Hal Puthoff

Harold "Hal" Puthoff is an American physicist and engineer whose career runs straight through the strangest corners of government-funded research. In the 1970s, at Stanford Research Institute, he co-directed the CIA-funded program that studied "remote viewing," the claim that people could perceive distant locations psychically, later known under the umbrella name Stargate.

Puthoff went on to become a central scientific figure in modern UAP research. He was involved in the Pentagon-linked AAWSAP and BAASS program funded through Robert Bigelow, and he co-founded To The Stars Academy with Luis Elizondo and Christopher Mellon. His framing, that anomalous craft might be studied as a physics and engineering problem, has shaped how the serious end of the field talks about the subject.

In 2026 Puthoff drew fresh attention by claiming the US holds the remains of four separate alien species, an assertion that, like much of his UAP work, rests on accounts from insiders rather than producible evidence. His career is a study in that exact tension: real credentials and real government programs, attached to claims that have never been independently confirmed.