Alex Jones on Rogan: Are rogue intelligence agencies using psychedelic drug DMT to communicate with transdimensional aliens?

​The appearance of the notoriously outspoken walking blunderbuss, Alex Jones, on the Joe Rogan show was certainly one of the most eagerly anticipated returns to the world’s biggest podcast in recent times. To the delight of Rogan’s millions of followers, Jones didn’t disappoint: as of writing, barely 24 hours after being uploaded onto YouTube, the latest episode of the JRE podcast has garnered close to 3 million views, and the internet is already alight with responses to Jones’ rants, raves, and explosive diatribes on all manner of highly contentious and, some might say, outrageous topics, most of which I have no business in commenting upon. But, nestled somewhere between “5G is a DNA scrambling technology” and the senator-sanctioned harvesting of organs from wailing newborns, Jones treated us to his own unique insights into a subject for which he has already attracted some level of attention: DMT and the Clockwork Elves. Referring to the spritely little creatures often met at the height of a trip on one of the world’s most powerful psychedelic drugs — N,N-dimethyltryptamine or DMT — what Jones calls the “clockwork elves” are more commonly known as “machine elves”, so named by the legendary late psychedelic luminary, Terence McKenna. Whilst reports of meetings with the machine/clockwork elves are certainly familiar to anyone with any knowledge of DMT, Jones’ additional claims were perhaps a little more contentious.

Briefly, according to Jones’ (unrevealed) sources, “breakaway rogue intelligence agencies” maintain an “alien base” somewhere near San Francisco where “astronaut-level people take super hardcore levels of [DMT] and go into meetings with these [clockwork elves and aliens] and make intergalactic deals.” OK, so far so fucking nuts — or so it seems. Of course, it would be much easier to simply dismiss such claims as the ramblings of a man that large swathes of the population already regard as being utterly batshit crazy. And, indeed, it didn’t take long for certain individuals to excoriate Rogan for even giving a platform to a raving lunatic who ought to be on forced medication in some kind of secure institute rather than on one of the world’s most popular podcasts. But, as is so often the case, if we’re willing to dig a little deeper, through the thin outer stratum of facile self-congratulatory mockery — known technically as the “Twittersphere” — we often uncover, albeit after venting the bellicose upwelling of hot gases, a few rather curious-looking nuggets of truth. 

As a psychedelic drug, the use of DMT by humans has a very long history, which Jones appears to be fully aware of: he mentions the use of ayahuasca, a decoction of at least two plants — one of which contains DMT — used by indigenous Amazonian tribes since prehistory to communicate with the spirit world. So, we can at least agree that the belief that DMT is a tool for some kind of transdimensional interspecies correspondence is not a new one. Of course, that doesn’t make it true and it certainly doesn’t implicate the darker arms of state intelligence in such matters. However, it’s no secret that the CIA has a history of using psychedelic drugs — specifically LSD — as potential tools for mind control: the now declassified Project MKUltra documents reveal the agency’s 20 year foray into “off-label” administration of such drugs to — often entirely unwitting — individuals in the hope that their mind-altering effects might ultimately prove useful in eliciting confessions from prisoners. As such, and as Rogan rightly points out, it would be surprising if certain shadowy recesses of the agency hadn’t at least taken a look at DMT, which is arguably the most mind-altering psychedelic of them all. However, it remains something of a leap from the extensively documented CIA LSD experiments in the mid-20th century to a modern-day clandestine base hidden somewhere in the backwoods of northern California where high-ranking officials are pumped full of DMT in order to broker deals with alien species from another dimension. To try and make some sense of these admittedly rather wild-sounding claims, we must first place them in some context.

