Terence McKenna was a psychedelic author, explorer, and showman. He was born in 1946 and grew up in Paonia, Colorado. In high school he moved to Los Altos, California and from there attended U.C. Berkeley for two years before setting off to travel. He travelled widely in Asia, South America, and Europe during his college years and his first book, co-authored with his brother Dennis McKenna, was based on their 1971 investigations of Amazonian hallucinogens. 

 

In 1975, Terence graduated from Berkeley with a degree in ecology, resource conservation, and shamanism. Soon thereafter, he and Dennis pseudonymously published one of the earliest psilocybin mushroom growing guides under the names Oss and Oeric. Terence then spent some time doing large-scale farming of psilocybin mushrooms during the 1980s.