At the institute, Puthoff works in yet another domain of contemporary physics fraught with contention. This work involves quantum vacuum energy, or zero-point energy (Nullpunktsenergie), a concept originally developed by Max Planck in 1911 (Planck’s work on quantum theory won him a Nobel Prize in 1918). The contentious aspect is not whether zero-point energy exists, but whether it can be harnessed for useful purposes. If proven, says Puthoff, zero-point energy could be a radical breakthrough in deep-space propulsion technologies. “The possibility of extracting useful energy from vacuum fluctuations [would be] the ‘Holy Grail’ of energy research,” he says. For example, a manned space probe powered by zero-point energy could, theoretically, make a trip to Mars in seven to forty days, depending on the separation distance between Earth and Mars, as opposed to NASA’s current figure (using more traditional advanced propulsion techniques) of seven or eight months.
Critics deride Puthoff’s efforts. In my interview with Lawrence M. Krauss, the astrophysicist known for popularizing the term “dark energy,” Krauss stated that harnessing quantum vacuum energy was impossible: “Zero-point energy is the lowest point in the universe. If you could extract energy out of it, there would have to be a lower point. There isn’t a lower step on the staircase. So by definition, if it exists it can’t be used.” Krauss called Puthoff a “crackpot,” and added, “besides, he has a history of backing crazy schemes.” Then Krauss said something interesting. “Views of reality must conform to reality, not the way you want the world to be. If zero-point energy were feasible or available, the universe would have used it,” Krauss observed. But Einstein taught us that two contradictory pictures of reality can and do exist when he spoke of the wave-particle duality that is quantum mechanics. Scientists who have witnessed ESP and PK phenomena, Puthoff among them, seem to have a different view of reality than scientific skeptics, including Krauss.
To harness zero-point energy could, Puthoff posits, lead to a general theory about ESP and PK phenomena. In our interview he summarizes this hypothesis. “Throughout mankind’s cultural history there has existed the metaphysical concept that man and cosmos are interconnected by a ubiquitous, all-pervasive sea of energy that undergirds, and is manifest in, all phenomena. This pre-scientific concept of a cosmic energy goes by many names in many traditions,” he says, citing the Chinese concept of qi and the Hindu concept of prana as examples. He wonders whether this metaphysical concept of cosmic energy is analogous to zero-point energy. In pursuit of this theory, Puthoff and his team conduct quantum optic experiments using lasers, beam splitters, lenses, and diffraction gratings. It’s a challenging, long-term quest, he says. At age eighty, he has no intention of slowing down.
Puthoff’s search echoes what China’s H. S. Tsien proposed in a discipline he called somatic science, “where man [humanity] is considered to be a giant system embedded in the supergiant system of a cosmic world.” Research experiments in this field, wrote Tsien, would likely lead to “an increased understanding that all of us are immersed, both as living and physical beings, in an overall interpenetrating and interdependent field in ecological balance with the cosmos as a whole.” Tsien believed that this vital force known as qi was the key to the next scientific revolution—this from the man who codeveloped the original U.S. rocket program, cofounded the Jet Propulsion Lab, and built China’s rocket, satellite, and manned space programs.
In 2007, Aviation Week & Space Technology named Tsien the Person of the Year and put him on the magazine’s cover. “China is now at the forefront of space exploration, with two key developments in 2007: a successful anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons test and a planetary mission,” wrote the magazine’s editor in chief. The article highlighted Tsien’s primary role in China’s early aerospace programs and his enduring legacy in the modern era. That same year, New Scientist named Tsien one of the Top Ten Influential Space Thinkers of all time. Because of the stigma associated with anomalous mental phenomena research, including Extraordinary Human Body Function (EHBF), ESP, and PK, Tsien’s work in this area has remained almost entirely unreported in the West. He died in October 2009 in Beijing at the age of ninety-eight.
To interview Dale Graff, I traveled in 2015 to Pennsylvania, where he and his wife, Barbara, live in the country not far from where they both grew up. I confirmed with Barbara the near-drowning story that happened in the strong surf off Hawaii in 1968 and that the couple did not speak of this mysterious, existential event for roughly thirty years. It was Graff’s conversion moment, he agrees. In service of a general theory about ESP and PK, he continues his research and experiments today at age eighty-two. “In the seventies and eighties, we were looking at the electromagnetic spectrum,” he says. “Now it’s quantum physics, nonlocality and quantum entanglement,” or what Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance.”
The concept of quantum entanglement is difficult to comprehend yet has been elegantly simplified by the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. Kaku explains quantum entanglement this way: “According to the quantum theory, everything vibrates. When two electrons are placed close together, they vibrate in unison. When you separate them, that’s when all the fireworks start,” where quantum entanglement begins. “An invisible umbilical cord emerges connecting these two electrons. And you can separate them by as much as a galaxy if you want. Then, if you vibrate one of them, somehow on the other end of the galaxy the other electron knows that its partner is being jiggled,” he says. While entanglement has puzzled physicists ever since Einstein spoke of it (most scientists originally disputed it), quantum entanglement is now an accepted theory. “Today, physicists create entangled particles in huge numbers in labs all over the world,” the MIT Technology Review reported in February 2016. “They routinely use entanglement to send perfectly encrypted messages, to study quantum computation, and to better understand the nature of this profound phenomenon.”
