VISITORS FROM HIDDEN REALMS

Discover the connection between UFO visitors and shamanic lore! Brent Raynes' stunning book—intro. by Brad Steiger.

A saucer disappears inside a hill?

It was early morning at a farm in Terra Alta, West Virginia. “I was very young at the time,” Bob Teets began, the author of West Virginia UFOs: Close Encounters In The Mountain State (1995). “Around 8-years-old or so. To the best of my recollection, it was 1958. It was a summer morning. We come from a farm family and we were early risers. We worked hard, and even the kids worked, so we slept well.”

“All of a sudden, this tremendous noise brought me out of a sound sleep. It was so loud that it hurt my ears. I couldn’t figure out what in the world it was. I jumped out of bed, and as there was a window at the foot of my bed I threw open the curtain. I thought that there must have been a terrible storm or something, but I looked out and there was really just the first rays of the morning sun. It was calm and there was an azure sky.”

“This noise was just tremendous. Even with my hands over my ears it still penetrated my head. It was just unbelievable. It was like if you were standing right beside a freight train that was going full throttle. There was a flat little field between the house and the barn and I was looking out over the barn roof, more or less, and it was probably 50 yards or so away, and then there’s a big hill on the right hand side, which would be on the southern exposure.”

“Then it just sort of caught my eye and I looked up, almost straight up through the window, and that’s when I saw this round object. It startled me in so many ways. Primarily because it’s not something that one assumes you’re going to see when something catches your attention, and meanwhile your mind is so preoccupied with this terrible noise. So I look up and see this very smooth object, very slowly making its way just over the top of that tree and I suppose it was a 60-70 foot or so maple.”

“It was surrealistic. I wouldn’t have called it that at eight years of age, but that’s exactly what it was. Then it came into full view and it was so smooth. It was one of those instances when you see something that looks that smooth you want to touch it. I do recall wishing I could just move my hand over that thing, and I did not associate seeing that with the sound.”

“It moved beyond the tree, in full view, and was just barely moving along and I could see these two glowing orange-red orifices in the back. Exhausts or whatever you want to call them. I don’t know. This machine was silver, a smooth silver, and then to see these two vivid orange orifices in the back was startling indeed.”

“But I think that the most surprising thing of all is the speed then with which it…it was like if you’ve seen time-lapse photography where a car light seemed to be just a steady stream instead of just seeing the light. It makes a long ribbon. Well, that’s what happened. This thing just absolutely, just in a heartbeat, went straight for that hillside, and yet it seemed to be still in slow motion, in my mind, and I’m sure that part of that is because that sound was so overwhelming and it flooded my receptors. You can only take so much information in at once.”

“It was what we may think of now as hyper-dimensional. I don’t know. Sort of being in two realities or stepping between realities, or whatever was occurring there, because it seemed to move so slowly (yet) at the same time at astonishing speed. Then I threw my hands down on the bed because I was expecting a tremendous crash, and that hill where it disappeared couldn’t have been 150 yards from the house. Maybe the length of a football field, or just a little bit more. Maybe 150 yards at maximum.”

“The machine itself wasn’t all that large. Probably in the neighborhood, judging from the field of view out of that window and everything, maybe 30-35 feet across, at the most, and it was circular. …It was almost a quintessential ‘50s UFO looking thing.”

At this point, I questioned Bob as to whether there were any other details or structures on the flying silver disk-looking craft besides the two glowing orifices, and he stated that there wasn’t. “You know, there was no smoke coming out of those, or no exhaust fumes and no distortion in the air around them, that I recall. They glowed a very vivid, as I said, this reddish-orange.”

“Gee, I don’t know what else to say,” Bob continued. “It took off for the hill and I was in that nether space of realities, whatever that was, and I remember grabbing the bed and feeling it shaking. And it could have just been me shaking the bed. I don’t know. I waited for the crash. Truly, as I said in the book, I blinked and I blinked again, and it was gone. It didn’t maneuver up over the hill. I had a very clear view. It was a pasture field on our farm and there were only some trees up along the top, so it was perfectly open. I could see everything, and it really went into the hill.”

I asked Bob if there was any change in the appearance of the orifices or anything before it disappeared “into the hill.” “Not that I recall,” Bob said. “The only thing, you know, it was like you see in the movies sometimes (where) the moment that it disappeared into the hill that tremendous noise just trailed off like thunder peels away. It wasn’t immediate. I could still hear sort of the reverberations of that thunderous noise, and then it was all quiet again, and that was it.”

