Marcia Moore's "Bright World"
Wealthy socialite deepens her love affair with ketamine
The above graphics are details from Journeys into the Bright World by Marcia Moore and Howard Alltounian.
The following is an excerpt from p. 194-197 of Chapter 4, “Mystical Medicine, Wicked Weapon: A Both/And Approach to Ketamine” from my new book, Drugism (2022):
[This excerpt is the second in a three-part series exploring the strange story of Marcia Moore, the Sheraton hotel heiress. This excerpt is continued from last week’s.]
In Journeys into the Bright World, the book they cowrote together, Moore and Alltounian present an apparent explanation of how they met. It is a bit creepy:
Late in May 1977, Dr. Howard Sunny Alltounian was browsing through the Quest Bookstore in Seattle, Washington. Fingering a massive textbook entitled Astrology, the Divine Science, co-authored by Marcia Moore and Mark Douglas, his gaze was caught by the picture of a woman on the back flap of the dust jacket. At that point the name Moore was completely unfamiliar to him. However, as he studied the photograph the thought flashed through his mind, ‘Wow! Would she make a perfect wife!’[i]
While in modern times this may draw red flags, it seemed not to concern Marcia Moore or Howard Alltounian, who published the story to explain how they met.
“Howard first glimpsed Marcia on a local television program.”
However, according to their acquaintances, this is not in fact how Moore and Alltounian met. We know this thanks to the work of Joseph and Marina DiSomma, a husband-and-wife duo of investigative writers who spent several years studying Marcia’s case, interviewing her former acquaintances, etc. Their findings were published in 2021 as a book entitled Dematerialized: The Mysterious Disappearance of Marcia Moore.
Drawing on these interviews, the DiSommas present a slightly different account of Howard’s discovery of Marcia. “In reality,” they write, “Howard first glimpsed Marcia on a local television program.”[ii] Shortly thereafter, he noticed that she was scheduled to speak at a series of workshops organized by a friend of his.[iii] He attended every single event of Marcia’s and brought a tape recorder with him to record Marcia’s lectures.
At the conclusion of the workshop series, the organizers held a small private party for Marcia. When Howard learned of the party, he badgered the organizer friend of his to invite him to the party despite her own hesitance. But after continued pressure from Howard (a “temper tantrum” according to one source), she gave in and brought him to the party. There, he cajoled Marcia into a walk outside. It was on this walk that Marcia discovered that Howard had knowledge of and access to ketamine.[iv]
At a small party, Howard cajoled Marcia into a walk outside. It was on this walk that Marcia discovered that Howard had knowledge of and access to ketamine.
However they met, whether through obsessive bookstore voyeurism or a temper tantrum, Alltounian and Moore got along well. When they met, Alltounian was house sitting for a friend and invited her to join him. She did. The house was in a “thickly wooded” and “secluded area.”[v]They spent a week at the house and, while there, experimented with ketamine twice. Both times, the ketamine was prepared and administered by Alltounian.
During their first trip together, Moore repeatedly chanted Alltounian’s first name, Howard, and “thought that he was God”—“the Lord God Himself,” remembered Moore. Alltounian had a vision of what he called “a cosmic marriage” between the two of them.[vi] After their second ketamine trip together, having spent a week alone in a house in the woods, they decided to get married.
Shortly thereafter, they did. They continued to do ketamine together regularly, supplied by Alltounian. Because he was a physician, he had easy access to pharmaceutical ketamine. Further, as an anesthesiologist, he had personal experience administering ketamine to patients. Moore felt that the ketamine complimented her yoga practice and developed a style of yoga supplemented with ketamine. She called it samadhi therapy.[1]
Moore felt that ketamine complimented her yoga practice and developed a style of yoga supplemented with ketamine. She called it samadhi therapy.
If ketamine ever helped Moore attain enlightenment, however, it certainly is not evident from her work. As we will see, her life instead got progressively darker.
Moore and Alltounian both took a strong liking to ketamine. Journeys into the Bright World refers to the inner world in which Moore and Alltounian found themselves when they used ketamine. As recounted in the book, during one experience, Alltounian remarked, “when I close my eyes I see all this gold. It’s beautiful.” Moore replied, “Isn’t it nice. I love that gold. Now you know why I call it the bright world.”[vii]
Moore insisted she had never attained this state of consciousness before ketamine. She soon began to visit “the bright world” quite frequently. She experimented with various dosages, settings, etc. In early 1978, she “deliberately accelerated [her] intake” of ketamine, wanting to “check out the upper limits of safety before publishing the manuscript,” referring to Journeys into the Bright World. “After a week of daily tripping,” Moore developed severe insomnia, “sleeping only about three hours a night.”[viii]
Lilly told Moore about an extended ketamine experiment he hosted; two of the participants had died shortly thereafter.
