About The Psychonaut Files
Welcome to the untold story of Gordon Todd Skinner, a scientific prodigy turned psychedelic explorer whose life reads like a twist-laden thriller.
For over ten years, I’ve been working on a book about Skinner, and now I’m ready to share much of that research. What you’ll learn will cause you to question everything you thought you knew about Skinner, the infamous LSD bust, and all those who surrounded him. The Psychonaut Files represents unprecedented access to the deepest secrets of America’s psychedelic society.
Who is Gordon Todd Skinner?
• An Oklahoma-born genius with "Diracian intuition" for mathematics and chemistry
• A “security” figure involved in the world's largest LSD bust
• A government operative, drug kingpin, and visionary
• Among the most experienced psychonauts in human history
What you'll discover:
The Missile Base Laboratory: Journey into the Atlas-E Missile Complex in Wamego, Kansas, converted from a Cold War relic into a cutting-edge psychedelic research facility.
The Mozart of Psychedelic Chemistry? Photoisomerization and quantum wells are just part of Skinner’s claims for scaling up LSD production.
Rewriting Psychedelic History: Find out the real origin behind certain substances as well as the the cheeky inside story on the shamanic colonic, the craze that blew through psychedelic circles.
Time Dilation and Reality Manipulation: Explore Skinner's ideas involving the use of psychedelics to alter perception of time and space.
The Dark Side: Delve into the kidnapping case that led to Skinner's life sentence and the complex web of relationships that surrounded him.
Psychedelic Celebs: Find out how Sting, Sasha & Ann Shulgin, Nick Sand, R. Gordon Wasson, Paul Stamets, Terrence McKenna, Jonathan Ott, Rick Doblin, and many others figure into this bizarre landscape.
Why subscribe?
• Bi-weekly dispatches filled with mind-bending stories and revelations
• A nuanced look at the intersection of brilliance, madness, and the quest for expanded consciousness
• Exclusive content for paid subscribers, including rare audio files and legal documents
The Psychonaut Files offers an inside look into the life of a man who shaped, and was ultimately undone by, the American psychedelic community.
Join me on this journey into the heart of the psychedelic underground, where science meets mysticism and reality itself becomes questionable. Subscribe now to The Psychonaut Files and prepare to have your perception altered.
About Me
Although The Psychonaut Files unfolds within a biographical framework, my work is less about a single life and more about interpreting the hidden architectures of human quests. I’m fascinated by how people seek transformation, wrestle with power, and stumble toward meaning.
My journalism career has moved between science, spirituality, and story. Head Cases (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), explored brain injury and consciousness and led me to testify before Congress about the plight of wounded veterans. As founder and editor of This Land magazine, I built a platform for uncovering hidden histories and helping other writers find their voice.
For the past decade, I have been immersed in psychedelic culture, supported in part by the Tim Ferriss/UC Berkeley Psychedelic Journalism Fellowship. This journey has drawn me into the world of Gordon Todd Skinner, a figure whose life both fascinates and unsettles. Yet my focus is not Skinner himself but what his story reveals about the wider human drive to alter consciousness, test boundaries, and confront the sacred and the profane.
Through years of research, direct access, and reflection, I’ve come to see these explorations not as tales of chemistry alone, but as windows into how relationships, errors, and paradoxes create meaning. Whether through psychedelics, meditation, or the simple act of reading, I am drawn to the “in-between” spaces—those charged fields where consciousness, culture, and history intersect. My hope is that The Psychonaut Files contributes not just to psychedelic history, but to a deeper conversation about what it means to be human.
Send questions or comments to me at michaelpmason@gmail.com
