Hal Puthoff on SSE/IRVA Conference

Hal Puthoff recently spoke on The 2018 SSE & IRVA Joint Conference, which was arranged by two pseudo-scientific organizations, Society for Scientific Exploration and International Remote Viewing Association.

While there was little new or newsworthy, that presentation nevertheless contained tidbits that are of interest in relation to the earlier posts here about the AATIP/AAWSAP programs and the role BAAS and it's subcontractors played in it. So here's some commentary based on the just released transcript.

AATIP

Puthoff describes AATIP as follows:

It was deeply buried, but the New York Times had good sources and they came up with information about the program

We already know he himself was one of the sources! Leslie Kean has revealed how it all began with a tip and a confidential four hour meeting on October 4, 2017 between her and the TTSA guys, Puthoff, Elizondo, Semivan and Mellon. She was shown "revelatory documents and data off the record." Puthoff seems to have a tendency of downplaying his own role in such instances.

The program was nicknamed Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). People have had trouble trying to get documents out of the Pentagon by saying they want all documents on AATIP, and they have a hard time because that wasn’t the actual name of the program. “Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program” is the actual name of the program. But AATIP was the nickname it went by.

People have had that trouble because Puthoff and his TTSA buddies have been the ones calling it that! AAWSAP and its name weren't secret. It was published as an open bid before it even began. That was the name Puthoff wrote down on the documents he created back in 2009-2010. So why did they use the nickname and keep the correct public one secret? Why did they let people fill the FOIA queues with requests having the wrong name? There's no reason to blame the government or anyone else for that. They did it. Why?

It began in June of 2007. The Defense Intelligence Agency was concerned about the fact that obvious observation had shown that Advanced Aerospace Vehicles – crafts, or drones of unknown origin, were flying all over the United States, over waters, in fact globally as was the case. So a Congressional budget was approved to address the issue behind the scenes. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid from Nevada was the one who was the initiator of the program, joined by Senator Inouye and Senator Stevens. These are the people who generally approve programs that were in the black, under high security, behind the scenes, and so they set up this program.

What exactly happened in June 2007? AAWSAP began more than a year later, and BAASS was filed as a new company in January 2008. Did it begin in some unofficial/internal form in 2007? Or was that when the "guy from DIA", most likely James T. Lacatski, set the wheels in motion? Was Puthoff already involved at the time?

The Defense Intelligence Agency put out a Broad Area Announcement, in fact it was unclassified. They wanted to evaluate twelve potential threat areas with regard to these Advanced Aerospace Vehicles.

Once again, the problem is that the solicitation document itself doesn't mention UFOs/UAVs/UAPs or any such vehicles at all. It's about:

The objective of this program is to understand the physics and engineering of these applications as they apply to the foreign threat out to the far term, i.e., from now through the year 2050. Primary focus is on breakthrough technologies and applications that create discontinuities in currently evolving technology trends.

It seems you would basically have to be Bigelow to even know what the program was eventually about, since the solicitation doesn't reveal it.

Now, it turned out that anyone, any aerospace corporation could apply, could send in a proposal. DIA chose Bigelow Aerospace as the contractor to address the threat. Now there’s been buzz on the Internet about, ok well, Senator Reid came from Nevada and Bigelow Aerospace is in Nevada, so wasn’t this some sort of sweetheart deal? In fact, that’s not the case. It was a Broad Area Announcement; anybody could go for it. Bigelow was actually a good choice. He’d spent a lot of his own money because he was interested in this area up to this point investigating the phenomena, and he had the best proposal. So he was tasked. He set up a special organization called Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies – we call it BAASS – to do all the things you’d expect a program like this to do. BAASS connected me at EarthTech International to collaborate as a subcontractor, and I agreed to do that.

Puthoff basically just seems to confirm the arrangement was as shady as it sounds like, even if he tries to do something else. The competition may have been open, but that doesn't mean it was fair.

DIRDs

Okay, what did I address as a subcontractor? One of the critical issues there’s so much high-level security and compartmentalization in this subject area, and there’s a lot of it, it’s difficult for contractors to obtain expert opinions on advanced technologies because they would expose why they are interested. So, I acted as a surrogate. I was contracted to commission mostly unclassified whitepapers from experts around the globe about where their particular subject areas would be in (the year) 2050 as like a general survey of aerospace futures. I decided this would be the best way to get the best knowledge we had across many technologies without actually exposing why we wanted to know.

Um... What?!

The program clearly did something else than what the public facing solicitation stated, and we have learned from multiple sources how they sort of tried to hide in the shadows at various stages to keep the program alive within the DoD. But what Puthoff just said doesn't make sense.

