EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,143 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumming) Joe Rogan podcast,…
- NANarrator
(drumming) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays)
- HPHal Puthoff
All right.
- JRJoe Rogan
All right. Now.
- HPHal Puthoff
Hey.
- JRJoe Rogan
What's happening?
- HPHal Puthoff
Oh, a lot's happening, really.
- JRJoe Rogan
A lot.
- HPHal Puthoff
A lot.
- JRJoe Rogan
A lot's happening.
- HPHal Puthoff
A lot.
- JRJoe Rogan
Thank you so much for being here. I'm very excited to talk to you. Um, I've been thinking about nothing but that since that dinner that we had, uh, a few months ago.
- HPHal Puthoff
Oh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Been thinking about it a lot.
- HPHal Puthoff
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Y- you told me a lot of crazy stuff, so ... (laughs)
- HPHal Puthoff
(laughs) Yeah, well, it just seems like that, that's been my, my thing in life, uh, is-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- HPHal Puthoff
... get involved in the crazy stuff no matter where it comes from.
- JRJoe Rogan
When did that start? When did you start getting involved in the crazy stuff?
- HPHal Puthoff
Well, actually I began early on. I was, uh, you know, a ham radio operator as a teenager, and I went to a vocational school. I didn't think I'd ever go to college or whatever. But I got all involved in, uh, learning about, uh, radio, uh, transmission and all that kind of stuff. So I finally decided, I'm gonna, okay, I'm gonna go to college and, and really concentrate on electrical engineering and physics and all that kind of stuff. (clears throat) But the weird stuff actually began, uh, kind of by absolute accident. At the time, I was, uh, involved at, uh, Stanford University, getting my PhD. Uh, I was just doing cool things. I had, I'd invented a broadly tunable infrared laser, uh, one of the first of its kind. Even got a patent as a graduate student.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- HPHal Puthoff
And, uh, (clears throat) co-authored with my thesis advisor, uh, a textbook, graduate-level textbook, Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics, published in English, French, Russian, and Chinese. So I was, I was on a cool roll, just doing the normal physics kinds of things. (clears throat) 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, uh, (clears throat) uh, 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, (laughs) and he got a big response.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- HPHal Puthoff
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. Uh, I was gonna grow some algae culture, split it up, put half of it in a laser link site far away, and zap the local culture to see if it responded, and I could measure velocity propagation and so on. So I sent that off to this, uh, polygraph guy, Cleve Baxter is his name, and so he said, "Well, that, that'd 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- HPHal Puthoff
... famous artist, but fellow that m- did remote viewings, so-called. And so he invited him over to his, uh, to his, uh, lab and said see if he could affect the plants and so on. While he was there, he saw my, uh, 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." Well, I mean, I couldn't care less about dealing with, quote, "a psychic" or whatever, but attached to his letter he had a big, uh, report that had been generated at City College in New York where he'd done some experiments where he would raise and lower the temperatures of temperature-sensitive, temperature-measuring devices across the lab. And so I read that and I said, "Whoa, that's, that's pretty interesting." So just on a lark ... by this time, I'd, I'd, I'd headed over to Stanford Research Institute to do my, to do my laser work. So anyway, I invited him for, you know, a weekend, just to see what else he could do. And of course, I talked to all my physics colleagues and they say, "Oh my God, these guys are all frauds and charlatans. You better, 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 and I said, "Remember that thing you did with the, with the, uh, thermistors there at City College in New York? Well, this is sort of that, like that on steroids." And so he said, "Okay, well, I'll see what I can do." Well, it turned out he'd generated all kinds of signals in, in that little quantum chip. And of course, the graduate student, whose life depended on this not being, you know, affected by anything outside, said, "Well, maybe there's, 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 ...... was that I ask him, "Well, how'd you know what to do?" And he said, "Well, I didn't know what to do, so I just looked inside." Looked inside, through all this shielding. And, and he drew a diagram of what was inside there that'd never been published and he said, "Well, this is when I put my attention on it, that just happened, by accident."
- JRJoe Rogan
So he drew... drew an accurate diagram of-
- HPHal Puthoff
Drew an accurate-
- JRJoe Rogan
... all the shielding that you had around this equipment.
- HPHal Puthoff
And, and the little quantum chip and its circuitry deep inside.
- 15:00 – 30:00
Trickery. …
- HPHal Puthoff
in degrees, minutes and seconds, and I'll look wherever that is and tell you what I find." So in fact, uh, okay, I found that hard to believe also, but we did a lot of experiments and started targeting on things. Anyway, Pat Price shows up, we do some local experiments, and he's doing very well as well. And so again, our CIA contract monitors were worried that this some kind of, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
Trickery.
