June 8, 2018 in Las Vegas marked an exception to this policy when he spoke at a joint conference of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) and the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA). Puthoff’s background is quite extraordinary and is summarized on the TTS/AAS website as follows:
- Dr. Harold E. Puthoff is the co-founder and Vice President of Science and Technology of TTS Academy. Since 1985, Dr. Puthoff has served as President and CEO of EarthTech International, Inc. (ETI), and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (IASA). He has published numerous papers on electron-beam devices, lasers and space propulsion and has patents issued in the laser, communications, and energy fields. Dr. Puthoff’s professional background spans more than five decades of research at General Electric, Sperry, the National Security Agency, Stanford University and SRI International. Dr. Puthoff regularly advises NASA , the Department of Defense and intelligence communities, corporations and foundations on leading-edge technologies and future technology trends. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1967 and won a Who’s Who Lifetime Achievement in 2017 that recognizes individuals that have achieved greatness in their industry and have excelled in their field for at least 20 years.
This is in keeping with TTS/AAS’s strategy to advance the Disclosure process without breaking any non-disclosure agreements, releasing any classified documents or directly stating, let alone confirming the phenomena extraterrestrial in origin. This approach was likely a condition for receiving clearance – from whom we do not know – to proceed with the project.
PRG has reviewed all the interviews of and statements by TTA/AAS team members, and this is the message PRG is hearing:
We’re Not Saying it’s Extraterrestrial
But It’s Extraterrestrial
Some of the more notable statements from Dr. Puthoff’s address are highlighted in bold text.But It’s Extraterrestrial
________________________________________
BENGSTON (Dr. William Bengston, President of the Society for Scientific Exploration): This certificate says, “Tim Dinsdale Memorial Award recognizing significant contributions to the expansion of human understanding through the study of unexplained phenomena. To Harold Puthoff for the application of sound scientific principles and methodologies to the study of remote perception; quantum, zero-point fluctuations; and unidentified aerial objects, and for recognizing the potential usefulness of these often-shunned phenomena in the real world.” To Hal.
PUTHOFF: Thank you, thank you. I am very honored to receive this award. I’ve known many of the previous recipients of the Dinsdale Award over the years, and they were all really, truly excellent researchers pushing the boundaries into the frontier areas of science. So to join their ranks I consider really quite a privilege.
The three areas he named in giving me the award, quantum vacuum fluctuations – actually I still publish in that area in physics journals. The second area remote viewing, in fact it’s very serendipitous that I should receive this award for this particular meeting since we have this cosponsored event with the Society for Scientific Exploration on the one hand and IRVA, International Remote Viewing Association, on the other – I was a founding member of IRVA, so I’m really excited to see how people have picked up the ball and run with it in that area.
The third area, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, I have not published anything in. Why? Because the program I was involved in, in the Pentagon and in the intelligence community has been Top Secret, behind-the-scenes and only recently has there been release of information about the program. So this is the first chance that I’ve had a chance to actually appear before the public and speak about details of the program and not go to jail. So I’m going to go along at a rapid clip; I’ve got a lot of information here. So here we go.
The SSE is no stranger to the subject of UFOs. Unidentified Aerial Phenomena is just a new acronym for UFOs. Back a couple of decades ago Peter Sturrock – one of our founding members of SSE – arranged with (Laurance) Rockefeller to hold a weeklong workshop at the Rockefeller residence. We brought in the best of the UFO researchers, and then a panel of independent experts, and had a weeklong discussion of physical evidence related to UFO objects of which there’s a significant amount of data. Laurance Rockefeller hosted the whole thing. It was a wonderful meeting.
Eventually after publishing in the SSE journal (“Physical Evidence Related to UFO Reports,” Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 12, NO. 2, pp. 179-229), Peter Sturrock put together a book, The UFO Enigma: A New Review of the Physical Evidence (Warner Books, New York, NY, 1999) and it still one of the best books you can find out there to take a look at what are the physical aspects of UFOs that researchers have uncovered.
However, of course the government is also no stranger to the UFO phenomena. Anyone who follows the field would be familiar with Project Sign, Grudge and Blue Book, but in 1969 the Condon Committee shut it all down and said, really we don’t need to be involved in this area any more. We’re not learning anything. We’re not getting anywhere. It’s not clear this is a significant area. So for the average person on the street, that’s where it all kind of ended, at least serious government interest. In fact, that’s not true.
The very memo that shut down Blue Book written by General Bolender had as part of its language, “Reports of UFOs which could affect national security would continue to be handled through the standard Air Force procedures designed for this purpose.”
Nonetheless, as far as the public was concerned that was it. Even the Air Force public affairs office put out circulars all the time in response to questions saying, “We gave this up in 1969.” What, in fact, did occur was that there were programs going on behind the scenes anyway as required by the Bolender memo. Now most people did not know about these programs, they weren’t advertised, they weren’t responded to, FOIA requests usually went dry. But that all changed last December when the New York Times published a front-page story on how there was this program investigating this area – Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. (Helene Cooper, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal. “2 Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen’.” The New York Times, 16 December 2017, page A27.)
It was deeply buried, but the New York Times had good sources and they came up with information about the program, and so there’s been a lot of publicity about it. Since the New York Times broke the story, The Washington Post, CNN. Fox News – it’s been picked up all over the place.
One of the reasons why it’s attracted attention at this point is the quality of the sources going public. Ex-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is the one who initiated the program. Top-rated F-18 pilots who encountered Advanced Aerospace Vehicles at close range were permitted to come forward and tell their stories, which up till now they hadn’t because they didn’t want to lose their flight status by reporting what they had found, at least publicly. And a number of significant Department of Defense and intelligence community officials have come forward to talk about the reality of this phenomena and the fact that there were programs going on. The program was nicknamed Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). People have had trouble trying to get documents out of the Pentagon by saying they want all documents on AATIP, and they have a hard time because that wasn’t the actual name of the program. “Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program” is the actual name of the program. But AATIP was the nickname it went by.
It began in June of 2007. The Defense Intelligence Agency was concerned about the fact that obvious observation had shown that Advanced Aerospace Vehicles – crafts, or drones of unknown origin, were flying all over the United States, over waters, in fact globally as was the case. So a Congressional budget was approved to address the issue behind the scenes. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid from Nevada was the one who was the initiator of the program, joined by Senator Inouye and Senator Stevens. These are the people who generally approve programs that were in the black, under high security, behind the scenes, and so they set up this program.
Senator Reid has not walked this back since all the news came out. He’s been very forthright and has given a number of interviews. This particular statement sort of captures it all, “We don’t know the answers, but we have plenty of evidence to support the questions. This is about science and national security. If America doesn’t take the lead in answering these questions, others will.”
There is a two-fold nature to the threat. First of all, you’ve got these Advanced Aerospace Vehicles flying around that we don’t know where they come from, who’s driving them, what the intent is – possibly off-world even. But the future threat, was actually as far as the Department of Defense went and the intelligence community, one of the greater concerns. What happens if potential adversaries achieve significant breakthroughs by getting hold of advanced technology either based on their study of the phenomena, or from sensor data, or from crash retrieved materials? That could provide a problem for the United States in the sense of threat. There’s reason to be concerned about that. This is a document in the program we dug up out of the Soviet Union (“Thread-3”). It’s a very thick document. It shows that the Soviet Union had a massive program also trying to get to the root of all of this. In this document a number of research institutes and military institutes are listed. Of course, they had the same concerns we did. Is there a threat from the phenomena or might the Americans make headway before us and that be a threat?
Just to give you an idea of what’s being observed, which many people have seen because it’s been in the news a lot lately. Back in November of 2004, the Nimitz Carrier Group was out on patrol off of San Diego, and on several occasions an Advanced Aerospace Vehicle would descend rapidly from 60,000 feet to 50 feet in seconds, then hover, and then take off like a bullet. When it first happened and happened over a number of weeks actually, two F-18 pilots were vectored on to the site where they were being observed by the radars to investigate, and what they saw was what they called a “Tic-Tac craft” – solid white, smooth, no edges, about 46-feet in length, uniformly colored, no nacelles, pylons or wings. The F-18’s could not obtain lock with their radars because they were stealthy, but Forward Looking Infrared Radar (FLIR) could pick them up to some degree based on their heat signatures. The Advanced Aerospace Vehicle appeared to demonstrate advanced acceleration, aerodynamic and propulsion capability beyond anything that we knew existed on the planet.
