Al Hubbard and Willis Harman's Psychedelic Research Collaboration

Al Hubbard and Willis Harman’s collaboration linked psychedelic practice to research on human potential and, later, to a discreet program inside a government-contracted research institute. Harman supplied academic and institutional connections; Hubbard brought LSD, experience guiding sessions, and a far-reaching network of contacts. Their partnership was consequential precisely because it crossed boundaries between therapy, research, and institutional cover, while leaving important aspects of its purpose uncertain.

Meeting through the Menlo Park group

Harman entered Hubbard’s orbit through Myron Stolaroff, an Ampex engineer whose first LSD experience under Hubbard’s guidance convinced him that the drug might help people realize their potential. Stolaroff shared the experience with a small circle of friends and colleagues, who began meeting roughly monthly to discuss spiritual questions and LSD’s possible value for healthy people. Harman, then a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, joined the group alongside Don Allen, a young Ampex engineer. Hubbard began traveling to Menlo Park to guide the group’s psychedelic journeys and train participants to guide others. In Stolaroff’s later assessment, Hubbard was an exceptionally effective therapist.

The group’s aspirations soon reached beyond private exploration. Stolaroff, with Hubbard’s help, tried to reshape Ampex into what he envisioned as the first psychedelic corporation. Hubbard led weekly workshops at the company’s headquarters and gave LSD to executives at a site in the Sierra. The experiment foundered when Ampex’s general manager objected to religious imagery Hubbard insisted on displaying in his office, including images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Last Supper. In parallel, Harman redirected some of his teaching at Stanford toward human potential, including a course that concluded with a unit on psychedelics. These efforts show two different routes by which the partners hoped to bring psychedelic ideas into professional life: workplace experimentation and university teaching.

Building a research institution

In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to work full-time on psychedelic research. He and Harman established the International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS), giving their shared interest a formal institutional base: the foundation would investigate LSD’s potential to enhance personality and creativity. Their collaboration was not limited to providing a setting for sessions. Harman helped build an organization in which research, staffing, and clinical practice could be brought together, while Hubbard remained an important source of practical expertise and drug supplies.

The foundation hired psychiatrist Charles Savage as medical director and James Fadiman as staff psychologist; Allen also left his Ampex post to work as a screener and guide. IFAS obtained an FDA research permit and supplies of LSD and mescaline through Hubbard, then began processing clients. Over six years, it treated about 350 people, mainly healthy participants or what Fadiman described as a healthy neurotic outpatient population. Each client paid five hundred dollars for a package that included personality tests before and after the session, a guided LSD experience, and follow-up. Hubbard moved in and out of the foundation’s work: Allen remembered him as its inspiration and resident expert, while Fadiman later described him as the hidden force behind the Menlo Park research. He also took staff members to Death Valley for training, believing its primordial landscape particularly suited revelatory experiences.

Research beyond the foundation

Harman and Fadiman also explored whether LSD could help people overcome blocks in creative work. Working in groups of four, they gave the same dose to artists, engineers, architects, and scientists who were stuck on particular projects. They deliberately shaped participants’ expectations and surroundings, and subjects reported more fluid thinking, stronger visualization, and a greater ability to reframe problems. Some participants included William English and Doug Engelbart, figures who would later help transform computing. The study was uncontrolled, depended on participants’ own assessments, and ended before completion, so its promise was suggestive rather than established. It nevertheless illustrates the partners’ interest in applications extending beyond treatment for illness.

IFAS had closed by 1966, but the collaboration resurfaced in a different institutional setting. In 1968, Harman, then working at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), brought Hubbard out of semiretirement. Harman led SRI’s Educational Policy Research Center, whose task was to imagine the future of education. LSD had become illegal, although engineers and academics around Stanford continued to use it. Hubbard, by then broke, was hired part-time as a special investigative agent, ostensibly to monitor drug use in the student movement. Harman’s employment letter described concern that some student drug use might be a deliberate weapon aimed at political change, and framed Hubbard’s access to otherwise unavailable information as useful to long-range educational policy. Hubbard also used his government contacts to help keep SRI contracts flowing.

The concealed work and its ambiguity

The official security role did not, according to the account of Harman and a former SRI employee, describe Hubbard’s actual work. Harman later said Hubbard did nothing resembling security work; his job was to run special sessions. The larger mission, as the book presents it, was apparently to provide LSD experiences to political and intellectual leaders around the world. Hubbard’s uniform, badge, sidearm, and title thus belonged to a cover story that could coexist with his work as a psychedelic guide. The arrangement reflected the altered conditions after prohibition: what had once been pursued through a dedicated research foundation might now continue more quietly within an institution with government connections.

The evidence does not settle whether the SRI arrangement was simply a concealed continuation of their earlier research or also served other purposes. Hubbard may have investigated campus drug use for SRI or another party, even as he participated in sessions; the account leaves that possibility open. Nor does the partnership’s institutional setting prove a connection to intelligence operations. What it does establish is the contrast between the stated investigative role and the recollections that Hubbard’s real task was to conduct psychedelic sessions. Their collaboration remained difficult to separate from the networks and secrecy that surrounded Hubbard’s career.

Legacy and retrospective meaning

Harman’s association with Hubbard also placed him within a wider chain of psychedelic practice. Later underground guides could trace professional lineages through figures including Hubbard, and researchers returning to university trials drew on knowledge accumulated by underground therapists. The relation between Harman and Hubbard therefore belongs to a history in which techniques and experience traveled through personal contacts as well as formal institutions; their Menlo Park work was one important point in that wider circulation.

At a 1979 reunion of first-wave researchers in Los Angeles, Hubbard appeared alongside Harman and other veterans, now in his late seventies and living in a trailer park in Casa Grande, Arizona. The gathering recalled a project whose public prospects had collapsed, but whose participants still believed it had changed how people understood consciousness. The book does not describe a final reconciliation or a definitive accounting of Harman and Hubbard’s partnership. Instead, their story closes against a broader historical backdrop: researchers later criticized the counterculture’s disruption of legitimate research, while also recognizing that unconventional figures such as Hubbard had played necessary roles in pushing the field beyond its accepted limits.