- HPHal Puthoff
... trickery and, and so that, so they came up with coordinates of what turns out to be right next to Sugar Grove facility, which is a highly classified NSA facility picking up Soviet satellite transmissions. So I just... I, I had no idea what it was. I mean, we always kept ourselves blind to what the target was so no one could say we just gave them the data. (clears throat) So Pat Price, uh, decided to, you know, to follow our instructions and go to those coordinates and say what he says. And so he describes this place, but as part of that, what he does is he says that he merged his mind, whatever you want to say, into a safe and a whole bunch of words popped up into his mind. So he gave this whole list of words. Okay, fine. So we wrote them all down, sent them off. Pretty soon the entire law enforcement apparatus (laughs) of the country landed on us and said, "How'd you get this information? This is highly classified project titles. Do you have a source inside?" And we went, "No, we were, we're just doing this experiment," and that's what he got. And so eventually, 20 years later, you can find the, the paper that was published by the CIA about w- what a deal this was. And so anyway, at that time, we were at a point where we were about ready to get the next year's contract, and we had, um, a deputy director, uh, John McMahon said, "Okay, well, let's not waste it on our sites for God's sakes. (laughs) Do a Soviet site." And so they gave us coordinates of a Soviet site, turned out to be an R&D facility at Semipalatinsk in the Soviet Union. And (clears throat) so we targeted Price on that, he turned out to be a really... a good remote viewer, along with Ingo Swann, and, uh, he described this giant crane that rolled over the top of a building. And, uh, I mean, it was... it, it sounded like science fiction. I mean, I, I've got some examples here of, of the drawings of that. And so, uh, it turned out that from satellite imagery, what he drew was correct. And so that finally started, okay, this stuff is real. It can be used. Let's go to work with it. So that's what started the whole, you might say, espionage-oriented, uh, SRI program on remote viewing. It went for, I don't know, like, 23 years or so, and-
- JRJoe Rogan
What are the meetings like when you're explaining this to the CIA and you're showing them results, and you've got these, you know, hard-nosed individuals who are pretty rational?
- HPHal Puthoff
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... trying to figure out what you're saying. This episode is brought to you by Visible. Now, you know, I tend to go down a lot of rabbit holes. I want to know everything about everything. And if you're like that, you need wireless that can keep up. Visible is wireless that lets you live in the know. It's the ultimate wireless hack. You get unlimited data and hotspot, so you're connected on the go. Plus, Visible is powered by Verizon's 5G network, meaning fast speeds and great coverage. And with the new Visible+ pro plan, you get premium wireless without the premium cost. And the best part? It's all digital, no stores. You can switch to Visible right from your phone. It only takes about 15 minutes, and then you manage your plan in the app. Ready for wireless that lets you live in the know? Make the switch at visible.com/rogan. Plans start at $25 a month. For the best features, get the new Visible+ pro plan for $45 a month. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details.
- HPHal Puthoff
There are really basically two levels of response. For example, some of the early work when we went to, to, to brief, uh, we had 10 or 12 people and we're talking about the work. Pretty soon, the guy in the back of the room jumps up and he says, "I know what this is. This is some kind of psyop test of our gullibility, and I want you to know, whoever's, you know, putting this out, I'm not buying it." And he stormed out of the room.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- HPHal Puthoff
So that, that was one response. But there's a second response we got, which, uh, turned out to be interesting. At a certain point, after we had done a number of years of successful work in, in doing the remote viewing, we had to keep briefing higher and higher, as you can imagine. I hated briefing higher, because if you brief a high-level guy and he says, "Oh, come on, this is nonsense. This is BS." And, you know, that's the end, that's the end of your programs. (clears throat) So I got it up to a point where, for example, uh, I briefed, uh, Bill Casey, who was director of CIA under Reagan, and we had 45 minutes with him. And so I went through stuff like I've been describing for 45 minutes. He got so entranced with it that he dismissed the rest of his afternoon calendar, and we spent five hours briefing him on that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- HPHal Puthoff
So there was this funny thing where a certain level of people would just, "Ugh, this, this can't be." And then really high-level people seemed to be more open to it. So actually, we came up with a hypothesis, and that is, okay, people who make it to the top of the food chain might be people who, at some level inside themselves, are, you know, they're always making decisions based on insufficient information, and they end up making the right decision. That's how they got to where they are. So maybe this is, uh, some aspect that's at least at the unconscious level happening all the time. Well, that finally got put to a test, because there were some parapsychologists who did some experiments, uh, with a meeting of, uh, CEOs of, I think it was 67 CEOs of major corporations, and had them try to guess the numbers that were going to be generated on a computer the next day. And so they did that, and it turned out that those who scored quite positively, significantly so, when we interviewed them, it turned out they were the people who had the businesses that were really doing well. And the people who scored poorly had businesses that were kind of failing. So these, uh, investigators would ask them, "Well, you know, what the ... Are you using ... Do you use ESP or something? Do you have some glint of the future on?" They said, "No, no, no, no. I don't believe any of that nonsense. But I realized that when I trust my gut instinct, I'm usually right." So anyway, that sort of leads to the eye that this, this is a, a broadly, uh, available phenomenon that, you know ...
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you think this is an emerging aspect of human consciousness, or do you think that this is something that maybe we developed a long time ago but lost because of communication, because of the written word, because of our ability to express ourselves, that we stopped communicating with the mind?
