Beatific Angels and vegetal goddesses, hi-tech Aliens and clockwork Elves, metallic Insectoids, space Dragons, enormous Snake Gods and animal Spirit Guides. One of the most common and mind boggling phenomena of the psychedelic experience is encountering what appear to be autonomous entities of incredible power and intelligence. Not everyone who uses psychedelics reports entity encounters, and some only report auditory or sensed presences of the beings, however a remarkable consistency in the types of beings are seen across cultures.
This phenomenon is nothing new. Historical roots tracing back to our earliest cave art show therianthropes (literally ‘beast men’) of what appear to be mushroom headed beings, bee people, human-animal hybrids, even depictions eerily similar to the canonical “gray Alien”. Psychedelic traditions from distant places like the amazonian ayahuasqueros to the siberian shamans have always contended these entity encounters are part and parcel with psychedelics, even indicating they are always around us, waiting to interact…
In a recent interview Rick Strassman MD, pioneer DMT researcher, commented on the difficulty in broaching this topic. He stated that for most people “it’s simply too weird.” We don’t have the words to describe them, let alone the intellectual framework to explain what is going on in these experiences. He would know, in his groundbreaking research at the University of New Mexico in the 1990s, participants consistently reported entity encounters that to them felt “more real than real life”. Dr. Strassman went on to write two books discussing the reports and possible explanations, but we’re largely where he left off 30 years ago.
Modern science offers little help. Hand-waving explanations like mere hallucinations or complex distortions in normal brain chemistry, don’t do much to help those experiencing these sometimes disturbing and destabilizing encounters. Erratic, often manic, trip reports are littered across the internet, but with no good way to communicate the encounter, or frame it within a scientific scaffolding, reporters are left to haphazardly recount a fading dream where they met alien beings unlike anything they knew could exist. But the sheer amount and consistency of the encounters hint there might be an explanation for these entities.
Noonautics wants to change the way we look at these encounters. By engaging with experts about the phenomena we can determine how to best categorize and record the experience scientifically. First, with a standardized entity report that can be used in future research, then an open source database to store and analyze reports. Finally, develop machine learning for verbally generated entity illustration. We hope by organizing this data, it encourages researchers to look for patterns and help develop the language needed to understand the phenomenon scientifically.