‘All the meds I was on for eight years through the VA did nothing for me whatsoever. From what I know now, psychedelic treatment is the number one way to treat PTSD in veterans. I did that stuff, and the next day I had my life back.’

In this final episode, veteran Albert shares his struggles with physical and mental trauma throughout his life and career, and how he received a surprising amount of healing from ibogaine treatment, through our psychedelic research study.

‘This anger started coming over me, and I didn’t know what it was. As it reached an uncontrollable boiling point, it all came back to me. My grandfather had molested me and my handicapped sister. I got out my gun to kill him, then realized that he was already dead. So I wanted to blow out my own brains, and right then came a knock on my door, where nobody ever visits.

‘I didn’t make it to my social security office appointment at 9. At 9.02, it was bombed. 168 dead. When my paramedic student reached there to help, she was given a bucket to pick up body parts. Months later I went for that appointment to a different office. I was there for 2 minutes when I blacked out. Next moment I woke in the parking lot, and there was an explosion in my head, blood red, body parts flying towards me. That’s when it clicked.’

In this second part, Albert shares two mysterious stories of synchronicities that saved his life. In the first story, a lifeguard who he had a crush on was led by a mysterious mind voice to his doorstep in one of the lowest moments of his life. In the second, a chance phone call pulls him away from the Oklahoma City bombing, but months later the explosion strikes again, inside his mind.

‘I went down to the train tracks, and heard someone walking up behind me. I turned around. They both had bows and arrows with real razor hunting tips. “You’re our prisoner now”, they said, and started walking me to the train underpass. I knew in my heart that if I went there, I would not come out alive.’

Albert Hobaugh is a retired special agent, tactical operator, EMT-Paramedic and combat instructor. He was a U.S. Army Ranger and a federal investigator and undercover agent. He is the author of ‘Blacksheep Ghost: The early years: The Life and Making of a Special Agent’. Albert’s journey through PTSD and neurological trauma led him to seek an ibogaine treatment study at our psychedelics research center.

Here Albert shares his surprising and unusual life story: the difficult and adventurous story of his childhood and youth.

‘I saw dead bodies, rotting and smelling in the heat. I realized that they had not been collected because there were mines planted all around, and I was walking through them.

‘The military found out that I was involved in secret anti-regime propaganda, and sent me to the war front. One night a rocket dropped on us. The shrapnel chopped the head off a running boy, but he kept on running without his head.

‘I was setting fire to a shop as a political protest, but the petrol got on my shoes and I caught fire as well. They arrested us and gave us 75 lashes with a hard rubber radiator tube. They took us prisoners to a big public prayer by a mullah, where I saw my father. I stood up and started challenging the mullah. They beat us and took us to a bigger prison where the in-charge molested the younger prisoners, and insects from the rubbish crawled over us all the time. They made us watch as they hanged our friends. As I was leaving after my year-long sentence, a guy at the prison entrance happened to see me and sent me back for one more year.

‘This girl and I were stopped and searched while driving with anti-regime leaflets. I was arrested again and given a death sentence.’

Hussein shares with me the stories of his rough childhood in Iran, fighting in the Iran-Iraq war, being imprisoned and sentenced to death for his anti-regime activities, and his harrowing odyssey to flee Iran through four countries with fake documents.

‘I have narcolepsy. Sometimes in sleep paralaysis, I hallucinate that my visual world is split. The left side is reality, and the right side is a bad dream, and I am sliding towards it.

‘I met this blind woman who at some point started hallucinating technicolor light, then started seeing her hand as she waved it across her face, then other objects. I ran experiments, and her brain images looked similar to those of a sighted person looking at the same objects.’

Dr Jesse Breedlove studies mental imagery and hallucinations. We first talk about her own narcolepsy and sleep paralysis experiences. Then she describes her experiments on a blind lady with non-optic sight, the blindsight on ibogaine phenomenon from the previous episode, and her theory for what’s going on here. Then we talk about stretching the definition of ‘vision’, the pushback in the scientific community against such phenomena, and about neurodivergence.

‘The traditional ibogaine ceremony of eating the ground root bark is a rite of passage for all males in the Bwiti tribe. They use it as an oracle. We have adapted it as a treatment for the diseases of the western developed world, like PTSD, trauma and depression. When an 18 year-old enlists in the military and conducts sanctioned violence for 20 years, they sometimes can’t get out and live a normal life without these psychedelic interventions.

‘On ibogaine, the participant often perceives that they can see through their closed eyelids and the eyeshade. I see them starting to peek through the eyeshade, and wave their hands in front of them to verify, and there’s disbelief at first. It can feel like a superpower, but also terrifying, because you can no longer hide from your visions. You can also see beings you know, or humanoid creatures. The ibogaine can also take on a voice and an entity that can be in dialogue and answer questions. And you can experience a life review, like a projected home movie, with your life memories and trauma.

‘I myself experienced being able to see the room through closed eyes and eyeshades, then I saw a six-foot-tall humanoid with a goat head. I could walk around and look away and look back, and it was exactly where and how it should be in 3D. These beings will often tend to you for the entire visionary experience.

‘The ibogaine asked me if I wanted to know how I would die. I am a death doula and comfortable around my own death. I said no, because I don’t want it to take away the surprise. It said, good answer, and moved on.’

Colm Walker is a veteran and the executive director of The Mission Within psychedelic retreat, where the patients we are studying at our Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy (at the University of Texas at Austin) go for their ibogaine and psilocybin treatment. He shares his background and a description of their program, and what a typical ibogaine experience is like. Then we talk about a strange phenomenon that is allegedly common on ibogaine: being able to see through closed eyes and an eye mask, and we discuss the prospect of seriously scientifically studying it.

‘1985, first year, second semester: Professor Ed Diener walks into the lecture hall and asks, “what do people want in life?” “Love, sex, money, happiness, a new boat, rock and roll, drugs”, the chalkboard fills up. He circles “happiness” and says, “I believe that all the other wants are about this one. I am studying the nature of happiness, and here’s my research.” I learned something life-changing in his class. He’d found two variables that mattered most in the pursuit of happiness: the quality of your relationship with others, and with yourself.

SQUID is such a simple but powerful concept that improves quality of life so quickly. So it has become the focus of my life to put on a costume and teach it full-time in the streets, instead of being a traditional professor.'

For years, Dr Mel Ganus, doctorate in education with a focus on applied psychology, has put on street shows in a squid costume to teach kids how to not get triggered by situations, and has co-authored a book about it with Dr Philip Zimbardo who conducted the famous Stanford Prison Experiment.

Dr Mel starts by asking who I am, why I’m here, where am I going and what do I want. Then she shares her life story and her experience of attention deficit disorder and neurodivergence, about how she was introduced to positive psychology, and the origins of her lifelong work on Quality of Life Experiments. We end with talking about psychedelic mushrooms and the connectedness of mycelium.

‘I have really suffered mentally, and from mysterious chronic illnesses, which I believe are all an illness of the interface between body and mind: the nervous system.

‘As a kid, I had panic moments of fixating on my death, and would actually kick, punch and scream. On ketamine, my self disappeared, and I was left puzzled: what is awareness without a vantage point that it’s emanating from?’

Former Navy SEAL Chris Irwin was the first subject of my eye-tracking experiments at the new Psychedelics Research and Therapy Center at UT Austin. He has created the Rare Sense podcast and blog that shares his mental health journey. We talk about mysterious chronic illnesses, then I explain my eye-tracking experiments, and we discuss EMDR therapy. We then talk about our fears of death, and the self disappearing with psychedelics or spiritual practice.

Video version of this on Chris's podcast.