Joe Rogan Experience: #2314 with Hal Puthoff (Transcript)

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 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—”Wait a minute, maybe there’s some bubbles in the hydrogen line or something.” But no, he was able to do it.

But what was most interesting was when I asked him, “Well, how do 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.”

JOE ROGAN: So he drew an accurate diagram of all the shielding that you had around this equipment?

HAL PUTHOFF: And the little quantum chip and its circuitry deep inside.

JOE ROGAN: And when you say he was able to affect something, what in particular was he able to affect?

HAL PUTHOFF: 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, “You want me to do something else?” And then he made it oscillate fast. And that’s when the graduate students sort of went berserk.

And so he said, “Wait, wait, 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. And so he said, “Okay.”

JOE ROGAN: So he’s doing it exactly when he’s saying he’s going to do it?

HAL PUTHOFF: Exactly when he said he’s going to do it.

The CIA Comes Knocking

But anyway, the reason I’m trying to get around to answering your question was that I then wrote this up and circulated around to other physicists. And pretty soon the CIA come landing on my doorstep and said, “Oh, have we been looking for you.”

And I said, “Why?”

Well, they looked in my background. They saw that I had, between my master’s degree and PhD, I’d been a Naval Intelligence officer at the National Security Agency. I had lots of high level clearances. And he said, “You know, we have a problem.”

And they plopped a big report down on the desk and said, “Look, the Russians have been spending millions of dollars at their best institutes trying to use ESP for espionage purposes. And we don’t know how to evaluate it. I mean, no scientist in America even believes there is such a thing. And yet you did this experiment and it looked like this guy could actually get inside this device and describe it and affect it. And here you’re at SRI, we have lots of black projects here.”

Anyway, so we’d like to check him out. Can you bring him back and let us come and do some experiments with him? And by the way, we’re hoping that we’ll find this is just all BS and we don’t have to think about it and that’ll be the end of that.

So anyway, brought him back. They spent a day hiding things in the boxes and envelopes and he would describe what was inside and they were totally blown away. So they said, “Okay, we’d like to give you a little project here, I don’t know, 50 or 60k, and see what else he can do.”

So anyway, that’s how I got started on doing, quote, weird stuff. And so as many would know, that project ended up being very productive. And it went over more than 20 years and so on, highly classified level. Maybe we’ll get to that separately, because I think the UAP stuff is kind of more interesting to start with. But anyway, that’s how I got started in weird physics, you might call it. And then sort of like in Ghostbusters—well, if you got some difficult problem, who are you going to call? There I am.

Remote Viewing Takes Shape

JOE ROGAN: So what other things did you do with Ingo? So he was able to affect the oscillations.

HAL PUTHOFF: Able to affect the oscillations.

JOE ROGAN: So there’s some—he had some sort of an ability. Did you describe, first of all, what this ability was, how he perceived it?

HAL PUTHOFF: He said that for some reason, starting when he was a little kid, he would try to focus on some news item or whatever, and he’d suddenly get some kind of picture in his mind about what was going on. And later he would check it out and turn out to be correct. So he just said, you know, I just—

JOE ROGAN: So he stumbled upon remote viewing, right? Remote viewing. And then being able to interact with the equipment and change the oscillation seems very different, right?

HAL PUTHOFF: It is very different. And as we might discuss later, I’ve got some ideas about what some of the quantum mechanisms might be involved in that.

But anyway, as far as the CIA was concerned, they were most interested in this ability to see through shielding. And they said, “Does that mean if we have all kinds of classified documents in a super-glued safe, the Russians might be able to reach in and see them?” And so that’s what they were most worried about.

JOE ROGAN: And did you find that to be true?

HAL PUTHOFF: That started a whole program when we found out that it was true. We started out doing what you would think, you know, just hiding things in the next room and “Can you describe them?” and stuff like that. But then he got bored. He says, “Well, if you want to know what’s in the next room, go look. You want to know what’s in the envelope in the box? Open it up.”

So he said, “Well, what do you have in mind?”

He said, “Well, just send somebody out into the San Francisco Bay area and I’ll describe where they are.”

And so that’s how what we call the remote viewing program got started. We started doing experiments, which I got to say, I resisted this stuff every inch along the way because as a physicist, I had no idea how this could possibly be.

But nonetheless, we began working with him. Our lab director, who was always concerned about, was this some kind of hoax between the subjects and the experimenters? He’d make up a long list and store them in his safe. And we’d go get an envelope out of the safe, leave SRI, drive to wherever the envelope said, and he would give a description. That’s how that whole program got started.

A Shift in Worldview

JOE ROGAN: When you were experiencing this and you’re initially very skeptical and you start seeing these results, what kind of a shift does that have in your worldview?

Remote Viewing: The Early Challenges

HAL PUTHOFF: It was very challenging, I’ve got to say, because as a physicist and as a quantum physicist, where I’ve written equations for all kinds of interactions, I had no clue how anything like this could possibly be. And I’ll be honest, I still don’t really have a clue about exactly what’s going on other than consciousness seems to be expandable out into the environment in a way that we don’t usually consider could possibly be the case.

There are people who get into meditation and all that kind of stuff, but none of that was in my background. So I just found this a challenge. And it was only that the CIA was paying us to look into this that I kept going the next step, resisting every inch along the way.

The Pat Price Breakthrough

To give you an example, along the way, there was a little bit of PR in the newsprint newspapers about our experiments. We began getting people calling in and saying, “Well, I have some of that ability too,” and whatever. And so one of the people that came along that way was Pat Price. He was ex-police commissioner Burbank. And he said, “You know, when we were solving crimes, I would get an image of where the culprit might be hiding, and it would turn out to be correct. So maybe I have some of this ability.”

Well, I had no reason to necessarily believe that. But it turned out that right at that moment, we were being challenged by the CIA to prove this wasn’t just some kind of a hoax between the experimenters and the subjects. And so they came up with coordinates because, as it turns out, when we sent people out to a site and Ingo or somebody else had to describe it, they would describe not only the site as being observed by the outbound person, but also what was inside the building and what was on top of the building.

So we suddenly realized, okay, that person is just a beacon. It’s not that he’s sending something back telepathically. So once we realized that, Ingo Swann in his never-ending challenge, said, “Well, just give me coordinates, you know, latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes and seconds, and I’ll look wherever that is and tell you what I find.”

So, in fact, 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 there’s some kind of, you know, trickery. And 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.

The Sugar Grove Incident

So I just 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. So Pat Price decided to, you know, to follow our instructions and go to those coordinates and say what he sees. 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 he wrote them all down, sent them off. Pretty soon, the entire law enforcement apparatus 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, no, we’re just doing this experiment. And that’s what he got. And so eventually, 20 years later, you can find the paper that was published by the CIA about what a deal this was.

Targeting Soviet Facilities

And so anyway, at that time, we were at a point, we were about ready to get the next year’s contract, and we had a deputy director, John McMahon, said, “Okay, well, let’s not waste it on our sites, for God’s sakes. 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.

So we targeted Price on that. He turned out to be really a good remote viewer, along with Ingo Swann. And he described this giant crane that rolled over the top of a building. And I mean, it sounded like science fiction. I’ve got some examples here of the drawings of that. And so 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 SRI program on remote viewing. It went for, I don’t know, like 23 years or so.

JOE 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, trying to figure out what you’re saying?

Two Levels of Response

HAL PUTHOFF: There are really basically two levels of response. For example, some of the early work when we went to debrief, we had 10 or 12 people and we’re talking about the work. Pretty soon a 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 putting this out, I’m not buying it.” And he stormed out of the room. So that was one response.

But there’s a second response we got which turned out to be interesting. At a certain point, after we had done a number of years of successful work 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 you say, “Oh, come on, this is nonsense, this is BS,” you know, that’s the end of your programs.

So I got it up to a point where, for example, I briefed Bill Casey, who was director of CIA under Reagan, and we had 45 minutes with him and so 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.

The CEO Experiment

So there was this funny thing where a certain level of people would just, “This can’t be.” And then really high-level people seem 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 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 with a meeting of 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 the 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 investigators would ask them, “Well, you know, what are you using? Do you use ESP or something? Do you have some glint of the future?” “No, no, no, no. I don’t believe any of that nonsense. But I realize that when I trust my gut instinct, I’m usually right.”

So anyway, that sort of leads to the idea that this is a broadly available phenomenon.

JOE 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?

An Ancient Ability

HAL PUTHOFF: I think your second interpretation is the correct one, because probably when you’re out in the jungle and there’s a tiger coming down the trail that you don’t know about quite, it would be a thing that could really help you exist and survive. But once we get into language and technology and so on, that sort of…

Nonetheless, we found—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 like to find people in CIA who could do this, so give us a full medical roundup of these people.” So we get a full medical, including seven-layer brain scans. And they came back and said, “Well, these are just normal people.”

“Oh well, 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 do this even if they didn’t know about it?

Testing Normal People

So about that time we said, “Okay, well let’s just bring in some people from SRI Labs who never thought about ESP, who never thought about any of this stuff.” So I remember we had a woman, Hella Hammond, and we asked her to come volunteer for an experiment. She said, “What kind of experiment?” She said, “Well, it’s sort of like an ESP experiment.” She said, “Give me a break, I don’t believe in that stuff.” And said, “Okay, but do it anyway.”

And so one of the first experiments we did with her, and we have a wonderful diagram of what she did, we sent somebody out by our usual random protocol to an overpass over a freeway that’s all fenced in with a very interesting structure. And she made a drawing of all of that and said, “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 musical ability, there’s a bell curve and you got superstars at one end, you got duds at the other, but to some degree anybody could do it. So that had a lot of outcome later on in the program.

The Soviet Plane Recovery

When finally, to give an example of a real-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 CIA director, knew about our remote viewing program. And so he said, “Well, you’ve got these, quote, ‘remote viewers,’ they’re supposed to be so good, why don’t they find the plane for you?”

So in fact, we had a remote viewer at our lab. And at that time we were working with Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Foreign Technology Division, they had a remote viewer. So we targeted these two remote viewers. All they knew was the plane went down somewhere in Africa, hundreds of thousands of square miles, and make 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 Georgia someplace and somebody said, “Well, anything happened while you were president that was really strange?” He said, “Oh yeah, Soviet plane went down in Africa and it was full of electronics and we wanted to get it and nobody knew where it was and satellites couldn’t find it because of all the vegetation. 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, the real-world consequences came out of this stuff.

JOE ROGAN: So when Carter said that, was that a breach of confidence?

HAL PUTHOFF: That was a breach of security. But a president can—

JOE ROGAN: They’re allowed to do that.

HAL PUTHOFF: They’re allowed to do that.

JOE ROGAN: Don’t tell Trump.

HAL PUTHOFF: Right.

JOE ROGAN: So you, the United States was able to go and get this jet.

HAL PUTHOFF: So by the TU-22 bomber, I think it was. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So this has real-world uses, so this remote viewing. So do they invest more time and more effort into this now? Are they still skeptics?

Remote Viewing: Converting Skeptics Through Direct Experience

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, we pretty much handle the skeptical problem. And let me give you an example. I mean, as we’re churning out these results, as you can imagine, anybody who didn’t have direct knowledge of this would be skeptical, and rightly so, by the way. I mean, I was skeptical every inch along the way as we plowed our way into this stuff.

So one day a guy shows up from CIA and says, “Okay, I’m here to find out what the fraud is. I’m sure this is absolute nonsense.” They said, “Okay, fine, so show me one of your experiments.” So, you know, we put him in the lab with an interviewer and a remote viewer. And in this case, I’m sent out someplace for 30 minutes and I come back. It turns out that the remote viewer described it really well.

And he said, “Well, you probably told him where you’re going to go. Let’s do another experiment and I’m going to go and we’ll go in my car because you might have had a transmitter in your car transmitting where you’re going. So I’m going to pick the site.” So we do another experiment, get a great result.

So the guy says, “Well, I’ve got to figure out what’s wrong with this.” So my colleague Russell Targ and I sat down. This guy’s a hard case, but we got the bell curve. Who knows, maybe somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. So he comes in the next day and we say, “Okay, today you’re going to be the remote viewer.”