Where this profound phenomenon gets spookier still is the question of how quantum entanglement might affect the forward one-directionality of time—time’s arrow—that governs the universe as a whole. Some physicists suspect that causality (the relationship between cause and effect) itself may be different when it comes to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. The PBS Nova reporter Allison Eck explains it this way: “Entangled particles start off close together, and when separated, they’re able to communicate with each other and share information at a rate that’s seemingly instantaneous—faster than the speed of light. Whatever one particle does, the other follows suit in a consistent way. But according to the theory of relativity, nothing can travel that quickly,” i.e., faster than the speed of light. Here is where some physicists and philosophers of science, including Dale Graff, propose the impossible. They say the solution could lie in a contentious concept called retrocausation, or backward causation—“the idea that the future might influence the past,” says Graff.
In a Nova ScienceNow article titled “Retrocausality Could Send Particles’ Information Back to the Future,” Eck interviews physicists at the University of Cambridge who are conducting experiments to this end. “In our non-quantum lives, we can’t see these things happening. We’re locked into our perception of time and causality. Time is still a forward arrow, and action comes before reaction,” she writes. “At the particle level, though, some physicists believe this logic could be sound, and they’re beginning to use it [i.e., retrocausation] to explain existing results.”
Dale Graff is one of those physicists. In 2016 I met up with him at the Quantum Retrocausation III symposium at the University of California, San Diego. There, Graff delivered a lecture entitled “Perceiving the Future News: Evidence for Retrocausation.” He discussed the data he’d obtained from a recent series of remote-viewing experiments with a viewer in Florida who allegedly used precognition to “view” photographs in Graff’s local paper days in advance of when the AP photographs were taken. Graff displayed his data as a series of slides and gave his analysis as he presented them. The majority of those in
the audience were PhDs and doctoral students interested in and accepting of retrocausation as a thought experiment (Schmeidler’s sheep). For a skeptic, the lack of scientific controls would be self-evident. One had to take Graff at his word that the experiment unfolded as he said it did. After Graff finished there was a question-and-answer period. A man in the audience raised his hand. “What you’re talking about has already been discredited,” he declared in an angry tone. “The U.S. Army ran a remote-viewing program in the 1980s, and it turned out to be total garbage.” A lively discussion ensued.
“There is an underlying reality,” Graff insists. “Remote viewing illustrates that this underlying reality exists, although it is the tip of the iceberg. It bubbles up in places like precognition.”
To interview Kit Green, I travel to Detroit, where Green has returned to private medical practice and also serves at the Wayne State University School of Medicine, in Michigan. Over the past thirteen years, Dr. Green has been a professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Radiology at the Harper University Hospital, and the Detroit Medical Center, and served as the medical school’s executive director for Emergent Technologies (i.e., forensic brain scanning applications). Green’s career path is unusual for a former intelligence officer. He returned to medical practice after a long, meritorious government career. “These new positions afford access to state-of-the-art technology in high-field brain MRIs, neuroradiology, and software,” Green says. And he exploits this technology, he explains, in order to pursue an area of research that he had not shared publicly until our interviews for this book.
Green’s identity as a CIA officer remained secret until 2007, when he appeared in an episode of the PBS series Secrets of the Dead. The episode, called “Umbrella Assassin,” was a Cold War case file involving the murder of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, killed at a bus stop in England in 1978. “If we hadn’t suspected Markov had been murdered by the KGB,” says Green, “his death would have likely been written off as ‘cause unknown,’ or ‘death from natural causes.’” But because Green and his CIA colleagues had a strong hypothesis to work from, they went the extra mile in the laboratory. “Our Intelligence services found a tiny platinum-iridium pellet in Markov’s leg and removed it. We prescribed specialized blood tests and identified ricin, which we looked for because of the victim’s signs and symptoms. An assassin used a weapon disguised as an umbrella,” says Green. For his work breaking this and other forensic medical cases over the next five years, Green was awarded the National Intelligence Medal.
After Green officially left the CIA in 1985, he worked for General Motors’ Research Labs, and was eventually promoted to chief technology officer for Asia-Pacific. He has remained an active military and intelligence science adviser to the CIA and the Department of Defense, serving on more than twenty Defense science and advisory boards. His positions have included chairman of numerous National Academy of Sciences Boards and Studies; Fellow, American Academy of Forensic Sciences; founding member, Defense Intelligence Agency Technology Insight-Gauge, Evaluate, and Review Committee; chairman of the Independent Science Panel for the Undersecretary of the Army for Operations Research and later for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear Matters. He also recently served as chairperson of a nineteen-member National Research Council effort to examine the future of military-intelligence science and brain research over the next twenty years. Green’s bona fides are clearly not lacking. In 2016, he was asked to join a classified science advisory board for James R. Clapper, director of National Intelligence (to whom the directors of all seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies and organizations report) and the man who, in the 1990s as director of DIA, criticized the anomalous mental phenomena programs calling them “just too far out at the leading edge of technology.”
