Hal Puthoff

Harold E. "Hal" Puthoff (born June 20, 1936) is a physicist and engineer who co-founded the Stanford Research Institute remote viewing research program with Russell Targ in 1972 under CIA contract and served as its principal investigator through 1985. The program, which operated under the code names SCANATE, Gondola Wish, and Grill Flame before consolidating as STAR GATE under DIA oversight, represented the primary U.S. government institutional effort to investigate anomalous cognition for intelligence applications over two decades. Puthoff subsequently contributed technical research to the AATIP Pentagon program and became a founding member of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science.

Early Career

Puthoff was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Dade County, Florida. He attended the University of Florida and completed a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in the 1960s. Before joining Stanford Research Institute, he worked briefly for the National Security Agency in a signals intelligence-related research capacity in the late 1960s, an experience that gave him direct familiarity with government intelligence requirements and classification systems.

He published a standard textbook in his field, Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics (1969, co-authored with R. L. Pantell), and held patents in tunable infrared laser technology. He joined SRI in 1969 as a researcher in laser physics and related applied science areas.

Scientology Background

Puthoff was a practicing member of the Church of Scientology for several years in the late 1960s. Ingo Swann and Pat Price, the two most prominent early subjects in the SRI program, were also current or former Scientologists. This overlap attracted attention within the CIA's counterintelligence staff, who questioned in internal assessments whether the church was exploiting the program for its own intelligence or reputational purposes, and whether claimed psychic results reflected Scientology training methods rather than independently verifiable phenomena. The Scientology connection among the program's leading figures was flagged repeatedly but did not result in the program's cancellation.

Initial Contact with CIA and SRI Experiments (1972)

Puthoff's shift from laser physics toward parapsychology research grew from his interest in quantum mechanics and questions about the physical basis of consciousness and observation. In 1972, he was contacted by Ingo Swann, an artist and self-described psychic who proposed a formal laboratory test at SRI. Puthoff arranged for Swann to attempt to disturb the output of a heavily shielded proton precession magnetometer at Stanford University's Varian Hall, designed to detect quarks. The magnetometer output showed anomalous fluctuations that Puthoff could not account for through conventional means.

On June 27, 1972, Puthoff wrote formally to Kit Green at the CIA's Life Sciences Division, proposing government-funded research at SRI to investigate whether anomalous cognition could be reproduced under controlled conditions. This letter, subsequently declassified and available in the CIA FOIA Reading Room (document CIA-RDP96-00791R000200030006-8), established the institutional relationship between SRI and the CIA that funded the program for more than a decade. The CIA designated the initial program SCANATE (Scan by Coordinate) and provided initial funding; formal experiments began under CIA contract by October 1972.

Puthoff hired Targ as a research colleague, and together they developed the remote viewing experimental protocol: a subject remained at SRI while a second experimenter traveled to a randomly selected target site; the subject attempted to describe the target through verbal description and drawings; independent judges blindly matched transcripts to target sites.

The 1996 Account

After the CIA declassified 270 pages of SRI reports in July 1995, Puthoff published his own account. In early 1972, doing laser research at SRI, he had written a proposal that Ingo Swann saw at Cleve Backster's laboratory and wrote to him, and Puthoff invited him for a week in June 1972. He arranged access to "a well-shielded magnetometer used in a quark-detection experiment in the Physics Department at Stanford University," in a vault beneath the floor "shielded by mu-metal shielding, an aluminum container, copper shielding and a superconducting shield"; Swann "appeared to perturb the operation of the magnetometer" and then "went on to 'remote view' the interior of the apparatus, rendering by drawing a reasonable facsimile of its rather complex (and heretofore unpublished) construction." Within weeks "a pair of visitors showed up at SRI with the above report in hand. Their credentials showed them to be from the CIA. They knew of my previous background as a Naval Intelligence Officer and then civilian employee at the National Security Agency," and spoke of "increasing concern in the intelligence community about the level of effort in Soviet parapsychology being funded by the Soviet security services." An eight-month "Biofield Measurements Program" of 49,909 dollars followed, and Russell Targ joined; the second year, January 1974 to February 1975, was funded at 149,555 dollars. The first coordinate target, "the West Virginia Site," produced from one subject "a detailed map of the building and grounds layout" and from the other "information about the interior including codewords, data subsequently verified by sponsor sources"; Pat Price then "went on to scan the other side of the globe for a Communist Bloc equivalent and found one located in the Urals," also "verified by personnel in the sponsor organization as being substantially correct." The Semipalatinsk experiment of July 1974, "carried out in three phases," was "under direct control of the COTR," and "several details concerning the salient technology of the Semipalatinsk site appeared to dovetail with data from other sources, and a number of specific large structural elements were correctly described." The CIA "dropped out as a major player in the mid-seventies due to pressure on the Agency (unrelated to the RV Program) from the Church-Pike Congressional Committee," and Major General Edmund Thompson, the Army's assistant chief of staff for intelligence from 1977 to 1981, said: "I had one or more briefings by SRI and was impressed. The decision I made was to set up a small, in-house, low-cost effort in remote viewing." One application, Puthoff noted, "yielded not only a published, statistically significant result, but also a return of $26,000 in 30 days in the silver futures market." The article does not mention Scientology.¹