And he said, “Oh, give me a break. I don’t believe in this bulls*.” He said it much more strongly than that, actually. And I said, “No, no. Okay, well, just try it. You’ll see we’re not stressing you out,” and whatever, whatever, whatever. And he says, “Okay, and when you go to your place, I 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.

Yeah, there’s an example now. He misinterpreted what it was. He thought maybe it was a cupola or whatever. But anyway, that’s his drawing on the right, and that’s where we were on the left. And so he said—so he went back to CIA and said, “Okay, this stuff really works.” And he became one of their star remote viewers over the years.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. So a skeptic became one of their remote viewers.

HAL PUTHOFF: Yep, sure did.

JOE ROGAN: What is the process? What is the process for a person to remote view? Is there a state that you have to go into? Is there a method to getting into that state?

The Remote Viewing Process: Visceral Response Over Imagination

HAL PUTHOFF: There is a method and it’s different from what you might think. You might think you would say to somebody, “Okay, we’ve got somebody to decide, 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—it took years and a lot of trials—was that you get a visceral response to a site. It’s not that you necessarily get an image. So in fact, we told them if you get an image, just put it down 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 if it’s like water, they might do waves, or if it’s a mountain peak, they might—as Jacques described in one of your previous broadcasts, 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 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 pretty good feeling for what the site is.

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 there’s a whole training procedure that we developed.

And eventually when we briefed the Assistant 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 bunch of them and said, “Hey, you’ve just volunteered to become a psychic spy,” and they said, “Well, okay.”

And they sent them out to SRI and we ran them through this step-by-step training procedure and they learned to do really, really well. I mean, Joe McMoneagle, who—anyone who follows the literature is known to be really an excellent remote viewer—and so give you an example.

The Typhoon Class Submarine: A Major Intelligence Success

One time he said—I mean, we trained them and so they learned to do really well. We set up a whole program. And he said, “Okay, 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. 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 on. He gave this whole description.

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. “This is nonsense.” But about a month later, out rolls this unbelievably giant submarine, the Typhoon class submarine, the largest submarine ever made.

Indeed, there are his sketches and a lot of description that went along with his sketches. There’s a submarine on the right. And so finally the people of the National Security Council said, “Okay, we better start taking this seriously.”

So make a long story short, he eventually—Joe McMoneagle got a National Merit Award for over 200 great viewings he did for CIA, National Security Council, FBI, I mean, you name it. So anyway, that grew into a whole industry.

JOE ROGAN: So this is still kind of a mystery even to you. Even someone who has studied this for this long, you know that it works, but you’re not exactly sure how it’s working. Is that a fair assessment?

The Mystery of How Remote Viewing Works

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s a fair assessment. I mean, when we as physicists—we hate to say, “Oh, I don’t have a clue.” So well, we now know there’s so-called quantum entanglement, which is that things seem to be connected at a quantum level across great distances. And so the easy answer is, “Well, it must be quantum entanglement.” But that’s just words. It doesn’t really tell us how it works.

But to give you an example, we wondered how far you could go. So we did an experiment again with Ingo Swann, who was such a really top-level remote viewer, to view Jupiter—planet Jupiter—before the flyby, before the NASA flyby. And so he did, and he described Jupiter the way anybody might, you know, Red Spot and all that kind of stuff. But he said, “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.”

Nobody knew about any ring around Jupiter. Carl Sagan happened to come by in the lab and said, “Oh, what do you think of this? We got this result.” He said, “Ring around Jupiter? That’s nonsense.” 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 a book we wrote about all this stuff before it was known in the scientific community.

So that’s what we find out, that apparently even distances is not a big deal. The other thing we wondered—I can tell you what it isn’t. We thought maybe it was brain waves. The Russians came up with an idea. “Well, brainwaves, low frequency, long wavelength, they can seemingly get through some aspects of the environment.”

So we came up with a series of experiments. And one of them was, “Okay, let’s put our remote viewers on submarines, take them into the depths of the ocean,” because it turns out seawater is highly conductive. And so even at low frequencies, even at brainwave frequencies, it would be a complete shield for that.

So we piggybacked on somebody else’s experiments, Stephen Schwartz’s experiments, using remote viewers to go find archaeological wrecks and 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 it’s got to be some new field, some quantum aspect that we don’t understand yet.

JOE ROGAN: We don’t understand, but yet you could repeat it.

HAL PUTHOFF: But we could repeat it.

Overcoming Internal Skepticism at SRI

Now, I’ll give you another example of the skepticism that we got. And by the way, I can’t blame them. We had some psychologists at SRI and they said, “You’ve got that stupid ESP experiment stuff going on. And you know, this is going to ruin our reputation. People think that we’re, you know, 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, so our director said, “Well, what do you think? I mean, how would you know if this is false or whatever?” And he said, “Look, make a list of all experiments, places that have been 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 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. Give you another example of—and by the way, I can’t complain about the skepticism. I mean, even as we’re doing all this, we haven’t lost our skepticism about how could this be.

But we finally, we got into a spot where the only thing that was secret about this program was that it was secret. People heard that we had these people coming in and doing experiments, but we weren’t publishing anything. So I went to the CIA contract monitor and said, “You know, you’ve got to let us publish something because the only thing secret about this project is it’s a secret project. So if we publish something, that will handle that.”

JOE ROGAN: Did you want to do that to get more scientists involved?

HAL PUTHOFF: Yes, that was our personal aspect.

JOE ROGAN: So that if there was actual data, more people who were on the outside skeptical would say, “Well, hold on, why am I skeptical? Maybe, perhaps there’s something to this.” And then you start considering your own life. These moments of intuition, weird coincidences. You’re thinking about someone, they call you. We all have this idea that there’s something there, but we don’t know what it is. But we’re very skeptical of someone who tells us that they can do it.

# The Bell Labs Experiment and Publication

And that’s reasonable to think that way. And so in this case, where we got permission to publish something, since we’re engineers, Russell Targ, my colleague, and I are engineers and physicists, we wrote it up for the Proceedings of the IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. This is an engineering journal where we had published technical papers.

So I said, well, we have a better chance there, sent it off to them. The editor was head of communications at Bell Labs. And he comes back and says, “Well, I don’t know.” And we said, “Why are you getting bad reviews?” And he says, “Well, actually I’m getting good reviews, but one really heavy hitter just gave me a one sentence review saying, ‘This is the kind of thing I wouldn’t believe in even if it were true.'” What does that mean?

So anyway, we said, “Look, I understand your problem. Let us come and present this stuff to your engineers. If they throw tomatoes, okay, don’t publish our paper, but if they like it, then publish it.” So we went to Bell Labs, presented our data. The engineers were all excited, trying to figure out what the mechanism could be and so on. So we figured we were home free. He said, “Nah.”

So then we pull out our trump card, as always, which is, “Okay, look, do your own experiments at Bell Labs. Pick people from your engineers, pick people from your offices to make up lists of targets. Pick people here to be your blind match group to see if they can match them up. And if you get results like we got, then publish it. If you don’t, don’t.” He said, “Okay, that’s fair.”

So it turns out he did the whole thing, got the same kind of 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.”

Princeton’s Replication Studies

So it turns out that for those who follow the field, know that Robert John and Brenda Dunn—Robert John was head of engineering at Princeton—he had a student who wanted 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, I don’t know, 20 year program, completely replicating our remote viewing work and also doing effects on random number generators that were quantum driven.

And so the so-called Paralab, Princeton Engineering Anomalies research lab, replicated all of our work. And so pretty soon it’s all over the place. So by the way, at the end of the 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 lived through the same kind of thing. So there it is.

JOE 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 is doing all this stuff. The United States never gets involved in it at all. That could have happened.

HAL PUTHOFF: That could have happened. I mean, it was really the tiniest flip of a coin that that happened. So what that means is for me personally is that even though I had no interest in all that kind of 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 when the UAP, the UFO issue kind of rose up again. Who you going to call? Al Puthoff? I get my call.

Introduction to the UAP Phenomenon

JOE ROGAN: So what was the initial introduction to the UAP phenomenon? And when was this?

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, there was an early introduction in 2004. Well, maybe a little earlier in the 90s, I was doing worked for Robert Bigelow at Bigelow Aerospace. And in addition to his aerospace stuff, he put two units circling the earth and he made the module that got attached to the space station and all that kind of stuff. But he was also very much interested in UFOs and that kind of thing. And so I was involved with him.

And around that time I had gotten a call from somebody I knew in Washington D.C., head of a think tank. I can’t name him, but he said, “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 right now. I’m just too busy.” He says, “Look, come. 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 for the Navy and so on, I said, “Okay, I’ll come.” So I showed up there and I saw people, some of whom I knew, including my ex contract monitor from CIA and people from DIA, a lot of military people and so on.

The Washington Briefing

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 that the United States, Russia and China have obtained 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 the other people, I found out by talking to him later, we thought, “Oh, this is cool. I mean, maybe we can get some kind of disclosure here.” And so he said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to 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 he saying that that’s true stuff or is this a hypothetical or…

Anyway, so make a list. So we came up with a long list, like, I don’t know, 60 items or something. You say, “Oh, well, stock market might be affected, religions might be affected, whatever. Government affected, policies be affected. Politics would certainly be affected.”

And then for each item we had to go give it a score from +9 to -9 as to how intense the effect would be and whether it’s positive or negative. So we broke up into groups and our group had our list of eight or so. So we went down our list and it turned out that we ended up getting net negative numbers.

The Disclosure Dilemma

And let me tell you why you can get negative numbers. One of the things down toward the bottom of the list and 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. And then years later, corporation A is making lots of money based on what they got. Meanwhile corporation B has gone bankrupt. And then they find out they were excluded.

Well, they’re going to end up suing the corporations, suing the government. I mean, it really gets gnarly when you 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, we 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.

JOE ROGAN: Was this during George Herbert Walker Bush’s?

HAL PUTHOFF: No, it was during Bush 2.

JOE ROGAN: Bush 2. George Bush, rather George Bush W. So when this was all going on, you still didn’t know what they had?

HAL PUTHOFF: Didn’t know what they had. This was just, they were saying this could be hypothetical or could be trying to tell us something. But he wouldn’t say.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting. And how long, how much time did they give you to compile this list and to generate these numbers of plus minus?

HAL PUTHOFF: Two or three days? I don’t recall right now.

JOE ROGAN: How did you attribute numbers to things like the stock market? How did you figure out how that would be negatively or positively?

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, you know, it was just a gut response. Basically.

JOE ROGAN: You remote viewed it?

HAL PUTHOFF: No, didn’t do that. By the way, in the remote viewing program, one of the things they told us, “Look, you guys that are running this program, don’t you ever think about remote viewing yourself. We learned in the LSD days that if the experimenters get involved in the subject they’re researching, they lose their objectivity. And don’t think you can sneak away and get away with it because we’ll get you on the polygraph.” And so, no, never did.

JOE ROGAN: Don’t remote view yourself. What a bizarre thing to tell someone.

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s what they said. So anyway. But anyway, back to this. So we came up with our numbers and said, “This does not look like a good idea.” At that time. That was the viewpoint. Now, as we’ll get into at this point, I have a different viewpoint. I think there should be more disclosure than is apparent.

Shifting Views on Disclosure

JOE ROGAN: That’s much more common.

HAL PUTHOFF: Much more common.

JOE ROGAN: That thought is more common with not just academics, but even government people.

HAL PUTHOFF: Even government people, I think more. In fact, I have a great example of that, and that is Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, involved in the Manhattan Project. You’d think if anybody wanted to keep secrets about national security, it would be him.

One of the strongest statements he made, which actually was kind of a driver in my shifting my viewpoint about, “Well, should we come out with this or not?” He said, “You know, in exploring nuclear energy, we had the Manhattan Project highly classified, but nonetheless, we and the Russians kind of marched along step by step. But in electronics, we didn’t classify electronics, you know, circuit boards and all that kind of stuff. And we took off like a rocket and left Russia in the dust.”