“I have no real conception of how long I sat there. It wasn’t long, I’m sure. Several seconds, and there was another window in the other wall between my brother and I, and so I turned around to see if he was looking out that window. Lo and behold, he was still asleep. He’s six years older than me, so he was in his teens. He was sound asleep and I couldn’t figure out what was going on with that either.”

“It was one of those things that I carried my whole life really without telling anyone about it, but certainly I never forgot it.” Bob admitted that he had been a little nervous about including a brief mention of this childhood incident in his book, fearing that it might in some way compromise his integrity as an investigative journalist by revealing that he had had such a dramatic encounter in his own past. Thus he wasn’t just investigating and reporting on the experiences alleged by others.

I reminded Bob of how he had written in his book that before this incident the hill where he had seen the UFO disappear had always seemed like a magical place to him. “Yes, I often went there by myself,” he said. “Of course, it was on our farm. That’s not unusual for a farm kid to just go out into the fields, and in this case there was a woods up beyond the pasture on the hill that was just wonderful to play in and I spent a lot of time there. Often by myself. I just always had a wonderful attachment to the hill. It did seem magical in many ways, and even without any paranormal connections whatsoever it was a special place. My father and I would go up there and cut the Christmas tree and, you know, just lots of wonderful memories of that, and it was a spectacular view down over an undulating valley with smaller hills going down through it. And, oh my, when I started researching into the paranormal and UFOs I had so many accounts of people who reported, without even knowing other than that I was interested, it’s pretty amazing how many people reported seeing UFOs in that valley that’s formed by the hill that I’m talking about and one that was opposite in a valley in between them. Lots of reported UFO activity in there for many, many years.”

The hill, radio experiments in the 1880s, and a non-human intelligence

Though young Bob Teets didn’t know it at the time, his magical hill had been the site of early wireless radio experiments conducted by a dentist named Mahlon Loomis, a man whose efforts had preceded Marconi’s famous accomplishments by some two decades. In addition, Loomis may have even been influenced by a non-human intelligence. “I couldn’t have known it then,” Bob stated. “In fact, the family didn’t even know it until I must have been in college when a professor came over one time. I was away at school and my parents told me that a professor came and wanted to set up some sort of a little experiment there on the hill to see if he could pull in free electricity. That is, enough electricity from the air to run a little electric motor that he had, and he was sort of peripherally interested in Loomis, and he happened to mention it to them. Then in 1976, there was a gentleman in that town where I grew up who, as part of the bicentennial effort, really did some research and sort of sparked some interest locally, and then the media ran a couple of stories on it. The national media really.”

“Loomis was recognized, maybe not to have invented radio, but he got radio to work. But he didn’t know exactly what it was that he was doing. The debate is still whether he was propagating actual radio waves or just some frequency propagations.”

From that hill that Bob as a boy had seen the round silver object enter, Loomis had erected an antenna for his experiments. “When I was doing research I had a lot of collateral confirmation of it,” Bob explained. “There was a gentleman still alive at that time who used to go up there in the 1920’s when he was a kid and he said there was the remains of certainly what would suggest used to be sort of a tower. Because a few of the posts were still sticking up, though most of the boards and so forth had collapsed on it, but when he and other kids would go up there to play they would sit on that a lot of times. What was left of it.”

“Loomis’s house was right across the street from the house that I grew up in. It was a stones throw away. Loomis, of course, would have gone to the highest point because when he was in Virginia doing his early experiments he put kites up to try and get as much height as he could. So it only stood to reason to go to the highest point around to put the aerials up, and by this time his experimentation had gotten pretty sophisticated for the time and he realized that he could make a permanent antenna site. That’s what this wooden tower, or at least I’ll speculate about that. There are not a lot of records left over, but there are several of his drawings and his notes in the Smithsonian.”

