Harold Puthoff

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.

Publishing in Nature in 1974 was the high point of the programme's scientific standing and, in the long run, the source of its most damaging criticism, because a paper in that journal is read by people equipped to check it. The editors took the unusual step of printing an accompanying note explaining why they had accepted a paper on so unlikely a subject, citing the quality of the shielding and the blind judging rather than any confidence in the conclusion.

In 1978 the same journal published a response from David Marks and Richard Kammann, who had obtained transcripts and found that they contained extraneous material, references to the previous day's target, remarks about the order of sessions, and similar traces, which would let a judge reconstruct the correct sequence without needing any information about the sites at all. When Marks and Kammann re-judged transcripts with such cues removed, the effect vanished.

Puthoff and Targ disputed the account, arguing the edited transcripts had been degraded and that later series avoided the problem. No agreed resolution followed. When the whole programme was reviewed in 1995, the reviewer sympathetic to psi and the reviewer hostile to it both treated the cueing question as the central methodological issue that the early SRI work had never fully closed.