So his viewpoint was that having more openness even in national security areas is a better bet. And so that made me think, even though I’d been part of, as it turns out, decades long, highly classified, not for the street UAP investigations. That sort of affected my thinking about it and I became more open to the idea that we should do that.

Official Involvement in UAP Research

But the way I got actually more officially involved was that, as it turns out, in 2008, I think it was Harry Reid, who was at the time Senate Majority Leader, Daniel Inouye from Hawaii, Ted Stevens from Alaska. They’re part of the Gang of Eight, so-called. So they get better briefings than most people on what’s going on behind the scenes.

So at that point you might think, “Well, UFO stuff, I mean, that’s all dead.” Let me give you a little background first. And that is, you know, back in the 50s and 60s, we had Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Blue Book, and then they had the Condon Committee at University of Colorado examine the area and say he came out with this thing saying, “There’s nothing here. It’s not worth the effort spending any time on it.”

Actually, the Condon Report, if you read it, there’s a deep report showing all kinds of reasons why this is real. And then there’s the forward which most media read, in which he said, “Oh, nothing here, don’t worry about it.” So after 1969, which is when that report came out, if you called Air Force Public affairs office said, “Well, what’s going on with UFOs?” “Oh, no, no, we gave up all that stuff back in 1969.”

The truth of the matter is that the very memo that canceled Blue Book by General Bolender had down the fine print, “But anything that might affect national security, we should keep track of.”

The 2017 Program

So now we come up to, you know, 2017. These senators, who knew that there was still stuff going on, decided there should be a new program. And so they asked the top physicists at DIA, Jim McCaskey, who is one of the top physicists on propulsion and rocketry and so on, to put out a request for proposal. And so that went out.

And so actually, Robert Bigelow picked it up and he said, “Okay, we’ll do this.” And so he then got the program. And since I’d been involved with Bigelow, he asked me to be part of the program. So that’s when I got, you might say, officially involved and really digging into the issue.

JOE ROGAN: And what was your perspective at that point? So you had this thing during the George Bush administration, and what was your perspective after that conversation? Did you think maybe they do have something? The crash Roswell site, maybe something else? Did you know more from talking to other people? Had you heard whispers? Like, what did you know?

HAL PUTHOFF: What I knew was not much. I mean, I heard whispers, but I didn’t get really involved in thinking about it. I mean, a good physicist realizes this is tinfoil hat conspiracy stuff.

JOE ROGAN: But you had already had experience with remote viewing.

The Physics Behind UAP Phenomena

HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah, I’ve already got that problem. But when they came up with the idea we should do another, deeper dive into this. And by that time I was, you know, I mean, as a physicist, I mean, through the years, I mean, I was a Star Trek fan and all that kind of stuff. And as a physicist, I would hear about these UFO sightings and so on. So I always wondered about, you know, how can this, you know, could somebody really have any kind of propulsion that would look like that?

Anyway, when this program got set up, it turned out my particular assignment was, “Okay, let’s look at all the physics and engineering that might be behind this stuff. And by the way, we will arrange for you to get access to some materials.” Okay, fine. So that was my tasking. And so I said, okay.

So I can’t get into a lot of detail, but I did do a lot of back and forth with some aerospace executives about getting access in case they had any materials and that kind of stuff. So they finally said, “No, if that were the case, it would be too compartmentalized. We can’t show 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 couldn’t share them.” So a lot of negotiation went on.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you don’t have time with the Vice President unless there’s something to negotiate about.

HAL PUTHOFF: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: If there’s nothing to negotiate about, you’d say “We don’t have materials.” You wouldn’t say “You don’t have enough clearance for us to even discuss this.”

HAL PUTHOFF: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: And sorry, they’re tipping their hat.

HAL PUTHOFF: They’re already tipping their hat. So anyway, the second place to go then was okay, they’re not going to share their materials. I’m going to almost assuredly have them. Suppose they had shared them, what would we have done? Well, we would have gone to subject matter experts all around the world. We’d give them some materials, we’d say “This came from a Russian sub or whatever, give us your best output” and so on.

So I said, okay, since we’re not able to get materials and share them, 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 I realize you probably don’t have immediate access to this, but just to give you an idea, some of the papers that we got by going out to these people 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.

JOE ROGAN: Jamie’s got it up here.

HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah. So this is just the first few of 38 papers that I arranged for leaders to come up with.

JOE ROGAN: So this is based on projections from where technology currently sits to if you extrapolate where it’s going to be in 2050 based on what they’re working on.

HAL PUTHOFF: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Space time metric engineering, traversable wormholes, stargates.

HAL PUTHOFF: So you see, we weren’t kidding around.

Defense Contractors and Compartmentalization

JOE ROGAN: Well, when you started getting the warp drive, dark energy, extra dimensions, brain machine interfaces. 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. You have to bring in people who make military jets. Advanced propulsion systems.

HAL PUTHOFF: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Those are the people that would be able to…

HAL PUTHOFF: And the people we had working on those papers were people from those communities.

JOE ROGAN: How did they… this is the conundrum that if they did disclose and the companies that weren’t given access to these materials did fall apart, and then the companies that got access to these materials advanced and had spectacular businesses, how do they decide who. Just assuming you would have something, how would you decide?

Was it based on relationships like knowing that someone could keep a secret? Like, because you’re dealing with outside the government now, presumably if you have a defense contractor that’s an independent company. Not necessarily. Even though they work hand in glove with the government, they’re not necessarily a part of the government.

HAL PUTHOFF: So in fact, if you put your thinking cap on, you’d say, okay, this would be the way if you want to keep it out of the public.

JOE ROGAN: Because you don’t have to disclose it.

HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah. You don’t have to give it to a contractor, say, “Okay, this is your stuff and from now on you own it.”

JOE ROGAN: But how do you control that, though? You’d have to have government agents embedded deeply in that, which I assume they do anyway. But you’d have to have intelligence agents deeply embedded in these defense contractors where they would make sure that they maintain some sort of intense level of secrecy.

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s exactly right. And when you think about, okay, these days, well, suppose we have some kind of disclosure, what are these companies going to do? They’ve been hiding things, or various parts of the government. Been hiding things.

JOE ROGAN: Misappropriating funds, lying to Congress.

HAL PUTHOFF: Lying to Congress. So it’s, you can see why it’s such a big problem at this point.

The Age of Disclosure Documentary

JOE ROGAN: Well, that was that disclosure documentary that I saw you in as well, that appeared at South by Southwest, which is excellent.

HAL PUTHOFF: What is it called? It’s called “The Age of Disclosure.”

JOE ROGAN: Amazing documentary.

HAL PUTHOFF: It’s an amazing documentary.

JOE ROGAN: Really hope that gets released somewhere big like Netflix or something like that.

HAL PUTHOFF: So people, I think Dan Farah, who’s the director and producer of that, by the way, a very well known producer, you know, he collaborated with Steven Spielberg on “Ready Player One.”

JOE ROGAN: Right.

HAL PUTHOFF: The big hit and so on. And the approach he used, which is really very clever, he contacted people like me, people like Lou Elizondo, on and on and on, and said, “You know, many of you don’t want to come out really, and reveal too much podcast by podcast, by podcast. So tell you what, my goal,” he says, “I’m going to approach 38 of the maximum insiders.”

And by maximum insiders, I mean it includes people like Senator Rubio, Secretary of State Clapper, who’s, you know, and “I’m going to get all of you to collaborate on saying what your involvement was to the degree you can and, you know, not say something and ended up going to jail. And then we’ll put out maximum disclosure evidence all at one time in this film. And it’ll include people coming forward like Jay Stratton, who is head of the UAP task force.”

He’s been involved in this field for 16 years, by the way. He has a book about to come out also which will really be a disclosure. So anyways, “We’ll put this together. We won’t talk about it along the way.” And so 38 of us ended up being interviewed for the film, telling whatever role we felt we could tell.

So in fact, when that film comes out, that’s going to be disclosure on steroids. I think that’s going to be the maximum. And well, you saw the film so you know, it’s pretty revealing.

JOE ROGAN: It’s very well done.

HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah, very well done.

The Journey Into UAP Research

JOE ROGAN: So for your own personal journey into this stuff, you’re initially introduced to it because they’re talking about disclosure. You rate the pros and cons. And then when do you get introduced to it again?

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, it was when basically when Robert Bigelow got the contract that Harry Reid and the other senators asked.

JOE ROGAN: And how much time has passed?

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, that was in 2008, so a couple. And so that went up through 2012. And then AATIP, which you may have heard of, that Lou Elizondo ran sort of picked up there to keep the ball rolling forward.

And now it’s been revealed, by the way, only recently that when the funding dried up, it dried up for the reasons you might think of. And that is it was so highly classified that when congressional statements came down that, “Okay, we need so much money for this,” it didn’t actually describe. It would just “advanced propulsion” and all that kind of stuff.

So another group picked up the money and said, “Oh well, that’s what we’re working on, propulsion things.” So, you know, but it wasn’t the real deal. And so, you know, what do you do at that point? Do you go “Now wait a minute, this was really for this?” Well, no, then you’d be revealing what this was really for. So anyway, that sort of ended that way.

But anyway, so based on that, we then as a group went to, as it turns out, the Department of Homeland Security to set up a whole new program. And it was going to be a special access program. It was under a name which can now be revealed because AARO, the Advanced Aerospace Resolution Office has revealed it. It was called Kona Blue.

And we built up a stack of documents that would go to the ceiling here about what needed to be done, what we were going to do, how it should be done, who should be involved.

JOE ROGAN: So at this point you’re convinced that this is a real phenomenon?

David Grusch and High-Level Intelligence

HAL PUTHOFF: At this point I’m convinced that there’s a real phenomena. I mean, you know, how far can I go? I mean, I can say I interacted with, for example, Dave Grusch that you’ve had on your program before, who is really a high level intelligence officer.

People in the public can hardly have any idea how high a level intelligence officer he was. He prepared briefings for the President. He was top UAP investigator for NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office, and then transferred over to NGA, National Geospatial Intelligence Office and so on.

And so in that role he was asked, he was an official part of the UAP task force, asked by Jay Stratton to find out what’s going on behind the scenes at these super classified levels. And he did. And so that’s why he eventually came out in that August 2023 congressional hearing under oath, saying, “Yep, I’ve talked to more than 40 people who are directly involved in the program.”

Well, I know Dave, I know many of the people, I know many of the programs that he’s involved in. And so there really is something to it. And it’s only a matter of time before it comes down. I don’t think he can put the toothpaste back into the tube.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it seems like people don’t want to. And I think there’s so many more people that are openly discussing the possibility or what this is, maybe not even the possibility of it, but addressing that there’s something going on. So what is it? Is it interdimensional? Is it intergalactic? Like, what is it?

The Reality of Advanced Detection Systems

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s just such an excellent question. Because the problem is there’s an embarrassment of riches. These craft, you know, which in the old days, you know, farmer in the fields, someone’s streaking across the sky and you know, “I don’t know what to think.” You know, you could sort of blow it off.

But because our own detection equipment has really marched up into unbelievable sophistication. And so now we have these really advanced sensor systems, FLIR, forward looking infrared radar, high quality radars, satellites. Ratcliffe has admitted that satellites have picked up evidence of these craft.

And these craft have interfered with military exercises, as we all know from say the Nimitz and the Gimbal and the Go Fast videos that made it out into the public in 2017. So it’s really out there now at this point that there’s a reality here. And so that’s where we are at this point.

The Nimitz Encounter

JOE ROGAN: One of the more spectacular ones, you talked about the Nimitz, the Commander David Fravor experience. So they’re flying over the water outside of San Diego and they think they see something below the surface which is large, and then this 20 foot Tic Tac looking thing that’s hovering over the water that seems to turn towards them and recognize that they’re there.

It jams their radar, it does something to block their ability to detect it. They have it on screen, they have video of this thing. There’s eyewitnesses of this thing. They track it on radar going from above 50,000 feet down to sea level in a second. They don’t know what it is. It takes off at an insane rate of speed. It goes to the CAP point where they were supposed to meet up.

So they have all this data about this thing that behaves in a way that’s impossible with our current understanding of propulsion systems.

