LSD, Hallucinations, and UFOs

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

The New York Review of Books reviews two books about psychedelics in its August, 16, 2018 issue (The reviewer is A. J. Lees, professor of neurology at the National Hospital, London):

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan [Penguin]

Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change by Tao Lin [Vintage]

I’m not going to re-review the books noted above but, rather, will cite some comments from reviewer Professor Lees as they pertain to what I will be driving at here.

And I’m not about to enter a discussion my son Josh, a neuroscientist, suggested a while back, about new findings (data) that LSD and certain other hallucinogens may provoke malignancies in humans.

(Professor Lees, in his NYRB review, mentions a few instances where users of LSD did die of malignant cancers: Terence McKenna and Steve Jobs.)

I have a few UFO and/or Facebook pals who present some jejeune or louche positions about hallucinogens or psychedelics, trying to make a case for their use.

And since my colleague and friend Jose Antonio Caravaca is about to tackle an idea that UFOs derive from a mechanism of the collective unconscious and I am inclined to think some UFO sightings are hallucinatory in nature, let me try to tie LSD and UFOs together.

Most of you know about the notorious CIA program, MK-Ultra, that, in 1959, experimented with LSD on military personnel and volunteers.

Professor Lees tells readers that Willis Harman, an engineer, “heavily involved in psychedelic research, recounted [Al] Hubbard [a wealthy Roma Catholic who advocated psychedelic use to societal influencers] once told him that an angel had appeared before him on a hiking trip":

“She [the angel] told Al that something tremendously important to the future of mankind would be coming soon and that he could play a role in it if he wanted to. But [Hubbard] hadn’t the faintest clue what he was supposed to be looking for.

“Later, in 1952, Hubbard managed to acquire a dose of LSD [and] Under the influence of the drug, he had the most spiritual experience of his life and realized what the angel had meant.” [NYRB, Page 35]

This angelic episode is similar to many gathered by Albert Rosales for his Humanoid Encounters books and the events that Jose Caravaca has assessed for his Distortion Theory.

My associations with persons who’ve used LSD and my readings of Oliver Sacks writings about his use of psychedelics – Sacks had uveal melanoma (in his right eye) and died, at age 82, of metastases from the ocular tumour [Wikipedia] – tell me that use of hallucinogens, and I include marijuana among that group, are detrimental to human health, biologically and mentally.

While in Detroit and associating with the music crowd there (The MC-5, Bob Seger, et al.), I discovered members of the rock and roll community, most heavy cannabis users, were not hysterical or psychotic but, rather, sweet tempered and immersed in personal reveries.

But they were incapable of rational activity or thought about everyday menial life and activities.

Then those who indulged in LSD were seen as a bit wilder and irrational, removed from sensate thought of any kind and sometimes combative.

LSD testimony, from research records, indicate that observation and mental activity for users of the drug consisted of distortions of a bizarre kind: rippled visualizations and images so grotesque that any attempt at reconstruction were futile.

Even schizophrenics and other psychopathic victims present occurrences that have a semblance of reality; that is, what psychoneurotics or psychopaths provide, in those few moments of coherence, have a glimpse of reality about them, the images seen, voices heard, and activity portrayed, are distortions of reality but none so bizarre that one couldn’t recognize them as anything other than warped perceptions of what exists and is experienced by “normal” people.

Professor Lees’ rendering of Sandoz chemist Albert Hoffman’s use of LSD show extremities of a very unsettling kind: feelings of impending death, a demon invading him, taking control of his body and mind, and feeling of being in “another world, another place, another time.” [Page 34]

Not unlike schizophrenia except this from a person said to be normal except for his bout with LSD.

Many UFO events mimic the LSD experience – see Jose Caravaca’s book Encuentros Cercanos Con Ovnis, an introduction to Jose’s Distortion Theory.

But there is a tether to reality in UFO events, those presented by Caravaca or Rosales while LSD accounts are untethered to reality as normal people experience it.

I’ve always thought (and written) that the Pascagoula encounter (Hickson/Parker) and Travis Walton’s “abduction” may have been drug induced, but neither event is like a LSD or hallucinogenic episode, nor are the many UFO incidents telling of interactions with what appear to be aliens (extraterrestrials).

Thus, we have to look for other explanations for UFO humanoid encounters, leaving psychedelic ingestion to those who believe such use is helpful to their forlorn lives.

N.B. Image atop from Facebook: LSD Magic-Trip

RR