“The way his system initially worked is that he would fill balloons with helium and coat them with copper paint and then attach copper wires to the bottom and send them aloft, at the same height, distances apart. He knew enough to put a coil of the wire into the ground and then he would bring those two wires close together, and he was of course up to speed on what the telegraph was and he rightfully pretty much astonished the world by saying that the telegraph didn’t need two wires. That the earth could act as the ground, so he already knew that. But he’d bring the two wires together, the tips of them, the one out of the ground, and that was attached to the balloon, and a spark would occur. At the time that spark would occur he had a galvanometer, which is a very crude device from the 1860s, but it still, nonetheless, could measure weak electrical currents, and it was affixed to the other balloon miles away. And when Loomis would make a spark at this first balloon the galvanometer would deflect at the second site where the other balloon was, as long as the balloons were at the same height.”

“They had a different way of looking at things. Science at the time was convinced that there was a life force around the planet in the air, and they referred to it as the aethers. It’s interesting, and you can trace that sort of back to even Egyptian thought about the etheric energy around not only the earth but around bodies. A life force.”

“So he was convinced that if he could get his balloons high enough then there was more and more life force up there and that he could then rely on that in the form of electricity to give him more and more power. We do have some newspaper articles from the time in which he was friends with Alexander Graham Bell. Bell gave him some handsets and he had voice communications. That was reported in the press at the time, and he got to the point once that one of his assistants at this remote location, the only way that Loomis would allow him to converse with him was via the telephone that they had hooked up between these two points, and that would have been at the time when he understood and got the system better built so he would have had a tower on the ground as well as a balloon. He probably tied them together in some fashion or whatever.”

“At the time the spiritualist movement was very popular in America and Loomis was associated with it as a spiritualist, and one of his brothers was a medium. So Loomis was in touch with a spirit guide, very intimately. I don’t know whether the spirit guide identified itself or whether Loomis associated a name with it, but anyway he referred to it as Frances, and what few diary entries of his remain he often mentioned Frances in them and his brother and a session that they would have had the night before. So without specifically saying as much, it is not a leap of faith at all or anything else to say that Loomis was getting a lot of information from the spirit guide and it definitely influenced his thinking in developing this communication system. In his notes, he says specifically, and in fact he may even mention someplace in his patent, which he was granted, by the way, that this could not only be a source of free power for locomotion and energy use and so forth, it could also be a communication system coast to coast in America. Then he goes a little bit further and says, ‘Even so far as communicating with other planets.’ So you could infer from that, ‘Well, who would be on the other planets to listen to what we had to say.’ He definitely talked about space travel and came up with a formula that is pretty darned close to what we use now to fuel the lift-off of the space shuttle.”

“So it’s entirely possible that he was just thinking that we’ll go out onto the other planets and talk with each other. He did not say specifically contact with alien intelligences, but how does one define what Frances was. That’s when we get to the interesting nexus point of the whole idea of non-human intelligence. Is it aliens, or is it spirit guides, or just what is it?”

“The whole point to me, at the time I was doing the research, is that we don’t know what the non-human intelligence is, and I just found it fascinating that this guy was in touch with a non-human intelligence and I saw something disappear into a hillside that certainly wasn’t human.”

“The famous poet Ezra Pound, was Loomis’s cousin, and you want to talk about an existentialist and somebody into all manner of intellectual connections with the occult (not meant in a prejudicial way, that word occult, for it simply means hidden). Ezra Pound, one of America’s most famous writers and poets, and a radical at that, a real Bohemian, even tried for treason because he sided with the Italian government during the second World War. He was deeply into the occult, and he and Loomis, who were cousins, would have talked about this all the time. They would have communicated about this.”

“Loomis was a dentist, and at the time there was no distinction between a medical doctor and a dentist. You pulled teeth and you cured people as best you could from their illnesses. But you know, when physicians at the time were studying they also studied philosophy and poetry and the classics, and that would have had a tremendous influence on their worldview about what it was that they were doing and what it was that they were interfacing with. The Greeks didn’t find anything wrong at all about this. It was commonplace for them.”

“The point is history is full of examples of contact with non-human intelligences leading to fantastic discoveries and other sorts of breakthroughs, philosophically and otherwise.”

As our conversation continued, I mentioned about the ancient shaman and all the hats that the shaman of his tribe or community would wear, by comparison. “Right,” Bob said. “The first medicine.” Then I discovered that like myself, Bob had also, over the years, become very interested in the subject of shamanism as well.

Nikola Tesla: Visionary Electronics Genius, Secular Shaman?