Remote Viewing and the Nixon Administration

HAL PUTHOFF: Right. And of course, in the program we interviewed the pilots about their experiences and so on. And so you can’t blame a pilot. He says, “Look, this thing was at 80,000 feet or whatever when he 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.”

You know, this stuff is just way beyond our physics. Of course, to a physics nerd like me, yeah, now wait a minute. If it’s real, it’s physics. So it can’t be beyond our physics. It’s beyond our understanding, but it’s beyond our engineering.

So, in fact, in that series of papers I showed you, the 38 papers, by the way, there’s a little side story there which is interesting. And those 38 papers were then posted. None of these people who generated those papers had any idea it had to do with ETs or UFOs or whatever. They all went up on what’s called the JWIC server. It’s classified server for the Pentagon and intelligence officers and aerospace contractors, you know, could get access, but nobody in the public could.

And usually those things go up and they’re up for a little while and a month or so and they take them down. This was such a popular set, this 38 paper, such popular set that everybody screamed every time they tried to take it down. And so it was posted there forever. But eventually, through Freedom of Information Act and so on, most of those papers have been released.

And I was concerned that, “Oh, my God, these guys are all going to call me up and say, ‘What? You didn’t tell me this had anything to do with ETs or UFOs.'” But actually, nobody seemed to complain about it.

The Ultraterrestrial Hypothesis

So back to the question that you mentioned a little earlier, though, about, you know, what’s the source of this? Like I said, it’s an embarrassment of riches. There’s so much observation, you know, the idea that it may be a scout coming by from some other planet and checking us out and heading off or whatever. I mean, it’s much more than that.

And of course, as you know from interviewing Jacques Vallee, he dug into literature and found out, you know, you can go back millennia and see descriptions of exactly what we’re talking about today.

So as far as where they come from, what they’re doing here, I myself have written a paper called “Ultraterrestrials,” where I try to cover the gamut and I cover everything. Yeah, they could be spacecraft from some other galaxy whipping through here, 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 showed up here 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 years ago, and they’re hiding out with some bases locally and so on. And of course, we have a fellow by the name of a professor by the name of Masters who thinks that, well, maybe it’s time travelers from the future coming back.

And then there’s the whole idea, since physicists like to talk about additional dimensions. You know, maybe they come from another. So anyway, then in my “Ultraterrestrials” 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 classification than I had access to, and maybe it’s known, but right now I’d say we don’t.

JOE ROGAN: Do you have a suspicion?

HAL PUTHOFF: 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 but some time back, and that there are stations here.

You know, I mean, one of our remote viewers that was really good came up one day and said, “I was looking around and I think I found a UFO base on Earth.” This is during the remote viewing. And you know, “Oh my God, I’ve got to report this to my CIA contract monitor. Do I want to tell them that?” So I did.

And one of the places he came up with some. But one of the places he came up with was Mount Zeal in Australia. And so my CIA contract monitor says, “Well, I know the station keeper, CIA station keeper out in Australia. I think I’ll call him and 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, “I’d like to ask you about that Mount Zeal area.” He said, “Oh, you mean where the UFOs are always flying around.” Whoa. So I thought, “Oh, gee, you know.” So anyway, this was from Pat Price. I take him seriously.

Pat Price and the Nixon Prediction

Let me give you an anecdote. I mean, I know it’s hard to believe that some of this stuff could possibly be real. Here was a real game changer for me. One day Pat Price, during the remote viewing program, came in the office and he said, “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 a CIA contract manager.” Which I did. And so they sent a team over looking for, you know, hidden microwaves, hidden toxic substances. And they didn’t come up with anything.

Of course, as we now know from history, it was the tape recorder that did them in. And he couldn’t make it through his second term because he was during the Nixon administration. Yeah, Nixon administration.

And so, interesting enough, when he reported that, I said, “Oh my God, that means 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 is going to make it through his next term and his vice president is not going to take over because he goes first?” I mean, the odds of that, I mean, there’s just no doubt that means it’s really something.

JOE ROGAN: Well, especially when you consider Nixon was one of the most popularly elected presidents ever.

HAL PUTHOFF: Right?

JOE ROGAN: I mean, he won by an enormous margin. That was the whole where the vice president or the other candidate’s vice president had electroshock therapy that hadn’t been revealed. Yeah. And it turned out people were very concerned that he was mentally ill. When it was too late to replace him, they didn’t know what to do. They finally replaced him, but it was too late.

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That was a big part of the whole thing.

Time and Remote Viewing

HAL PUTHOFF: So now, one thing you may be surprised to learn, and you’ve asked me from time to time, what did I think as I’m facing into all this stuff? We obviously, as physicists think about time going forward reasonable way. And as I mentioned, the Princeton lab got involved. Robert Jahn at Princeton was very good in quantum theory and so on.

And he knows that in quantum theory, time is kind of a slippery slope. You know, we have the space-time 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 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 Electronics Engineers, a couple years after our paper, like ’78 or so.

And so it turned out that the results, either looking a bit into the future, a bit into the past, didn’t. The results were just as good. So that sort of helped solve another problem for us because we were always. I mean, I can’t blame the skeptics coming forward.

In fact, our favorite phrase is, as far as remote viewing goes, there are two outcomes. People investigate it and know it works. People who don’t and know it can’t. That sort of.

So anyway, you know, a big thing that we always got pushed on was, “Well, if these people are so psychic, why aren’t they rich? Why aren’t they at Las Vegas? Why aren’t they doing silver futures or whatever?”

The Silver Futures Experiment

Well, it turned out I had a chance to test that because as it turns out, my wife, Adrienne Kennedy, was on the board of a new grammar school that was being set up in the Bay Area, where we were at the time. And so I was trying to raise money because they were about $25,000 short.

And so I went to a wealthy dentist I knew of and said, you know, “Would you mind giving $25,000 for this school? It’s just being set up with shorts.” He says, “Now, wait a minute, I know who you are. You have that ESP program over at SRI, don’t you?” And I said, “Yeah.”

He said, “Tell you what I do. Silver futures. If you can get your ESP people to tell me what’s happening each day, the next day in silver futures, I will follow what you tell me and I’ll bet on it and see if I make money based on that. And tell you what, whatever money I get, I’ll give your school 10% of what I make. And don’t worry if I lose money, I won’t charge you something.”

So anyway, that was interesting. Well, by now in the program, we recognized that, okay, there’s the bell curve, sort of. Anybody can do it to some degree. So I simply went to the board of directors of the school and said, “We’re going to go into silver futures to make our missing $25,000. But I’m not going to ask you what you think the market’s going to do the next day, because that will depend on what you’ve read or what you hope for or whatever.”

“We’re going to do something different. I’m going to pick a couple of objects, objects that are very different from each other. I’m going to label one of them, mark it up. I’m going to label the other one, mark it down. And I want you to describe to me today the object I’m going to show you tomorrow, which would depend on what the market does.”

And so, okay. And for a crash course, I gave him this shortened version of how, you know, don’t try to image it, just try to get. It’s a visceral thing. How do you feel about it? What’s the sort of texture of it and so on.

And Jamie, can you pull up that first of the. It shows the wooden figurine and the tape measure, if you could show that. Yeah. So on a given day, I have two objects, and of course, they’re different as they can be, in case you get a lousy description or whatever.

So on a given day, that’s a couple of objects I picked out. And I labeled the one to myself. I labeled the one on the left, “mark it up.” The one on the right, “mark it down.” But they have no idea what my objects are.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

HAL PUTHOFF: So the next day you get the following slide. Do you have the following slide?

JOE ROGAN: I have a previous slide. Is that it?

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s it. Okay. And so I had seven viewers and on this particular day, five of them didn’t turn out much. But one of the viewers said, “I’ve got something all squirreled up in a can all wound around and I hear the words 1, 2, 3, said rhythmically tapered.” The second guy, same thing, “A can, something all the on it.” So that’s what I go with.

Anyway. Make a long story short, 30 days in the market, we made $260,000 for the investor. We got our 10%, which is $26,000. So we got a bit of a bonus there for the school.

JOE ROGAN: Why didn’t you guys keep going and get rich?

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, that I know everybody asked me that. The truth of the matter, it was almost a 24-hour a day job to do this. And meanwhile, we’re back over at the lab training army intelligence remote viewers how to remote view. So.

JOE ROGAN: Clearly that wasn’t your ambition, but you proved your point.

HAL PUTHOFF: I proved my point.

Access to Materials

JOE ROGAN: So now when going into the future, you’re reasonably certain that these things, this is a real phenomenon. Do you ever get access to these materials that you were discussing earlier? Have you ever seen anything?

HAL PUTHOFF: Yes, I have one example I can talk about. One sample I can talk about is.

JOE ROGAN: Are there things you can’t talk about?

The Art Bell Sample and Material Analysis

HAL PUTHOFF: There are things I can’t talk about. Right. But there’s one sample I can talk about, which you could put up on the screen. That would be that this right here. It’s right here, yeah. Right.

Turns out that an army person said that his grandfather had been involved in picking up debris from the Roswell crash. And so he sent it, of all places, he sent it to Art Bell of the radio podcast, the great Art Bell. So Art Bell turned it over to Linda Howe. Linda. So she got it and so she said she’d make it available and so on.

So about this time, I had already had my viewpoint shifted, as I say, by Edward Teller, about, you know, we should have more openness going on. And so, in fact, Tom DeLonge came along, you know, the punk rock Blink-182 and said, you know, we should be. By the way, this is before even things came out in the New York Times in 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 it could generate some interest that way. And so, long story short, he got Jim Semivan now retired high level person at CIA got me.

JOE ROGAN: Keep that up, James.

HAL PUTHOFF: And so anyway, we started To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science. And so we were part of what was behind helping Leslie Kean get that story out in the New York Times to break out that something was really going on behind the scenes.

JOE ROGAN: Back to this material.

HAL PUTHOFF: So anyway, on this material she came up with this material.

JOE ROGAN: How big is this, what we’re looking at?

HAL PUTHOFF: Oh, it’s about, it’s about this big.

JOE ROGAN: So 4 inches, something like that. Okay, pretty big.

HAL PUTHOFF: And so it’s got all these layers. So on the one hand you could say, well this is just a guy sending in at some stuff. There’s no chain of custody, right. You don’t know if he’s a fraud, making it up or whatever. But anyway, it turns out those are layers of titanium and bismuth.

So anyway we, Tom DeLonge got a hold of a copy and so we said, okay, we’re going to do everything we can to nail this down. So we actually set up a contract with an army office and then they arranged for AARO, the All Domain Anomalies Resolution Office to consider taking this seriously. And so they arranged that this could be analyzed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. And so we provided this to them to analyze.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, and what were the results?

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, the results were that there’s no obvious proof that it comes from out of our solar system because there are various isotopes would be different if it came from some other solar system. So that would be the first thing you look for to say, oh, this really is ET. So that didn’t wash.

The second part though was a little more interesting and that is these layers of magnesium and bismuth. I mean those are the size of a human hair, some of those layers. And they said, well, we can’t find any evidence in the history of development of materials of materials like that and can’t even imagine why anybody want to make it. So it’s just, it’s an anomaly.

So no proof that it’s ET but one of the things we did do, we said, okay, well how hard is it to make something like this? And so we got an aerospace corporation to say, can you bond bismuth and magnesium together? You know, sort of like what we see in this sample. Well, they got two layers bonded, cost them over a million dollars, broke down their instruments to do it. So it’s still basically a mystery. So we got to read the report. It was not totally provided to the public.

JOE ROGAN: Is this about a quarter inch thick? Is that what we’re looking at here?

HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So how many layers did they estimate?

HAL PUTHOFF: I think we had it might have been 18, something like that. We could probably count them. So anyway, so that’s a possible example, but no conclusion. We come to the conclusion.

JOE ROGAN: So this is something that is of terrestrial origin in terms of materials, when you measure the isotopes, but it’s of a construction method that’s not currently available.

HAL PUTHOFF: That is a perfect description of the situation. And by the way, certainly wasn’t available back in the 40s and 50s when this supposedly was found.

JOE ROGAN: Supposedly. That’s the problem. So when was this analyzed? In what year?

