Video of the day

I wonder how this experience changed her in years to come?

Part of the appeal of the video, of course, is seeing a stereotypical-looking 1950s-era prim young housewife talk like a stereotypical-sounding tripping hippie.

"She had no social cues. She didn't know you were 'supposed' to talk like that on LSD. What I found fascinating about it is the mystical religious experience that people have on psychedelic drugs is real in the sense that it's not learned," Lattin, who also wrote 'The Harvard Psychedelic Club,' tells ABC News.

"I would love to track her down," he says. "If she were still alive she would be in her 70s or 80s."

The strain of research Cohen and his colleagues did with psychedelics would be picked up in the subsequent generation by Timothy Leary, whose evangelizing would cost the drug some credibility in scientific circles, says Lattin.

"This shows that very early on in the 1950s, researchers were aware that there were possible beneficial uses, rather than military or more nefarious uses," he says.

Today, studies have been approved by the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Food and Drug Agency that explore the use of MDMA, more commonly known as ecstasy, to treat veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

"You can really see the beginnings of that," says Lattin, "With this early research by Cohen."