Let's say he wanted to learn about dark energy, one of the areas he mentioned. Why would it be difficult for a contractor to just ask physicists to provide some papers about that to them? There seems to be now some twisted logic that they actually wanted to learn about UFOs and did that by requesting general whitepapers of general topics through a "surrogate" without telling those experts what they actually wanted. That makes no sense. It sounds much more likely those papers were just a smokescreen to begin with.

So, I let out 38 contracts over a two-year period.

Now we could wait, we told these people they could publish their reports in physics journals and engineering journals, but of course the contractors didn’t want to wait for that, so the Defense Intelligence Agency bundled up these 38 papers and put them out as Defense Intelligence Reference Documents posted on a JWICS server that anyone in the government or contractors could get access to. By and large they have not been released to the public yet; a couple of them leaked out.

So apart from a couple of reportedly classified papers, they were free to publish their reports back then. That was some 7-8 years ago, so those should have been published a long time ago already if they were sent to journals. Note that Puthoff also confirmed those documents were created during a two year period, which seems to have been how long the government funded the program.

It's hardly too surprising that the few that leaked were done by Puthoff and his Earthtech colleague Davis. Did any of the others publish theirs anywhere? Why can't Puthoff reveal that?

This is the list of topics from the solicitation document:

The contractor shall complete advanced aerospace weapon system technical studies in the following areas:

1. lift
2. propulsion
3. control
4. power generation
5. spatial/temporal translation
6. materials
7. configuration, structure
8. signature reduction (optical, infrared, radiofrequency, acoustic)
9. human interface
10. human effects
11. armament (RF and DEW)
12. other peripheral areas in support of (1-11)

 And this is the list of topics Puthoff revealed that were at least covered:

• positron aerospace propulsion
• IEC fusion as a compact energy source
• warp drive
• dark energy
• extra dimensions
• metallic glasses for aerospace use
• negative mass propulsion
• antigravity for aerospace applications
• programmable matter
• invisibility cloaking

He didn't mention any that would be primarily focused on human interface or human effects, which could be the most interesting areas. Did they connect those somehow to the Skinwalker Ranch or that "human body as a readout system" stuff, or were those just general documents about the sort of stuff one could expect based on the solicitation document?

Update: There's a good chance this paper is the one Puthoff referred to for "Negative Mass Propulsion". Puthoff has also referred that author and thanked him elsewhere for his other work. It also seems to be pretty much as close to practical applications within the next 30 years or so as the other papers we have seen:

Making a tunnel through the moon, provided there is a good supply of negative mass, could revolutionize interstellar space flight. A sequence of thermonuclear shape charges would make such tunnel technically feasible.

FLIR videos

Puthoff also described the Nimitz incident and showed the Gimbal clip while doing that. Does he still confuse those two, or purposefully try to confuse others? Aren't we past that mix-up already?

Puthoff also made some comments reminiscent to those by Elizondo:

Now you might ask yourself, what can you prove from a videotape? I mean, you can see videotapes all over the Internet and so on. But this was data fusion. They are gun-camera tapes. There are these videotapes from the pilots, voice recordings, data link recordings from Aegis and many other military platforms, expert witnesses. So, in fact, the data density – and this is what’s changed the field a lot – our detection capability has gotten so advanced that we’re losing our inability to see exactly what’s going on.

What they clearly try to do is to group together all those videos and various sources of data as if all of it applies to all of them and those sources would confirm each other. But that isn't really the case. Only the Nimitz clip has any information of radar detection and even in that case the video wasn't taken during the visual encounter and according to the "executive report", they couldn't even confirm those were the same target.

And as for losing the ability to see what exactly is going on, they have certainly proven that already, especially with the Go Fast clip.

Puthoff was also asked about the other videos, as he has stated there were a lot of them. His answer was:

They’re not a lot different from this. Some of them were classified because of where they were taken. But as far as the content of what we are interested from the technical standpoint, they’re not that different. Provided you strike out the location and so on, then there’s a chance of getting them declassified and we are working on that.

So if the expected quality is about the same, there's not much to expect.

Metamaterials

Puthoff also gave further confirmation that (at least some of) the mystery materials that have been described as alloys and metamaterials and whatnot, were in fact the same that Linda Moulton-Howe got from an anonymous source in 1996. Puthoff also acknowledges their questionable origins and the possibility of a hoax and them being just "some slag off some foundry floor" (which is basically what they look like).

