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

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.