The connection between DMT and the modern alien archetype — the classic “Greys” of science fiction, for example — is obviously more recent than the “spirit world” connection gleaned from indigenous culture. The identity of DMT as the active component of the ayahuasca brew was only confirmed in 1956, by Hungarian physician, Stephen Szara, who synthesised and tested the drug on himself. Whilst a flurry of psychiatrists were quick to inject the newly-discovered “psychotomimetic agent” into a clutch of both witting and unwitting patients and volunteers, reactionary anti-drug legislation abruptly put an end to such research — as far as we’re aware of anyway — which meant that more extensive studies of the effects of DMT in humans would have to wait a few more decades. However, even in these early studies, individuals injected with the drug reported contact with a diverse panoply of intelligent beings, including “strange dwarf-like creatures” reminiscent of the machine — or clockwork — elves so often reported in the modern DMT trip report literature.

In the early 1990s, after much legal and regulatory hoop-jumping, University of New Mexico psychiatrist Dr. Rick Strassman received the requisite permissions to carry out what remains the largest ever study of the effects of DMT in humans — 60 volunteers were recruited, the majority of whom received several doses of the drug by intravenous injection, with their trip reports carefully recorded and a selection subsequently featuring in Strassman’s psychedelic classic, “DMT: The Spirit Molecule”. Being familiar with the limited historical psychiatric literature on DMT available at the time, together with a growing number of trip reports available on the early psychedelic internet forums, Strassman was no doubt expectant that a number of his subjects would report some kind of otherworldly experience. What Strassman didn’t expect, however, was the sheer frequency with which his volunteers would report contact with intelligent entities within the so-called “DMT space”, nor the consistency across their reports: around half of Strassman’s volunteers experienced apparent transport to an “alternate reality” that was, more often than not, populated by some kind of intelligent entity. This led the doctor to question his orthodox assumption that DMT was merely eliciting hallucinations in his subjects, but to consider the possibility that this obscure psychedelic might actually be a key to some kind of normally unseen parallel reality within which these alien intelligences reside. Whilst this conclusion remains outside of mainstream scientific opinion, more and more scientists are beginning to side with Strassman in taking seriously the idea that there is more to DMT than mere hallucination. Including myself.

As a neuroscientist and chemical pharmacologist, my fascination with psychedelic drugs — which began in my late teens — led me to bring my scientific mind to their strange effects on the brain and consciousness. But, when confronted with the bizarre reality-switching effects of DMT, I was left confounded. I simply could not explain it. There was nothing within the pages of the modern neuroscience literature that could have prepared me for DMT — I knew I had to look deeper.

Whilst DMT’s effects on consciousness are profound, they are also extremely brief — users typically note complete transition from normal consciousness to the “DMT space”, the realm of the alien intelligences, within 30 seconds of drug administration (by injection or inhalation of the vapour), with the effects resolving only a few minutes later. For most, this brief and wild rollercoaster ride through these bizarre alien realms is more than enough. But, for a plucky few, the brevity of the experience is frustrating, with some complaining of being dragged back into the normal waking world just as the DMT space is beginning to stabilise and communication with its alien occupants established. I realised that a serious attempt at stable and extended communication with these intelligences would require us to bring our best tools to the table and treat DMT, not simply as a drug to be consumed, but as a technology to be developed.

Aside from its remarkable effects on the human brain and consciousness, DMT also possesses a number of peculiarities that set it aside from other well-known psychedelics, including LSD and psilocybin (the active compound in so-called “magic mushrooms”). In particular, in addition to its extremely brief effects — a result of rapid metabolism of the drug by specialised enzymes in the brain — DMT also displays a complete lack of subjective tolerance. Unlike the other classic psychedelics, which display diminishing effects with closely spaced doses, DMT can be injected repeatedly without any loss of subjective potency. Regular LSD users typically abstain from the drug for at least a couple of weeks following a trip. Whilst this is partly as a means of allowing integration of the experience and avoiding negative after-effects, attempting a repeat trip the following day is likely to fail: LSD exhibits rapid and sustained subjective tolerance. With DMT, in stark contrast, the entry and exit from the DMT space is clean and rapid and, as soon as the tripper returns, re-entry is as simple as injecting a repeat dose. This gave me an idea.

