A web of EEG electrodes covered Anton Bilton’s scalp like a jeweled headdress.
The machine would map his brain activity while the potent psychedelic dimethyltryptamine, commonly known as DMT, coursed through an IV drip and into his bloodstream. With some trepidation, he waited to be plunged into an otherworldly realm 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 of having your head in a guillotine, waiting for it to fucking drop.”
Then, like a rocket ripping out of Earth’s atmosphere, he arrived. And he knew he was being watched—not only by the humans back in the hospital room but also by a panoply of alien beings within the DMT realm itself.
The peak of Bilton’s trip lasted about half an hour—considerably longer than a typical DMT experience. (Vaping, the most common mode of ingestion, produces peak effects lasting 10 to 15 minutes.) It was 2022, and he was one of 11 volunteers in the world’s first clinical study with “extended DMT,” nicknamed DMTx, at Imperial College London. The idea had been suggested six years earlier in a paper by neurobiologist Andrew Gallimore and psychiatrist Rick Strassman, which argued that a technology called target-controlled intravenous infusion, originally developed to maintain steady levels of anesthesia during surgery, could be repurposed to prolong the DMT state.
For Gallimore, one of the goals behind DMTx is to study an especially strange aspect of the DMT experience: perceived encounters with nonhuman, seemingly superintelligent entities. On March 18, he and a team of experts will launch a new psychedelic retreat center-slash-research facility on the tiny Caribbean island of Bequia aimed in part at establishing sustained, two-way communication with these beings. A “SETI for the mind,” Gallimore calls it, referring to the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.
Called Eleusis, the facility is named after an ancient Greek city that once attracted spiritual pilgrims for the ritual consumption of what some experts believe was a psychedelic potion. DMT is currently a Schedule 1 drug in the US, the federal government’s most tightly controlled category, but it can be administered legally in Bequia by licensed care providers.
Eleusis’ research wing will be overseen by Noonautics, a nonprofit headed by Gallimore which “explores the edges of human understanding,” according to its website, while the therapeutic side will be managed by Charles Patti and Christina Thomas, a couple who also co-own a ketamine clinic in Florida. (While the therapeutic potential of DMT hasn’t been as rigorously studied as that of some other psychedelics, it has shown promise for the treatment of alcohol use disorder and major depressive disorder.)
DMTx sessions will be available to Eleusis guests (the resort is expecting to host 30 this month) under the supervision of medical experts, and alongside a plethora of new-agey offerings like breathwork and sound healing. All applicants will be prescreened to exclude anyone with “clear contraindications such as certain cardiovascular conditions, unmanaged psychiatric disorders, or medication conflicts,” says Thomas.
The Eleusis experience—starting with a four-day package costing $9,500 and including two DMTx sessions, lodging, and food—is promoted as a more personalizable and manageable alternative to ayahuasca, which in addition to lasting several hours can also be a physical ordeal and, like any psychedelic, sometimes end up in a terrifying trip. In the Amazon, where some experts believe ayahuasca has been used by indigenous peoples for millennia, the physical and psychological discomforts caused by the potion are viewed as important components of the healing process. But the IV-based DMTx system can be titrated up or down depending on the psychonaut’s comfort level. If they want to abort, the drug flow can be cut off, and its effects will wear off in minutes.
“Instead of having to sit in your own personal hell for six hours on ayahuasca, you can actually dial that back for people and make it more digestible,” Patti says.
Guests will be interviewed on camera after their DMTx sessions to describe their experiences, including any entity encounters. Those testimonials will then be used to create promotional clips for Eleusis’ social media channels, along with a full-length documentary “to help break the taboos and stigmas associated with the medicine,” according to Patti.
Ineffability is a hallmark of the psychedelic experience, and that’s especially true of the alien beings that DMT users often report meeting. (One study found such perceived encounters occur in around 94 percent of DMT trips). The ethnobotanist Terence McKenna—one of the more gifted articulators of the psychedelic experience—famously described these entities as “self-transforming elf machines” and “jeweled, self-dribbling basketballs from hyperspace …” McKenna likened them to playful leprechauns, but others, like Bilton, have also met more sinister beings: “dark, evil motherfuckers—horrible things,” as he describes them.
The thread connecting most perceived DMT entity encounters is an overwhelming sense of technological sophistication and godlike power. “I was confronted with what seemed to me to be the undeniable hand of some kind of intelligence,” Gallimore said of his first DMT trip during his recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, “a supremely advanced, ancient, and yet highly technological intelligence.”
In his latest book, Death by Astonishment (a nod to the late McKenna, who used that phrase to describe what he believed to be the only risk of using DMT), Gallimore argues that whatever is happening to the brain during a DMT trip, it’s not mere “hallucination”—a term he uses somewhat derisively. He makes the case that DMT unlocks a realm ordinarily cut off to our senses and populated by unfathomably advanced nonhuman entities.
If this all seems far-fetched, there are experts who’d agree.
Robin Carhart-Harris, a neurology researcher at UC San Francisco, and one of the coauthors of the Imperial DMTx study, knows better than anyone how powerful DMT experiences can be.
It’s his firm belief, however, that what feels like a face-to-face encounter with an intelligent entity is an illusion, basically a higher-order version of seeing faces in clouds. “We’re a very visual and very social animal, so we are already by our intrinsic nature primed to process beings,” he says. “And lo and behold, what comes up out of the highly entropic DMT state is a ‘sentient being.’”
The psychologist and consciousness researcher Susan Blackmore tells me something similar: “Deep down in our brains, we’re ready to encounter other humans and trying to assess whether they’re good or bad and what their intentions are, because we wouldn’t be alive if we couldn’t do that pretty well,” she says. “I think that’s, in the end, what we’ll find out [is happening in the DMT state].”
Gallimore’s counterargument is basically that DMT entities are so radically unlike anything humans could’ve ever conceivably encountered in their waking lives that they can’t be dismissed as manifestations of unconscious archetypes; there’s no ready-made psychological blueprint for self-transforming elf machines, in other words.
But his ambition to study these entities—and to determine whether they exist independently of the human mind—raises some thorny methodological questions. Consciousness is a notoriously slippery phenomenon to observe and measure scientifically, and as the rise of AI chatbots has made troublingly clear, humans can all too easily mistake what looks like intelligence for subjective, conscious awareness.
Gallimore envisions a multidisciplinary approach: sending mathematicians, linguists, and specialists from other fields into the DMT realm to study the so-called entities firsthand. (Think Arrival, but inside the human brain.) “If you were going into the Amazon rainforest for the first time, you’d send in biologists, primatologists, cartographers, geologists, soil scientists, meteorologists, hydrologists, all these different people to analyze certain features of the environment,” he says. “The DMT space is no different in that regard.”
Other experts have suggested quizzing DMT entities to test their supposed intelligence; asking them, for example, to factor phone-number-length numbers into their unique sets of primes (which most humans can’t do without a computer). But that would require their cooperation, and as Gallimore points out, they might not be interested.
At the end of the day, though, the question of the entities’ “independence” could be irrelevant. If the purpose and promise of psychedelic therapy is to help people break out of psychological ruts, and an encounter with an alien being that’s somehow conjured by the brain is enough to make that happen, maybe that’s all that matters. As Patti—who credits such encounters with helping him to overcome a yearslong struggle with addiction—told me: “Whether they were real or not doesn’t matter to me as much as the positive things I gained from the experience.”
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