- HPHal Puthoff
I think your second, uh, interpretation is, is the correct one, 'cause probably, you know, when you're out in the jungle and there's a tiger coming down the trail that you don't know about quite, you know, it would be a thing that you would, could really help you-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- HPHal Puthoff
... exist and survive, but once we get into language and technology and so on, you know, that sort of ... Nonetheless, we, we found ... I'll, I'll tell you what was the most mind-boggling thing in the whole program was the following. We had a few people who did really well. So of course, CIA wanted to know, "Well, we'd, we'd like to find people in CIA who could do this, so, uh, give us a full medical roundup of these people." So we got a full medical, including seven-layer brain scans.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- HPHal Puthoff
Uh, and they came back and said, "Well, these are just normal people." We said, "Oh. Oh. Well may- maybe it's psychological or neurological or whatever." So they did all those experiments, and they said, "These are just normal people." So we wondered, "Well, does that mean that normal people could, could do this even if they didn't know about it?" So about that time, (clears throat) uh, we said, "Okay, well let's, let's just bring in some people from SRI, uh, labs, uh, who never thought about ESP, who never thought about any of this stuff." So I remember we had a, a woman, Hella Hammid-... and we asked her to, uh, come, uh, volunteer for an experiment. She said, "What kind of experiment?" I said, "Well, it's sort of like an ESP experiment." And she said, "Oh, give me a break. I don't, I don't believe in that stuff." And I said, "Okay, uh, but, but do it anyway." And so, uh, one of the first experiments we did with her, and we have a, a wonderful, uh, diagram of, of, of what she did. We sent somebody out by our usual random protocol to a overpass over a freeway that's, uh, all fenced in with a very interesting structure, and she made a drawing of all of that and said, uh, "You know, there's this kind of trough up in the air, but it's got holes in it so it couldn't carry water. There's something going by really fast." I mean, she really nailed the place. And so we got the idea, and that was the biggest discovery in this whole thing, was that apparently, as with, say, athletic ability or, uh, musical ability, there's a bell curve.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- HPHal Puthoff
And you got the superstars at one end, you got duds at the other, but to some degree, anybody could do it. So that had a lot of, uh, outcome later on in the program when finally, uh, to give an example of a real world, world result, a Soviet plane went down somewhere in Africa. That's all we knew. Somewhere in Africa, a plane went down. So Stansfield Turner, who was Carter's, uh, CIA director, knew about our remote viewing program, and so he said, uh, "Well, you've got these, quote, 'remote viewers' who are supposed to be so good. Why don't they find the plane for you?" So in fact, uh, we had a remote viewer at our lab and at that time, we were working with, uh, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Foreign Technology Division. They had a remote viewer. So we targeted these two remote viewers. All they knew was a plane went down somewhere in Africa, hundreds of thousands of square miles. And, uh, to make a long story short, they described how it looked and put an X on the map that was three miles from where the plane landed. We were told that would never be revealed to the public, but it turned out that after Carter got out of office, he was giving a speech in, uh, Georgia someplace, and somebody said, "Well, anything happen while you were president that was really strange?" He said, "Oh, yeah. Uh, the Soviet plane went down in, uh, Africa and it was full of electronics, and we wanted to get it, and nobody knew where it was, and the satellites couldn't find it because of all the vegetation, and, but we had some remote viewers, so-called, and they pinpointed where it was, and we went in and got it before the Russians could find it." So I mean, so the real world consequences came out of this stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
So when Carter said that, was that a breach of confidence?
- HPHal Puthoff
That was a breach of security, but a president can-
- JRJoe Rogan
They're allowed to do that?
- HPHal Puthoff
... they're allowed to do that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Don't tell Trump.
- HPHal Puthoff
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- HPHal Puthoff
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, so you, the, the United States was able to go and get this jet, and-
- HPHal Puthoff
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... so by then-
- 30:00 – 45:00
Yeah, there it is.…
- HPHal Puthoff
want you to take pictures and do a recording, and when you come back, show me your stuff before I show you mine." "Okay, fine." Well, it turned out we went to a playground with a merry-go-round. Meanwhile, back in the lab, he's drawing a picture of a playground with a merry-go-round, and he sees the results and he says, "Okay. You've convinced me." So it was that kind of thing that would push him over-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, there it is.
- HPHal Puthoff
... yeah. There, there's an example.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- HPHal Puthoff
Now, he misinterpreted what it was. He thought maybe it was a cupula or whatever.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- HPHal Puthoff
But anyway, that's his drawing on the right and that's where we were on the left. And so he said... So, so he went back to CIA and said, "Okay, this stuff really works." And, uh, he became one of their star remote viewers over the years.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. So a skeptic-
- HPHal Puthoff
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... became one of their remote viewers.
- HPHal Puthoff
Yep, sure did.
- JRJoe Rogan
What is the process? What is the process for a person to remote view? Like, m- is there a, a state that you have to go into? Is there a method to getting into that state?
