Case file · Remote viewing & psi research

Hal Puthoff

American laser physicist (b. 1936) who co-founded the SRI remote-viewing research and later became a central figure in UFO disclosure.

1972 CE · 37.46, -122.18 · status: disputed

The account

After a Stanford PhD (1967), Puthoff and Russell Targ studied remote viewing and psychics such as Uri Geller at the Stanford Research Institute from 1972, reporting positive results in Nature in 1974; the work fed the government programme later called Stargate. He founded the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (EarthTech), published on zero-point energy and gravity, joined Bigelow's NIDS in 1995 and BAASS in 2008 (the contractor for AATIP), and co-founded To The Stars with Tom DeLonge in 2017. His letter of 27 June 1972, kept in CIA files, describes Swann changing the output of a superconducting-shielded magnetometer in Arthur Hebbard's quark experiment at Stanford. Puthoff wrote that the 'implications are staggering' but urged controlled experiments. A 1984 government science panel (Donald Kerr, Fred Zachariasen, W. Ross Adey) found Puthoff's SRI evidence 'too impressive to dismiss as mere coincidence' but said it was either real or due to experimental interference, criticised the team's unwillingness to explain the coordinate method, and recommended cautious funding with open, independently replicated research (p.2-5).

The sceptical view

Critics found sensory cues in the remote-viewing transcripts and replications failed; physicists disputed his zero-point-energy calculations, and his recent UFO claims are second-hand by his own account.

Connections in the atlas

Sources

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