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, analyses started taking place by Linda Howe at other laboratories, I think in the years in the 2000s. We got to go back. Yeah, we got it. I don’t know, maybe 2020, something like that.

JOE ROGAN: But whoever.

HAL PUTHOFF: We got it analyzed. We got it analyzed only a couple years ago.

JOE ROGAN: But if the chain of custody is accurate, it goes back far enough where this is impossible.

HAL PUTHOFF: Right, right. And seemingly, given the effort that the Aerospace Corporation put in, they can’t even manufacture this today.

The Roswell Incident

JOE ROGAN: Right. In that level, this Roswell crash is the big one, right. That’s the one that everybody knows about. And it was in 1947, Roswell, New Mexico, and the wreckage was flown in two separate planes to Wright Patterson Air Force Base, which is unusual in and of itself. And the idea was that it’s flown in two planes just in case one goes down. That this stuff is so important that we have to analyze it.

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s great.

JOE ROGAN: What do you think that was?

HAL PUTHOFF: I think it was a true non-human intelligence craft that crashed. We talked to one of my colleagues. Eric Davis is one of my senior scientific advisors. He interviewed General Exon, who had been head of Wright Patterson Air Force Base, and so on, and also DuBose.

So he’s interviewed a couple of people that were involved back in those days, and they say it was the real deal, that this was a real unidentifiable crash and these materials were really, really from out someplace.

JOE ROGAN: And what did they say was done with the wreckage?

HAL PUTHOFF: That had been taken to Wright Patterson Air Force Base for analysis.

JOE ROGAN: And did anything come out of that analysis?

HAL PUTHOFF: Not that the public would hear about.

JOE ROGAN: Not that you can disclose.

HAL PUTHOFF: Not that I could disclose.

The Problem of Compartmentalization

JOE ROGAN: That’s where it gets frustrating. So there was.

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, I guess it gets frustrating even for. I mean, the compartmentalization in this area is really obscene. So you can have people sitting at this desk and someone else sitting in that chair, and they don’t have access. I can’t tell him what I’m working on. He can’t tell me what he’s working on.

So that’s, our going forward with this is very, very slow and not opportune, I would have to say. And of course, we have data. Can’t go into detail. We have data about crashes in other countries. So it’s really clear that we’re not the only ones on the planet. So that’s something to be concerned about.

Because, for example, here we have our capitalistic competition, aerospace corporations, electronics corporations, all being very hushed up and not sharing, which stifles innovation. Stifles innovation. Meanwhile, in China, you put all the labs on something like this and say, and by the way, don’t say anything outside that you’re not supposed to say, or, you know, you’re done. And so the competition that potentially could.

JOE ROGAN: They’re unhindered.

HAL PUTHOFF: So that’s part of what’s behind our not revealing what we’ve learned. Because there might be some aspect that we’ve learned which in principle you’d think, well, you could reveal, but it might be the missing piece that some potential adversary said, oh, that’s what we’ve been missing.

So I’m, so, even though, generally speaking, I’m of the feeling that there should be more disclosure, I’m also very tight on, you know, anything that could be potentially helpful to an adversary in this area, you know, we’re not going to reveal. That would be a mistake.

Why Do They Crash?

JOE ROGAN: So how do these things keep crashing if they’re so good? If they can get here from somewhere else, why do they slam into the desert?

HAL PUTHOFF: Some of them have just been left in the desert. Not crashed.

JOE ROGAN: Some of them.

HAL PUTHOFF: Some of them have just.

JOE ROGAN: I talked to Diana Pasulka about this.

HAL PUTHOFF: Oh, okay.

JOE ROGAN: And she refers to them as donations. She said that’s how they were described to her.

HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah. So, in fact, maybe some of them are donations to help us accelerate our forward motion. Or maybe they donate something here, something in China, something in Russia, and see who is best at moving forward just as part of their ISR evaluation of us.

I mean, let’s face it, we’ve had, as is known in the public, we’ve had UFOs come over our missile silos. One at Malmstrom Air Force Base that Salas has talked about. Bob Salas. They turned off all of our missiles. There’s no way it could be launched.

In Russia, there’s even a worse case. They started the launch sequence in Russia at a missile silo, nuclear missile silo. And the people at the location could not stop it, could not turn it off. So they thought, you know, World War 3 is about to start. Fortunately, it was turned off. So anyway, you’ve got two things.

JOE ROGAN: So whoever was doing that, whoever was manipulating it, turned it off.

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s right. So there’s a big question. There are two ways to look at that. They’re friendly and benign. And they just want us to know that if we get too frisky down here and think about having a nuclear war, they can stop us.

Or they might not be benign and the armada is on its way, and they just want to test that they can stop our use of nuclear weapons against them. So it’s from a security standpoint and from a DOD standpoint, from an intelligence community standpoint, you always have to have the worst scenario in your mind and see where you go.

The Security Nightmare

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, I would imagine from a security standpoint, it’s a nightmare because you’re not secure at all. If something can fly over your airspace and you can’t do anything about it and it can shut down your missiles or turn them on, you’re in a very strange situation.

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: Where you’re completely helpless, dependent upon the whim of these beings.

HAL PUTHOFF: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Or whatever their mandate is. Whatever they’re trying to do. What do you think they’re trying to do here?

HAL PUTHOFF: I have thoughts going in many directions in answer to that question, all the way from, well, they seeded us here millennia ago, and they’re just seeing how their petri dish is doing.

JOE ROGAN: Human beings the product of accelerated evolution.

HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah, something like that. But, I mean, it’s really hard to know. I mean, it may be that we’re a very special planet because we have all this water, which, generally speaking, is kind of rare. So, you know, maybe they’d like to slowly build up a connection with us so that they could take advantage of direct access to some of our resources. Don’t know.

By and large, interactions have not been what you might call negative. I mean, even when we shoot missiles at them or whatever. But there were a series of events in Colares Island in Brazil back in the 80s, I think it was. And as part of our program, we investigated that in some detail where over some long period, like weeks.

And the Brazilian Air Force got involved. They got thousand hours of film and they put a big Air Force group down there, and the UFOs were coming over and sending out beams that were actually harming people. That’s our one example that stands out of there being apparent episodes where UFOs there’s no way to interpret it but as negative.

So that makes you wonder. Well, you know, maybe there’s just one particular group of ufonauts that are negatively disposed, but the rest of them are okay or so anyway, that’s.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they’re probably just like humans in that regard.

HAL PUTHOFF: Right?

JOE ROGAN: There’s humans that are involved in scientific research expeditions. They go there not looking to do any harm at all. And then there’s humans that will go into an area where they’re looking to extract resources, and all they want to do is do that. And anything that gets in their way, you know, is casualties.

Recovered Non-Human Craft

HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah, exactly. So there’s a lot. I mean, it’s still a big area that needs a lot of look see. And interestingly enough, even though this had been a “tinfoil hat crowd” kind of thing up until around 2017, when that New York Times story came out, suddenly that really made a difference because the people that were coming on board that there’s something real here, were people like Senator Harry Reid and other senators and so on.

And so that’s sort of broken open that, okay, there really is something here. And so as a result of that, that’s how some of these programs have gotten pushed forward and reignited.

JOE ROGAN: How many of these crashed crafts do you estimate there are that human beings have recovered?

HAL PUTHOFF: More than 10.

JOE ROGAN: More than 10.

HAL PUTHOFF: More than 10.

JOE ROGAN: How many of them are in possession of people in the United States?

HAL PUTHOFF: I meant more than 10 in possession of the United States.

JOE ROGAN: What about worldwide?

HAL PUTHOFF: Worldwide.

JOE ROGAN: Do we have any data on that?

HAL PUTHOFF: We have data, but it’s classified. There’s no way to really talk about it.

JOE ROGAN: So there’s more, though. You could safely say it’s not just the ones in the United States.

HAL PUTHOFF: Not just the ones in the United States.

JOE ROGAN: Are they equally distributed?

HAL PUTHOFF: Actually, I don’t know for sure. In terms of data, I mean, we have our best data, of course, on our own retrievals, but more than 10.

JOE ROGAN: Retrieved in the United States.

HAL PUTHOFF: More than 10.

The Bob Lazar Enigma

JOE ROGAN: What is your take on Bob Lazar?

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, we looked into the Bob Lazar story and, but only from a certain relatively superficial level. We looked at, well, we found out what his clearance levels supposedly were and so on, which came back saying it was not high enough to be doing what he says he was doing.

On the other hand, it may just simply be, yeah, it was better than that, but we didn’t have the access to see that. So when I hear his physics descriptions, it’s a puzzle. It seems not exactly as I would anticipate might be the technology behind the craft, but I can’t absolutely write them off.

So it’s just, it’s an enigma and I don’t have any hard data to prove one way or the other. So it’s, I know you’ve talked to them.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s a fascinating puzzle.

HAL PUTHOFF: It is a fascinating puzzle.

JOE ROGAN: That would be the place. S4 would be the place where they would do that kind of work if you wanted to do something like that in complete privacy and secrecy. You do it in the middle of the Nevada desert, very protected.

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: Outside of Area 51.

HAL PUTHOFF: So even when people that have high clearances go and say, “Well, tell me about this, what’s behind this? Who knows?” If it’s a special access program, an SAP, it might be, “No, we’re going to tell you that he didn’t do anything of significance here.” In fact, he might have done something of significance. There’s just no way of telling from the outside.

Element 115 and Anti-Gravity Technology

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So the actual generator, the thing that powers the craft that Lazar talked about, what was your take on that? This idea that it was element 115, that when it encounters high radiation it has some sort of an anti-gravitational effect, some warp effect?

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, there are two aspects. One is what is the material or mechanisms that generate the effects. Then the other is, are the effects being described reasonable descriptions of the kind of effects you think are associated with such craft?

On the element 115, as you know, in the general scientific community, we finally, we’ve seen element 115, but it’s very short lived, so it’s hard to evaluate. And at this point there’s no evidence that that’s it.

JOE ROGAN: So we should explain to people it was theoretical at one point until they detected it using, was it a large hadron collider or another particle collider?

HAL PUTHOFF: Right now I think it was a particle collider in the Soviet Union.

JOE ROGAN: Or in Russia, and it’s very short lasting. But the idea is that what Lazar was in possession of or what the craft was powered by was some sort of a stable version of element 115.

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s what he says. So in general, it was known and predicted that there was an “island of stability,” as we call it, on some of these higher elements in the periodic table that are beyond uranium and so on, but really no data predicted as to what their lifetimes would be.

Element 115 is in that bunch. And when he first discussed it, it hadn’t been seen yet.

JOE ROGAN: This is way back in 1985.

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s right. But eventually that element was detected, although the version of it that was detected had a very short lifetime. But of course there may be some other isotope of that element that could have a long lifetime, who knows? So it’s just hard to evaluate. So it sits in my gray box, as I say.

But his description of the anti-gravity effects and so on, that’s an area that is well described as what you might expect.

Space-Time Metric Engineering

As it turns out, in that series of 38 papers, one of my own papers that I provided was one called “Space-Time Metric Engineering.” And when the pilots came to me and said, “Drops down, takes off, right angle turn at Mach 10,” this is way beyond our physics. And I said earlier, no, I think it’s not beyond our physics, beyond our engineering.

But what I did on the physics level was, all of our electronics that we have here, for example, this microphone, the recording that you’re making, and so on, it’s all based on electromagnetic kinds of technologies, all of which come out of Maxwell’s Equations. Maxwell’s Equations, Clerk Maxwell, way back in the 1800s developed the equations for electromagnetism and basically any kind of electromagnetic device, you name it, Wi-Fi, whatever, can be traced back to this equation.

So what I said to myself was, okay, we have these apparent craft operating with this unbelievable kinds of activity. Is there any way to account for that in our physics? Well, it turns out, so what I did, I took a sheet of paper. On the left hand side of the paper, I wrote down all the weird effects that have been claimed. Right angle turn at Mach 10. I got close to the craft and suddenly it wasn’t the same size as it seemed to be when I was further away. It was a certain color, but when I got close to it, it was a different color. All these weird things.