- HPHal Puthoff
There is a method and it's different from what you might think. You might think, uh, you would say to somebody, "Okay, we've got somebody at site. Kind of imagine where they are and see what it looks like, and tell us what you find," and all that kind of stuff. They're usually wrong when they do that because their imagination comes into play and they make up something or whatever. But what we found out in the research, you know, it took years and a lot of trials, was that you get a visceral response to a site. It's not that you get, necessarily get an image. So in fact, we, we, we told them, "You know, if you, if you get an image, just put it down on the right-hand side of the paper because it's probably wrong. Instead, just kind of put down your feelings as you get into the site." And so, uh, you know, if it's like water, they might do waves, or if it's a mountain peak, they might, uh, as, as Jacques described (laughs) in one of your previous broadcasts, uh, a mountain peak and they just feel like drawing something like that. So bit by bit, the process is very much a visceral feeling process. And so the training procedure has them sitting with pads of paper and just making sketches and drawings and not trying to interpret what it is, and also being very, um, not in a rush about it. It's sort of like you've got a door and you drill a hole through, and then drill another hole through and another hole through, and then finally the door crumbles, and then you've got a, a, a pretty good feeling for what the site is. So, so the process that we use to train people involves this multi-stage process where they're to go by feelings, colors, flashes of things. You see a flash, a piece of metal, don't try to turn it into a car or a bicycle or whatever. So anyways, a whole training procedure that we developed, and eventually when we, uh, briefed, uh, the assistant, uh, chief of staff for intelligence, assistant director of intelligence for the army, they said, "Okay, well, then we need to have our people get involved in learning how to do this." And so they sent army intelligence officers. They picked out a gr- bu- bunch of them and said, "Hey, you've just volunteered to become a psychic spy." And said, "Well, okay." And they sent them out to SRI and, uh, we ran them through this step-by-step training procedure and they learned to do really, really well. I mean, uh, (clears throat) Joe McMoneagle, who anyone who follows the literature is, is known to be really an excellent, uh, remote viewer. And so, uh, give you an example, uh, (coughs) one time he said... I mean, we trained them and, and, and, and, and so they learned to do really well and we set up a whole program. And, uh, he said, "Okay, the... there's this site in the Soviet Union and they're making this unbelievably giant submarine and it's made out of titanium or something. It's... I mean, it's bigger than any submarine that anybody's ever heard of. And it's strange because the missile silos are on the top rather than along the sides." And so he gave this whole description. (clears throat) Of course, we had to... At that time, we were briefing all the way up to National Security Council and so they looked at this and they said, "This is nonsense." But about a month later, out rolls this unbelievably giant submarine, the Typhoon class submarine, the largest submarine ever made. Uh, indeed, uh, there are his sketches and a lot of description that went along with his sketches.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- HPHal Puthoff
(sighs) And there's the submarine on the right. And so finally, the people at the National Security Council said, "Okay, we better start taking this seriously." So make a long story short, he eventually, Joe McMoneagle got a, uh, National Merit Award, uh, (clears throat) for over 200 great viewings he did for CIA, National Security Council, uh, FBI, I mean, you name it. So anyway, that grew into a whole industry.
- JRJoe Rogan
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- HPHal Puthoff
That's a fair assessment. I mean, when we, as physicists, we hate to say, "Oh, don't have a clue." So, well, we now know there's so-called quantum entanglement, which is that things are, seem to be connected at a quantum level across great distances. And so the easy answer's, "Well, it must be quantum entanglement." But, you know, that didn't, that's just words, it doesn't really tell us how it works.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- HPHal Puthoff
But, but to give you an exa- example, we wondered how far you could go. So we did an experiment again with Ingo Swann, who was such a, a, a really top level remote viewer, to view Jupiter, planet Jupiter before the flyby, before the NASA flyby. And, uh, so he did. And he described Jupiter the way anybody might, you know, red spot and all that kind of stuff. And, but he said, "But, but there's a thin ring around Jupiter. I wonder if I went to Saturn by mistake. But I really see a ring around Jupiter." And nobody knew about any ring around Jupiter. Carl Sagan happened to come by in the lab and he said, "Oh, what do you think of this? We get, we got this result." He says, "Ring around Jupiter? That's, no, that's nonsense. There's no r-..." But when the NASA flyby finally got there, it turned out there was a ring, a small ring around Jupiter. And so we got that in publication in, in a book we wrote about all this stuff before, uh, it was known in, in the scientific community. So that's what we find out, that apparently even distances is not a big deal.
- JRJoe Rogan
We-
- HPHal Puthoff
The other thing, the other thing we wondered, uh, I can tell you what it isn't.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- HPHal Puthoff
We thought maybe it was brainwaves. The Russians came up with an idea of, well, brainwaves, uh, are low frequency, long wavelength, um, they can seemingly get through some, some aspects of the environment. So we came up with a series of experiments and one of them was, okay, let's, let's put our remote viewers on submarines, take 'em to the, into the depths of the ocean, 'cause it turns out seawater is highly conductive. And so at the, even at low frequencies, even at brainwave frequencies, uh, it would be a complete shield for that. So we, we, we piggybacked on somebody else's experiments, uh, Stephen Schwartz's experiments using remote viewers to, to go find archeological wrecks and, uh, shipwrecks and so on, which turned out to eventually be a successful experiment. But anyway, we got to do two experiments. We got pristine results, even with them under there, under the ocean water. So we know it's not ordinary electromagnetic functioning. So we can strike one thing off the list. Not that we know what to put on the list in its place, other than, you know, it's, it's, it's gotta be some new field, some quantum aspect that we don't understand yet.
