ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

Chapter 7
I had expected the drive to Austin, the state capital, to provide me with a
rich set of impressions of the frontier that divided the Eastern Seaboard
from the wilderness that started here and extended to the Pacific. But for
two hours I sat on the freeway, my views of Texas obscured by bumperto-bumper
traffic, peeling trailer homes and secondhand car lots. And so
I thought of the man I was about to visit instead.
Dr. Harold E. Puthoff, "Hal" to those who knew him better than I,
was the director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Austin. Puthoff
had lived his whole life on a frontier; one that straddled known science,
the world explained and understood, and a place that most people,
scientists included, said didn't exist.
I felt drawn to Puthoff, because his academic qualifications, not to
mention his connections to the military, put him squarely in a place that
I could relate to; yet, he was clearly also involved in strange science.
His résumé, which I had pulled off the Internet, said that he had
graduated from Stanford University in 1967 and that his professional
background had spanned more than three decades of research at General
Electric, Sperry, the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and the National
Security Agency, the NSA, the government's super-clandestine electronic
eavesdropping organization.
It also told how he "regularly served various corporations, government
agencies, the Executive Branch and Congress as a consultant on leadingedge
technologies and future technology trends" and that he had patents
issued in the laser, communications and energy fields. Puthoff was no
lightweight.
What his résumé didn't describe was one of the strangest episodes in
the history of U.S. intelligence gathering: a program, known as remote
viewing or RV, that enabled the Central Intelligence Agency and the
Defense Intelligence Agency to spy on America's enemies using clairvoyance.
For years, depending on whom you believed, this highly
organized, well-funded operation had proven remarkably successful,
providing reams of usable data on Soviet military activities that were
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