Target-controlled intravenous infusion represents the pinnacle of modern drug administration technologies: a continuous but variable infusion of a drug into the blood, delivered by a programmable infusion device, with the goal of attaining and maintaining a specific concentration of drug within the brain over an extended period of time. This technology has been developed specifically for use in general anaesthesia, where keeping a patient in an unconscious state relies on maintaining a stable brain concentration of the anaesthetic drug throughout the surgical procedure. It occurred to me that DMT possessed exactly the properties required of anaesthetic drugs administered in this way.

Although a continuous infusion of DMT seems like a simple idea, the practicalities are more complex. As soon as the drug is introduced into the body by intravenous injection, it is rapidly diluted and distributed by the blood, as well as equilibrating with other tissues. The elimination of the drug from the body also begins immediately, by a combination of enzymatic transformation and excretion through the kidneys and biliary system. A mathematical model that takes into account all of these factors must be developed to regulate the infusion, which would allow the brain DMT levels to be held within a narrow concentration window at all times. Once such a technology is mastered, an individual could, in theory, be brought into the DMT space and held there for an indefinite length of time, extending the window for communication with any resident alien intelligences from a few minutes to, potentially, several hours or longer. 

To develop this model, I reached out to Rick Strassman, who I hoped might still have the required blood sample data from his 90s study — sure enough, within 30 minutes of firing off an email, an Excel spreadsheet arrived in my inbox and the games could begin. Working with Rick, I used his data to generate an infusion model that could be used to reach and maintain a stable blood concentration of DMT in the brain. After a surprisingly easy ride with a couple of sympathetic journal referees, we were able to publish our paper in a mainstream scientific journal shortly thereafter. The response to the paper, published in Frontiers in Pharmacology, was dramatic — a stream of applications for an, as yet, non-existent study in humans, flooded my inbox. This was followed by a number of articles describing the technology in various online publications. Looking back, although this attention wasn’t intended or courted, it was perhaps unsurprising: the idea that we might share our Universe with living conscious beings beyond our own muddy little home has become a source of great fascination and wonder amongst the public and scientists alike, as the SETI program demonstrates. As such, it’s not entirely surprising that the possibility that communication between humans and aliens not only beyond Earth, but beyond the Universe itself, might be facilitated by the ingestion of one of the most common compounds in the natural world (estimates for the number of plants that contain DMT run into the thousands), was met with such excitement. There are now, to my knowledge, at least three entirely independent groups seriously looking to use this “extended-state DMT” technology, whether for mainstream academic research or, as I originally intended, to attempt the unthinkable: to establish extended communication with autonomous intelligences from outside our Universe.

So, considering communication with transdimensional aliens has now left the pages of science fiction and is threatening to invade the mainstream scientific arena, we need to ask ourselves whether Alex Jones’ claims are so crazy after all. A small, but growing, number of reasonably sober scientists are beginning to take seriously the idea that DMT might indeed gate access to alternate orthogonal dimensions of reality, and that extremely intelligent alien beings might well exist independently of us within these realms. And, further, that, by developing DMT as a technology, extended communication with these aliens might eventually be established. Is it such a stretch to imagine that clandestine groups — including perhaps the more secretive elements within US intelligence — might well be ahead of the curve? There can be little doubt that, should they suspect the existence of alien intelligences, whether from this Universe or an entirely different one, the intelligence agencies would certainly be interested in establishing contact. And, of course, it certainly cannot be assumed that they’d be keen to let us know about it. So, is the CIA using DMT to make intergalactic deals with clockwork elves from across the dimensional divide? Or is Alex Jones just a madman? Hey, who really knows eh?


Dr. Andrew R. Gallimore is a neurobiologist, chemical pharmacologist, and writer on psychoactive drugs. His latest book, “Alien Information Theory — Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game” (April 2019, Strange Worlds Press) is available for pre-order now on Amazon or at his website: www.buildingalienworlds.com. Andrew is always keen to discuss these and related subjects with interested individuals, groups, podcasts, or publications, and can be contacted via his website: http://www.buildingalienworlds.com/contact.html