- JRJoe Rogan
We don't understand, but yet you could repeat it.
- HPHal Puthoff
But we could repeat it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- HPHal Puthoff
Now, I'm at, I'll give you a, I'll give you another example of, of, of the skepticism that we got. And, and by the way, I, I can't blame 'em. Uh, we had some psychologists at, uh, SRI and they said, uh, "You've got that stupid ESP experiment stuff going on."
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- HPHal Puthoff
"And, you know, this is gonna ruin our reputation. People think that we're, you know, we're a no non- we're a nonsense place. And so it's hurting our reputation." Of course, they didn't know it was a highly classified CIA program. So anyway, uh, so our director said, "Well, what do you think? I mean, how, how would you know if this is false or whatever?" And he says, "Look, make a list of all experiments, places that have been abs- uh, investigated, uh, looked, gone to as targets, and then give us the transcripts that were generated for those viewings. And don't tell us which ones go with which ones, and we'll try to rank, rank them for each place." And so they did that. Much to their chagrin, seven of the nine were first place matches in a nine experiment series.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
It's so interesting that…
- HPHal Puthoff
that's, that- that's fair." So it turns out he did the whole thing, got the same kinda results we got. Our paper got published 1976 Proceedings of the IEEE. And so that suddenly got other people saying, "Okay, well maybe there really is something to this." So it turns out that, for those who follow the field know that Robert John and Brenda Dunn ... Robert John was, uh, head of engineering at, uh, Princeton. He had a student who wanted him to do these kind of experiments and he thought it was nonsense, but they came out and heard our briefing and he went back. Long story short, he set up a, I don't know, 20-year program, uh, completely replicating our remote viewing work and also doing, uh, effects on random number generators that were quantum driven. And so, so the so-called PEAR Lab, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab, replicated all of our work, and so pretty soon it, it, it's all over the place. (coughs) So by the way, at the end of the, uh, sort of Cold War there where there was a detente, some of our remote viewers went over to Russia to talk to their remote viewers and they traded war stories. They, they, uh, lived through the same kind of, s- kind of thing. So there it is.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's so interesting that we almost didn't consider that. Just imagine you not running into Ingo Swann, you not asking him to affect that quantum chip. Imagine where Russia's doing all this stuff and the United States never gets involved in it at all. That, that could have happened.
- HPHal Puthoff
That could have happened. I mean, it was really, you know, the tiniest flip of a coin that, that that happened. So, so what that means is, uh, for me personally, is that even though I had no interest in, in all that kinda stuff, this totally random event happened, and then once I built up a reputation for being willing to take on things that are impossible, then that's why, uh, when the UAP, the UFO issue, uh, kind of rose up again, who you gonna call? So (laughs) -
- JRJoe Rogan
Hal Putnam.
- HPHal Puthoff
Hal Putnam. There, I get my call.
- JRJoe Rogan
So what was the initial introduction to the UAP phenomenon? And when was this?
- HPHal Puthoff
Well, there was an early introduction in, uh, 2004. Uh, well, may- maybe a little earlier in, in the '90s. I was doing, uh, work for Robert Bigelow at Bigelow Aerospace and, uh, in addition to his, you know, aerospace stuff, he put two units, uh, circling the Earth and he made the, uh, uh, module that got attached to the Space Station and all that kinda stuff. But he was also very much interested in UFOs and that kinda thing. And so, I was, I was, uh, you know, involved with him. And around that time, I had gotten a call from somebody I knew in Washington DC, head of a think tank. Uh, I c- can't name him, but he said, uh, "I need you to come to Washington to be part of a little project, a little briefing." And I said, "No. I don't have the time." (laughs) "Right now, I'm just, I'm just too busy." He says, "Look. Come and it'll be the most important meeting you've ever had in your life." Well-... since I had him calibrated, because I had done other work with him in, uh, for the navy and so on, I said, "Okay. I'll, I'll, I'll come," so. So I showed up there and I saw people, some of whom I knew, including my ex-contract monitor from CIA, people from DIA, uh, a lot of military people, and so on. So he sat us all down and said, "Okay. Here's the deal. Here's why I've invited you all here. Let's just say," he says, "that United States, Russia, and China have obtained, hm, ET craft that have crashed and we have proof of that, bodies that aren't human, and so the question is can this be released to the public? What effect would it have?" So I, and, and the other people, I found out by talking to them later, we thought, "Oh, this is cool." I mean, "Maybe we can get, you know, some kind of disclosure here." And, uh, so he said, "Here's, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna make up a list of what would be affected in the culture with this kind of a disclosure." And by the way, at this point, we still didn't know, is, is he saying that that's true stuff or is he, this is a hypothetical? Or anyway.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- HPHal Puthoff
So anyway. "Make a list." So we came up with a long list, like, I don't know, 60 items or something. You say, "Oh, wow. Uh, stock market might be affected-"
- JRJoe Rogan
Religion.
