Clinical psychiatrist who conducted the first approved human psychedelic research in the United States in over two decades. His DMT studies at the University of New Mexico in the early 1990s documented a striking and consistent pattern of entity encounters among participants, findings published in DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2000).
Rick Strassman is a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico who between 1990 and 1995 administered several hundred doses of DMT (dimethyltryptamine) to sixty human volunteers under controlled conditions. His research represented the first government-approved clinical study of a psychedelic in the United States since the early 1970s. A recurring and unexpected finding was that a significant proportion of subjects reported contact with autonomous nonhuman entities during their sessions, described in terms strikingly similar to abduction and UAP contact accounts. Strassman proposed that DMT may act as a chemical interface between human consciousness and other realms or intelligences, a hypothesis that has drawn serious interest from UAP researchers exploring the consciousness dimension of the phenomenon.