Harold Puthoff

Harold E. Puthoff is an American electrical engineer and physicist who earned his PhD at Stanford in 1967 with work on lasers. In the early 1970s at Stanford Research Institute he and Russell Targ began experiments on psychic perception, and in CIA officer Kenneth Kress's account the two physicists re-awakened CIA interest in parapsychology.

Puthoff and Targ coined the term remote viewing for attempts to describe distant or hidden places by mental means alone. They tested subjects including Pat Price and Uri Geller, and published results in Nature in 1974. Critics, among them the psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann, reported that judges in some trials had access to cues about the order of the sessions, and said that when these were removed the results fell to chance.

In 1985 Puthoff founded the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, which has studied ideas such as zero-point energy that most physicists regard as unsupported. In 2017 he co-founded To the Stars Academy, a company focused on UFOs.