With the cottonwood foundation having the technology to now read 'normal' levels of DMT metabolites in the urine/blood/etc, what would you think about a research project centered around alien abductees to see if they have a heightened natural level of DMT?

It seems like if you could monitor some of the alien abductee patients for a few days you might find fluctuating levels of natural DMT based on their circadian rhythm or something like that...

What do you think?
Or are aliens just really abducting people?

Not to be argumentative but after having seen many of the people who have claimed to be abducted by aliens without any DMT involved talk about their experiences...I'm not sure they are really having the same experience that DMT users, including myself describe. I tend to think the average "abductees" experience is more of an ego based phenomena than a genuine one but that is of course just my opinion.

Can you elaborate on that? You don't think it has to do with endogenous DMT levels but that they're making it up or there's just some other internal phenomena occurring?

BTW, where did you meet abductees? That sounds like a very interesting story.

What would be the goal or purpose of this study? How would it benefit the medical/research community? Personally, I feel people who claim to be abducted by aliens are delusional and I do not see how a study like this would benefit anyone.

True.
Maybe we could alter the original proposal. Remove alien abductees from the equation because that may be a ridiculous notion for science to explain.
But for science sake, perhaps a more beneficial experiment would be to measure the endogenous levels of DMT metabolites throughout a specific time frame (maybe 3 days) to see if the levels fluctuate throughout the day and night.
Obviously you would have to have a way of controlling environmental factors for the time period, so as to limit stress-induced changes.
Maybe you could compare 3rd shift to normal shift workers since they have different sleeping patterns, etc.
That may go a way toward understanding the role of DMT as a neurotransmitter?

Sound worthy of grant money?

Now this I'd be interested in.

Sounds interesting but:

Doesn't that mean you have to wait for an abduction to take place, then rush over to the abductee just after it happened and persuade them to milk their urine/blood for 3 days ??

I forsee obstacles...

Yeah. I'm giving up on the alien abduction study unless a volunteer who came forth that had multiple "abductions" would allow scientists to collect their urine for X amount of days just waiting for another "abduction" event to take place. But, as a1pha pointed out, aside from dispelling rumors as to the abduction phenomena origin, it does nothing to promote good science (and therefore would be outside of the realm of funding).

I do think it would be interesting to see how the circadian rhythm affects endogenous DMT levels however, since it is structurally similar to melatonin. Not only that, but by measuring the metabolite level over the course of a few days you can see if the patients DMT levels are increasing during sleep and REM hours to possibly promote dreaming!?

This study doesn't sound really viable for several reasons. First of all, one of the things that has often gotten to me about the DMT - alien abduction connection is that most alien encounters via DMT tend to require a healthy amount of concentrated DMT to be delivered to the brain in a surge such as what happens with vaporization. I would think one would need quite the endogenous DMT surge in order to facilitate such an experience in the first place, and if such a surge did occur, one would expect to see other DMT-ish stuff as well.

Now, even if an abductee's endogenous DMT levels did allow for for an alien encounter with the above aside, that DMT would be metabolized so quickly before you would manage to get a blood sample on them. There's a reason why you don't see any drug tests for DMT, and not just because the technology hasn't been sensitive enough. Even if I smoke a large amount of DMT, it is metabolized so incredibly rapidly (hence the extremely short effects) that it's out of the system in no time at all, leaving barely a trace. I believe a small fraction gets stored in serotonin vessicles which may account for long afterglows, but for the most part, this kind of experiment doesn't seem feasible, even if you could induce an alien abduction without using any DMT, and then tried to measure the levels.

Good point Global. The extreme metabolism of DMT would make it incredibly difficult to detect in this instance. But perhaps its action as a neurotransmitter and its effect on trace amine receptors could be elucidated upon if we followed the circadian rhythm approach to the study and left the aliens to fend for themselves? Though I really like them...

:thumbs_up: