Hal Puthoff
Harold E. "Hal" Puthoff is an American physicist and engineer who, together with Russell Targ, led remote viewing research at the Stanford Research Institute funded by the CIA and military intelligence. He later also played a role in studies connected to the Pentagon's UAP program and in the company To The Stars.
Harold E. "Hal" Puthoff (1936) is an American electrical engineer and physicist. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University in 1967 on tunable lasers and co-authored a textbook on quantum electronics. He also worked at a Navy unit and at the National Security Agency (NSA). In 1972, as a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in California, he began studying remote viewing together with Russell Targ. The research was funded first by the CIA, then by the Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), from 1991 under the name Stargate Project.
What he claims
According to Puthoff, the remote viewing experiments produced measurable results, and scientific study of the phenomenon is warranted. In 1985 he founded the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, which since 1991 has belonged to his company EarthTech International and works on energy generation and propulsion. According to his theory, inertia may be an effect of the vacuum's zero-point field, and new propulsion principles could emerge from such research.
EarthTech researchers took part in 38 background studies (DIRDs) for the Pentagon program called AATIP. In 2017 Puthoff founded, with Tom DeLonge, the company To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which worked on UAP research and advanced technologies. He also appears in the 2025 documentary The Age of Disclosure.
Official and skeptical views
In 1995 the CIA shut down and declassified the Stargate Project. According to the evaluation prepared on its behalf by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), not a single remote viewing report provided information usable for intelligence purposes, and further use of the method was not justified. The evaluation's two experts disagreed: statistician Jessica Utts considered the results evidence of psychic ability, while psychologist Ray Hyman said this conclusion was premature because the results had not been replicated in independent experiments. According to skeptics, methodological flaws in the SRI experiments, such as telltale cues hidden in the transcripts, skewed the results. His theory of zero-point energy has been disputed mathematically by several physicists, including Steve Carlip and Yefim Levin.