I am going to play a FLIR video that many of you may have seen.
[Video of UAP intercept begins.]
“That is a [expletive deleted] drone, bro.”
“There is a whole fleet of them, look on the ASA!”
“My gosh!”
“They are all going against the wind; the wind is 120 knots from the west. Look at that thing, dude!”
“That’s not . . . I don’t understand. Look at that thing!”
“It’s rotating.”
[End of video.]
Now you might ask yourself, what can you prove from a videotape? I mean, you can see videotapes all over the Internet and so on. But this was data fusion. They are gun-camera tapes. There are these videotapes from the pilots, voice recordings, data link recordings from Aegis and many other military platforms, expert witnesses. So, in fact, the data density – and this is what’s changed the field a lot – our detection capability has gotten so advanced that we’re losing our inability to see exactly what’s going on.
The FLIR displays were recorded. There are detailed debriefs of the pilots. In that original New York Times article you can see a page-long debrief of Dave Fravor.
Key Assessments:
- The Advanced Aerospace Vehicle is no-known air vehicle in the inventory of the U.S. or foreign nation as far as we can tell.
- Low-observable characteristics, they are stealthy.
- They exhibit advanced aerodynamic performance that we can’t imagine how they do it.
- Recognize that these are infrared tapes from the pilots, so if there was some kind of hot propulsion gasses coming out the back you would have seen it, but we don’t see that.
- They had the advanced capability to remain stationary and then take off like a shot. Dave Fravor said it was like somebody had suddenly shot a bullet.
Okay, what did I address as a subcontractor? One of the critical issues there’s so much high-level security and compartmentalization in this subject area, and there’s a lot of it, it’s difficult for contractors to obtain expert opinions on advanced technologies because they would expose why they are interested. So, I acted as a surrogate. I was contracted to commission mostly unclassified whitepapers from experts around the globe about where their particular subject areas would be in (the year) 2050 as like a general survey of aerospace futures. I decided this would be the best way to get the best knowledge we had across many technologies without actually exposing why we wanted to know.
So, I let out 38 contracts over a two-year period. I’ll show you what the studies were on. You can read them there: positron aerospace propulsion, IEC fusion as a compact energy source, warp drive, dark energy, extra dimensions, metallic glasses for aerospace use. Really cutting edge kinds of things.
Here are some more of the papers that I commissioned: negative mass propulsion, antigravity for aerospace applications, programmable matter, invisibility cloaking – these are just the kind of things that we needed to have maximum technical input from the best people around the globe. And so, that’s what we did, that’s what I did.
Now we could wait, we told these people they could publish their reports in physics journals and engineering journals, but of course the contractors didn’t want to wait for that, so the Defense Intelligence Agency bundled up these 38 papers and put them out as Defense Intelligence Reference Documents posted on a JWICS server that anyone in the government or contractors could get access to. By and large they have not been released to the public yet; a couple of them leaked out.
So let me give you an example of, how this stuff helps people who are chasing these really difficult problems. I’m choosing one here: metamaterials for aerospace use. I’d love to talk about really fancy materials, but they’re classified. However, there’s a lot of materials that have been picked up or provided even in the public domain. I’m going to give an example because it shows exactly what the structure is for how to deal with this. This is an open source sample. It was sent anonymously to talk show host Art Bell. The fellow claimed to be in the military. He said that this sample was picked up in a crash retrieval, and so he sent it by email. So what does that mean? Chain of custody non-existent. Provenance questionable. Could be a hoax. Could be some slag off of some foundry floor or whatever. However, it was an unusual sample, so we decided to take a look at it.
It was a multilayered bismuth and magnesium sample. Bismuth layers less than a human hair. Magnesium samples about ten-times the size of a human hair. Supposedly picked up in the crash retrieval of an Advanced Aerospace Vehicle. It looks like it’s been in a crash. The white lines are the bismuth; the darker areas are the magnesium separations. So the question was what about this material, so naturally we looked in all the national labs, we talked to metallurgists, we combed the entire structure of published papers. Nowhere could we find any evidence that anybody ever made one of these.
