 In 1955, 12 years after Albert Hoffman's discovery of LSD, a Manhattan banker and amateur mycologist named R. Gordon Wasson sampled the magic mushroom in the town of Huahalta de Jimenez in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Two years later, he published a 15-page account of the, quote, mushrooms that cause strange visions, end quote, in Life magazine, marking the moment when news of a new form of consciousness first reached the general public.