In the above clip, one of many pieces of extra interview material from the documentary DMT: The Spirit Molecule that are available via the DMTRMX project, Dr. Rick Strassman discusses how his book was received negatively in some parts of the UFO/alien research community, and his rebuttal to their criticism:

One of the criticisms that my book has received from the UFO community, or the alien abduction/contact community, is that I’m just saying it’s a drug, or it’s just their imagination. But I think on the contrary, that this provides an explanatory model… One of the qualities of both a high-dose of DMT and the entity contact experience is its profound reality. People who have been abducted or contacted, or people under a high dose of DMT, they repeatedly and uniformly say the experience is more real than real…it’s the most real that’s ever happened to them, that this reality just seems like a dream compared to the pure solidity and convincing nature of what happens under a high dose of DMT. And that’s similar to what you’ll hear from people that have had a spontaneous contact experience.

If you read the religious literature from thousands of years ago, or even the more recent past – people who have had contact with spiritual beings, non-corporeal beings, for lack of a better word… Those experiences are the most real and shattering and revelatory of their entire lives as well.

I think rather than just discounting the phenomenon as hallucinatory or imaginary, I think it’s maybe more useful to look at a mechanism of action. If it is real, then how does it work. And I think using DMT as an explanatory model, as a kind of a mediator between our consciousness and the consciousness of a non-corporeal kind of reality, it’s handy and makes sense. And it can be tested.