To me, the weirder the better. Because if somebody was just making up a BS story, they want it to sound rational so you don’t come up with things like, “Well, I got in the craft, five minutes went by, I came out and two hours had gone by.” I mean, you’re just not going to make that up.

Then on the right hand side of the piece of paper I said, okay, we have Einstein’s equations in general relativity and we use them to talk about black hole mergers or neutron star mergers or whatever. And all these things are massively energetic events. Suppose I could engineer Einstein’s equations the way we engineer Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetic effect. What would I expect to see?

And I find out I got a hand in glove match between what was claiming to be observed and what Einstein’s equation, if you could engineer them. Well, why can’t we engineer them? Well, at least what we know today is the energy density required to engineer those equations. And it’s just way beyond our ability to do so.

JOE ROGAN: Can you give me a comparison to what the energy requirements or something like that would be like?

HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah, people have, in fact, Alcubierre warp drive, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, but Miguel Alcubierre is a researcher in general relativity and kind of a Star Trek fan and so on. He said, “I wonder if we could really have warp drive.”

And so he used Einstein’s equations to say, okay, under what conditions could we do a warp drive? And he actually came up with solutions from out of the equations. Okay, what would it take to drive that? Oh, it would be hundreds of times more than the energy of the sun. I mean, out of sight energy.

So until we have a new energy source or until there’s some back door that we haven’t sewered in on, it’s just really outside of our expertise to think of any.

JOE ROGAN: There could be conceivably some breakthrough in an understanding of this backdoor, whatever, it could be some new type of science themselves, new kind of understanding.

Vacuum Energy and Quantum Fluctuations

HAL PUTHOFF: And one of the things that I’ve looked into myself is, well, what about vacuum energy, so called. As a quantum physicist, we all know that you push a kid in a swing and it comes down and stops. But at the quantum level, you get something going, it doesn’t stop. It always comes down to a certain level and it just, it’s still there.

So it turns out that what we call empty space is not really empty. It’s full of quantum fluctuations. And in fact, one of the difficulties of modern physics theory is that when we go by using our standard quantum theory to calculate, well, what’s the energy density like right here or way out in empty space, what’s the energy density of those quantum fluctuations? It’s 120 orders of magnitude greater than could possibly be according to all of our other theories. I mean, it would collapse gravity and everything else.

So we have this conundrum that that energy that is everywhere, somehow all is random and cancels out. So it’s just not having an effect. So the idea is if you could somehow access that energy and cohere it, so to speak, maybe you could get to the energy.

What would that look like? Well, if I go off on a weird tangent, I could tell you what it might look like. Along the way in the remote viewing program, where we’re kind of looking at physical effects, decided to take a look at so called levitating saints.

And so you think, okay, well, that’s just, that’s a Catholic church trying to pretend that it’s got these magical people and whatever, whatever. But when you dig into the data, you find that isn’t it. It’s that the church hated the idea that some individuals were levitating because they might be in the middle of giving mass and suddenly they float up or whatever.

So it turns out that even looking in the deep literature of the Inquisition and so on, the evidence is really solid that there have been levitating saints. And what the Catholic Church usually did is they squirreled them off into some monastery where nobody would see them.

The Case of Levitating Saints

JOE ROGAN: When you say levitating, what do you mean? How far off the ground sometimes?

HAL PUTHOFF: Jamie’s got something here.

JOE ROGAN: “Notable example happened during a visit to Italy from the Spanish ambassador. The ambassador had visited Joseph in his monastic cell and was so impressed that he wanted to return with his wife. Joseph entered the church where the couple hoped to meet him, and upon seeing the statue of Mary elevated 10 feet into the air, flew over the crowd to the statue, prayed, flew back to the door, and returned home. The church later took depositions from a number of people who were there that day, and their stories were consistent.” What year was this? 1628.

HAL PUTHOFF: 1628. So there are enough stories like that with lots of observers and reporting under really excellent conditions. Okay, now that guy didn’t have a nuclear power pack on his back. So how did that happen?

Well, the only thing I can think of in terms of the physics we know today would be that somehow the vacuum energy, which can be very high, if you cohered it and if you made it non-random, maybe that could do it.

JOE ROGAN: So perhaps he was able to access this with states of consciousness because he was so devout in his faith that upon seeing this, the experience was so overwhelming that he was somehow able to access this energy.

HAL PUTHOFF: Right. And that ecstatic state.

JOE ROGAN: But it would take this extreme belief, this extreme commitment, this state of mind. That’s very rare.

HAL PUTHOFF: Exactly. That’s what it would take.

JOE ROGAN: And you would follow that when you did the experiments with the quantum chip, you would say, well, if someone’s able to control oscillations, you’re doing something with your mind that shouldn’t be possible. And you’re affecting a physical thing that shouldn’t be possible.

And this is just someone who’d never thought of doing that before, someone who didn’t know that they were going. This is a physical manifestation of the power of whatever unknown ability of the human mind.

HAL PUTHOFF: So since it’s unknown, there’s no way we would know how to tap it. Right.

The Physics of Consciousness and Energy

JOE ROGAN: And if these are very unique moments where this is an extremely devout person who obviously was a monk, was probably meditating and achieving this insane state of consciousness that’s almost impossible to get to unless you’re committed as long as he was, unless you’re as dedicated as he was. And then he has this overwhelming moment.

HAL PUTHOFF: Right. And I have no way to connect the physics to it.

JOE ROGAN: But the idea is that if there is energy that’s allowing a person using their mind to do this, that somehow or another, if this energy could be accessed through science, through physics, through engineering.

HAL PUTHOFF: We tried to look into that. For example, Andrei Sakharov, a very famous Soviet physicist, said, “You know, I don’t think gravity is its own thing. I think really it’s a manifestation of the underlying quantum fluctuations.” And so I and some colleagues from Lockheed Martin and elsewhere kind of looked into that option.

And, you know, if we’re just sitting here talking and so on, you know, universe is full of quantum fluctuations. Why don’t I notice it? On the other hand, if you get into your fast moving car and you suddenly take off, you’re pressed back in your seat. Well, what is it that’s pressing you back? I mean, it isn’t the wind. You’ve got a windshield and a cover.

Well, there’s some modeling that says, well, maybe it’s because if you try to accelerate through the vacuum fluctuations, it will push back on you. So that might be our first little touch that, okay, under conditions of acceleration, we do notice the background fluctuations. Well, it says to a theorist, inertia and gravity are connected somehow. Then it makes you think, okay, well, maybe there’s some way of accessing vacuum fluctuations to control gravity. That’s what we would like to think.

And so one of the things we did in the program was just collect every bit of data that we could. So, for example, when I went through my analysis of, well, if we could engineer general relativity, what we’d expect to see, a number of things came out of it.

So, for example, in this room, most of the electromagnetic energy we don’t see—it’s in the form of heat, and we don’t see heat. You know, if you get an infrared detector, you can see it, but we don’t see heat. Well, it turns out that under the conditions in which you’re controlling gravity, the way these craft appear to be doing, one of the consequences, and one of the attributes that goes along with it is that frequencies get raised.

And so the heat of a craft that you ordinarily wouldn’t see can get raised up into the visible spectrum, and so that’s why they might look so bright. It also has certain other additional consequences. That is, if it’s powered up and it’s sitting there on the ground and you get too close, the ordinary heat spectrum, which isn’t harmful, or the visible spectrum, which isn’t harmful, can be shifted up frequency into the ultraviolet and soft X-ray.

So if you get too close to a landing craft that’s powered up, you might get a sunburn, which is one of the things that has been reported, or you might actually, in fact, get radiation poisoning from X-rays and so on. So those kinds of things seem to go hand in hand and give us some clues of where to look.

The Travis Walton Case

JOE ROGAN: What’s your take on the Travis Walton story?

HAL PUTHOFF: I think the Travis Walton story is right on. I think that’s a solid story. I don’t have any—I have a bobblehead. It’s a Travis bobblehead.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yes. Okay.

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s him. He gave it to me.

JOE ROGAN: I see. Okay.

HAL PUTHOFF: No, I think all aspects that I’ve seen of his story, I take that.

JOE ROGAN: For people that don’t know the story, I’ll give you a brief synopsis or brief breakdown of what it was. They’re loggers. They’re driving through Arizona. They see this craft moving through the sky, and it goes into the woods. Travis gets out of the truck, runs towards it, gets too close to it and is hit with some sort of a beam, flies back, falls down.

The other guys panic. They take off in the truck. And as they’re taking off, they’re arguing that they need to go back and get him, we need to go help him. We need to go back and get him. They’re all freaked out. They decide, yeah, we got to go back. So they turn around and he’s gone. They get back to the spot, the craft is gone. Travis is gone. They reported. Everyone’s freaking out. No one knows. They suspect they might have killed him or something.

Five days later, Travis appears wearing the same clothes, looking none the worse for wear, with this fantastic story that they took him aboard this craft and they communicated with him and fixed his body, that something happened to him. Upon the impact of whatever that ray was that hit him, that he was going to die, they repaired him and they communicated with him and brought him back. Five days later, he has the story. And he’s had the same story for decades.

HAL PUTHOFF: And one of the reasons I accept that story is that, for example, the other people who left the site and then went back, they eventually did polygraphs on them and they passed the polygraphs. I mean, they weren’t making up that story.

JOE ROGAN: Polygraphs are manipulatable. You can manipulate polygraphs.

HAL PUTHOFF: You can. But would I expect that some unsophisticated loggers would do it, particularly—

JOE ROGAN: One of the guys didn’t even like Travis. One of the guys, Travis got into a fist fight with the actual day of the event.

HAL PUTHOFF: Oh my.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and he also told the exact same story, right?

HAL PUTHOFF: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So there was a lot going on with that one. And then there had been frequent sightings in that one particular area, which is also weird. Like what is it about certain areas? I mean, there’s the area that you discussed in Australia. Well, that would kind of make sense if there really is a base somewhere, you know.

And the real thought that keeps getting brought about in the zeitgeist is the ocean. That’s what people bring up all the time. If you wanted to hide in plain sight, where would you hide? Well, you hide in three quarters of the earth’s surface that we very rarely examined.

Underwater UAP Activity

HAL PUTHOFF: And the observation of UFOs coming up, non-human intelligence craft coming up out of the ocean, they’re all over the place. So Tim Gallaudet, who’s ex-Navy admiral, who was in charge of NOAA, the National Oceanographic whatever it’s called, he’s really big on the idea of collecting data about UFOs emerging from the water.

And so it seems like the data on that is just all over the place. Also observing UFOs in the water, zooming by submarines at 400 knots, 500 knots or whatever without any cavitation. I mean, it’s just—so the data, we’re buried in data really, we’re just not buried in how to explain it.

JOE ROGAN: Have any of these remote viewers tried to look at the bottom of the ocean?

HAL PUTHOFF: Not that I’m aware of. Why wouldn’t—now remote viewers have zeroed in on UFOs, although it turns out not at the bottom of the ocean. Let me give you an example. But we should probably do that. I mean, since now these days I’m not involved in the remote viewing programs. So maybe there are some.

JOE ROGAN: But there are remote viewing programs that are still going on right now.

HAL PUTHOFF: I would say that’s likely. I mean you have an asset that works to some degree.

JOE ROGAN: Even though it’s dismissed publicly.

HAL PUTHOFF: Even though it’s dismissed publicly. So even after the SRI program got shut down, after I came out to Austin in what, ’85 to set up EarthTech International and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, starting to pursue my physics stuff because I really wanted to pursue my physics. I didn’t want to stay in looking at remote viewing forever.

But I got calls from certain intelligence agency asking me if I’d be willing to set up another program in remote viewing. And so I figured, okay, I turned them down because I liked the change I had made. So if they asked me that, chances are they asked somebody else that and they probably got somebody to agree to do it.

And from time to time many of the remote viewers that we trained in Army INSCOM, for example, have now retired from the army and they’re teaching remote viewing classes and they often get tasked by somebody back in the intelligence community to check out something. I mean they’ve been very prolific in for example detecting say cargo ships coming across the ocean where certain containers full of dope—really that’s been released on CIA site about remote viewing results.