Protocol Development and Pat Price

Swann's suggestion to use geographic coordinates rather than outbound experimenters as the targeting mechanism - initially resisted by Puthoff and Targ as theoretically implausible - proved to generate consistent results and became the basis of Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV), the structured methodology used throughout the government program.

Pat Price, a retired Burbank police commissioner introduced to the program in 1973, produced what Puthoff considered the most operationally significant results of the SRI period. Price's remote viewing of the Soviet URDF-3 facility near Semipalatinsk - describing a large gantry crane, spherical metal objects estimated at 60 feet in diameter under construction, and a novel welding technique - was subsequently evaluated against classified satellite photography and assessed as substantially accurate. Price and Swann's subsequent remote viewing of the NSA signals intelligence facility at Sugar Grove, West Virginia, triggered an NSA security investigation into whether remote viewing, if genuine, represented a vulnerability for classified installations.

Price died of a reported heart attack in Las Vegas in July 1975, under circumstances Puthoff considered potentially suspicious. His suitcase of remote viewing notes and CIA materials disappeared before Puthoff arrived in Las Vegas. No evidence of foul play was established.

On September 26, 1977, Puthoff sent Dave Johnson, whose office the memorandum does not give, the reply of Senator William Proxmire to a letter from a Wisconsin-born colleague: "Since fear of the 'Proxmire Effect' is often cited in discussions with sponsors and potential sponsors, I asked a friend of mine in psychoenergetics research to query his senator with regard to this field."²

Published Research

Puthoff and Targ published the SRI program's experimental results in two major peer-reviewed venues: "Information Transmission Under Conditions of Sensory Shielding" in Nature (October 1974, volume 251, pages 602-607), and "A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research" in Proceedings of the IEEE (March 1976, volume 64, number 3, pages 329-354). Both papers presented statistical significance claims for anomalous information transfer under controlled conditions and triggered extensive methodological debate in both journals' correspondence sections.

The Nature paper represented an unusual case of a mainstream scientific journal publishing parapsychology research; the editorial board attached a statement acknowledging the reviewers' uncertainty about publication. The IEEE paper presented data across multiple subjects and sessions, including Hella Hammid, a German-American photographer included specifically to test whether anomalous results were limited to self-identified psychics.

The Army's Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee of 1979 reviewed a paper of Puthoff's, "Potential Criticisms and Responses," setting out nine criticisms of the SRI work with his answers (experiment selection, data selection, cueing, "educated guess," target limitations, target generality, "read-in" matches, handling of judging materials, and post hoc photography), and found most "at least partially valid": SRI "ran 7000+ experiments with Swann" of which "only a fraction appear in the literature"; of the term "double-blind," "the word clearly does not apply in either the traditional, or in a meaningful, sense to the SRI protocol"; and "was the San Andres airfield photograph taken after the judging? Why do aspect angles of photographs always coincide with the direction from which the Subject 'views' the target?" Against the authors' claim to have "in five years of self- and other criticism... not found a way to fault either the experimental protocols or the conclusions derived therefrom," the annex answered: "I do not agree, and I believe that careful evaluation amply documents numerous such faults."³

The 1979 evaluation by Harry and Arlene Snyder of Systemetrics, held by the CIA, reproduced his protocol "as described in a written communication from H. Puthoff to a sponsor in late 1977," noted that in the alphabet-letter experiments "Puthoff did the judging," quoted his letter of March 28, 1978, to Karnes and Susman of Denver ("We have found remote viewing to be extremely sensitive to the feedback parameters"), and of his and Targ's claim to have found no fault in five years, "we do not agree." To David Marks he wrote on July 10, 1978, that "neither the single judge (Hastings) nor the panel of five judges were given the order; they were kept blind," in May 1979 that the transcripts could not be released "since premature disclosure would prevent further blind analysis work," and on August 25, 1980, that "the published list of the targets was in the order of target usage, and that, furthermore, when the target list was provided to the judge, it was inadvertently (through an error) given in the same order."⁴