- HPHal Puthoff
... "religious might be affected." Um, you know, whatever.
- JRJoe Rogan
Government.
- HPHal Puthoff
Government af- affected. Policies'd be affected. Uh, Brit- you know, politics would certainly be affected. And then for each item, we had to go sk- give it a score from plus nine to minus nine as to how intense the effect would be, and whether it's positive or negative. So then we broke up into groups and our group had our list of eight or so. And so we went down our list and it turned out that we ended up saying, getting, uh, net negative numbers. And let, let me, let me tell you why you, you can get negative numbers. One of the things down toward the bottom of the list, when we really got into the weeds, was, "Well, suppose materials from a crash retrieval of a non-human craft was given to corporation A, but corporation B didn't get any samples."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- HPHal Puthoff
"And then years later, corporation A is making lots of money based on what they got. Meanwhile, corporation B has gone bankrupt and, and then they find out they were excluded."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- HPHal Puthoff
"Well, they're gonna end up suing the corporations, suing the government." I mean, it really gets gnarly when you get, get into the weeds and into the details. And so as it turns out, with our group of eight or so, we said, "You know, this, this, we'd get a negative number." Well, it turned out that all the groups got negative numbers. So the outcome of that exercise was if you're thinking about disclosure, forget it. It's...
- JRJoe Rogan
Was this during George Herbert Walker Bush's...
- HPHal Puthoff
No. It was during Bush II.
- JRJoe Rogan
Bush II. Ge- George Bush, rather.
- HPHal Puthoff
George Bush. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
W.
- HPHal Puthoff
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, so when this was all going on, you still didn't know what they had?
- HPHal Puthoff
Didn't know what they had. Yeah, it's like-
- JRJoe Rogan
This was just... You, you were saying-
- HPHal Puthoff
This could be apathetical or he could be trying to tell us something.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- HPHal Puthoff
But he wouldn't say, so.
- JRJoe Rogan
Interesting. And how long... How much time did they give you to compile this list and to generate these numbers of plus and minus?
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Geez. …
- HPHal Puthoff
stuff, and by the way, we will arrange for you to get access to some materials. Uh, okay. Fine. So that- that was my tasking. And so I said, "Okay." So I can't get into a lot of detail, but I did, uh, do a lot of, uh, back and forth with some aerospace executives about getting access in case they had any materials and that kind of stuff, uh, it's very... So they finally said, "No, it's- it's, uh, if that were the case, it'd be too compartmentalized. We- we- we can't share this. Even though you have an official program, I mean, you got top secret, SCI, gamma, HCS, got all these clearances, but..."... if we had materials, it'd be too highly classified. We, we, we couldn't share them.
- JRJoe Rogan
Geez.
- HPHal Puthoff
So, a lot of negotiation went on, and I mean, I spent a lot of time-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, you don't negotiate-
- HPHal Puthoff
... with the Vice President and everybody.
- JRJoe Rogan
... unless there's something to negotiate about.
- HPHal Puthoff
Exactly, yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
If there was nothing to negotiate about, you didn't say how. Uh, we don't have materials.
- HPHal Puthoff
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
You wouldn't say, "You don't have enough clearance for us to even discuss this."
- HPHal Puthoff
Exactly. And so-
- JRJoe Rogan
They're already, they're tipping their hat.
- HPHal Puthoff
They're already tipping their hat. So, anyway, the second, uh, place to go then was, okay, they're not gonna share their materials. I'm gonna almost assuredly have them. Um, suppose they had shared them, what would we have done? Well, we would've gone to subject matter experts all around the world. We'd give them some materials. We'd say, you know, "This came from a Russian sub," or, you know, whatever. "Give us your best output," and so on. So, I said, "Okay, since we're not able to sh- get materials and share them, um, let me go to all of the subject matter experts that we would have gone to and say, 'We're doing a survey for Bigelow Aerospace.' He wants to know, 'Where will your field be in the year 2050?'" So, we figured, okay, we'd get the best sort of assessment of possible futures for their fields. And, and, uh, I realize you probably don't, uh, have immediate access to this, but just to give you an idea, some of the papers that we got by going after these people, I mean, and you'll see how serious we were, aneutronic fusion propulsion, superconductors and gravity research, positron aerospace propulsion, warp drive, dark energy, extra dimensions, advanced nuclear propulsion.
- JRJoe Rogan
Jamie's got it up here.
- HPHal Puthoff
Yeah. So, so this is just the first few of 38 papers that I, uh, arranged for leaders to, to come up with.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, this is based on projections from where technology currently sits to-
- HPHal Puthoff
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... if you extrapolate where it's gonna be in 2050-
- HPHal Puthoff
In 2050, right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... based on what they're working on?
