Harold Puthoff

Harold E. Puthoff was born on June 20, 1936, in Chicago. He took his undergraduate degree from the University of Florida and his doctorate from Stanford University in 1967, working on tunable lasers under the supervision of Marshall Chodorow. His thesis work led to one of the early patents in tunable-laser technology. After leaving Stanford he worked briefly at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

In 1971 Puthoff joined Stanford Research Institute, then a major nonprofit research lab on the San Francisco peninsula. SRI's funding came from a mix of federal contracts and private clients, and the climate of the early 1970s gave staff researchers wide latitude to pursue unusual research directions if outside funding could be found. Puthoff began corresponding with the parapsychologist Cleve Backster and the New York-based researcher Karlis Osis about whether the experimental results coming out of the American Society for Psychical Research could be reproduced in a physics-grade laboratory.

In May 1972 Puthoff traveled to New York to observe a session with the ASPR's most consistent subject, Ingo Swann. The result of that session, in which Swann appeared to influence the readings of a magnetometer, led Puthoff to invite Swann to SRI for a longer evaluation. Within months the CIA's Office of Technical Service had funded the contract that became Project SCANATE.

Puthoff served as principal investigator for the SRI program for the next thirteen years. He co-authored the October 1974 Nature paper with Russell Targ, "Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding," which remains the most-cited single publication on the laboratory results from the program. He published Mind-Reach with Targ in 1977 and continued throughout the SRI years to argue that remote viewing was a real phenomenon whose mechanism was unknown.

In 1985 Puthoff left SRI and founded the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, an independent research lab funded by private donors and federal small-business contracts. The Institute's later research direction moved away from remote viewing and toward speculative physics, in particular zero-point energy and vacuum-energy questions. Puthoff has been awarded multiple patents in these areas.

In the late 2010s Puthoff became publicly associated with several private-sector unidentified aerial phenomena research initiatives, including the To The Stars Academy founded by the musician Tom DeLonge and the Aerospace Corporation veteran Luis Elizondo, and earlier work with the Bigelow Aerospace research program on the Skinwalker Ranch property in Utah. These later associations have been controversial. Defenders treat him as a serious physicist whose interests have remained consistent across decades; critics argue he has lent scientific credibility to claims the underlying evidence does not support. He continues to work and publish.