Al Hubbard's Mentorship and Training of Myron Stolaroff

Al Hubbard's Mentorship and Training of Myron Stolaroff joined an itinerant psychedelic guide to an engineer who would leave industry to establish a research foundation. Their relationship began with a guided LSD session in 1956 and developed into a practical partnership: Hubbard introduced Stolaroff to the experience, came to guide his colleagues, and trained members of the group to guide others. Through Stolaroff’s work at Ampex and later at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, that mentorship helped carry psychedelic practice into organized research on creativity and the development of healthy people.

Stolaroff’s First Session

By the mid-1950s, Myron Stolaroff had become assistant to the president for strategic planning at Ampex, an early technology company in a still-rural valley of farms and orchards. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer and one of Ampex’s first employees, he was also a spiritual seeker. His route toward Hubbard ran through Gerald Heard, the English philosopher and friend of Aldous Huxley. Heard’s description of his own LSD experience with Hubbard moved Stolaroff enough that, in March 1956, he traveled to Vancouver for a session with the Captain in his apartment.

Hubbard administered 66 micrograms of Sandoz LSD. Over several hours, Stolaroff experienced a sweeping sequence that began with the planet’s formation, moved through the development of life and the appearance of humankind, and culminated in the trauma of his own birth. He later described the session as both terrifying and ecstatic. In his account, reliving a painful birth experience brought into view what he understood as its influence on his personality; the experience also included a sense of human oneness and the reality of God. The session was not simply an introduction to LSD: it became the decisive point at which Stolaroff committed himself to the work.

From Experience to a Guided Group

Stolaroff did not keep the experience to himself. He shared it with a small circle of Ampex friends and colleagues, who began meeting every month or so to consider spiritual questions and whether LSD might help healthy people realize their potential. Don Allen, a young Ampex engineer, and Willis Harman, a Stanford professor of electrical engineering, joined the group. Hubbard then began traveling to Menlo Park, where he guided members through psychedelic journeys and trained them to guide others. Stolaroff’s later assessment was direct: Hubbard was one of the best therapists he had encountered.

The exchange was part of Hubbard’s broader pattern of connecting otherwise scattered research centers. By the late 1950s he was traveling between Weyburn, Manhattan, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and other sites, bringing LSD and clinical advice to researchers and treatment programs. He had assisted Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer in their work with alcoholics and met with R. Gordon Wasson; in Los Angeles he conducted sessions with Betty Eisner, Sidney Cohen, and Oscar Janiger. His journeys to Menlo Park extended that network into a circle interested not only in treating illness but in expanding the capacities of people considered healthy. Stolaroff was not merely a recipient of Hubbard’s guidance: he became the organizer who would give that interest a lasting institutional form.

Ampex and the Limits of the Corporate Experiment

Convinced that LSD could help people transcend their limitations, Stolaroff tried, with Hubbard’s help, to remake Ampex as what the book calls the world’s first “psychedelic corporation.” Hubbard led weekly workshops at the company’s headquarters and administered LSD to executives at a site in the Sierra. The initiative brought the company’s technical and managerial world into contact with the spiritual imagery Hubbard considered part of the work. It foundered when Ampex’s general manager objected to the images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Last Supper that Hubbard insisted on bringing into his office.

The failed corporate project did not end the collaboration’s influence. At about the same time, Harman shifted his teaching at Stanford toward human potential, with a unit on psychedelics at the end of the course. In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to dedicate himself full-time to psychedelic research. The change marks a consequential difference between the two settings: the company experiment depended on winning acceptance within a commercial organization, while the foundation Stolaroff established could make psychedelic research its central purpose.

The International Foundation for Advanced Study

In 1961, Stolaroff and Harman established the International Foundation for Advanced Study to investigate LSD’s potential to enhance personality and creativity. Stolaroff recruited psychiatrist Charles Savage as medical director and James Fadiman, then a first-year graduate student, as staff psychologist. Don Allen left his Ampex engineering post to become a screener and guide. The foundation obtained a drug research permit from the Food and Drug Administration and received LSD and mescaline from Hubbard. It began processing clients, using Hubbard’s term, and over the next six years worked with about 350 people.

Hubbard remained a formative presence without being the foundation’s day-to-day center. He would float in and out, serving as its inspiration and resident expert; Fadiman later called him the hidden force behind the Menlo Park research. Hubbard also took staff members to Death Valley for training, believing its primordial landscape especially conducive to revelatory experience. The details show how the mentorship operated across several levels: provision of drugs and practical expertise, instruction in guiding sessions, and a shared attention to the conditions surrounding an experience.

The foundation’s researchers published about half a dozen papers in the early 1960s. Among their reported results, 78 percent of clients said the experience had increased their ability to love, 71 percent reported greater self-esteem, and 83 percent said they had glimpsed a higher power or ultimate reality during their sessions. Participants who reported that kind of experience also reported the most lasting benefits. Don Allen recalled changes in beliefs, attitudes, and behavior that he described as notably sustainable: clients became less judgmental and rigid, more open, and less defended. The outcomes were not uniformly positive. Several clients abruptly ended marriages after their sessions, believing they were mismatched or caught in destructive patterns. The work’s promise, as these reports present it, came with consequences that could reach beyond an individual’s inner life.

A Mentorship With a Wider Afterlife

Stolaroff’s work also linked Hubbard’s early practice to later accounts of psychedelic therapy. The underground guides interviewed by the book’s narrator often traced their professional lineage to earlier therapists, including Hubbard, sometimes through another generation of practitioners. Leo Zeff, who had worked underground and trained guides, was among the figures in that lineage. In the introduction to The Secret Chief Revealed, Stolaroff argued that the legitimate research that resumed in the late 1990s had developed partly from underground therapists’ anecdotal evidence, as well as from the research of the 1950s and 1960s.

That history makes the Hubbard–Stolaroff relationship more than a story of one person introducing another to LSD. Hubbard carried methods, supplies, and experience between research centers; in Menlo Park, he helped a circle of engineers and academics become guides and researchers. Stolaroff converted that early experience into sustained institutional work, first by attempting to reshape Ampex and then by founding the International Foundation for Advanced Study. Their collaboration thus connected an individual guided session to a research program, and a research program to a therapeutic tradition whose influence continued in both underground practice and the later return of university research.