- HPHal Puthoff
Right. So, I-
- JRJoe Rogan
Space time metric engineering, traversable wormholes, stargates.
- HPHal Puthoff
So, you see, we weren't, uh, kidding around. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) Well, when you started getting into warp drive, dark energy, extra dimensions, brain-machine interfaces.
- HPHal Puthoff
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Now, did you ask any of these ... So, presumably, this is just me from a civilian's perspective. Presumably, you have some sort of a crash thing. You have to bring in people who make spaceships.
- HPHal Puthoff
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
You have to bring in people who make military jets, advanced propulsion systems.
- HPHal Puthoff
Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's, those are the people that would be able to back and-
- 1:15:00 – 1:30:00
Right. And, of course,…
- JRJoe Rogan
that behaves in a way that's impossible with our current understanding of propulsion systems.
- HPHal Puthoff
Right. And, of course, in the program, we interviewed, uh, the pilots about their experiences and so on. And, and so you can't blame a pilot. He says, "Look, this thing was at, you know, 80,000 feet or whatever when we first detected it. Suddenly, it's down there right above the water, and then it takes off and does a right angle turn at mach three." Uh, you know, this stuff is just way beyond our physics. Of course, to a physics nerd like me, so, "Yeah, now wait a minute. If it's real, it's physics," so... (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Right, it's not-
- HPHal Puthoff
Can't, can't be beyond our phys-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's probably beyond our understanding.
- HPHal Puthoff
But it's beyond our engineering. So in fact, in that series of, uh, papers I showed you that, uh, the 30, 38 papers, by the way, um, there's a little side story there which is interesting. And those 38 papers were then posted... None, none of these people who generated those papers had any idea it had to do with ETs or UFOs or whatever. Uh, they all went up on what's called the JWICS server, it's a classified server for the Pentagon, and, uh, intelligence officers and aerospace contractors, uh, you know, could get access, but n- nobody in the public could. And usually, those things go up and they're up for, you know, a little while, an- a month or so, and they take them down. This was such a popular set, these 38 papers, such a popular set, that everybody screamed every time they tried to take it down. And so it was posted there f- you know, like, forever. Uh, but eventually, uh, through Freedom of Information Act and so on, most of those papers have, have, have, uh, been released. And I w- I was concerned that, oh my God, these guys are all gonna call me up and say, "What? You didn't tell me this had anything to do with ETs or UFOs or..." But actually, no- nobody seemed to, uh, you know, not, not complain about it. So back to the question that you mentioned a little earlier though about, you know, what's the source of this? Like I said-
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- HPHal Puthoff
... it's an embarrassment of riches. There's so much observation. Uh, you know, the idea that maybe a scout coming by from some other planet and checking us out and heading off, uh, or whatever. I mean, there, there's much more than that. And of course, as you know from interviewing Jacques Vallée, he dug into literature and found out, you know, you can go back millennia and see descriptions of exactly what we're-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- HPHal Puthoff
... talking about today. So (clears throat) as, as far as where they come from or what they're doing here, I myself have written a paper called Ultra-Terrestrials, where I try to cover the gamut. And I cover everything. Yeah, they could be spacecraft from some other galaxy whipping through here, uh, (clears throat) or maybe there's some Atlanteans left over from eons ago and they're just kind of hiding out in the seabed or on some mountain range someplace. Or maybe some ET group, uh, showed up here 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 years ago and they're hiding out with some bases locally and so on. Uh, and of course, we have a fellow by the name of, a professor by the name of Masters who, who thinks that, well, maybe it's, uh, time travelers from the future coming back. And then there's the whole idea, since physicists like to talk about inter- additional dimensions, you know, maybe they come from another... So anyway, then in my Ultra-Terrestrials paper, I list everyone I can think of and say, you know, "We should be exploring all of these." So at this point, I would say we know it's NHI, non-human intelligence, but it's not clear what the source is. Maybe at a higher level of, uh, classification than I had access to, maybe it's, it's known. But right now, I, I'd say we, we, we don't, don't really know.
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you have a suspicion?
- HPHal Puthoff
(coughs) ... I guess my suspicion that it's likely non-human intelligence from some other galaxy or far out in our own galaxy that have come here, (coughs) but some time back, and that there are stations here. Uh, you know, I mean, one of our remote viewers that was, that was really good came up one day and said, uh, "I was looking around and, and I think I found a UFO base on Earth." (coughs) This was during the remote viewing era and, uh, you know, oh my God, I've, I've got to report this to my CIA contract monitor and do I want to tell him that? And so I did. And the pla- one of the places he came up with some, but one of the places he came up with was, uh, Mount Zeal in Australia. And so my con- CIA contract monitor says, "Well, I know the station keeper, or CIA station keeper out in Australia. I think I'll call him and, uh, I won't tell him why I'm asking, but I'll ask him about Mount Zeal area." So he gave him a call and he said, uh, "I'd like to ask you about that Mount Zeal area." He says, "Oh, you mean where the UFOs were always flying around?" (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- HPHal Puthoff
So I thought, "Oh, gee," you know? (clears throat) So I, anyway, I ... This was from Pat Price, I, I take him seriously. Let me give you an anecdote. I mean, it, I know it's hard to believe that this s- some of this stuff could possibly be real, but here was the real game changer for me. One day, Pat Price, during the remote viewing program, came in the office and he said, uh, "I got bored last night. So I started looking around and I decided to look at the Oval Office. And as I kind of did my way around the Oval Office, I realized there's something in the Oval Office that will harm him, and he will not get through his second term." And I'm thinking to myself, "Oh my God," you know? "I have to report that to the CIA contract monitor?" Which, which I did. And so they sent a team over looking for, you know, hidden microwaves, hidden toxic substances and well, they didn't come up with anything. Of course, we now know from history, it was the tape recorder that did him in, and he couldn't make it through his second term because he-
- JRJoe Rogan
So this was during the Nixon administration?
