N,N-dimethyltryptamine, a short-acting tryptamine psychedelic found in many plants, present in trace amounts in mammalian tissue, and the compound whose reported phenomenology overlaps the contact literature more closely than anything else in pharmacology.
The trials
Rick Strassman ran the first US government-approved human psychedelic research in a generation at the University of New Mexico between 1990 and 1995, dosing around sixty volunteers with DMT under clinical conditions and publishing the results as DMT: The Spirit Molecule in 2001. A substantial minority of his volunteers reported not visions but encounters: contact with apparently autonomous beings that behaved as though they had their own agenda and, in several cases, appeared to be expecting them.
Why that is in this vault and what it does not settle
The overlap with abduction and Experiencers reports is real and is not explained by suggestion alone, since Strassman’s volunteers were not primed for it and several were disturbed by it. What it establishes is that a molecule can reliably produce the encounter phenomenology, which cuts both ways: it gives the sceptical reading a mechanism, and it gives the Control System Hypothesis reading a channel. Terence McKenna’s self-transforming machine elves are the popular version, and The Anunnaki Connection reaches for the same material as its route to contact through consciousness rather than through space.
Connections
Rick Strassman · Terence McKenna · Experiencers · The Anunnaki Connection · Heather Lynn · Control System Hypothesis · John E. Mack · Near-Death Experience · Greys