Secondly, some attempts were made to try to reproduce this material, but they couldn’t get the bismuth and magnesium layers to bond.
Thirdly, when we talked to people in the materials field who should know, they said we don’t know why anybody would want to make anything like this. It’s not obvious that it has any function.
Well, years later, decades later actually, finally our own science moves along. We move into an area called metamaterials, and it turns out exactly this combination of materials at exactly those dimensions turn out to be an excellent microscopic waveguide for very high frequency electromagnetic radiation terahertz frequencies. So, the wavelength is 60 microns, which is a pretty small size. But it turns out because of the metamaterial aspect of this material, those bismuth layers that act as waveguides can be one twentieth the size of the wavelength, and usually when you make a waveguide it’s gotta be about the size of the wavelength. So, in fact this turned out to be a material that would propagate sub-wavelength waveguide effects. Why somebody wants to do that we still don’t know the answer to that.
But anyway, it’s amazing we’ve gone through this and this is the kind of structure we go through a lot. You get a material sample with unusual characteristics to be evaluated, the method of manufacture is difficult to assess or reproduce, the purpose of the function is not readily apparent – as with our sample here, and then as our own technical knowledge moves forward we finally see a possible purpose or function comes to light. That sequence is repeated over and over in this particular area.
I’ll pick a second one here for the engineers or physicists in the crowd. Probably be more interesting – spacetime metric engineering. This happens to be the paper that I myself provided. One of the questions is: can the reported anomalous observables of these Advanced Aerospace Vehicles be accounted for on the basis of known physics? You hear people describing craft taking right angle turns at high speeds, other things with the hovering and rapid acceleration and so on, as if the craft didn’t have any inertial mass. Well, it turns out although Einstein’s general relativity is usually used in astrophysical applications and gravity studies and so on, you can look at it from an engineering standpoint. So, if you take an engineering approach to general relativity, what I just showed can be understood. If you could change the spacetime metric the way general relativity – I’m talking about textbook, not some fanciful physics – you could even get faster-than-light travel. Alcubierre warp drive as in Star Trek. Again, you might think that’s a fanciful kind of thing, but that paper was published in one of the top general relativity journals, Miguel Alcubierre, “The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel within General Relativity,” Classical and Quantum Gravity (11:L73-L77,1994). So, if you engineer spacetime metric, you can begin to line up observables with physics that we know and love even if we can’t reproduce it.
What about the velocity of light constraint? People are always saying that. How could you have a wormhole that lets you go from one side of the universe to the other? Aren’t you beating the speed of light? What does the physicist and engineer mean by the speed of light? He means this little equation here where the speed of light is given by 1 over the square root of the permittivity times the permeability of the vacuum. So the point is if you reengineer those vacuum parameters, then you can make the effective speed of light higher in the engineered region. Those are the solutions in general relativity that are called wormholes, and again, it’s not science fiction. This is just right-off-the-shelf, standard text book general relativity applications.
So, what that means is a reduced time interstellar travel is not as skeptics would say, “You can’t get from there to here.” Advanced ET civilizations now, or ourselves in the future are not fundamentally constrained by physical principals. The exotic physics for such can be addressed in engineering terms – some metric engineering as it were. Does this have any help? Again, by the way, this paper was also published as one of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s reference documents. And since we are permitted to publish in the open literature, I published that paper in a British interplanetary science journal, an engineering journal, so if you’re interested in looking at the details, you can learn as much as you want to know about metric engineering. (Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metirc) Engineering, H. Puthoff (2010), Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 63, 82-89.)