And so you can find it. Of course I tell any remote viewers, I know you don’t want to advertise that because you don’t want cartels on your back. So.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but what I’m interested in is the possibility of things under the ocean. And I would imagine if I was running a remote viewing program and I had suspicions that there’s activity under the ocean like that craft that was seen that goes 500 knots under the water, that I would start looking under there.

HAL PUTHOFF: I can well imagine that somebody is. But you’re just not aware of anything. I’m just not aware of it.

JOE ROGAN: But there’s this structure that exists off the coast of California at the bottom of the ocean that looks very odd, it looks very constructed, it looks man-made or intelligent in its construction. And I was just looking at something on Google Earth the other day where people are having a hard time finding it now and they’re thinking that it’s perhaps obscured.

HAL PUTHOFF: Obscured, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: See if you can find that.

HAL PUTHOFF: Because I know what you’re talking about. You saw it as well? I saw it as well and it was certainly interesting.

JOE ROGAN: It looked very weird. You know, it looked like some sort of a base. It was flat on the top and it looked like it had openings in it.

HAL PUTHOFF: See, I lost your sound. Is there?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, you did? Jamie, maybe it’s your headphones or did you step on something? You hear me now?

HAL PUTHOFF: No, I mean I just hear you through the air, but not.

JOE ROGAN: We’re going to take a break right now because I got to use the restroom anyway and Jamie will fix it and we’ll be right back.

Advanced Technology and Back Engineering

JOE ROGAN: Had a little tactical snafu. Use the restroom and we’re back. So I forget exactly where we’re at, but I know where I wanted to go. Where I wanted to go is we’re talking about potential sources of energy, potential sources of propulsion systems. How much do you consider the possibility that the things that people are seeing are ours? They’re made in some top secret program using some advanced propulsion system, some advanced energy system that is not publicly disclosed?

HAL PUTHOFF: I wouldn’t rule out the fact that we may have some pretty fancy things running from our own labs. I know that what gets developed in the dark labs, some of which I know about, are really advanced. But it just can’t cover the whole observation that we’re seeing with what we call NHI craft, non-human intelligence craft.

JOE ROGAN: But do you think that some of this stuff has been back engineered from these non-human crafts?

HAL PUTHOFF: Some of the materials? I would say yes. I think we’ve got some. I mean there’s—it’s out on the web these days that for example, Battelle Institute has supposedly were given some materials from the Roswell crash. And we always hear the descriptions of this foil that you could crumple up and then you let go and it just flattens out again and so on.

So material of that type was provided to Battelle and they worked on it for some years to try to see if they could reproduce it. And the claim is that, and it’s in the public domain that Nitinol came out of it, which is that material that can be heated and then it’ll reform into its original source. It doesn’t exactly reproduce the effect you saw, but some of it is kind of in the direction of that.

It turned out that some of the main material engineers that worked on that at their deathbed, they told their relatives that they were working on pieces from the Roswell crash and they made some progress, but not a lot. You can look that up on the Internet and see that that’s the case.

JOE ROGAN: Is part of the limitation this thing that we were discussing earlier about compartmentalization and the lack of ability of other scientists to get access to this material so they can collaborate?

HAL PUTHOFF: Yes. The compartmentalization, I would say, is the biggest impediment to making really good progress, for sure. I think that’s the case.

JOE ROGAN: And this conundrum has sort of existed for quite a long time.

HAL PUTHOFF: Quite a long time. Decades.

JOE ROGAN: This is something—

HAL PUTHOFF: Decades.

Bob Lazar’s Compartmentalization Concerns

JOE ROGAN: Also in line with what Bob Lazar said. Bob Lazar said the big frustration when he was working, he was tasked with trying to figure out the propulsion system, but he had no access to the metallurgists. He had no access to anyone else that was also working on similar things. And he’s like, science just can’t progress this way. It needs to be collaborative.

HAL PUTHOFF: Absolutely right. That’s 100%. And it’s even worse than you would think. I mean, one of the stories that I ran into was a corporation had materials from crashes in their basement. They couldn’t even bring them up to the top floor for their own scientists to look at because it was so compartmentalized.

And so that was part of the deal where we said, “Okay, well, give them to us and then we’ll come in the front door and give them to your scientists, and we won’t say it came from your basement and we won’t say what it had to do with.” And, you know, maybe that would work, but that got shut down.

So it was so compartmentalized. Compartmentalization is really a death knell on much of this stuff. As I say, as I go back to my Teller story, more collaboration. Even though there are faults that can happen and material can leak out and information can leak out, and that might help an adversary, still, I think more openness would be a better idea.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, for sure. Well, definitely. For you and I, who are fascinated by this thing, have you had a personal experience with anything that you can’t explain?

HAL PUTHOFF: No, actually haven’t.

JOE ROGAN: So for you it’s not—

HAL PUTHOFF: I mean, one time I saw what appeared to be a satellite make a right angle turn. So that falls into that kind of a category. But who knows? Who knows what it was?

JOE ROGAN: Right. So, no, nothing profound.

HAL PUTHOFF: Nothing profound.

JOE ROGAN: So you’ve never been hopped in a jet and flown to the wreckage and had a chance to look at things?

HAL PUTHOFF: No, haven’t.

JOE ROGAN: Don’t you want to?

Quantum Communications Research

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, I sure would like to do that, but that’s still—we had this discussion earlier about, for example, remote viewing or quantum entanglement or what’s going on in our physics that we don’t understand. These kinds of things can be happening.

And you’ll be interested to know that someone you know, John Paul DeJoria and I are in partnership to explore a new means of communication, quantum communications. And so I’m actually now at this point, directly involved in a program to examine quantum communications.

And so it turns out that whereas ordinary electromagnetic communications can’t get through barriers, metal door or whatever. Well, why is that? It’s because the electromagnetic signal, when it gets to the metal door, the electric and magnetic field generate counteracting effects, and so the signal can’t get through.

So it turned out that some years ago, when I was digging around to try to find out how to explain unusual effects, I dug deeper into electromagnetism, down into the quantum levels, and recognized that there are some additional quantum processes where you could end up suppressing the electric and magnetic fields, but you would still have a quantum signal which in principle could get through barriers.

And so that would mean, okay, if that’s the case, and you could communicate to submarines. So whereas the salt water is sufficiently conductive, an electromagnetic signal can’t get down there and communicate. If you are able to pull out the electric and magnetic components, but you still have an underlying quantum aspect to it, you could get through.

Or same thing with spaceships. When our spaceships came back from when the Apollo spaceships came back, once they started in our atmosphere and are surrounded by plasma, we have this period where there’s no communication. Well, for the very reason that electromagnetic signals can’t get through charged plasmas. But this quantum communication aspect could.

JOE ROGAN: What would you use to—how would you encode the information quantumly and how would you project it? What kind of machinery would be involved in something like that?

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, it turns out that the machinery to generate the signals would be very explicitly designed antenna structures that are put together in such a way as to prevent electromagnetic components from being transmitted.

It’s the detection part where the secret to the technology is, because it turns out that, okay, if electromagnetic signals aren’t there, how are you going to detect such a signal? Because all of our detectors are, you know, electromagnetic signal comes in and generates a current and whatever.

Well, it turns out that this special kinds of signaling at the quantum level can only be detected by quantum devices. Quantum devices can detect these quantum communication signals even if there’s no electric and magnetic effects associated with them. So that’s what we’re looking at.

Quantum Consciousness and Microtubules

And so when I think about, okay, well, what areas does this have application for? Well, of course, it’s got a lot of application for things like communication and under conditions where you’d like to overcome shielding. But it may have something to do even with some of the consciousness stuff, because ordinarily, you know, when you hear about people trying to think, well, what about consciousness? Is it still just all molecules and neurons whirling around, or are there some additional fields?

There are a couple of physicists, well, the physicists and anesthesiologists. The physicist Roger Penrose, he got a Nobel prize for general relativity stuff, and Stu Hameroff, who is an anesthesiologist, they coupled up and started saying, “Okay, is there a possibility that there are quantum aspects in ordinary life, in ordinary consciousness?” Because sounds kind of reasonable.

The anesthesiologist says, “Well, when I give somebody a certain anesthetic, they lose consciousness. So there must be something about the anesthesia that grabs onto whatever’s responsible for consciousness.”

So make long story short, they came up with a model where they felt that there are in fact quantum processes occurring within the brain that in addition to the stuff we all read about, know about like neurons and all that kind of stuff, there’s also a distribution throughout our brain and nervous system of what’s called microtubules.

And turns out microtubules have such a structure. You do experiments in lab to show this, that they can detect quantum signals. So the idea that even in our consciousness there are mechanisms for detecting quantum signals is like a whole new area to investigate.

And so there are some biological and consciousness oriented experimenters that are taking a look at this idea that, okay, instead of just saying quantum entanglement, that’s how quantum information you get from here to there, maybe we can actually find out, okay, well what’s the mechanism though? And so this is a whole new area.

It turns out that I developed proof of principle for this sub-quantum communication stuff on a classified contract back in the 90s, actually. So I got proof of principle in that situation. However you say, “Okay, well if you got proof of principle, then why aren’t we using it? Why isn’t it all over the place?”

Well, it turned out that quantum detection, quantum detectors were very new kinds of circuitry, nothing ready for prime time. So I put that whole thing on the shelf, let it sit there for a while.

And now because of quantum computing, it turns out a lot of research effort is going to develop cryogenic circuitry near absolute zero to be used in quantum computing. So I said, “Okay, they got these Josephson junctions working, which is exactly what I want to use for my detection scheme.”

And so if I find time, I decide to take it off the shelf. So I approached JP and showed him what the potential was not only in just communications, but maybe it has implications for biological things or medical things or whatever because of this other work on microtubules.

So he said, “Okay, well, let’s go for it.” So we have another major lab that is actually putting together circuitry that operates about 3.7 degrees above absolute zero. I mean, this is really quite a technical challenge, but he and I are working in that together. He’s my collaborator.

Quantum Entanglement and the Algae Experiment

JOE ROGAN: Fascinating. Quantum entanglement. Is that what you think was going on with the algae? So if you were able to do something to the algae in one area, this same colony of algae, when you had separated by long distances, they instantaneously recognized that something was happening.

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s the only thing I can imagine at this point, based on the physics that we know.

JOE ROGAN: How far were they separated in distance?

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, I was going to separate it. It was about five miles, as it turns out. I never actually got to do that experiment because the CIA came and scooped me up and said, “Well, we got to look at this remote viewing.”

And so even though I proposed doing the experiment, the polygraph guy said this would be a great experiment. Never got around to doing the experiment because along the way Ingo Swann visited his lab, came out and perturbed the tiny quantum chip in the super shielded environment that brought the CIA on my doorstep. And so then we went off in that direction. So I never got to do the experiment.

The Case for Disclosure and Amnesty

JOE ROGAN: So as you consider all these technologies, as these innovations occur and technology becomes more and more powerful, like quantum computing, like many of these things that we’re seeing now, do you think that these are all steps to further understand how these crafts could possibly work?

And we’re getting closer and closer to it where disclosure would accelerate that. And we would have to get over this. We’d have to get, we’d have to have some sort of amnesty. Amnesty towards the people that misappropriated funds and lied to Congress. Amnesty towards whatever defense contractors were given access to this equipment or these materials and other ones.

There has to be some executive decision that’s made where like look, for the greater good of the human race, we have to bypass all of these blockades that are involved in us being able to truly understand what’s going on here. And one of them is we have to have disclosure.

The Path to Disclosure

HAL PUTHOFF: Yes, exactly. And in fact, we’re not alone in thinking that way, as you may, as many in the field are aware of. In 2023, then majority leader, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and a Republican Senator Rounds got together and they put together an outline of an amendment to be attached to the National Defense Authorization Act called UAP Disclosure Act 2023.

And it’s pages and pages long and it’s hard to believe, but within this document they outline how you would go through disclosure. And it’s very detailed. I mean, for example, this is an official government document. You can go find it on the Internet. “Non-human intelligence” phrase is mentioned more than 20 times.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

HAL PUTHOFF: And the document said, look, what we need is a presidential panel, president officiated panel of people from several different areas who—and all those people out there who have materials and so on—we’re going to practice eminent domain, which turns out to be one of the things that turns people’s hair on fire when they think they’ve got something and don’t want to share it.

