Something Cosmic Is Going to Happen to You

Televangelist Oral Roberts paved the path for a pioneering psychedelic laboratory

Unencircled by other buildings, a golden, 60-story complex occults Tulsa’s southern horizon. CityPlex, the tallest skyscraper in Northeastern Oklahoma, was dreamt into existence by Tulsa’s most magical son, the ever-grinning televangelist Oral Roberts, who made a career of popping in and out of the limelight proclaiming “Expect a Miracle!”. Roberts originally envisioned the complex as a spiritually-attuned hospital named the City of Faith.

“We believe it’s going to set a pattern for this country, and perhaps in this world, for future institutions of this kind,” Roberts told his television audience in 1978. “We hope that it will bring untold blessings to millions, even yet unborn.“

Roberts died in 2009 and left much of the building unfinished, largely unoccupied, deeply in debt, and mired in bureaucracy¹. He died thinking it was a monumental failure. Little did he know his great faith ran true. The building did set patterns and did produce untold blessings, and miracles he did not expect.

CityPlex’s strange energy lured many suspect entities toward it: exorcist preachers, corporate conmen, the Department of Homeland Security, and Hobby Lobby heir Mart Green, whose family founded the Museum of the Bible. The sixty-foot bronze statue of praying hands and a defunct creationist museum at the base of the building only added to the queer feel of the place. Gordon Todd Skinner found himself attracted to the madness of it all.

The night view from CityPlex’s top floor is supernatural. Facing north, the Arkansas River murmurs like a dark mantra through the silver sandbars along the black western hills, while downtown’s art deco buildings glow on the horizon. Below sprawls illuminated geometries of gold, glass, and aluminum—an unearthly assembly called Oral Roberts University. In 1994, the 2,500 square-foot penthouse apartment at the top of the tower, with its preternatural vistas, was arguably the most prestigious address in Tulsa.

While waiting on his missile base in Kansas to be completed, Skinner struck an eighteen-month lease on the penthouse by telling the CityPlex leasing company that his family’s company, Gardner Spring, would consider renting the building. The apartment was an incredible bargain—not simply because of the square footage and location, but because CityPlex was virtually empty, save for an older couple down the hall. Skinner, his wife Kelly Rothe, and their kids, occupied the tallest, most expensive building in Oklahoma for $800 a month, and it didn’t cost much more for him to bribe the janitors for keys to the rest of the place.

Two floors of a research laboratory were fully-equipped and never used. A leasing agent, hoping to secure the contract, told Skinner that he was free to take or use whatever he wanted. Upon moving in, he set to work converting the lab into a round-the-clock psychedelic research center. Soon the City of Faith became one of the most productive psychedelic drug and research laboratories in the world, thanks in part to the generous donations of Christians who funded the lab, believing they would seed miracle work.

High Altitude Alchemy

In the pristine lab conditions, Skinner was free to experiment and refine his methods. Petri dishes and ball glass jars full of various mushroom mycelium filled the drawers. Whispy trays of phalaris arundinacea² grew on countertops, along with phragmite austrelis grasses, banesteria cappii vines, arundo donax reeds, echinopsis pachanoi cacti, and salvia divinorum plants³. He learned that the infamous red-capped amanita muscaria mushrooms were too temperamental for his liking, but that amanita pantherina was a psychedelic unlike any others; if you could hone in on the right dose, it was a sociable, energetic drug that created an extraordinary, superhuman body high, making you physically feel as strong as a Greek god. He just didn't like the pool of slobber it induced.

Both Skinner and Rothe enjoyed taking the kids for strolls alongside the nearby Arkansas River. During one excursion along the bike trails, Skinner happened upon thousands of Illinois bundleweed (desmanthus illinoensis) growing along the riverbank. He sent a team of Gardner employees to dig them up and, through heavy labor, separated the root bark from its roots. Soon he amassed barrelfuls of the DMT-rich bark⁴. Using thin layer chromatography and other techniques, his experiments showed that extraction with boiling water yielded the best results: a bland, reddish dirt-like paste that, when combined with an MAOI like peganum harmala, made a potent huasca.

Recalling his travels in Negril, Jamaica, Skinner noted that visitors to Miss Brown’s Tea House⁵ drank a honey-flavored mushroom tea, which created a remarkable warm and convivial environment. He wondered, what other ingredients might complement the mushroom experience? Using a crockpot, he experimented with different concoctions, ultimately arriving at a recipe based off a Montezuma’s brew sold by the 1980s botanicals purveyor Of The Jungle. Cocoa contained precious theobromide, black tea and coffee offered the right caffeine buzz, and peppers (typically cayenne or habaneros) brought the critical capsaicin. Psilocybe mushrooms were regularly fed into the pot at varying doses, and many visitors showed up to enjoy a weekend of camaraderie. Naked Lunch and Disney cartoons continuously played on a projector.

“We grew everything natural, and natural means unpredictable,” Skinner recalls. “The brew turned psilocybin into a social drug. We kept the mushrooms light, and we kicked up the caffeine and capsaicin and chocolate. It felt like MDMA but more mellow and stable. These were great fun gatherings.”

Skinner estimates that he was doing psychedelics weekly, or more often, while living at CityPlex and working at Gardner Spring. In between trips, he would take the elevator down to the fourth floor, zip over to the neighboring tower, and check on his projects. Occasionally, he would use large cases to move equipment back and forth between his lab and his apartment. The prolific research also meant that Skinner was producing an extraordinary amount of product which was making its way across the globe. Untold blessings poured forth from the hallowed building.

“At any given [moment], I had more psychedelics on my person than existed in all of Oklahoma,” Skinner says, his smile audible on the other end of the line. “We did a lot of psychedelic research up there—a lot.”