That helped us understand some of the aspects, I mean you may have heard the phrase, “dense stars you get red-shift.” It turns out in this engineered technology you get so called “blue shift.” That is, frequencies are up-shifted to higher frequencies. So, for example in this room most of the radiation coming off our bodies, off the walls and so on is in fact in the infrared. But we see things in the visible range. What happens when you get into a volume of space where the vacuum has been engineered in the way I’ve been discussing? It turns out you get a blue shift. So, in fact the infrared that you don’t ordinarily see can get blue shifted up into the visible so it’s not surprising that all these craft should be so luminous. Now the downside from all of this is the fact that visible light, which doesn’t have any particularly harmful effects, gets blue shifted up into the ultraviolet, so if you get too close to a landed craft, you might get a sunburn, or off into the soft X-ray regions so there’s a chance of radiation poisoning. If you run across one of these sitting on the ground and it’s powered up, I recommend you don’t rush up.
Well, that helped us to understand. We as part of this program looked at some cases that were really good from Brazil. In 1977, 78, it was like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A thousand pages of documents all done by the Brazilian Air Force investigative team, 500 photographs, 15 hours of motion film, a lot of medical injuries. This is a list of the different kinds of medical injuries that occurred when people encountered these craft at close range, and it has some overlap with cases that we’ve investigated during the program, of injuries occurring.
Despite the progress in the AATIP program, let’s face it, the topic is inherently anomalous, right? Therefore, despite the reality of the observations and all the people that we interact with in the intelligence community and the Pentagon agree – the data is there, it is real. Nonetheless the topic doesn’t fit smoothly into known profiles of the government programs for sure. And by virtue of national security implications it’s a high compartmentalizational topic, therefore a slow pace of cumulative progress and integration. We call ’em “stovepipes.” You have a lot of people with lots of detailed information about some particular aspect, but they don’t talk each other even if it is sitting at the next desk. And let’s face it, advocacy of this issue in government circles is not viewed as career enhancing in part because, despite the weirdness of the subject, if you don’t make a lot of progress, you know, it doesn’t look good on your resume that you’re moving up the line.
So, because of that, there’s a forward story. Many of us involved in the program decided that there should be an outreach program in the public sector. So this is the forward story. The goal was to establish a broad-based, high-quality scientific community-of-interest in the public sector concerning these Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and other related leading-edge topics. And so we got together and formed a company called, To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. It was cofounded by entrepreneur Tom DeLonge – I’ll talk about him in a minute – senior intelligence officers from the Department of Defense and CIA and distinguished research scientists. We all banded together to form this academy. It was set up as a public benefit corporation so the public can invest and therefore it’s owned by the public. So this is something new. Whatever comes out of any of the research or any of the releases of information is actually going to be owned by the public. It is not going to disappear into a black hole. A very transparent structure, if you go to the website you can see everything from the financial structure to the activities, and we do have a web-based community-of-interest where things get posted. For example, the F-18 FLIR tape I showed, we now have three of them up there and probably more to come.
Alright, who are the principals of this organization? Tom DeLonge, Blink 182 rock star. Frankly, I’d never heard of Blink 182, but my son told me, “Oh yeah, we know about Blink 182.” But anyway, in addition to being the rock star that he is, he’s also a director and producer, puts out books and music and film and so on, and he’s had a lifelong interest in the UFO area. So, he started talking with various people and he was kind of the I guess you could say the action-oriented person, who said “Why don’t you set up something. Why don’t we make this more available to the public?” and he got to a number of us, and so we all began to band together. Lou Elizondo, who was in fact the Department of Defense’s, the Pentagon’s AATIP program director resigned from the Pentagon and joined us.
Chris Mellon, 20-year career, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Minority Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he joined us. We got Jim Semivan, 25-year career and CIA’s Director of Operation. He was the real James Bond kind of guy. Steve Justice just retired as program director for the billion-dollar programs at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. He joined us.
And then, I agreed to be on the Board. So, I joined them. In addition to my science and engineering background, I’ve had a lot of activity in classified areas so it was a natural fit for me interacting with all these people.
We also put together a policy and scientific advisory panel of the best people we could find. Chris Mellon agreed to be the Chair. Dr. Colm Kelleher, he was actually the deputy administrator at Bigelow Aerospace to run the AATIP program out of the Pentagon. Dr. Gary Nolan, top genetics professor at Stanford University. Dr. Kahn, 30 year career with the CIA counter biological weapons program. Dr. Rapp, professor of military and emergency medicine, Uniform Services University. Dr. Gilpin, consultant on academic biomedical research and research law.