But anyway, that we have to come up with a process whereby corporations have been involved in this, can begin to share their history and their data and their materials. And the National Archives will be set up to make this information available as is safe to do considering security concerns.

And so this is a multi-page document that you can find on the Internet. Okay, it passed the Senate, but the House killed it. So you might think, okay, well, that’s the end of that. Surprisingly so. And it makes you realize the intensity of this.

After it was killed, both Schumer and Rounds got back up on the Senate floor and said, okay, it got killed, but we’re not giving up, going to get it in there next year. And so the following year, 2024, they included it again and most of it got killed.

The only thing that got through was, okay, the National Archives will make available whatever information is provided them on this subject area. And the National Archives has started to do that. But as you can imagine, anybody who’s got some really juicy stuff isn’t going to give it to the National Archives. So that’s—it’s still dead in the water.

So anyway, recently I was asked to come in and brief Senator Rounds, who was one of the two people who pushed this. And he said, “We’re not giving up on this. Give me what you found so far about the physics of this. Because when we try to push it, we always get the pushback that, well, you know, we’re not going to make any headway. The pilots say this is way beyond our physics. But I understand that you and your colleagues have worked on this and felt that you can provide some of the physics. We may not get the engineering yet, but we have someplace to start. Is that true? Because I need to push back on the pushback.”

So I gave him a long lecture on the physics, which I’ve also presented to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Armed Services Committee, Arrow, the old Domain Anomalies Resolution Office. So the information is coming out into those places.

And so there are those people in high positions of power in our Congress who are really pushing it. So, for example, as it turns out, tomorrow there’s going to be a big meeting. I think it was set up by Representative Luna, or I think it’s Representative Luna, you know, when they put out that official document saying, okay, JFK files are coming out, RFK files are coming out, MLK files are coming out. In that list, UFO files are coming out.

Well, they haven’t gotten there. The Epstein files are coming out. Okay, so it’s officially on that list. As it turns out, tomorrow, there’s going to be a big thing in Congress where they’re going to have an open hearing with people coming forward to talk about if there should be some release of some steps forward to release this kind of data.

So it is not a dead issue. I mean, it is hot and there are a lot of really powerful people behind it. But you’ve got the resistance buried. I mean, there are people within the intelligence community and the DoD who do think we need more openness. They see the same issues I see that we’re not making much progress because everything is so compartmentalized.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

HAL PUTHOFF: So is there a concern? It’s an ongoing thing.

National Security Concerns

JOE ROGAN: When you talked about, during the Bush administration, you were tasked along with others, to try to figure out what are the pros and what are the cons and what outweighs what. And your group decided that the cons outweighed the pros when it comes to disclosure.

Today with the risk of espionage and with the risk of this information if it becomes disclosed and everybody has access to it—clearly, if it’s disclosed to the general public, it’s also going to be disclosed to our enemies. And so this becomes an issue of national security.

HAL PUTHOFF: Yes. So it’s got to be done correctly.

JOE ROGAN: How would one do that?

HAL PUTHOFF: Well, this write up that Schumer and Rounds and some other people, Gillibrand and Rubio, put together said, okay, we’re going to have to lay everything out on the table at a highly classified area. We’re going to have to sort our way through of what can be released that doesn’t take the chance of giving our potential adversaries data they need to leap ahead of us.

But nonetheless, we’ve got to have more collaboration so that we can move ahead faster. So that’s the job of, at least in that document, of a nine-person panel, to figure out, okay, what could be released without jeopardizing our national security so much, but nonetheless accelerating the kind of collaboration we need to make headway faster.

JOE ROGAN: And then there’s the issue of when it does get disclosed, like what happens to the general public’s perception if this is like a national disclosure. If the president, if Trump gets on television and discloses everything we know so far—we are in possession of 10 vehicles, however you want to call them, of non-human intelligence, that are not ours.

We have been working on this for decades in secrecy, but because of the fact that everything has been so secret and everything so compartmentalized, innovation has been stagnant. Our understanding of it has been stagnant. The only way forward is to disclose. But this is going to come with a radical reimagining of our place in the universe.

HAL PUTHOFF: What you’ve just described is what I think has to happen. I mean, because you have whistleblowers like Dave Grusch coming forward and he basically says, “We’ve got craft, we’ve got bodies, we’ve got aerospace corporations working on this behind the scenes.”

But in the end, that doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t really solve the problem. And you have people come forward and said, look, I can give you the address of where the stuff is stored so we can take this out of the discussion area and really prove something. But it would take, I think, a presidential executive order or something to light a fire under that process to have it happen.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s all possible.

HAL PUTHOFF: It’s all possible. And when I compare, you know, where are we today as compared to where we were in 2004 or whenever that other disclosure discussion took place. At that time, there was a lot of stigma. There was no proof you could kind of put your hands on. There was in fact purposely designed misinformation by the intelligence community.

So-called Robertson panel went out of their way to say this is all nonsense. So that was something you’re dealing with. So there you realize, well, if I come forward and say there’s really something to this, I’m really blasting through quite a brick wall here.

But in the intervening decades, I think we’ve gotten to a point where the reasons we had to not do it then are no longer applicable. But some of the concerns we had discussed then are still applicable and have to be—we have to pay attention to them.

So I think, for example, this film that you saw that had its premiere at South by Southwest that Dan Farah put out, and upcoming book coming out by Jay Stratton, who was in charge of the UAP task force, these kind of things are going to accelerate that option.

And so I think it’s only a matter—I mean, I would find it difficult to believe that within a decade we’re not going to figure out how to do this and that there will be what you and I would call disclosure, but in a responsible way where we’re not providing the enemy information they need.

I mean, I recall when the DoD program was set up out of DIA, they said, well, we need to investigate this to find out whose craft there are, how do they run, and whatever. And then the second reason was, what if our potential adversaries get access or figure this out from their data collection before we do and they leap ahead of us?

So it turned out that whole program was not based on—they couldn’t care less where these things were coming from, what their intentions were. They were really worried about the possibility of an adversary getting ahead of us. So that was the driving force behind the whole program.

Well, now having all these intervening years go by and, you know, there hasn’t been any obvious super breakthrough by adversaries, I think now is the time we could have a kind of a reconciliation process, make sure we don’t put everybody in jail that had anything to do with covering this up, provide proper lanes to bring various aspects of information forward. And so that’s what I and colleagues that I interact with are trying to do today.

The Changing Zeitgeist

JOE ROGAN: I would also think that if I was looking at civilization, particularly United States civilization, and thinking, what kind of an impact would things have in 2004 with disclosure and what kind of an impact would they have in 2025? I think that this gradual acceptance and this understanding that this is probably a real phenomenon is much more widespread today.

So the concept of it, it wouldn’t be as shocking as it would have been two decades ago. You know, two decades ago, by the way, is when the Tic Tac vehicle was observed.

HAL PUTHOFF: 2004. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Which is really kind of crazy when you think about the technology that was required to do something and then imagine that technology being ours in 2004. It seems preposterous. It seems almost outside of the realm of even whatever top secret programs could have been running, some black programs could have been running. That seems too much.

HAL PUTHOFF: It is too much, it seems too crazy.

JOE ROGAN: So I think a big breakthrough—and I think you probably agree—the New York Times, that 2017 report in the New York Times was huge. Because here it is in the most prestigious newspaper in the United States, in the world, right. And it’s saying, look, there’s real things happening here.

And these real people who are at a very high level who are talking about these things, whether it’s Commander Fravor or Ryan Graves or all these different fighter pilots that have encountered these things that are just doing something that is beyond explanation. This is more in the Zeitgeist now.

HAL PUTHOFF: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And the more you have people like James Fox and Jeremy Corbell and these documentaries that get out, more and more of an understanding and appreciation of the fact that these aren’t kooks, these are real people. And we need to take into consideration the very obvious possibility that we are not unique.

There’s too many planets, there’s too many solar systems, there’s too many galaxies and then dimensions and then just the potential. Like what do we look like in a million years? What do we look like in a million years? And if we existed in this form for hundreds of thousands of years, it’s not inconceivable that a species like us could keep going with its innovative trajectory and achieve some state a million years from now that is just beyond our imagination currently and that we might be experiencing that.

HAL PUTHOFF: Right. I think you have laid out an exact map of the real situation and what the future probably holds for us. And the fact that now’s the time, sooner rather than later, to begin to have this become part of our total philosophical fabric, to face into this and to accept the reality of non-human intelligences, for example, and recognize that our own technical development is moving so fast, that the kind of things that we find to be so mysterious are pretty much likely in our not that far off future.

Quantum Leaps

JOE ROGAN: Or just what we see with the leaps that quantum computing is able to achieve. Equations that would take standard computing billions of years, it could do it in four minutes.

HAL PUTHOFF: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: You hear that and you go, what are you even saying?

HAL PUTHOFF: That’s right. In fact, my son this morning brought up that article and you know, it’s kind of unbelievable.

JOE ROGAN: It’s unbelievable and it’s real. It’s unbelievable and it’s real and it’s happening right now. And then just imagine taking that 50 years. Yes, 50 years ago. That was science fiction, complete science fiction.

The Challenge of Reverse Engineering

HAL PUTHOFF: I mean, I love my example of—in fact, I got it into the New York Times article. Suppose you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage door opener. What could he do?

Well, first of all, plastic—he doesn’t know what plastic is. Secondly, when he opens it up and sees all these little tiny things, he’d never heard of electromagnetism. I mean, there’s no way that even—okay, or give Einstein an iPhone back in 1945 or something. What could he do with it?

So that’s sort of the position that we kind of have been in to see these craft that we get access to, either through crashes or, quote, “donations.” And it’s really mysterious. But nonetheless, we should do our best.

And these days, because of the development of quantum technologies and so on, we have better tools. We have AI on our side to move fast through some calculations and stuff. So I think this is the time where disclosure—it’s going to happen, and relatively soon.

Facing Ridicule and Changing Times

JOE ROGAN: Well, if it does happen, it’s thanks to people like you that stuck their neck out for many, many years. And I’m sure you experienced a lot of ridicule and side eyes.

HAL PUTHOFF: Sure did. Right. In fact, I remember when I was involved in the remote viewing program, one of my sons was attending a grammar school. And one day another father’s kid came over to play with him. And when the other professor—actually at Stanford—came over and said, “I brought my kid over to play with you, but his last name is Puthoff. Are you associated with that Puthoff at SRI and that remote viewing?”

I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I am.”

And he said, “Okay, my son’s not going to come over and play with you.”

Oh boy. You run into that. You run into that. But I don’t know, some people—

JOE ROGAN: Why would he want to talk to you? If that was my kid, I’d be—

HAL PUTHOFF: Like, let’s hang out.

JOE ROGAN: Tell me, Hal, what the heck are you doing?

HAL PUTHOFF: So anyway, that’s what we used to run into.

JOE ROGAN: Close-mindedness.

HAL PUTHOFF: But that shows how things have changed in general. When we talk about the remote viewing aspects, people just say, “Okay, I accept that. Now, how can we apply it?”

And we talk about technologies associated with crash retrievals. “Okay, fine. But what can we learn from that? How can we apply it?”

So I mean, it’s a different world we’re in now, and I’m really excited about it. And I’m not going to stop.

Closing Thoughts

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’m very happy you’re out there. I really, really appreciate you, and I really appreciate your time. So thank you for coming in here and talking to us.

HAL PUTHOFF: Certainly welcome. And I appreciate the fact that you’re willing to be pursuing these frontier areas and bringing them to a large audience. I think that’s a real gift. I really appreciate that.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it feels like a gift for me because it’s so fascinating, and I’ve been obsessed with it my whole life, as I think a lot of people are who look into it at all and realize there’s something of substance there.

HAL PUTHOFF: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Well, thank you, Hal. Thank you.

HAL PUTHOFF: It’s a real pleasure.

JOE ROGAN: Bye, everybody.

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