Some People See Aliens While on DMT. Researchers Want to Find Out What They Can Teach Us

A new psychedelic retreat calling itself a “SETI for the mind” aims to establish two-way communication with the nonhuman entities people encounter while tripping on DMT.

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 ...