So, we put together a team as panelists to keep us on the straight and narrow of really top people who have wonderful backgrounds and really want to see scientific work be done in this area.
So, the goals for the To the Stars Academy are to,
- Promote the concept that such forefront topics as UFOs, SETI, consciousness studies, even telepathy and psychokinesis should not be considered taboo for serious scientific consideration. So, it’s a perfect match to the SSE because that’s our goal in the SSE as well.
- And of course, big ideas that generate funding to underwrite significant research in these areas
- Develop user friendly data bases so information that is generated can be accessed by anyone
- Provide positive support for collaborative government, aerospace industry, and academic efforts to accomplish all of the above.
The structure of the organization has a science structure, an aerospace structure, and an entertainment division. What are the activities of this organization to date? Actually we were responsible for legitimizing the topic in the mainstream press. That story that came out in The New York Times and so on, which then got picked up by the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, was based on agreed-upon interviews with those of us I’ve just gone through a list of. And given the quality of sources coming out from the shadows, for example Ex-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, top F-18 pilots, significant Department of Defense and intelligence community officials, the bar has been raised on the legitimization of this topic in the public arena. We think that’s an accomplished goal to date.
And via the community-of-interest postings on the website, we now have three high quality F-18 video tapes of unidentified aerial phenomena encounters. They’ve been previously languishing in the Pentagon servers, nobody doing that much with them. These are still being generated. One of the tapes is from 2016 off the East Coast of the United States. There are a lot more tapes. Hopefully we’ll get a lot more of them posted.
We don’t just produce positive results or what people would think would be supportive results. One of our scientists, science advisers is Garry Nolan from Stanford University, who’s a genetics expert. There had been claims that some small humanoid skeleton found in Chile – the so called Atacama Humanoid – might be ET. We could see why somebody might think that if you see the structure. But anyway, Nolan and people from other universities put together a complete genetics thing and did the entire genome and found in fact no unfortunately this is not evidence of ET, it’s a deformed human. That’s up on the website if you to read the paper. It was published in one of the top genetics journals – very well peer-reviewed. (Bhattacharya S, Li J, Sockell A, Kan MJ, Bava FA, Chen SC, Ávila-Arcos MC, Ji X, Smith E, Asadi NB, Lachman RS, Lam HYK, Bustamante CD, Butte AJ, Nolan GP. “Whole-genome sequencing of Atacama skeleton shows novel mutations linked with dysplasia.” Genome Research 2018 Apr;28(4):423-431.)
Meetings are being set up with people from other countries because other countries, who also have materials, don’t necessarily want to give them to the U.S. Government because they disappear into a black hole and they never learn anything. But given our commitment as a public benefit corporation, that’s not gonna happen with us. They are now talking to us and we are collaborating on obtaining materials from foreign countries.
We are negotiating with media outlets to get all this out in the public in the form of documentaries or TV shows, whatever. So basically that’s the back story, the forward story and I’m glad to answer any questions. I’ll answer any I can.
QUESTIONER: Your good friend John Alexander published a book, and I know I’ll have a chance to ask him this too. Why was it so hard for him to find who is doing the research, who was holding files on UFOs? In his book he said “Everybody thought someone else was doing it” and everybody said in all the departments “it’s not me, it’s somebody else that is doing it.”
PUTHOFF: It was somebody else doing it.
(Laughter)
PUTHOFF: If materials are being held in Special Access Programs, casual conversation even with high-level people who know your interest and they’re interested, too, won’t necessarily reveal the facts.
QUESTIONER: I think Luis Elizondo even said his own boss wasn’t quite sure what he was doing. Is that true?
PUTHOFF: That’s true.
BUCHMAN: My name is Joe Buchman, I was one of the organizers of the 2013 Citizen’s Hearing which was also an attempt to gather the best evidence on ETs or UFOs. I don’t know if you are aware of those hearings, if you are, I’d be interested in your take on it. But my second question though would be about the other tapes. You said there are a lot of other tapes. Are those classified? If not, or even if they are, can you characterize them in any way or tell us more about them?
