Acid Lore: Blinded by the Light
Acid Lore: Blinded by the Light
Kids on LSD Stare at the Sun Until They Go Blind
Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun
But Mama, that’s where the fun is
–Manfred Mann’s Earth Band
I heard about this guy once–took LSD, lay down in a field, and stared at the sun until his eyes melted… He was discovered later by friends staggering ’round the field permanently blinded and utterly mad. He never recovered his sight or his sanity.
That’s how I first heard this cautionary tale about the dangers of drugs. The shocking image of the tripped-out acid freak with his eyes dripping down his face is certainly an arresting one, and perhaps this is why the legend has become such an enduring part of Acid Lore. We’ve all been told tales of the poor soul who was blinded after staring at the sun on an LSD trip. But it’s just a myth, right?
Here Comes the Sun
The front page of the Los Angeles Times on 19 May 1967 carried a report by an anonymous ‘staff writer’ with the headline ‘Four LSD users suffer serious eye damage from sungazing while on trip’.
According to an anonymous spokesman from the Santa Barbara Ophthalmological Society, four students on separate occasions had taken LSD and stared at the sun causing permanent damage to their vision. One of the students told doctors he had been ‘holding a religious conversation with the sun’, while another said he had stared into the sun ‘to produce unusual visual displays.’ As they gazed at the sun, none apparently knew of the damage they were doing to their retinas.
According to the article, the four Santa Barbara students all suffered the same kind of eye damage. They had not been totally blinded; instead, the sun had burned pinhead-sized holes in their retinas. This meant they could never read again – they could see the corners of the page and the shape of the print, but they could not see the word their eyes were pointing at due to a permanent blind spot ruining their reading vision. So much for their studies – their young lives were destroyed because of careless experimentation with a dangerous drug. That’s the lesson that many readers will have taken from the article that was gleefully picked up by newspapers across the US and around the world.
There are many reasons to be suspicious of this story. No names are given, for one thing. The story also seems implausible because bright sun in the eyes instinctively causes them to fill with water, the pupils to narrow and it would be almost impossible not to look away, especially with dilated pupils when on an acid trip. It seems highly unlikely that four students in the same city would independently be dumb enough to stare at the sun on drugs long enough to cause permanent eye damage.
In any case, this seems to be the earliest print reference to the story, though we can speculate that it was circulating by word of mouth before then.
Let the Sunshine In
One sunny spring morning in 1966, six Pennsylvania college students headed to a nearby meadow to trip out on LSD. Six hours later, they had not returned, and concerned friends went to the meadow to look for them. They were horrified to find all six were helplessly blinded after lying on their backs and staring at the sun in a psychedelic daze.
They didn’t realise they had been staring at the sun until they came out of their trance. Somehow the drug had kept their eyelids open. The six students permanently lost their sight and received rehabilitation treatment from the Pennsylvania Welfare Department.
This report surfaced in the Los Angeles Times on 13 January 1968 and was covered widely in other newspapers. The source for the story was Dr. Norman Yoder, a man who had been blind since a childhood accident and worked for the Pennsylvania Welfare Department as the state commissioner for the blind.
Dr. Yoder said he could not reveal the names of the students, nor the college they attended. He did tell the press that as of 1968, the students were back at school and doing well, though still suffering from remorse and shame.
The story was confirmed by several state officials, including the governor of Philadelphia Raymond Shafer in front of a news conference. Nevertheless, there was growing skepticism and pressure on Yoder to reveal the names of the supposed victims. Reporters searched in vain for the blinded students, and Yoder’s superiors began to note inconsistencies in his claims.
Finally, Yoder confessed that he had fabricated the story as he was concerned about the dangers LSD posed to the young. After revealing his hoax, Yoder collapsed and was taken to a psychiatric hospital in Philadelphia. Governor Shafer, one day after telling the world he was convinced the story was true, found himself before another news conference to reveal that it had all been a hoax.
The previous summer Yoder had attended a lecture about the effects of LSD on the eyes and, afterwards, felt the need to do something. Perhaps inspired by an already circulating legend, or a memory of the Santa Barbara reports, Yoder concocted his morality tale. He increased the horror by making the hapless students totally blind, rather than suffering the partial visual damage of the Santa Barbara four.
Children of the Sun
So, the Pennsylvania six were invented by Yoder, and the Santa Barbara four were also likely a hoax or an urban legend reported as news. But people do stare at the sun deliberately or accidentally and suffer solar retinopathy – damage to the retina from sunlight. This is most likely to be the result of watching a solar eclipse. However, some people have also deliberately looked at the sun to get out of military service, because they were mentally ill, or were conducting sun worship rituals.
And yes, it has been documented in LSD users, though these cases occurred after the Santa Barbara and Pennsylvania hoaxes. Just as life imitates art, it also imitates urban legends.
In a 1973 paper for the British Journal of Ophthalmology, Schatz, and Mendleblatt examined the treatment for two cases of solar retinopathy involving LSD. One young man had taken the drug and gazed at the sun. He had a religious experience with the sun having the significance of God, though his spiritual ecstasy was short-lived as he almost immediately realised his vision was blurry. He could see spots before his eyes, struggled to read, and had to look to the side of something to see it clearly. He was treated with steroids, and although his visual acuity returned to normal, he was plagued by blind spots in his visual field. The man had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
The second case involved a fifteen-year-old girl who had been to a lecture on the dangers of drugs. The lecturer related the tale of the students who took LSD and damaged their eyes, and the girl thought ‘It would be a neat thing to burn out my retinas.’ She took some acid and gazed at the sun for an unknown period feeling omnipotent and unaware of any potential damage to her eyes. She later found she couldn’t read newspaper print or the blackboard at school, although she recovered after treatment. She was described as having a ‘hysterical personality’.
Too Much Sun Will Burn
Several other academic studies have examined similar cases, so perhaps the practice of sun gazing on LSD was more widespread than we might expect. In a paper for the Annals of Ophthalmology in 1971, Roger Ewald described the treatment of nine US Army soldiers who had engaged in psychedelic sun gazing independently of one another. ‘A funnel led up to the sun’, one said about staring at the sun on LSD. ‘A voice told me to look at the sun,’ said another. Some of the nine had taken to sungazing as they felt it brought about a flashback, calling it ‘tripping out on the sun’. The patients, who were all described as having ‘character and behavioural disorders’, suffered varying degrees of damage to their retinas as well as blind spots. One man thought he was stuck in a permanent acid trip because his blind spot meant that whatever he pointed his eyes at seemed to disappear.
Interestingly, Ewald seems to suggest that staring at the sun to enhance a trip or try and induce a flashback may have been common practice: ‘Based on the comments of several patients it is apparent that sungazing associated with LSD is by no means confined to the military environment and is probably more common in the drug community than is generally appreciated.’
So the story about the acid trippers who stared into the sun and damaged their eyes is a myth, but it’s also something that really happened after the myth had been circulating. Perhaps hearing about the myth was part of what motivated people to try sungazing on acid, a process folklorists call ostension – the acting out of legends. The real-life sungazers were clearly very disturbed or very silly.
It still happens today – a 2021 paper in the journal Photodiagnosis and Photodynamic Therapy examined the treatment of a teenage boy who had taken ecstasy and then stared into the sun…
So, if you take LSD and gaze at the sun, the good news is you probably won’t go totally blind. You might lose some visual acuity and suffer from blind spots or see constant spots before your eyes, perhaps permanently. On the other hand, you might get an article about you published in Photodiagnosis and Photodynamic Therapy.
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