In the course of their work with ketamine, Moore and Alltounian met another couple who were conducting similar experiments: John and Toni Lilly. One of Moore’s visits with the Lillys is included in Journeys into the Bright World.
When she visited the Lilly estate in March 1978, Moore was, in her own words, “still in my childlike awe at the wonders of ketamine.” Therefore, she was “astonished to discover that both Toni and John considered this to be an extremely dangerous substance.”[ix] John Lilly told Moore that he and a group of fellow ketamine enthusiasts had recently commenced an extended experiment involving fifty milligram doses of the drug administered hourly, for twenty hours a day, continuously for three weeks.
Lilly explained that two of the people involved in these experiments had died shortly thereafter, one from driving their car off a cliff. John himself had also nearly died. Both John and Toni Lilly “strongly emphasized that the therapeutic value of ketamine” depended greatly upon the “interaction between the therapist, the subject and the setting,” remembered Moore. Toni noted that ketamine had a “tendency to make a person lose touch with reality.”[x]
Despite such grim warnings, Moore told the Lillys that she intended to pursue experiments similar to theirs.
Moore was fascinated by the nature of the Lillys’ experiments. She saw that they had been using higher doses more frequently than she or Alltounian had yet dared to. Despite such grim warnings, she told the Lillys that she intended to pursue experiments more similar to what they had done. John Lilly replied, “you’d better be damn strong if you’re going to play that game.”[xi]
That was in March 1978. By October of that year, Journeys into the Bright World was published. In the time leading up to the book’s publication, Moore and Alltounian did several things worth noting. Somehow inspired by the Lillys’ experiments despite their tragic outcomes, Moore “again increased the dosages” of ketamine as she prepared to publish the book.[xii]
Also in this time period, Moore and Alltounian decided to pursue official approval to conduct formal research on ketamine. They consulted their local branch of the Drug Enforcement Agency, who told them that no special registration would be necessary, since ketamine was not a controlled substance at the time. Moore then met with an executive with the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company, hoping to negotiate the company’s approval of the research. The couple also submitted their request for approval from the FDA shortly before the book was published.
Moore “again increased the dosages” of ketamine as she prepared to publish the book.
In Journeys into the Bright World, Moore is hopeful that the FDA would grant approval to her and Alltounian. However, according to DiSomma and DiSomma, they instead received a cease-and-desist letter from the FDA in the fall of 1978.[xiii] They never got the official go-ahead to proceed with the research. Instead, just three months after the book was published, Marcia vanished.
No trace of her was found for more than two years. In March 1981, “in a swampy area” in a suburb of Seattle, a property owner was clearing the way for a construction project when, underneath some blackberry vines, they found a piece of a skull.[xiv] Dental records confirmed that it had belonged to Marcia Moore.
In his 2001 book, Ketamine: Dreams and Realities, Karl Jansen wrote that Moore went deep into the woods, “curled up in a tree” and “injected herself repeatedly with all of the ketamine she had been able to find” and then froze to death.[xv] However, Jansen provides no evidence or citation for this whatsoever. My research has failed to yield a single other source which confirms Jansen’s theory. Frankly, the thought that she would go deep in the woods and climb a tree to use ketamine in the middle of January in Seattle is absurd. As the DiSommas point out, Jansen’s research on Marcia revolved around an interview he conducted with Howard, who, as we will see, spread lies about Marcia after her death.
Just three months after the book was published, Marcia vanished.
[Join me next week for the final excerpt on Moore.]
Footnote
[1] Samadhi is Sanskrit for “enlightenment,” loosely analogous to nirvana.
Endnotes
[i] Moore and Alltounian, 16.
[ii] DiSomma and DiSomma, 188.
[iii] Ibid, 189.
[iv] Ibid., 189-190.
[v] Moore and Alltounian, 25.
[vi] Ibid., 27 and 29.
[vii] Ibid., 63.
[viii] Ibid., 71 and 165.
[ix] Ibid., 167.
[x] Ibid., 167-169.
[xi] Ibid., 169.
[xii] Ibid., 171.
[xiii] DiSomma and DiSomma, 207.
[xiv] “Author says sister’s...”; “Skull of Marcia...”; Rule, 269.
[xv] Jansen, 54.
Sources
“Author says sister’s death may be work of witches or bizarre cult.” United Press International, Mar 26, 1981.
DiSomma, Joseph and Marina DiSomma. Dematerialized: The Mysterious Disappearance of Marcia Moore. Post Hill Press, New York: NY. 2021.
Jansen, Karl. Ketamine: Dreams and Realities. Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, Sarasota, FL. 2004.
Moore, Marcia and Howard Alltounian. Journeys into the Bright World. Para Research, Inc. 1978.
Rule, Ann. Rage to Kill and Other True Cases: Ann Rule’s Crime Files, Vol. 6. Pocket Star Books, New York, NY. 1999.
“Skull of Marcia Moore, Seattle Psychic, Found.” The New York Times, Mar 26, 1981.
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