Harold Puthoff

Harold “Hal” Puthoff (1936–present) is a physicist and electrical engineer with legitimate work in lasers and quantum electronics, and more recently in zero-point energy and theoretical “metric engineering” approaches to propulsion (he has been linked to government UAP-adjacent programs).

With Russell Targ, he co-founded the SRI remote viewing program in the 1970s. He thus straddles credentialed physics and decades of involvement in highly contested psi and exotic-physics research.

The remote-viewing work Puthoff co-led has the same problem noted for Targ: despite real funding and longevity, independent evaluation (the 1995 AIR/CIA review) found no convincing, replicable psi effect, and skeptics documented protocol weaknesses and sensory cues.

Puthoff’s zero-point-energy research, while drawing on a real feature of quantum field theory (vacuum fluctuations), is at the speculative edge of physics, and his name became attached — particularly through Lynne McTaggart’s The Field — to the idea that the zero-point field is a cosmic information medium linking consciousness and matter, an inference his actual physics does not license.

He should be read as a credentialed scientist whose more exotic claims (psi, ZPE-as-cosmic-mind) sit far outside accepted.