Here's how weird Hal Puthoff really is

Though falsely promoted by Joe Rogan as a "physicist", the paranormalist Hal Puthoff has nothing to add to science or to real research.

Thanks for checking out my newsletter which separates reality from bullshit in pop culture. It is brought to you thanks to the paid subscribers! If you like it, please consider making this a two-way street, and joining them if you haven’t already:

There’s an interesting reason that Joe Rogan’s podcast is #1, despite being the world’s most influential source of misinformation. Educated and intelligent people have many, many podcasts where they can go, but Bro Culture has just one place to congregate: Rogan. Bros are a relatively small slice of the Internet audience, but since they all go to one place, that makes it by default the show with the single largest audience. The show has well earned its nickname Goop for Bros.

And since Rogan has elected to (once again) put his considerable influence behind parapyschologist and full-spectrum wooist Hal Puthoff of the UFO SMURFs, I feel I should offer my humblest best to provide a rational counter-perspective.

(SMURFs, for the uninitiated are the SMall group of Ufo Religious Fanatics that have so successfully steered the public’s general acceptance of alien visitation since 2017.)

We can get a sense of the harm Rogan does by promoting Puthoff by glancing through the comments — people gushing over how incredibly smart and sharp Puthoff seems.

Puthoff got his start as a young Scientologist who had recently graduated with a degree in electrical engineering — though today he is almost universally described as a physicist, for reasons that are unclear. In the 1970s he got an entry level job at SRI, a private research company, as an assistant testing the supposed abilities of Uri Geller, the Israeli magician who has for decades convinced people he has real psychokinetic powers, even after having been exposed as a faker countless times. Puthoff, though, became a devoted believer in Geller — and remains so to this day. Why? Geller’s talents are in the arts of deception, an area in which Puthoff has no expertise at all, and so failed to see the trickery. That’s why magicians like James Randi saw through Geller’s tricks so easily, while scientists could not. Having scientists analyze magician tricks is like calling a dentist to analyze a plumbing problem.

Dr. Ray Hyman was brought in by SRI to validate their findings, but it didn’t go well. Hyman exhaustively proved that Geller was fooling them all with simple magician’s tricks. Yet Puthoff said the tests “irrefutably proved the existence of ESP.”

Puthoff did quit Scientology, but only after saying that “Scientology had given me a feeling of absolute fearlessness” and claiming to have achieved remote viewing through its teachings.

Other researchers at SRI were easily fooled as well, and the program became the Stargate Project. The Army wanted to see if psychic powers like remote viewing were real and could have a military application. The data was clear that the abilities were not real, and so the project was abandoned. Puthoff, however, had been thoroughly fooled by the performers — as was his colleague Russell Targ, with whom he wrote the books Mind-Reach and Psychic Exploration.

A snip from one of my Skeptoid episodes on this:

Under Puthoff, Stargate made such breakthroughs as one of their psychics claiming to have traveled back in time one million years to commune with martians, and others describing the contents of photographs in a closed but unsealed envelope after having been left alone with the envelope for one hour. Author Martin Gardner later wrote that Puthoff and the others at Stargate "imagined they could do research in parapsychology but instead dealt with 'psychics' who were cleverer than they were".

The reason we know Puthoff’s name is that the rest of his career was then bankrolled by his friend the billionaire life-after-death aficionado Robert Bigelow. Bigelow employed him at Skinwalker Ranch as the head scientist for the National Institute for Discovery Science. Bigelow “investigated” reincarnation, inter-dimensional beings, ghosts, UFOs, and other strange things they all believed were found on Bigelow's Utah property.

Later, Bigelow persuaded his friend Senator Harry Reid to provide him with $22 million to continue funding this work. This money resulted in 38 written reports, mostly by Puthoff, on crazy science fantasy subjects including stargates, wormholes, warp drive, invisibility cloaking, antigravity, and vacuum energy. Physicist Sean Carroll read these papers and told Business Insider:

It's bits and pieces of theoretical physics dressed up as if it has something to do with potentially real-world applications, which it doesn't. This is not something that's going to connect with engineering anytime soon, probably anytime ever.

Later Puthoff partnered with burned-out guitarist Tom DeLonge to form To The Stars Academy which resulted in some graphic novels, poetry volumes, and music albums about metaphysics, alternate realities, and other weird stuff.

When that fell apart, Puthoff went back to Bigelow as a judge for the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies, which attempts to prove the afterlife is real. They did this by holding an essay contest in 2021. 29 winners shared $1.8 million in prize money for their essays which, in Puthoff’s words, established beyond a reasonable doubt the proof for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death.

Puthoff is best confined to the rubber room of forgotten history.