Hal Puthoff
speaker
374 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Hal Puthoff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
A lot. A lot.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, it just seems like that's been my thing in life, is get involved in the crazy stuff no matter where it comes from.
Well, actually, I began early on. I was a ham radio operator as a teenager, and I went to vocational school. I didn't think I'd ever go to college or whatever. But I got all involved in learning about radio transmission and all that kind of stuff. So I finally decided, okay, I'm going to go to college and really concentrate on electrical engineering and physics and all that kind of stuff.
But the weird stuff actually began kind of by absolute accident. At the time, I was involved at Stanford University getting my Ph.D. I was just doing cool things. I had invented a broadly tunable infrared laser, one of the first of its kind. I even got a patent as a graduate student and co-authored with my thesis advisor a textbook –
graduate-level textbook, Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics, published in English, French, Russian, and Chinese. So I was on a cool roll just doing the normal physics kinds of things. But interestingly enough, once I was there writing a graduate-level textbook, I realized, you know, there's something I don't know. And that is, what about consciousness? What about living things?
I mean is it still just atoms and molecules all the way down? We just don't know about it? Or are there some additional fields or whatever? So it turned out I came across some publications by a polygraph expert who taught polygraph to the CIA and FBI and so on. And one day on a lark, he connected his polygraph up to his plants.
And he saw signals coming out that looked like what you see out of people. And then he decided to threaten the plant like he would a person. And he got a big response. And so he then went on to connect up a couple of plants to polygraphs. And he would find that if he affected one, the other one would respond.
So I thought, okay, well, maybe this is some new fields that we don't include in our physics. So I came up with what, for me, was just a pure physics experiment. I was going to grow some algae culture, split it up, put half of it in a laser-linked site far away. And zap the local culture and see if it responded. And I can measure velocity propagation and so on.
So I sent that off to this polygraph guy. Cleve Baxter is his name. And so he said, well, that would be a cool experiment. Well, here's one of these things where your life takes a left-hand turn totally at random. He goes to a cocktail party in New York City. And there he runs into Ingo Swann, who turned out to be so-called psychic, famous artist, but fellow that did remote viewings, so-called.
And so he invited him over to his lab and said, see if he could affect the plants and so on. While he was there, he saw my write-up about the experiment I proposed, which for me is just a pure physics experiment. And so he then wrote me a letter and said, well, if you're interested in the borderline between animate and inanimate physics, why deal with algae culture? They can't tell you anything.
You should be dealing with somebody like me. I mean, I couldn't care less about dealing with, quote, a psychic or whatever. But attached to his letter, he had a big report that had been generated at City College in New York saying, We'd done some experiments where he would raise and lower the temperatures of sensitive temperature measuring devices across the lab.
And so I read that and I said, well, that's pretty interesting. So just in a lark, by this time I'd headed over to Stanford Research Institute to do my laser work. So anyway, I invited him for a weekend just to see what else he could do. And of course, I talked to all my physics colleagues and said, oh my God, these guys are all frauds and charlatans. You better know what you're doing.
Well, it turns out that I had a great experiment for him because we had an experiment set up at Stanford that was a very sensitive quantum chip inside of electrical shielding, inside of magnetic shielding, inside of superconducting shielding. Completely acoustically isolated from the environment. No way anything on the outside could affect that little chip.
They were only looking for quarks and stuff like that. So anyway, I brought him over to the lab. I said, remember that thing you did with the... with the thermistors there at City College in New York. Well, this is sort of like that on steroids. And so he said, okay, well, I'll see what I can do. Well, it turned out he generated all kinds of signals in that little quantum chip.
And of course, a graduate student whose life depended on this not being affected by anything outside said, maybe there's some bubbles in the hydrogen line or something, something. But no, he was able to do it. But what was most interesting... And I asked him, well, how did you know what to do?
He said, well, I didn't know what to do, so I just looked inside, looked inside through all this shielding. And he drew a diagram of what was inside there that had never been published. And he said, well, this is when I put my attention on it. That just happened by accident.
And the little quantum chip and its circuitry deep inside. And when you say he was able to affect something, what in particular was he able to affect? Well, in general, there was a big oscillating signal coming out of the thing that ran about 30 seconds or so. And then when he affected it, it just stopped oscillating. And then he said, do you want me to do something else?
And then he made it oscillate fast. And that's when the graduate student sort of went berserko. And so he said, wait a minute. Let me see what's wrong here. And he couldn't find anything wrong. So he said, well, I'm sure that was just some kind of coincidental glitch. And he did it again. So he's doing it exactly when he's saying he's going to do it. Exactly when he says he's going to do it.
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