Another pioneer in the field of electronics whose life was surrounded by much controversy and mystery, and who was also from the same early era as Loomis, would have been none other than the legendary electronics genius Nikola Tesla. Much has been written about Tesla, covering the full spectrum from factual to fanatical and many grey areas in between. The late Robert Anton Wilson, in his book Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977), devoted a brief section to Tesla entitled “Nikola Tesla, Secular Shaman.” Wilson described how Tesla’s ideas for the A.C. generators that unleashed upon the world a modern technological revolution came about through a series of “quasi-mystical visions” back in his adolescence. Tesla even, he pointed out, suffered mysterious illnesses between his visionary states, sometimes even nearly dying. Wilson compared Tesla’s most unusual episodes to others who have had classic mystical experiences such as noted yoga adept Gopi Krishna, who also had years of visions and illuminations and bouts with mysterious illnesses. He also compared these experiences to what shamans have long described enduring.

Another author who has written about Tesla is noted writer Tim Swartz. In fact, Tim wrote an entire book on the Tesla matter, entitled The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla. I wrote to Tim to see if he could give us an overview on Nikola Tesla, and perhaps separate the legend from the man and provide us with the essential true facts. He wrote:

I think that because Nikola Tesla was such a natural genius that often his abilities have been attributed to paranormal powers or even that he could have been an extraterrestrial. This, in my opinion, is a great disservice to the human race by implying humans are not capable of such genius. Men such as Tesla proves to me that humans are capable of greatness beyond conventional thinking. Unfortunately, people such as Tesla are probably born every day, but due to the constraints that society places on people to conform and not think (I hate this term) "outside of the box", their genius is often stifled.

One reason that some writers and researchers may attribute Tesla's abilities to psychic powers was his amazing ability to picture in his mind an invention. In his autobiography ("My Inventions"), Tesla tells of the early workings of his mind in which he began seeing flashes of light that interfered with his physical vision. When a word was spoken, he would envision the object so clearly that he had trouble distinguishing between the imagined (spoken) object and the real. At night and in solitude, Tesla had an inner world of personal vision where he made journeys to distant places, studies, carried on conversations and met people that seemed as real to him as his outer world. By the time he was a teenager he spoke four languages.

In later years, he would build a machine in his mind, run it to see where it was flawed, and make whatever repairs and adjustments were needed, before he ever began his construction. Tesla never considered this ability to be paranormal, he just accepted it as a normal part of his life.

In fact, through most of his life, Nikola Tesla held little regard for those who claimed psychic powers or the ability to talk with the dead. Tesla was a man of science and knew that everything could be realized through scientific principals. Tesla knew that the human mind was capable of great things and that most people went through their lives as if asleep, barely knowing what was going on around them and easily tricked into believing things such as "telepathy and other psychic manifestations, spiritualism and communion with the dead."

Tesla once wrote: "Just to illustrate how deeply rooted this tendency has become even among the clear-headed American population, I may mention a comical incident. Shortly before the war, when the exhibition of my turbines in this city elicited widespread comment in the technical papers, I anticipated that there would be a scramble among manufacturers to get hold of the invention and I had particular designs on that man from Detroit who has an uncanny faculty for accumulating millions. So confident was I, that he would turn up some day, that I declared this as certain to my secretary and assistants. Sure enough, one fine morning a body of engineers from the Ford Motor Company presented themselves with the request of discussing with me an important project. 'Didn't I tell you?,' I remarked triumphantly to my employees, and one of them said, 'You are amazing, Mr. Tesla. Everything comes out exactly as you predict.'

"As soon as these hard-headed men were seated, I of course, immediately began to extol the wonderful features of my turbine, when the spokesman interrupted me and said, 'We know all about this, but we are on a special errand. We have formed a psychological society for the investigation of psychic phenomena and we want you to join us in this undertaking.' I suppose these engineers never knew how near they came to being fired out of my office.'”

Now Tesla did admit to one unusual incident in his life, this involved the death of his mother.

"Ever since I was told by some of the greatest men of the time, leaders in science whose names are immortal, that I am possessed of an unusual mind, I bent all my thinking faculties on the solution of great problems regardless of sacrifice. For many years I endeavored to solve the enigma of death, and watched eagerly for every kind of spiritual indication. But only once in the course of my existence have I had an experience which momentarily impressed me as supernatural. It was at the time of my mother's death.