His "Standard Remote-Viewing Protocol (Local Targets)" with Targ, of November 1978, held by the CIA, prescribed a target list prepared "by an experimenter who will not interact with the subject after that," selection by "a Texas Instruments SR-51 hand calculator, which has a random-number function," fifteen-minute viewings, "no hypnosis, strobe lights, or sensory-deprivation procedures," feedback at the site "for each experiment to ensure success," and judging by direct matching or rank ordering. On August 3, 1979, he wrote to Manfred Gale that the Grill Flame Scientific Evaluation Committee had "all but skipped Part 2 on scientific questions" at its SRI visit and that "it is incumbent on the committee members to obtain a more thorough grounding in the technical details," enclosing a revised procedure with Targ and May; on March 19, 1980, he, Targ and May wrote to Walter LaBerge that "based on a recommendation of the Gale Committee, ODDR&E will not provide support for R&D efforts in the Grill Flame area," that "we were not mandated to undertake formal proof-of-principle research," and that their results had been described by clients "as being of vital importance to the national interests."⁵

Transition and Departure from SRI

When the Army established its own remote viewing unit at Fort Meade in 1977 under the code names Gondola Wish and later Grill Flame, it contracted SRI for protocol guidance and training under Puthoff's supervision. Puthoff continued as SRI's principal investigator through this period, overseeing both the research program at SRI and consulting on the operational program at Fort Meade. In 1985, Puthoff departed SRI; the research contract subsequently moved to SAIC under Edwin May.

After leaving SRI, Puthoff founded EarthTech International in Austin, Texas, a private research company focused on advanced physics including zero-point energy and vacuum fluctuation effects. His theoretical work at EarthTech centered on the physical frameworks he believed might explain anomalous cognition and other unconventional phenomena within accepted physical theory, particularly through quantum vacuum interactions.

UFO-Related Contacts, 1985 to 1996

A page of handwritten notes by Oke Shannon of Los Alamos, headed "Attendees" and placed by the authors of the Loose Threads Report at a meeting of August 7, 1985 labeled "ATP Ten," lists "Hal Puthoff" among participants in the Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group convened by John B. Alexander in the BDM facility at McLean, Virginia; those authors write that Shannon's notes of the first meeting show Puthoff giving a presentation on remote viewing.⁶ Jacques Vallee recorded a 1989 telephone conversation in which Puthoff said that Alexander had briefed "the head of Norad, the head of the Space Command, the top guy at SDI" and that "a lot of people had been briefed and had agreed to cooperate"; Vallee's account has Puthoff conceding that the plan "may have been killed by someone deciding that the timing was wrong, or they were the wrong people, or the approach was bad."⁷ At the 2018 conference of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, asked about Alexander's conclusion that no program could be found, he answered that "somebody else [was] doing it" and that "if materials are being held in Special Access Programs, a casual conversation even with high-level people, who know your interest, and they're interested too, won't necessarily reveal facts."⁶

Mark Pilkington wrote in Mirage Men that at a Denny's restaurant "back in 1986" Kit Green, Puthoff and Vallee "distilled what they knew about the subject into what has become known as the 'core story.'"⁸ Shannon said in a 2022 interview that in 1999 Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson telephoned him to ask whether Eric Davis could be trusted and "may have even mentioned Hal Puthoff and one or two other people."⁶

On October 17, 1996 Laurance Rockefeller wrote to John H. Gibbons that an international conference on extraterrestrial intelligence and UFOs would be useful, and enclosed with a Carl Sagan letter a draft invitation to a small meeting on its feasibility. The attached list of suggested invitees, headed "Supplemental Suggestions" after a list from Julia Marton-Lefevre of the International Council of Scientific Unions, includes Harold Puthoff, "Director, Institute for Advanced Studies," Austin, Texas, with Rodney Nichols (New York Academy of Sciences), Peter Sturrock (Stanford), William Golden, Charles M. Vest (MIT), Daniel S. Goldin (NASA), Frank D. Drake, Gordon Cooper and Harold Aspden. The letter describes the proposed meeting as "informal and off the record," of "6-10 people," in New York in the first quarter of 1997.⁹ Richard J. Boylan listed Puthoff as Owl in a roster of the Aviary.¹⁰

AATIP and Later Work

Puthoff contributed as a scientific consultant to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the Pentagon program that investigated Unidentified Aerial Phenomena from approximately 2007 to 2012 under Luis Elizondo. His contribution included commissioning and reviewing Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs) - theoretical analyses of advanced aerospace concepts including warp drives, traversable wormholes, negative energy, and exotic propulsion systems. His EarthTech research in zero-point energy physics made him the natural contractor for the theoretical physics studies that formed part of AATIP's research portfolio.

Puthoff became a founding member and scientific advisor to To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA), the public benefit corporation established by Tom DeLonge in 2017, which published three unclassified Navy videos of UAP encounters that the Department of Defense stated on April 27, 2020 it had authorized for release after "unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017,"¹¹ and became a public vehicle for intelligence community-adjacent UAP disclosure.