Myron Stolaroff

Myron Stolaroff was an electrical engineer whose encounter with LSD redirected his career and helped establish a research network devoted to its use by healthy people. A senior figure at Ampex, he became a student of Al Hubbard, a co-founder of the International Foundation for Advanced Study, and an advocate for the underground therapists whose experience, he argued, helped shape the later revival of psychedelic research. His trajectory joined technology, spiritual seeking, clinical experimentation, and the informal transmission of therapeutic knowledge.

Engineering, Ampex, and Spiritual Seeking

Born in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1920, Stolaroff studied engineering at Stanford and became one of the earliest employees of Ampex, a pioneer in reel-to-reel magnetic tape for audio and data recording. By the middle of the 1950s, he was assistant to the company president for strategic planning. Ampex would eventually employ thirteen thousand people at its peak, and Stolaroff’s early position there made him wealthy. Yet by his thirties, professional success existed alongside a growing search for spiritual understanding. Nominally Jewish, he was moved by the English philosopher Gerald Heard’s account of an LSD experience with Al Hubbard.

That account led Stolaroff to Vancouver in March 1956, where he arranged a session with Hubbard in the Captain’s apartment. The encounter joined an engineer’s interest in human potential to a therapeutic practice already being shaped by Hubbard’s use of guidance and ritual. The session did not simply acquaint Stolaroff with a new substance; it gave him an experience he would later treat as a decisive personal and professional turning point.

The 1956 Experience and Its Consequences

Stolaroff took sixty-six micrograms of Sandoz LSD. Over several hours, his experience moved through what seemed to be the planet’s history, from its formation and the development of life to the emergence of humanity, before culminating in the trauma of his own birth. Years later, he described the session as both terrifying and ecstatic. He said he relived a painful birth experience that had shaped many of his personality features, while also experiencing human oneness and what he understood as the reality of God.

Stolaroff later characterized this as an opening that committed him to the work. The journey’s movement from planetary history to personal birth was not, in his account, merely an unusual sequence of images: it connected an immense story of life with the formation of an individual personality. The book notes that this kind of progression was common in Hubbard-guided sessions. Stolaroff’s own experience thus became a point of entry into the therapeutic ideas he would pursue—above all, the possibility that an altered state might loosen established limits and produce lasting changes in how a person understood themselves and others.

Afterward, Stolaroff shared what had happened with a small circle of friends and colleagues at Ampex. They began meeting roughly once a month to discuss spiritual questions and the possibility that LSD might help healthy people realize more of their potential. The group included Don Allen, a young Ampex engineer, and Willis Harman, a Stanford professor of electrical engineering. Hubbard began traveling to Menlo Park to guide the group’s psychedelic sessions and train members to guide others. Stolaroff later remembered him as an exceptionally capable therapist.

From Ampex to the International Foundation

For a time, Stolaroff tried, with Hubbard’s help, to remake Ampex into a psychedelic corporation. Hubbard led weekly workshops at the company headquarters and administered LSD to executives at a site in the Sierra. The initiative foundered when Ampex’s general manager objected to the religious images Hubbard brought into his office, including images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Last Supper. The episode exposed a tension within the project: its advocates treated spiritual material as part of the experience, but that approach could meet resistance inside a conventional corporate setting.

A different institutional path opened when Harman shifted some of his teaching at Stanford toward human potential, ending a course with a unit on psychedelics. In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to devote himself full-time to research. With Harman, he established the International Foundation for Advanced Study to investigate LSD’s potential to enhance personality and creativity. He recruited psychiatrist Charles Savage as medical director and James Fadiman, then a first-year graduate student, as staff psychologist. Allen also left Ampex to become a screener and guide. The foundation obtained an FDA research permit and began work with LSD and mescaline supplied by Hubbard.

Over the next six years, the foundation processed about 350 people. Most were healthy volunteers or, as Fadiman described them, a healthy neurotic outpatient population. A five-hundred-dollar package included personality testing before and after the session, a guided LSD experience, and follow-up. Hubbard remained an intermittent presence: he came and went as an inspiration and resident expert, and sometimes took staff members to Death Valley for training, believing its primordial landscape especially conducive to revelatory experiences.

The foundation’s published reports gave numerical form to the claims its researchers were making. Seventy-eight percent of clients said their ability to love had increased, 71 percent reported greater self-esteem, and 83 percent said they had glimpsed a higher power or ultimate reality during their sessions. Those who reported such an experience also described the most lasting benefits. Allen recalled changes in beliefs, attitudes, and behavior that he considered unusually strong: clients became less judgmental and rigid, more open, and less defended. The results were not uniformly benign. Several clients ended their marriages after concluding that they were mismatched or caught in destructive patterns. The research therefore presented transformation not only as improvement, but also as a force capable of unsettling existing lives.

Warning Leary and Reuniting with the First Wave

Stolaroff also intervened in debates over how psychedelic work should reach the public. When Timothy Leary announced the International Federation for Internal Freedom and its plan to introduce strong psychedelics to large numbers of Americans, Stolaroff sent him a blunt warning. He called the organization’s plan insane and predicted that it would cause serious trouble not just for Leary but for researchers around the country, potentially damaging the field. Leary’s stated ambition was to change American society by increasing LSD use on a mass scale; Stolaroff foresaw that such an approach could bring consequences down on researchers who were trying to work within established institutions. His warning places him among those who believed psychedelic change required a different pace and strategy from Leary’s effort to take society by storm.

In February 1979, Stolaroff appeared at a reunion of first-wave psychedelic researchers in Oscar Janiger’s Los Angeles home. A videotape preserves him among figures including Humphry Osmond, Sidney Cohen, Willis Harman, and Leary, with Al Hubbard seated beside Leary. The gathering brought together people whose shared project had largely been defeated, and whose recollections included lingering hard feelings. Stolaroff’s presence connected the research communities he had helped build to this retrospective reckoning. The reunion’s central question was what their work had meant; Cohen suggested that it had disrupted thousands, perhaps millions, of people’s frames of reference. The scene gave Stolaroff’s career a wider historical frame: the research had been curtailed, but its participants did not regard its effects as erased.

Underground Lineage and Research Legacy

Stolaroff remained an important link between the first wave of research and the underground practice that continued after psychedelic therapy became illegal. He was a close friend of Leo Zeff and conducted the interviews that formed The Secret Chief, published anonymously in 1997 under the name of a therapist called Jacob. After Zeff’s family authorized disclosure of his identity, the book was republished in 2004 as The Secret Chief Revealed. The interviews preserved Zeff’s account of underground therapy and made a body of practice more accessible beyond the private relationships through which it had been transmitted.

In his introduction to the revised book, Stolaroff argued that the legitimate research resumed in the late 1990s had developed partly from the anecdotal evidence accumulated by underground therapists such as Zeff, as well as from the first wave of studies in the 1950s and 1960s. He also described continuing, cautious movement between underground and university settings. Some underground therapists helped train guides for university trials, and when the Johns Hopkins team investigated music in guided psilocybin sessions, it consulted underground guides about their musical practices. In this account, research history is not a clean succession of legal institutions replacing an abandoned underground: knowledge and technique crossed the boundary between them.

Stolaroff’s own career made that argument tangible. He moved from Ampex’s engineering culture into experiments on personality and creativity, helped organize a foundation that treated healthy people, and later documented a therapist whose work continued outside the law. His role was both practical and interpretive: he helped create a research institution, warned against a strategy he believed could imperil the field, and recorded the lineage that connected underground practice to renewed university research.