Bad acid trip: What if this is reality?

Child of the Novelty, eBay; S. Auberon, P. Macpherson, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

All I want is to talk about my bad trip.

Frank Marino was a psychedelic hippie kid in the Sixties. He took a bad trip after playing with the drugs of the day for a while.

He was a kid, and the acid (LSD) sent him out, out into the beyond sanity. He was hospitalized, and he gravitated to an acoustic guitar there as if it were a piece of flotsam and jetsam from the sunk boat of his world.

He clung onto it and eventually was pressured into a record deal. He calls the bad trip ordeal his "Mahogany Rush."

He would jam with friends all day in a room, and that became the name of the band. It was more a genre ("acid rock") than a band. Any bandmember who played with him, joined his experience and entered his Mahogany Rush.

This artwork represents what it was like, an Alice in Wonderland experience on overdrive, and it didn't end. It put him off drugs for the rest of his life.

• AUDIO: Mahogany Rush | Coast to Coast AM
• Sasquatch and Cryptids/Emotions and Illness

It's been "a long, strange trip" as the Grateful Dead might describe it, and it has led all the way to tonight, when he appears on Coast to Coast to talk about it.

What was that reality, that existing place some people visit on "trips"?

American cultural anthropologist Dr. Michael J. Harner, Ph.D. wrote an academic article titled The Sound of Rushing Water after consuming ayahuasca (DMT derived from the plant medicine Banisteriopsis caapi, aka natema, yage, caapi...Daime and many other names) with shamans in the Amazon rainforest.

The experience altered him. He had been asking too many "dumb" questions, the shamans he was asking, not wanting to be annoyed by answering such basics, eventually talked him into trying it. It ended all his questions because he suddenly saw that they had not been speaking in metaphor or dreaming or fantasizing. What they told him they could see, he saw. It was literally true.

Reptilians (nagas, Silurians) appeared to him and said, "We are the true gods of this world." What were they talking about, given that they seem to outlive humans by many decades? They live underground and in the shadows, possibly cloaking themselves and walking among us (like in the movie They Live) unseen or unnoticed by design. Obey, we're told, and don't question.