How a Laser Physicist Ended Up Running a Classified Psi Programme

Puthoff came to Stanford Research Institute as a specialist in lasers and quantum electronics, and the sequence by which he ended up testing psychics is well documented because the sponsor eventually declassified much of it. He had become interested in whether biological systems might exhibit effects not accounted for by known physics; the artist Ingo Swann wrote to him offering to be tested; an informal trial in 1972 in which Swann attempted to describe the state of a shielded magnetometer produced a result Puthoff found sufficiently odd to pursue.

Within months the Central Intelligence Agency was funding the work, initially because of concern that Soviet research in the same area might be ahead. Puthoff and Russell Targ designed the outdoor protocol that became the programme's signature: an experimenter travels to a site selected at random from a pool, and a viewer sitting in a laboratory describes and sketches what the experimenter is looking at, with the transcripts later matched against the sites by judges who do not know which is which. That design, and specifically what the judges could infer from the transcripts, became the whole of the subsequent argument. Puthoff left SRI in 1985 for the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, where his later published work has concerned zero-point energy and speculative propulsion physics rather than psi.