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

Webb Wright Culture Mar 4, 2026 6:30 AM 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. Save this story Save this story 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 ...