Menlo Park was a significant West Coast center in the early history of psychedelic research: here Al Hubbard brought LSD sessions and guide training to Ampex engineers, while Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harman turned their interest in human potential into the International Foundation for Advanced Study. The place joined an industrial setting to an emerging research network, helping psychedelic work move beyond treatment of illness toward questions of creativity and the capacities of healthy people.

A Node in Hubbard’s Network

By the late 1950s, Al Hubbard was moving among research groups across North America, sharing clinical techniques and supplies of Sandoz LSD. Menlo Park became one of the stops on this circuit. The connections he made there were part of a larger network that linked researchers, therapists, and institutions across the West Coast and beyond, rather than a single, isolated local experiment.

Hubbard’s role was not limited to distributing information or chemicals. He guided psychedelic sessions and trained others to guide them, carrying practices from one research setting to the next. This personal transmission of experience and technique would later echo in the lineage of underground guides, many of whom traced their professional inheritance to Al Hubbard, Leo Zeff, Stanislav Grof, or Timothy Leary.

Ampex and the Human-Potential Experiment

The Menlo Park work grew from a small circle of Ampex colleagues. After an LSD experience, Stolaroff shared what had happened with a few friends, who began meeting about once a month to discuss spiritual questions and the possibility that LSD might help healthy people realize their potential. Don Allen, a young Ampex engineer, and Willis Harman, an electrical-engineering professor at Stanford University, joined the group. Hubbard then began visiting Menlo Park to lead psychedelic journeys and train participants to guide others.

For a time, Stolaroff tried, with Hubbard’s help, to reshape Ampex into what he imagined as the first psychedelic corporation. Hubbard held weekly workshops at the company’s headquarters and administered LSD to executives at a site in the Sierra. The initiative faltered when Ampex’s general manager objected to religious images Hubbard insisted on placing in his office: Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Last Supper. The episode exposed a tension at the heart of the project. Its advocates saw spiritual experience as relevant to creativity and work, while the company setting did not necessarily welcome the religious forms through which Hubbard framed that experience.

From Company to Research Foundation

In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to devote himself full-time to psychedelic research. With Harman, he established the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park to investigate whether LSD could enhance human personality and creativity. The change gave an existing set of interests a more formal institutional home: the inquiry was no longer simply a circle of colleagues meeting around questions of spiritual development, nor an experiment in remaking a company, but a research foundation with designated staff and a regulated drug supply.

Stolaroff hired psychiatrist Charles Savage as medical director and James Fadiman as staff psychologist. Allen left his engineering position at Ampex to join the foundation as a screener and guide. The foundation obtained a drug research permit from the FDA and received LSD and mescaline from Al Hubbard. These arrangements connected Menlo Park’s research to both federal oversight and the older personal network that had supplied and circulated psychedelic knowledge.

A Legacy Beyond the Site

Menlo Park’s importance lies in the paths it brought together: engineering, psychological research, guided psychedelic practice, and the pursuit of human potential. The Ampex effort remained short-lived, but its questions did not end with the company project. Stolaroff and Harman carried them into the foundation, while Fadiman later became a visible link between early research and the wider psychedelic field. At a 2010 psychedelic-science conference in the Bay Area, he called for a meeting of underground guides and was surprised when a hundred people arrived. The gathering took place in San Jose, not Menlo Park, but it revealed how practices transmitted through earlier research networks had persisted beyond the institutions that first supported them.

That continuity also had a more formal consequence. Accounts of underground psychedelic therapy describe a flow of anecdotal knowledge back toward university research, including the recruitment of some experienced underground guides to help train guides for clinical trials. Menlo Park was one early site where personal instruction, institutional research, and the aspirations of healthy participants met. Its story therefore marks a shift in the aims of psychedelic work—from treating illness alone toward asking what altered experience might make possible for individuals and, through them, for organizations and culture.