Top 5 Hallucinogenic Hijinks Facts

Hippies, hallucinations and hijinks. Welcome to WatchMojo’s Top 5 Facts. Today we’ll be looking at the weird world of hallucinogens, and counting down the five strangest truths about the scandals, the science and the history of hallucinogenic drugs.

On April 19, 1943 Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann was at work examining a substance he had created 5 years previously, and accidentally absorbed a small amount through his skin. That substance turned out to be LSD. When the effects of the drug became too much he decided he needed to go home. This was during World War II, and vehicular travel was prohibited due to frequent bombing raids, so Hofmann was forced to ride his bicycle home while under the influence of LSD. To this day psychedelic communities celebrate April 19th as the anniversary of the first acid trip, conveniently right before April 20th. FYI, the next time 4/19 and 4/20 fall on a weekend is 2025–mark your calendars, stoners!

… Jeez, this almost sounds like a bad episode of Archer. Project MK-Ultra was a division of the CIA that came to light during the 1977 Senate Committee on Intelligence. The spy agency did experiments during the 50’s and 60’s to develop mind control technology to combat the Soviets. These experiments included electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, and secretly dosing subjects with LSD. MK-Ultra owned a brothel, which it used to lure unsuspecting perverts into drug fueled experiments. It even had a magician on staff to teach agents sleight of hand techniques to surreptitiously slip acid into drinks. Another experiment involved dosing former agents with massive amounts of LSD in hopes that it would scramble the ex-agent’s mind and destroy any classified information he had in his memory. Talk about a lousy severance package. Fortunately, MK-Ultra didn’t have much success and was shut down in 1964.

An Italian researcher made pairs of test subjects stare into each other's eyes for 10 minutes while in a dimly lit room. He found that 90% of them saw their partner’s face become disfigured. When you focus intensely on something right in front of you, things in your periphery slowly fades away. This is called “Troxler fading”. The researcher believes that the hallucinations occur when the brain tries to fill in the gaps left by Troxler fading. The brain is so addicted to its senses that it creates its own images when it stops receiving information. In fact, you can create your own hallucinations at home by putting half ping-pong Balls over your eyes and listening to white noise Or by staring at a video like this long enough.

The legal status of LSD and Magic Mushrooms has put many barriers in front of researchers. Alfred Hoffman, the Swiss guy who discovered LSD, called it “medicine for the soul” and hated the fact that it couldn't be used clinically. The available studies seem to suggest that hallucinogens are an effective treatment for addiction. One meta-study of LSD trials showed promise with alcoholics. Another study suggested that magic mushroom use combined with behavioral therapy doubled participants’ success in quitting smoking. In Peru, at least one addiction center uses the amazonian hallucinogen ayahuasca as part of its treatment program, and reports success rates much higher than more conventional methods.

In baseball, a no-hitter is just what it sounds like: a team goes the whole game without earning a base hit. It’s pretty rare, happening only about twice a year. On June 12, 1970 Dock Ellis threw an LSD no-hitter while pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He woke up stoned and dropped a tab of acid thinking, incorrectly, that he didn't have a game that day. Ellis Threw wildly. Some of the pitches hit the dirt and some hit other players, but they got the job done. At the end of his career Ellis claimed that he had never thrown a game sober, though most of his other games he had played on stimulants, not, understandably, on hallucinogens.

So, what do you think? Could you hit a Dock Ellis curve ball? For more psychedelic Top 10s and surreal Top 5s, be sure to subscribe to WatchMojo.com