"I had become completely exhausted by pain and long vigilance, and one night was carried to a building about two blocks from our home. As I lay helpless there, I thought that if my mother died while I was away from her bedside, she would surely give me a sign. Two or three months before, I was in London in company with my late friend, Sir William Crookes, when spiritualism was discussed and I was under the full sway of these thoughts. I might not have paid attention to other men, but was susceptible to his arguments as it was his epochal work on radiant matter, which I had read as a student, that made me embrace the electrical career. I reflected that the conditions for a look into the beyond were most favorable, for my mother was a woman of genius and particularly excelling in the powers of intuition. During the whole night every fiber in my brain was strained in expectancy, but nothing happened until early in the morning, when I fell in a sleep, or perhaps a swoon, and saw a cloud carrying angelic figures of marvelous beauty, one of whom gazed upon me lovingly and gradually assumed the features of my mother. The appearance slowly floated across the room and vanished, and I was awakened by an indescribably sweet song of many voices. In that instant a certitude, which no words can express, came upon me that my mother had just died. And that was true. I was unable to understand the tremendous weight of the painful knowledge I received in advance, and wrote a letter to Sir William Crookes while still under the domination of these impressions and in poor bodily health. When I recovered, I sought for a long time the external cause of this strange manifestation and, to my great relief, I succeeded after many months of fruitless effort.

"I had seen the painting of a celebrated artist, representing allegorically one of the seasons in the form of a cloud with a group of angels which seemed to actually float in the air, and this had struck me forcefully. It was exactly the same that appeared in my dream, with the exception of my mother's likeness. The music came from the choir in the church nearby at the early mass of Easter morning, explaining everything satisfactorily in conformity with scientific facts.

"This occurred long ago, and I have never had the faintest reason since to change my views on psychical and spiritual phenomena, for which there is no foundation. The belief in these is the natural outgrowth of intellectual development. Religious dogmas are no longer accepted in their orthodox meaning, but every individual clings to faith in a supreme power of some kind."

Later in his life Nikola Tesla did become fascinated with Eastern philosophy and became friends with Swami Vivekananda. The two men met frequently and discussed science and religion at length. Fascinated with Vedic cosmology, Tesla began using the Sanskrit words akasha (all-pervading material of the universe) and prana (energy) to describe mass and energy in his work.

Vivekananda, seeking a unified primal energy beyond akasha and prana, went to see Tesla at his laboratory in February of 1896, hoping that he would be able to demonstrate that matter is simply potential energy.

We don't know, however, if these meetings resulted in anything that satisfied either man. More than a year later Swami Vivekananda said, "There is the unity of force, prana; there is the unity of matter, called akasha. Is there any unity to be found among them again? Can they be melded into one? Our modern science is mute here; it has not yet found its way out."

Although he was a scientific visionary, Tesla was never able to prove empirically what Swami Vivekananda could clearly see as the perfect unison of Vedanta and modern science. In an article called "Man's Greatest Achievement," Tesla wrote: "What has the future in store for this strange being [man], born of breath, of perishable tissue, yet mortal, with his powers fearful and divine? What magic will be wrought by him in the end? What is to be his greatest deed, his crowning achievement? Long ago he recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, or a tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the akasha or luminiferous ether, which is acted upon by the life-giving prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena. Can Man control this grandest, most awe-inspiring of all processes in nature? To do so would place him beside his Creator, make him fulfill his ultimate destiny."

Well into the 20th century Tesla did speculate that the human soul could be a form of energy that somehow manages to survive without a body, though Tesla could not conceive how this energy could exist separate from a power source (body). Some of this theorizing came about due to Tesla's earlier experiments in his Colorado Springs lab. Tesla recorded what he concluded were extraterrestrial radio signals and announced his findings in some of the scientific journals of the time.

He notes measurements of repetitive signals from his receiver which are substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise. Specifically, he later recalled that the signals appeared in groups of clicks 1, 2, 3, and 4 clicks together. He stated in the article "A Giant Eye to See Round the World", of February 25, 1923, that:

"Twenty-two years ago, while experimenting in Colorado with a wireless power plant, I obtained extraordinary experimental evidence of the existence of life on Mars. I had perfected a wireless receiver of extraordinary sensitiveness, far beyond anything known, and I caught signals which I interpreted as meaning 1--2--3--4. I believe the Martians used numbers for communication because numbers are universal."

For years thereafter, Tesla continued with this research and even recorded voice transmissions from an unknown source on radio frequencies that were not being used for broadcasts. He noted that these later transmissions seemed to be locally produced, unlike the Colorado Springs transmissions which were obviously coming from space.

Tesla wondered if the voices he was hearing were not the electrical thoughts of discarnate souls "seeking communications with the world of the living." He told a reporter once that he was working on a radio receiver that could be accurately tuned to pick up these weak signals. However, there is no evidence that Tesla's idea was ever built and tested. It is interesting though that Tesla described what we know today as EVPs, electronic voice phenomena.

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The Strange World of DMT

Between 1990 and 1995, Dr. Rick Strassman conducted a government funded study into the effects of DMT (dimethyltrypatmine), an hallucinogenic substance common to the shamanic ayahuasca ceremonies of South America. Dr. Strassman was quite puzzled by many of the experiences and images described by his 60 volunteers. “I didn’t expect it,” he explained to me. “Rather, I expected mystical and near-death experiences, based upon my reading and previous study.”

“In the thick of it, while reacting to people’s stories during research, I tried and then abandoned a number of different models to explain these experiences,” the psychiatrist added. “Psychological, brain chemistry, Jungian archetypes, and the like. However, interpreting these experiences, which the volunteers uniformly described as more real than real, as something ‘else,’ closed down channels of communication. So, I started responding to their stories as if they were real. I found out a lot more that way.”

“Later, when I had some time to think about the nature of these stories, I began speculating about how DMT might provide our consciousness access to realms such as dark matter and parallel universes.” Dr. Strassman even found uncanny similarities in some of the experiences of his DMT volunteers to case studies of UFO abductees described by Dr. John Mack. These and other details of this study can be found in his book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001).

The DMT Experiences of Jeremiah

One of the subjects described in Dr. Strassman’s book was named Jeremiah (his real name is Don Wright, a gentleman I’ve written about previously in my column regarding his work with the Peruvian whistling vessels). I asked Don if he’d mind describing in some detail about his experiences with Dr. Strassman’s DMT research project. He thoughtfully responded with the following:

Editor: How did you become involved in this program?

Don Wright: I was contacted at the Milton Erickson Institute of New Mexico, where I was Clinical Associate in practice as a psychotherapist specializing in PTSD and anxiety disorders. Because of my interest in expanded states of consciousness and super-normal human states of experience, I was thrilled to be included in Doctor Strassman's research project. I graciously accepted his offer to participate.

Editor: Could you provide us a personal reflection on what you experienced, what you saw and felt and how it affected you at the time?

Don Wright: I reported to the Research Ward of the University of New Mexico Hospital on the date and time I was given for my first involvement in the project. I was not inexperienced in expanded states of consciousness and was aware of DMT, although I had never before experienced it. Upon checking into the ward, I was admitted as a "patient", supplied with hospital pajamas, and told in which room I was expected. The room was a private patient room which included a bed, and equipment such as an automatic blood pressure machine and other monitoring equipment.

I got into the bed and filled out a psychological inventory form that was provided. After a short period of time a nurse appeared and inserted an IV into a vein in my arm, and was connected to the monitoring devices. Dr. Strassman appeared shortly thereafter and informed me that what I was about to receive would be the highest dose of DMT that I would possibly receive in subsequent administrations. He explained that this would be the only known dosage, both to him and myself, that I would receive during the project. My knowing that subsequent dosages would not be greater effectively removed any anxiety I might have about "going too high".

Dr. Strassman asked me if I was ready as he connected the drug vial to the IV. I said "yep", and he started the injection. My first awareness was what seemed to be a tightening around my chest, causing me to have to force my breathing. This ceased after around a minute, and was replace by a sound I recognized as sounds I had experienced during Peruvian Whistling Vessel sessions. Next I experienced myself sliding down a dark tunnel reminiscent of those described in "Life After Death" descriptions in books such as those written by Moody. The tunnel was pointed downward at what seemed to be about 45 degrees, with a light at the far end. Upon reaching the "Light" I experienced myself rapidly moving over an infinite abyss. Suddenly I experienced being in what was clearly not present time/space. I was elated that I did not seem to be "altered" or hallucinating. Although I did not experience my physical body in this new realm, my conscious perception was sober, clear, and what I was perceiving was solid, real aspects of this realm. There was no feeling of danger or threat, and no sensation of any "holy" or "spiritual" elements. The entities appearing in that solid realm clearly knew I had arrived, and it seemed to me it was "business as usual" to them.