- HPHal Puthoff
Yeah, the Nixon administration.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- HPHal Puthoff
And so interestingly enough, when he reported that to us, said, "Oh my God, that means, um, Spiro Agnew will be president," because he was the vice president. And he says, "No, he goes first." Now, it turned out he did go first because of some money laundering scheme. So when I sit down and try to say, "Okay, what are the statistics of having somebody see that a president isn't gonna make it through his next term and his vice president is not gonna take over 'cause he goes first?" I mean, the odds of that, I mean, there's just no doubt that that, that means there's really something, there-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, especially when you consider Nixon was one of the most popularly elected presidents ever.
- HPHal Puthoff
Yeah. Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, he won by an enormous margin.
- HPHal Puthoff
That's right.
- JRJoe Rogan
That was the whole, where the vice president, uh, or the o- the other, uh, candidate's vice president had electroshock therapy that hadn't been revealed.
- HPHal Puthoff
Oh, I remember that. Yeah. Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. And it turned out people were very concerned that he was mentally ill, w- it was too late to replace him and they didn't know what to do. They finally replaced him but it was too late.
- HPHal Puthoff
That's right. I me-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- HPHal Puthoff
I remember that. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. That was a big part of the whole thing. So-
- HPHal Puthoff
Now, one thing you may be surprised to learn, you've, you've, you've asked me from time to time, well, you know, what did I think as I'm facing into all this stuff. (clears throat) We, obviously as physicists, think about time going forward reasonable way. And as I mentioned, the Princeton lab got involved. Uh, Robert John at Princeton was, um, very good in quantum theory and so on, and he knows that in quantum theory, time is kind of a slippery slope. Uh, you know, we have the spacetime metric and the possibility of maybe seeing something in the future or something in the past. And so he did a series of remote viewing experiments very much like, like what we were doing, but sometimes he would have somebody go to a site and then wait a week and have somebody describe where the person went. Or he might have somebody describe where a person went, but the person didn't go until a week later. And so he did a lot of experiments, which by the way, were good enough. He also got it published in the proceedings of the IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers a couple years after our paper, like '78 or so. And so it, it turned out that the results either looking a bit into the future, a bit into the past, didn't, uh, the results were just as good. (clears throat) So that sort of helped solve another problem for us, because we were always, uh ... I mean, I can't blame the skeptics coming forward. In fact, in fact our, our favorite phrase is, as far as remote viewing goes, there are two outcomes. People who investigate it know it works, people who don't and know it can't. (laughs)
- 1:30:00 – 1:31:56
Are there things you…
- HPHal Puthoff
one example I can talk about, one sample I can talk about is, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Are there things you can't talk about?
- HPHal Puthoff
There are things I can't talk about, right. But there's, there's one sample I can talk about, which you could put up on the screen. That would be that layer-
- JRJoe Rogan
This right here? This right here?
- HPHal Puthoff
Yeah, right. Uh, turns out that (clears throat) uh, an army, uh, person said that his grandfather had been involved in picking up debris from the Roswell crash. And, and so he sent it, uh, of all places, he sent it to Art Bell.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- HPHal Puthoff
(laughs) Of the, of the-
- JRJoe Rogan
The great one.
- HPHal Puthoff
... radio podcast. The great Art Bell. (clears throat) So, Art Bell turned it over to Linda Howe, L- Lin- Linda. So she's, you know, got it and so she had, said she'd make it available and so on. So, about this time, um, I had already had my viewpoint shifted, as I say, by Ed-... uh, my ƒ ever tell her about, you know, "We should have more, uh, openness going on." And so in fact, Tom DeLonge came along and, uh, you know, the punk rock, Bleach 182, and said, uh, you know, "We sh- we sh- we should be..." By the way, this is before even things came out in the New York Times, December 2017. He says, "You know, I've been talking to people at some aerospace corporations and they're saying how hard it is to get students to do their engineering and come to work for us." And so he said, "Well, you know, if there's anything to," quote, "the UFO area, you know, maybe you could generate some interest that way." And so, long story short, he got, uh, Jim Semivan, now retired, high-level person at CIA, got me-
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