We keep our noses clean here at Gizmodo, so we're finding ourselves a bit surprised that someone as upstanding as Carl Sagan, astronomer extraordinaire, was a stoner. It does kinda explain the obsessions with all things shiny and starry though.


In 1969, under the name of Mr. X, Sagan contributed to a book called Marihuana Reconsidered. Some time later he as revealed as the man behind statements like this one:

When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.


We're definitely not saying that getting stoned will turn you into a space-studying stud, but instead we just wanted to share a little known fact about a cool dude. [Boing Boing]