So let me give you an example of, how this stuff helps people who are chasing these really difficult problems. I’m choosing one here: metamaterials for aerospace use. I’d love to talk about really fancy materials, but they’re classified. However, there’s a lot of materials that have been picked up or provided even in the public domain. I’m going to give an example because it shows exactly what the structure is for how to deal with this. This is an open source sample. It was sent anonymously to talk show host Art Bell. The fellow claimed to be in the military. He said that this sample was picked up in a crash retrieval, and so he sent it by email. So what does that mean? Chain of custody non-existent.  Provenance questionable.  Could be a hoax. Could be some slag off of some foundry floor or whatever. However, it was an unusual sample, so we decided to take a look at it.

After describing some of their less than impressive details, which are already questionable due to the lack of proper analysis reports and the apparent scrap like qualities of their samples, he goes on to explain:

Well, years later, decades later actually, finally our own science moves along. We move into an area called metamaterials, and it turns out exactly this combination of materials at exactly those dimensions turn out to be an excellent microscopic waveguide for very high frequency electromagnetic radiation terahertz frequencies.

See that "our own science" there? He seems to strongly imply that highly questionable sample is of extraterrestrial origin or something.

By that waveguide structure he seems to refer to the work of Viktor A. Podolskiy and others from 2004 and 2005, so actually less than a decade after they got their samples (and there's probably earlier research than those two articles). There's little to support his conclusions their piece of scrap could similarly function as a waveguide, which seems to require proper structuring. And even such waveguide simply means a structure that allows electromagnetic waves of some frequencies to pass through, not some crazy levitation that Tom DeLonge has been implying.

I may write another more detailed post about those materials, at least if I can obtain some new information, so that I don't need to just beat up an already dead metahorse. Suffice to say, that piece of scrap has hoax written all over it.

Lifetime Achievements

Before Puthoff began, he was given a Tim Dinsdale Memorial Award certificate for his pseudo-scientific research on remote perception and so on. Earlier recipients have gained that award for studies on such topics as spoon bending, poltergeists and reincarnation.

TTSA has already marketed him as the recipient of that award as well as for the Who’s Who Lifetime Achievement in 2017. Here are some comments by other recent winners of that latter award:

Totally non-sense !
I did not published a new paper in SCI in the last 5 years and only have science-popular articles written in Chinese. There is no way they can find my publications but they gave me this award! ... I am really just a professor in a small-town university!  I plays no significant parts in science.

Got one too. Probably it is worth less than a "best scientist" mug with your Photo.

Hey, I just got one of these also. Where's the line to exchange this award for the best-scientist mug?

Today I have received some sort of promotion of Lifetime Achievement that requires the same 800 USD payment.

I just received a call that I received a "Lifetime Achievement Award". ... I'm proud of my work but see no rationale for such an award other than an appeal to my vanity.

I just received an E-mail that I received a "Lifetime Achievement Award". I did not believe that a developed country's prestigious publication the Marquis Who’s Who has still doing such (above mentioned) fraud works.

I have just had a phone call with a person at Marquis about being awarded the "lifetime Achievement Award." This time, I am required to spend money to receive the award.

You probably got the picture. Real scientific awards are not given for researching non-existent phenomena, such as remote viewing, to which Puthoff clearly still believes. Even after being fooled by Uri Geller among others and having been part of a program that wasted an AAWSAP programs worth ($20 million) of tax dollars for it with no results to show. His right hand man Eric Davis has similarly proposed wasting additional millions on "Uri Geller -type experiments".

Problem with pseudoscience

And herein lies the real problem. Even if I believed TTSA could provide irrefutable evidence of aliens and build actual spaceships (I don't), I wouldn't give them a dime. Not even if I expected to get two back in profits. Supporting anything that promotes pseudo-science, as well as purposeful spreading of misinformation, is very much against my ethics. And that's what the TTSA and their key members are currently doing.

So, the goals for the To the Stars Academy are to,

• Promote the concept that such forefront topics as UFOs, SETI, consciousness studies, even telepathy and psychokinesis should not be considered taboo for serious scientific consideration. So, it’s a perfect match to the SSE because that’s our goal in the SSE as well.

George Knapp, who is closely associated with TTSA members similarly promoted such pseudo-sciences while reporting about that event.

Remote viewing is a protocol developed for the CIA and tested by the U.S. Army. It was the basis for the George Clooney movie, "The Men Who Stare At Goats."  The technique allows people to project human consciousness across time and space, and it works.

Sure, that nonsense worked in a comedy, but not in real life.

For anyone hoping to see serious scientific consideration of UFOs, these sorts of linkages to pseudo-scientific and superstitious nonsense are the opposite to what is needed. It will just cause further ridicule, deserved one, and scientists will and should push back against attempts to spread such irrationality. Having UFOs discussed in an IRVA conference is not progress.