Each subsequent experience of DMT in the research took me to a completely different "world". In some I seemed to have a "deja vu" experience. An example was one in which I discovered myself in a round, multi-floored facility in which there were "transparent "capsules" containing human essences. I had the impression that human essences were there waiting to physically manifest. I clearly seemed to recognize that I had been there before.

Upon completing the experimental trips, I had a sense that they had, in some beautiful manner, prepared me for evolving in some manner beyond the consensual idea of evolving.

Editor: Please state your thoughts on the importance and success of Dr. Strassman's work and what you feel he has accomplished.

Don Wright: Dr. Strassman, in my opinion, is a hero of our species. He bravely and successfully broke through the injunctions of our societies demanding acceptance of conventional consensual reality, in order to explore our human ability to transcend our present primitive state of consciousness.

Editor: Describe anyway that being involved in this program affected you in any permanent way of perceiving anything.

Don Wright: Although I had previously expected and "believed" that there must be "parallel universes", alternate time/space realms, etc., I now KNOW they exist. I've been there!

Editor: If you have any thoughts on future applications of this program that you'd like to share, please feel free to explore that as well.

Don Wright: Any manner that our species can evolve beyond the present archaic, paranoid, primitive defensiveness of our present suppressed paradigm will make possible our future survival. The technological curve is nearing straight up. Technology such as Nanotechnology will, I believe, convert us to an unbelievably horrendously destructive selfish species, or an incredibly positive expanding species. I believe research into consciousness such as that of Dr. Strassman is necessary for the second instance to manifest.

Editor: Why do you think that you were selected to be a part of this program?

Don Wright: I expect that one of the reasons I was selected to participate in the project was that as a psychotherapist of the Milton Erickson Institute, I was skilled in clinical hypnosis and capable of recognizing projections of my "real" life experienced as metaphors while experiencing the DMT. Because of this, I would be able to recognize the realms and their artifacts as metaphors of my own present life, if that were the case. I honestly must say that I could not make a metaphorical connection between my life at that time and the alternative realms I visited. The entities were interesting in that they, as were the different "worlds" in which they appeared, completely unexpected and unique in my experience.

Editor: Could you describe in some detail the entities that you perceived during your experiences?

Don Wright: Here are descriptions of some of the entities:

The "Scientist": After flowing through the "tunnel" and across the abyss, I experienced myself observing a "laboratory" in which an entire wall was covered with various meters and other instruments. Standing in front of an observation device on the wall was a tall male grey haired human wearing a lab coat. He apparently was observing something about me. As he was facing the wall, I could only see his back. I could see, at the same time, another "screen" on the wall which was showing, in detail, my blood flowing through my capillaries which included red blood cells, as well as microphages, or white blood cells and a couple of unrecognized creatures. Following this experience, I felt that I had been "altered" or changed in some manner that was important to my future evolving. "Ah Ha!" you might say. You were in a hospital under the direct and total care of the psychiatrist, Dr. Strassman! Is this not a metaphor of your situation during the experience? Well,, no. This is something you would know if you knew Dr. Strassman!

The " Pyramid": After the (you know) entry trip, I first observed a large, what seemed to be a thick center column, with round, smaller "branches" appearing to be made of polished marble. The closest depictions of how they look may be on the cover of a book "In Pursuit of Valis", written by Phillip K. Dick, and published by UM, 1991. Suddenly, slowly moving from behind the column appeared a creature in the shape of a small pyramid. Its main features were a mouth slit and a single eye. It somewhat shocked me by its appearance. It seemed to perceive that it made me uneasy, froze, and then slowly backed up to disappear behind the column. It did not appear again. I was certain that it didn't want to frighten me.

The "Children": After crossing the "abyss", I noticed two, what seemed to be three or four year old blond haired children, looking into the center of a small, round table. After observing them interact without them speaking, I became aware that they were telepathically communicating, and that they were totally mature beings choosing to have bodies of children! They were observing something about me through the table top screen.

There were other "entities", such as the "Gumby" appearing entity sitting in a thrown type of chair affectionally watching me.