body (out-of-body experience)
• subjective feeling of entering an alternative realm
• perceiving and communicating with sentient ‘entities’
• feelings of inner-peace
• traveling through a dark region or ‘void’ (commonly associated with a tunnel)
• visions of a bright light

Science suggests that what we call near-death experiences are the ultimate hallucinations, based on neurons firing in unprecedented excitement as our organs stop working and the brain eventually shuts down: The bright light at the end of the tunnel is the last artifact of a dying visual cortex, the sentient beings are actually fragments of our dissolving unconscious selves, and the intense inner peace is the result of a neurotransmitter cocktail that helps us ignore potential pain and let go.

It is very likely that the similarity to these intense experiences is what makes people feel enlightened, cleansed, reborn or otherwise positively affected after an ayahuasca or DMT trip.

And there is indeed evidence that such experiences could offer potential therapeutic benefits for depression and PTSD, as well as relief from organic damage to the brain (before reading on: experts advise against self-medication and recommend that people in need seek professional help!).

Where Do The Aliens Come In?

However, the similarity to near-death experiences does not seem to be the whole story.

Interestingly, when people smoke or inject DMT their reports often show striking similarities up to the point where they describe similar breakthroughs into other dimensions, where they encounter beings they experience as inhabitants of this otherworldly sphere.

Terence McKenna, a prominent figure in the psychedelic scene, experimented with DMT in the 1960s and described the entities he encountered as fractal elves, or self-transforming “machine elves”. A term frequently used to refer to entities being experienced during a DMT trip. Here’s one of McKenna’s famous DMT trip reports:

I sank to the floor. I had this hallucination of tumbling forward into these fractal geometric spaces made of light and then I found myself in the equivalent of the Pope’s private chapel and there were insect elf machines proffering strange little tablets with strange writing on them, and I was aghast, completely appalled, because in a matter of seconds . . . my entire expectation of the nature of the world was just being shredded in front of me. I’ve never actually gotten over it. These self-transforming machine elf creatures were speaking in a colored language which condensed into rotating machines that were like Fabergé eggs but crafted out of luminescent superconducting ceramics and liquid crystal gels. All this stuff was just so weird and so alien and so un-English-able that it was a complete shock — I mean, the literal turning inside out of my intellectual universe. . . ! It’s like being struck by noetic lightning.

— Terence McKenna’s “Psychedelics Before and After History”, presented at San Francisco’s California Institute of Integral Studies, October 2, 1987

Nowadays science has picked up on the “DMT encounter phenomenon”.

Here’s an excerpt from An Encounter With the Other: A Thematic and Content Analysis of DMT Experiences From a Naturalistic Field Study, a study with 36 participants from which 72% experienced an “encounter with the other”:

Are DMT “Aliens” Real?

So could it be that DMT opens some kind of portal to visit another world? Is there really something out there like what McKenna called the “DMT hyperspace” and do alien beings like “machine elves” actually live there?

McKenna himself reportedly met with some DMT-experienced friends of his in order to come up with a taxonomy to explain the strange encounters they had. They essentially proposed three possibilities for the existence of DMT “aliens”:

1. DMT entities are semi-physical but elusive like other mythical creatures such as the Yeti and Big Foot.
2. DMT entities are non-physical. And they are autonomous. Which means that they are actually entities from another dimension.
3. DMT entities are non-physical. And they are “autonomous fragments of psychic energy that have temporarily escaped the controlling power of the ego” (McKenna). A perspective that reflects a mentalist reductionist approach and argues that DMT entities are projections of the mind: unreal in the physical sense, but very real for the DMT consumer.

So what to make of this taxonomy?

Number 1 is probably the least interesting option because it is impossible for us to verify any mythological creature.

At first glance, number 2 seems to be the most adventurous and is very likely Joe Rogan’s favorite, as it leaves plenty of room for his beloved “brain antenna” concept.

Number 3, however, seems to me to be not only the most likely option, but also by far the most interesting, as it could provide entirely new insights into how the mind works, particularly how the ego is constructed, and thus be a groundbreaker for how we might use psychedelic drugs in psychotherapy to help people with depression and other serious illnesses.

To Hyperspace And Beyond

Now, back to the plans of our DMT start-up. The approach is pretty straightforward: the project wants to better understand what’s going on during a DMT trip by allowing people to stay in “DMT hyperspace” for a longer period of time.

The Colorado-based Medicinal Mindfulness (one of the state’s first psychedelic therapy clinics) is behind this psychedelic endeavor and is currently seeking FDA approval to research a version of DMT (named DMTx) that is administered intravenously and allows for longer trips than the usual five to ten minutes. The project actually plans trips in hours (!) and therefore already includes adult diapers in the study design for good reason.

Apart from physical preparation for what might become the most extreme psychedelic experiment in human history, DMTx will probably have to solve a few more issues before their exploration of the hyperspace can proceed. These range from safety concerns about how such an extremely long stay on the most bizarre drug trip known to mankind will affect the minds of volunteer psychonauts, to questions about the method by which DMT users in “hyperspace” would be able to describe their bizarre and “incomprehensible” DMT experiences.

However, everyone in the space — i.e. in the earthly, psychedelic community space— seems to be quite excited about this potential adventure already. In a TNR report about DMTx, psychonaut John Lawrentz, who has already signed up for the project, describes his expectations toward meeting “his” DMT entities again:

“For my belief system, I really believe that these entities are parts of myself. […] It would be as if you had a very intimate friend and without looking at them or touching them or talking or hearing, you just know that they’re there and they’re there for you in every possible way.”

Indeed, if this endeavor is successful, it could help explore some of the big questions about how chemical processes and brain physiology interact to construct what we experience as “a mind” and it could likely improve the use of psychedelic drugs in psychotherapy to better help people with depression and other mental illnesses.

While FDA approval is pending, you can sign up for the DMTx project on their website.

However, if the project gets the green light, be prepared to meet this guy at the facility:

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