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CONTACT THROUGH THE VEIL: | «+ 187 especially the freewheeling fields of cosmology and theoretical physics, than on our more conservative religious traditions for satisfactory models and explanations of these "spirit-world" experiences. I had expected to hear about some of these types of experiences once we began giving DMT. I was familiar with Terence McKenna's tales of the "self-transforming machine elves" he encountered after smoking high doses of the drug. Interviews conducted with twenty experienced DMT smokers before beginning the New Mexico research also yielded some tales of similar meetings. Since most of these people were from Califor- nia, I admittedly chalked up these stories to some kind of West Coast eccentricity. Therefore, I was neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared for the frequency with which contact with beings occurred in our studies, nor the often utterly bizarre nature of these experiences. Neither, it seemed, were many of the volunteers, even those who had smoked DMT previ- ously. Also surprising were the common themes of what these beings were doing with so many of our volunteers: manipulating, communicating, show- ing, helping, questioning. It was definitely a two-way street. As strange as the reports that follow are, our 1990s research was not the first in the scientific literature to describe DMT-induced "contact." There also are reports from the 1950s quoting volunteers to that effect. These older DMT cases are remarkable in their foreshadowing of the stories we were going to hear almost forty years later. What is even more striking is that I have been unable to locate any similar reports in research subjects taking other psychedelics. Only with DMT do people meet up with "them," with other beings in a nonmaterial world. These older clinical excerpts derive from patients with schizophre- nia, many of whom had been hospitalized for years, if not decades. They were not especially verbal, insightful, or personable. They received DMT in studies attempting to determine how similar the DMT state was to schizo- phrenia. Researchers also were interested in gauging whether naturally psychotic patients were more or less sensitive to DMT's effects.