PUTHOFF: They’re not a lot different from this. Some of them were classified because of where they were taken. But as far as the content of what we are interested from the technical standpoint, they’re not that different. Provided you strike out the location and so on, then there’s a chance of getting them declassified and we are working on that.
BUCHMAN: Specifically regarding the Citizen Hearing, is there any of the data presented there that you found particularly useful?
Answer: Well, you have to pick and choose among the data. I’m familiar with the Citizen Hearing and so on and certainly the depositions by the individuals who were in the launch towers for missiles . . .
BUCHMAN: Bob Salas.
PUTHOFF: Bob Salas for example – that’s all really good data. And the FAA administrator who came forward (John Callahan) – all good data.
BUCHMAN: Thank you.
QUESTIONER: Thanks very much for your talk. I wanted to bring up something as to the nature of the release. I guess the figure was 22 million dollars and then the program was closed? It may be a leap, but I think it’s common knowledge among UFO researchers that the spending in actuality is in the billions if not more. So some people in the UFO research community have raised the question, is this a duck on the pond, to state a figure as low as 22 million and then state that the program no longer exists. I was hoping you might have some comments on the great deal of concern that has arisen from these statements.
PUTHOFF: That’s a fair concern. This 22 million dollar program was one particular program. That does not say that there were not other programs with other funding levels. It isn’t like, suddenly there was this one program that did not last long and did not have that much money and it shut down.
Interest is continuing. Negotiations are continuing. The programs are being looked at. A lot is going on. I and my colleagues spend a lot of time in Washington talking to committees that are looking at this from many different angles. So the general view that, “Oh, it was just one program that came forward and didn’t provide much of value and then it got cancelled . . .”. That’s not really the case.
Also those figures are associated with the figures that went out to contractors. But that does not mean that people within the system aren’t still working on it.
QUESTIONER: For all of us inventors working in our garages, on metric engineering devices, is there going to be a clearinghouse for people to trade discoveries? Just the thing about the frequency shift (to blue). We can all be looking for line shifts with lasers to see if we can generate generate micro effects. Something like that would be incredibly valuable. How can that come out?”
PUTHOFF: We have a Maverick Inventor Program at EarthTech International, my organization, and also at the To The Stars Academy is putting together a research organization. So, if you are doing some metric engineering in your lab and you’ve got some laser shifting a frequency, bring them on; we will look at them.
[END]
Source news
Harold E. Puthoff
Biography
In 1967, Puthoff earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.[1][2][3] He then worked with, and invented, tunable lasers and electron beam devices, concerning which he holds patents, and he is co-author (with R. Pantell) of Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics (Wiley, 1969), published in English, French, Russian and Chinese. Puthoff published papers on polarizable vacuum (PV) and stochastic electrodynamics topics, which are examples of alternative approaches to general relativity and quantum mechanics.Puthoff took an interest in the Church of Scientology in the late 1960s and reached what was then the top OT VII level by 1971.[3] Puthoff wrote up his "wins" for a Scientology publication, claiming to have achieved "remote viewing" abilities.[4] In 1974, Puthoff also wrote a piece for Scientology's Celebrity magazine, stating that Scientology had given him "a feeling of absolute fearlessness".[5] Puthoff severed all connection with Scientology in the late 1970s.[6]
In the 1970s and '80s Puthoff directed a CIA/DIA-funded program at SRI International to investigate paranormal abilities, collaborating with Russell Targ in a study of the purported psychic abilities of Uri Geller, Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Joseph McMoneagle and others, as part of the Stargate Project. Both Puthoff and Targ became convinced Geller and Swann had genuine psychic powers.[7] However, Geller employed sleight of hand tricks.[8]
In 1985, Puthoff founded a for-profit company, EarthTech International in Austin, TX. At about the same time, he founded an academically-oriented scientific research organization, Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (IASA), also in Austin, TX, where he is Director.[9] Independent of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, IASA pursues more focused research on topics specifically related to energy generation and space propulsion, with funding from anonymous donors.
