Then (1993), True Hallucinations
The Entity Research Program: From Anecdote to Survey Science
McKenna described machine elves as a consistent phenomenon of DMT experience, encountered across thousands of independent reports he had collected through lectures and correspondence. He had no systematic data, only his own experience and what audiences told him. His claim was phenomenological: something consistent is happening.
partially-confirmed
The 2020 Johns Hopkins online survey (Davis et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 34(9):1008-1020) collected reports from 2,561 people who had already had an entity encounter after inhaling DMT (mean age 32; 77 percent men). Because every respondent was recruited for having had an encounter, it cannot show how often encounters happen, and because it did not compare cultures, it cannot show that the reports are the same across cultures. It shows that many self-selected respondents described similar features. Most respondents said the entity was conscious, intelligent and benevolent and continued to exist after the encounter; 69 percent reported receiving a message. A 2021 Frontiers in Psychology EEG study with n=39 is often cited here for an entity-contact-specific neural signature; no such paper exists, and no published study has isolated one. Timmermann et al. (PNAS 120(13), 2023, EEG-fMRI): global functional connectivity rose sharply and network segregation broke down; the study did not isolate entity contact. Lawrence et al. (Scientific Reports, 2022) analyzed interviews with people given DMT in a laboratory study. McKenna's anecdotal observation is now a survey-documented report; it is not neurally characterized.
Sources
- Sexton et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 33(9) (2019) [Source not found; under review]
- Timmermann et al., PNAS 120(13) (2023)
- Lawrence et al., Scientific Reports 12:8562 (2022)
- Davis et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 34(9):1008-1020 (2020)