The Telepathy Trips

Michael Hobbs has been reported to transform into a pillar of light during strong trips; Hobbs doesn’t comment about it when I ask. He is a quiet, unobtrusive man in his forties, the kind of guy you could trust with all your secrets. He drives a black Mustang and wears bangs cut short across his forehead. When we met in San Francisco, he took me on a drive north, through Sausalito and into Stinson Beach where some of the most legendary trips occurred.

Michael Hobbs in a missile base, mid 1990’s.

“I was fascinated by how much he knew [about psychedelics] and had an answer for every question I had,” Hobbs says, recounting the early days when he first met Skinner, around 1991.

Ketamine is Hobbs’ favorite psychedelic owing to its purported telepathic properties. Skinner had tons of the stuff around, and estimated he had taken it on over 150 occasions himself, however, Skinner didn’t like ketamine and called it a “psychedelic heroin.” The telepathic properties were strong enough to induce Skinner to run tests, asking beketamined trippers to send messages to each other with just their minds, or asking them what was written on posterboard on the roof. None of it translated into significant results.

Hobbs says Skinner hired him as a day laborer at Gardner Spring where he operated a forklift and delivered parts. He remembers Skinner’s mother Katherine Magrini as a “hardass” who always got her way. In his off hours, Hobbs would eventually find his way back to CityPlex towers to participate in the psychedelic gatherings. Hobbs felt at ease around the couple, and the kids were crazy about him too—especially Skinner’s daughter, who often scrambled onto his lap playfully.

For Hobbs, the roles as a Gardner employee, a personal assistant, and a family friend began to blur. With Hobb’s help, Skinner planted thousands of pounds of psychoactive phalaris seeds near the Gardner offices along North Utica in Tulsa—an area of town that is still inundated with the grasses today. Just a few years ago, I spotted it growing waist high in the lots surrounding El Rio Verde restaurant, about a mile away. [Phalaris sprouts are loaded with DMT and 5MEO, which Skinner would separate using supercritical fluid extraction. We’ll explore Skinner’s phalaris operations in a future post].

Before long, Hobbs became Skinner’s right hand and regular tripping partner.

“It was cool to sit up there and watch thunderstorms roll by,” Hobbs says of the cosmic experiences at the top of CityPlex. “It was a pretty clean place, immaculately spotless.” (One nanny I spoke with, Glenda Wade, confirmed that Skinner kept a cabinet stocked full of Listerine bottles and would literally bathe in the stuff. He was obsessed with cleanliness, she said).

One receipt shows the first page of a 409-item order for psychedelic plants seeds from Oklahoma State, and another receipt shows service work to maintain Skinner's cleanliness obsession.

“There was no animosity between us,” says Hobbs. “We were pretty good friends.” He tells me that Skinner was often animated during trips, bouncing around to songs by Enigma and Moodswings and rummaging through stacks of CDs.

As Hobbs became a fixture in daily life, Skinner began to share more about his private operations. Hobbs recalls seeing the lab in the tower, and didn’t ask questions when Skinner directed him to pack up some of the glassware and instrumentation and load it into an empty 16-passenger van.

Hobbs drove the bulk of it to New Mexico, where the flasks, vials, and vacuum pumps were used in the future production of LSD and DMT. Skinner says that some of the CityPlex labware even made it to a number of clandestine laboratories overseas, and that the equipment is still in use today.

An Answer to Prayer

While Skinner was living and conducting research at CityPlex, the psychedelic community was in a race to create a psychoactive extraction of Salvinorin A from salvia divinorum, which then held potential because of its potency and legality (it is now a Schedule I drug). Salvia divinorum is a meter-high plant that grows throughout the cloud forests of Mexico.

Salvinorin A was first isolated by a Michigan pharmacology student in 1983, but there were no reports then of its psychoactivity. After repeated experiments, Skinner says that he arrived at Salvinorin A through columnar bead extraction, a method utilizing glass beads to stratify all the alkaloids. Once Skinner honed in on the right molecule, he and friends tried numerous routes to sample the drug at varying doses. They scrubbed it on the insides of their mouths with steel wool; they injected crystals subcutaneously; they mixed it with dimethyl sulfoxide and rubbed it onto their thighs. None of it worked.

One day, Skinner invited a few friends up to the penthouse to smoke the latest extraction. The first person to try it, a woman, wouldn’t agree to an interview; the second person took a few steps and slumped into a corner, calling it a “supremely sarcastic” high afterward. When Rothe sampled it, she launched into a wacky Warner Brothers cartoon. Skinner said he tried it while seated at the same dining table that Oral Roberts and Billy Graham used for their private prayer meetings and experienced something uncategorizable and alien.

“That night I called Jonathon Ott up immediately and I said ‘Houston we have lift-off!’ I told him exactly what we did,” say Skinner. Ott, who in emails called himself a “pharmacopolitical refugee” would not comment.

Meeting the Psychopomp

A week later, Skinner invited his friend from Peace of Mind bookstore, Barry Bilder, to smoke Salvinorin A.

“Everything was nice up there,” he recalls. “I guess they had leased the place fully-furnished, because it was full of the Oral Roberts’ family’s stuff.”

Bilder says that Skinner dipped a paperclip into a tiny vial of the diterpine form (a waxy, tacky substance), then dropped an infinitesimal smidge smaller than single grain of salt into a mini-pipette and handed it to him. Such a tiny amount couldn’t do anything, Bilder thought. He flamed the pipette and took a toke.

“That’s when I went 90 degrees out of this plane into another plane of existence,” says Bilder, his dark eyes widening as he recalls the experience.

Subscribers continue below to hear a 12-minute audio interview about Bilder’s mythological out-of-this body experience with Salvinorin-A. Please consider subscribing—reader support helps make these articles possible.