Puthoff and EarthTech were granted a US Patent 5,845,220[10] in 1998 after five years delay. The claims were disputed that information could be transmitted through a distance using a modulated potential with no electric or magnetic field components. The case is used for educational purposes in patent law[11] as an example of a valid patent where "The lesson of the Puthoff patent is that in a world where both types of patents are more and more common, even a competent examiner may fail to distinguish innovation from pseudoscience."
Assessment of scholarship
Uri Geller was studied by Russell Targ and Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Targ and Puthoff declared to have demonstrated that Geller had genuine psychic powers, though it was reported that there were flaws with the controls in the experiments and Geller was caught using sleight of hand on many other occasions.[12][13] According to Terence Hines:Geller turned out to be nothing more than a magician using sleight of hand and considerable personal charm to fool his admirers. The tests at SRI turned out to have been run under conditions that can best be described as chaotic. Few limits were placed on Geller’s behavior, and he was more or less in control of the procedures used to test him. Further, the results of the tests were incorrectly reported in Targ and Puthoff’s Nature paper.[14]The psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann attempted to replicate Targ and Puthoff’s remote viewing experiments. In a series of thirty-five studies, they were unable to replicate the results so investigated the procedure of the original experiments. Marks and Kammann discovered that the notes given to the judges in Targ and Puthoff's experiments contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two targets, or they had the date of the session written at the top of the page. They concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment's high hit rates.[15][16] Terence Hines has written:
Examination of the few actual transcripts published by Targ and Puthoff show that just such clues were present. To find out if the unpublished transcripts contained cues, Marks and Kammann wrote to Targ and Puthoff requesting copies. It is almost unheard of for a scientist to refuse to provide his data for independent examination when asked, but Targ and Puthoff consistently refused to allow Marks and Kammann to see copies of the transcripts. Marks and Kammann were, however, able to obtain copies of the transcripts from the judge who used them. The transcripts were found to contain a wealth of cues.[17]According to Marks, when the cues were eliminated the results fell to a chance level.[18] James Randi noted that controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cuing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests, produced negative results. Students were also able to solve Puthoff and Targ's locations from the clues that had inadvertently been included in the transcripts.[19]
Marks and Kamman concluded: "Until remote viewing can be confirmed in conditions which prevent sensory cueing the conclusions of Targ and Puthoff remain an unsubstantiated hypothesis."[20]
Massimo Pigliucci has written Puthoff's research into zero-point energy is considered to be a pseudoscience.[21] According to Martin Gardner, Puthoff (and Targ) "imagined they could do research in parapsychology but instead dealt with 'psychics' who were cleverer than they were".[22]
Publications
- Pantell, Richard H.; Puthoff, H. E. (1969). Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics. New York: Wiley. ISBN 0-471-65790-5.
- H. E. Puthoff, CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing At Stanford Research Institute, 1996, from the website of Ingo Swann, also said to be an ex-employee of Project SCANATE.
- Puthoff, H. E. (2002). "Searching for the Universal Matrix in Metaphysics". Research News and Opportunities in Science and Theology. 2: 22.
- Puthoff, H. E. (2002). "Polarizable Vacuum (PV) Approach to General Relativity". Foundations of Physics. 32 (6): 927–943. doi:10.1023/A:1016011413407. arXiv eprint
- Puthoff, H. E.; Little, S. R.;
Ibison, M. (2002). "Engineering the Zero-Point Field and Polarizable
Vacuum for Interstellar Flight". J. British Interplanetary Society. 55: 137–144. arXiv:astro-ph/0107316
. Bibcode:2002JBIS...55..137P..
This paper has been retracted, as stated in the arXiv entry: "Author
Ibison does not subscribe to some of the speculations in this document".
References
- Ward, Ray (2017). "The Martin Gardner Correspondence with Marcello Truzzi". Skeptical Inquirer. Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. 41 (6): 57–59.
Further reading
- Henry Gordon (1988). Extrasensory Deception: ESP, Psychics, Shirley MacLaine, Ghosts, UFOs. Macmillan of Canada. ISBN 0-7715-9539-5
- James Randi (1982). Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions. New York: Prometheus Books. pp. 131–160. ISBN 0-87975-198-3.
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