Harold E. Puthoff, widely known as Hal Puthoff, is a physicist and engineer1 who spent more than fifty years as a chief scientist on highly classified projects for the United States government.2 He earned his PhD from Stanford University in 1967,3 and his career subsequently spanned research posts at General Electric, Sperry Corporation, the National Security Agency (NSA), Stanford University, and SRI International.4 He served as a senior scientific advisor to almost every US government entity, including the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and agencies within the intelligence community such as the NSA,5 published numerous papers on quantum physics, lasers, and space propulsion,6 and held patents in the laser, energy, and communications fields.7 In various capacities he reported directly to the White House and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).8
Puthoff conducted research into extrasensory perception for the CIA,9 and pioneered the Remote Viewing (RV) technique at Stanford University in the late 1960s.10 He and Russell Targ were then approached by the CIA and told that Russia had a remote-viewing programme, prompting the effort that became Project Stargate.11 Puthoff went on to manage the CIA’s Stargate program.12 He and Targ were directly responsible for the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory’s output between 1972 and 1986,13 and their 1976 paper describing what became known as the Outbounder remote-viewing protocol, published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) journal, brought notoriety to the field.14 The programme became successful enough that Puthoff reported directly to the CIA director and the White House on a regular basis.15 According to Puthoff and Targ’s SRI report, individuals with no previous exposure to remote viewing, including visiting government scientists and contract monitors, were able to learn to perform well under the experimental procedure the pair developed.16 Most of the subjects they worked with displayed some degree of remote-viewing talent from the outset,17 and typically chose to continue their involvement out of personal interest, a form of self-selection.18 Ingo Swann worked with Puthoff and Targ, two of the field’s leading researchers,19 and recalled that Puthoff told him he had been the first to find a ring around Jupiter.20 Pat Price, another SRI remote viewer, gave Puthoff an unsolicited package of his remote-viewing notes in 1973 describing four alleged “UFO bases” on Earth.21
Puthoff’s work also extended to physical evidence associated with UAP. In a 1997 paper, he commented on possible UFO artefact samples recovered from the Ubatuba object, a Brazilian UAP reported to have ejected pure magnesium fragments in two separate incidents in 1954 and 1957.22 He wrote that laboratory analysis found the magnesium to be of exceptional purity, anomalous in its trace composition of other elements, and 6.7% denser than ordinary pure magnesium, a difference he stated was well beyond the experimental error of the measurement.23 He wrote that the result must be considered at least anomalous, and possibly evidence of extraterrestrial manufacture of the sample.24 His findings were published as the 1997 Hal Puthoff paper on Ubatuba magnesium samples. Puthoff also examined samples associated with Art’s Parts (alleged Roswell metal samples). He said that no evidence could be found that anybody had ever made a sample like the bismuth/magnesium-zinc material, and that people in the materials field did not know why anyone would want to make anything like it.25 In a 2012 letter to Linda Moulton Howe, he stated that tests he had carried out on the samples had not produced an interesting or anomalous outcome when various fields were applied,26 though he told a Las Vegas conference in 2018 that the bismuth/magnesium material turned out to be an excellent microscopic waveguide for very high-frequency electromagnetic radiation at terahertz frequencies.27 A 2019 To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (TTSA) Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure on Art’s Parts purchase recorded that Tom DeLonge sold six of the samples to the company for $35,000, and that Puthoff would analyse them for TTSA.28 An earlier 2018 disclosure by TTSA to the SEC had already revealed that the organisation retained Puthoff’s company, EarthTech International Inc., to prepare plans on materials analysis and beamed energy propulsion launch systems.29
Puthoff worked for the NSA and the CIA30 before, in 2017, joining Luis Elizondo and Christopher K. Mellon, another former DoD official, in a new commercial venture called the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA),31 which aimed to raise money for research into UFOs.32 He was TTSA’s third co-founder33 and helped lead the organisation’s campaign to get the US government to disclose what it knows about UAP.34 The venture also involved Jim Semivan and Steve Justice.35 In 2021, a week after disclosing the departures of Mellon, Elizondo, and Justice, Tom DeLonge disclosed Puthoff’s resignation as a TTSA director;36 he then transitioned to the company’s scientific advisory board.37 Separately, Puthoff was a contractor and senior advisor to the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) and the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), continuing to attend meetings, provide briefings, and prepare Proposed Program Plans under Elizondo’s leadership until Elizondo’s resignation.38 Puthoff was the programme’s chief scientist,39 and before Elizondo joined the effort, Puthoff had already conceived and commissioned studies into invisibility cloaking, traversable wormholes, antigravity, brain-machine interfaces, and warp drive.40 As a senior scientist for Bigelow Aerospace working on AATIP, Puthoff commissioned around 36 papers from experts worldwide on where their field of expertise would stand by 2050, without disclosing any connection to UAP or extraterrestrials;41 the papers were posted to a classified Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS) website,42 and most were later released under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.43 Puthoff has said AAWSAP was a classified programme intended to obtain answers about UAP,44 begun in 2008,45 and started by Senator Harry Reid and a couple of other senators,46 and that AATIP was a nickname for AAWSAP rather than an independent programme,47 which had not itself been funded by congressional mandate.48
Puthoff has told Elizondo that a UAP crash occurred at the 1947 Roswell Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) crash site in New Mexico and that the crash was covered up by the government,49 and that four deceased nonhuman bodies were recovered from the crash.50 He has possessed a piece of material allegedly recovered from the crash.51 Puthoff has also spoken of a Legacy Program with access to crash material and biologics,52 whose gatekeepers he describes as unelected security personnel whose job is to ensure the programme is not exposed.53 He has said the programme was shut down because no progress had been made, as its participants could not get materials in front of scientists able to evaluate them properly,54 but later clarified that it was specifically the attempt to make progress via AAWSAP that was halted, not the Legacy Program itself.55 Separately, Eric Davis, who worked for Puthoff,56 interviewed retired admiral Thomas Wilson in 2002; Puthoff was Davis’s boss at the time of the alleged meeting.57 The notes of that meeting later circulated as The Admiral Wilson Memo. Willard Miller said he would assist Davis and Puthoff with their ongoing research into UFO crash retrievals, subject to caveats,58 but required that his name not be mentioned or associated with their work.59 Asked about the memo at an Arlington Institute address in February 2020, Puthoff said it had been leaked on the internet and that Wilson was one of the joint chiefs of staff interviewed by Davis, declining to comment further because it discussed potentially ongoing programmes.60