Some people see aliens while on DMT. Researchers want to know what they can teach us

network of EEG electrodes covered Anton Pelton’s scalp like a jeweled headdress.

The machine will map his brain activity as the powerful psychedelic dimethyltryptamine, known as DMT, flows through an intravenous drip into his bloodstream. With some trepidation, he waited to be immersed in another world that was familiar, given his many years of psychedelic experience, and yet, as was inevitably the case with every DMT trip, completely new.

“I didn’t know when they were going to turn it on,” he says. “It was eight minutes where your head was in the guillotine, waiting for it to fall.”

Then, like a rocket emerging from Earth’s atmosphere, it arrived. And he knew he was being watched – not only by the humans in the hospital room but also by a group of aliens within the DMT world itself.

climax Pelton’s trip took about half an hour, which is much longer than a typical DMT experience. (Vaping, the most common ingestion method, produces peak effects that last 10 to 15 minutes.) It was 2022, and he was one of 11 volunteers in the world’s first clinical study using “extended DMTx,” aka DMTx, at Imperial College London. This idea was proposed six years ago in a paper by neurobiologist Andrew Gallimore and psychiatrist Rick Strassman, which argued that a technique called target-controlled intravenous infusion, which was originally developed to maintain constant levels of anesthesia during surgery, could be repurposed to prolong a DMT state.

For Gallimore, one of the goals behind DMTx is to study a particularly strange aspect of the DMT experience: perceived encounters with seemingly super-intelligent non-human entities. On March 18, he and a team of experts will launch a new psychedelic therapy center research facility on the small Caribbean island of Bequia, aimed in part at establishing ongoing, reciprocal contact with these creatures. Gallimore calls it “SETI for the mind,” referring to the search for additional Earth intelligence.

The facility, called Eleusis, is named after an ancient Greek city that once attracted spiritual pilgrims to consume what some experts believe was a narcotic potion. DMT is currently a Schedule 1 drug in the United States, the category most closely regulated by the federal government, but it can be administered legally in Bequia by licensed caregivers.

The Eleusis research wing will be overseen by Noonautics, a nonprofit headed by Gallimore that “explores aspects of human understanding,” according to its website, while the therapeutic side will be run by Charles Paty and Christina Thomas, a couple who also co-own a ketamine clinic in Florida. (Although the therapeutic potential of DMT has not been studied as thoroughly as some other psychedelic drugs, it has shown promising results in treating alcohol use disorder and major depressive disorder.)

DMTx sessions will be available to Eleusis guests (the resort expects to host 30 sessions this month) under the supervision of medical experts, alongside a wealth of new age offerings such as breathwork and sound healing. All applicants will be pre-screened to rule out anyone with “obvious contraindications such as certain cardiovascular disease, unmanaged psychiatric disorder, or medication incompatibility,” Thomas says.

The Eleusis experience — which starts with a four-day package that costs $9,500 and includes two DMTx sessions, room and board — is being promoted as a more personalized and manageable alternative to ayahuasca, which in addition to lasting several hours can also be a physical ordeal and, like any psychedelic, sometimes ends in a terrifying trip. In the Amazon region, where some experts believe indigenous people have used ayahuasca for thousands of years, the physical and psychological discomforts caused by the dose are seen as important components of the healing process. But an IV-based DMTx system can be titrated up or down depending on the psychotherapist’s comfort level. If they wanted an abortion, the flow of the drug could be cut off, and its effects would wear off within minutes.