From laser physics to psychic research, the controversial career of Harold E. Puthoff

History · Published 20 October 2026 · Updated 21 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Harold E. Puthoff is a trained electrical engineer who transitioned from laser research to investigating paranormal phenomena. His career spans decades of high-profile, often contentious work, ranging from government-funded remote viewing programs to theories on zero-point energy and UFOs, leaving a legacy that remains deeply divided between innovation and pseudoscience.

Born in 1936, Harold E. Puthoff earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1967, specializing in tunable lasers. By the 1970s, his focus shifted toward parapsychology. At the Stanford Research Institute, he and Russell Targ directed the Stargate Project, which investigated psychic abilities in individuals like Uri Geller and Ingo Swann. Puthoff and Targ famously claimed Geller possessed genuine psychic powers, a conclusion that faced immediate and intense scrutiny from the scientific community.

Critics, including psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann, argued that the positive results in Puthoff’s remote viewing experiments were not evidence of psychic ability but rather the product of sensory cueing. Marks and Kammann discovered that transcripts provided to judges contained inadvertent clues, such as dates and session order, which allowed participants to guess targets correctly. When these cues were removed, success rates dropped to chance levels. Despite requests for data to verify these findings, Puthoff and Targ consistently refused to share their original transcripts, leading many researchers to label their conclusions as unsubstantiated hypotheses.

Beyond parapsychology, Puthoff has pursued research into zero-point energy and propulsion through his organization, EarthTech International. His work often involves theoretical models of inertia and vacuum energy, which have been challenged by physicists for computational errors and violations of thermodynamic laws. Even when Puthoff secured a US patent in 1998 for a device transmitting information without electric or magnetic fields, legal scholars noted the case as a cautionary tale where an examiner failed to distinguish between genuine innovation and pseudoscience. His later career has remained focused on fringe topics, including co-founding the UFO-dedicated company To the Stars in 2017 and participating in documentaries regarding recovered alien technology.

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