Kit Green finds advising the Defense Department and intelligence community stimulating and challenging, he says, but what interests him most is his work for eleven years now in his private medical practice. “I’m interested in the notion of people injured physically by anomalous events,” Green tells me. “Often these events are perceived as [involving] unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, drones, high energy radio frequencies that confront people face-to-face and cannot be explained.” In an earlier age, some UAPs were known as UFOs. Green does not agree with the use of that term “because it is imprecise,” he says. But the nomenclature change helps to destigmatize the research. (Hillary Clinton spoke of UAPs while on the 2016 campaign trail.) The impetus of Green’s work, he says, can be traced back to an unresolved component of the CIA’s psychic research program in late 1974. The notion of people touched by anomalous events was a concept that Green was first confronted with when working with Uri Geller and the nuclear scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“These individuals carried top-secret clearances that were as high as mine,” says Green, including Q clearances for nuclear secrets. “And yet they told me they saw things that could not be easily explained. They reported seeing raven-like birds on their bedposts… orbs floating down the hallways in their homes. A disembodied arm hovering in the air. These individuals were not crazy,” he says. To paranormalists, these close-contact sightings are known as close encounters. “The idea of close encounters touches upon a lot of pathologies,” says Green, “but not all encounters involve pathologies.” This mystery plagued him for decades, he says. In 2005, he began working on a research project to address this enigma. He began creating “a structured database of individuals that were suffering enigmatic injuries, burns, skin lesions, cancers, diseases—and who also had face-to-face encounters with UAPs,” says Green.
“We would comb through each narrative,” remembers Green. “Compare statistics. Pare the information down. Pull out people with pathologies. What was left? Many very interesting cases. Cases that could not be easily explained.” After two years of data analysis, in 2007, Green took this research project from academic to operational. “I began performing much pro bono work,” he says, “forensic investigation and diagnosis of patients injured by multiply witnessed physical anomalous events with UAPs, drones, and other visible physical devices.”
Green accepted his patients carefully. “They are all high-functioning individuals, many prodigious savants, most of whom carry a high security clearance,” he says. “They are members of Special Forces, members of the intelligence community, employees of aerospace companies, officers in the military, guards of military bases, policemen. Often injuries take place on a military bivouac, [which is] an overnight mission at a secure location for the purpose of guarding, reconnaissance, or some kind of exploration.… Common injuries are from something that is airborne. [Something] that emits some kind of a light or a beam. Some orbs.”
Green takes on patients who already have a thick physician case file, and whose doctors have been unable to determine what injured them. “My patients were physically injured by something. They have signs on their body. Markings. Illness,” he says. They agree to give Green access to their medical history and permission for him to speak with their other doctors. None have mental illness. “They and their physicians have exhausted many avenues and find themselves at the end of their rope,” says Green. “These patients are by majority not prone to conspiracy or PTSD. This kind of thinking would interfere with their career path. They and usually their superiors come to me because my specialty is forensic medicine. I try to determine diagnosis from very little and often highly incomplete data.” Like the assassinations he investigated while in the CIA.
Using the technology available to him, Green orders brain scans, specialized blood, DNA and endocrine tests, and compiles the results. At present he has more than one hundred active patients. His original hypothesis was that a majority of his patients had “been exposed to technology from black programs,” he says, that is, advanced state-of-the-art, high-energy technologies developed in Special Access Programs. “Nonlethal weapons programs. Holograms. Cloaking devices. Drones.
Twenty-five percent of my patients die within five to seven years of my diagnosis, and I have no idea of how any programs I knew about years ago can do these things,” Green says.
To advance his hypothesis, based on the demographics and high-functioning of his patients, Dr. Green teamed up with the Nolan Lab at Stanford University, run by Garry Nolan, one of the world’s leading research scientists specializing in genetics, immunology, and bioinformatics. Nolan trained under the Nobel Prize–winning biologist David Baltimore, has published over 200 research papers, and holds twenty biotechnology patents. Age fifty-five, he has been honored as one of the top twenty inventors at Stanford University. His research is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Cancer Institute, and others. In 2012, Nolan was awarded the Teal Innovator Award from the Defense Department, a $3.3 million grant for advanced cancer studies. The Nolan Lab is perhaps best known for pioneering advances in large-scale mapping of cellular features and human cells at an unprecedented level of detail. “We are building on technologies that are just coming into existence,” Nolan told me in 2016. Dr. Kit Green and his colleagues sought out Garry Nolan for help.
“I have met and worked with many of Kit’s patients,” Nolan confirms, “and I have looked deeply at the relevant medical data. These people were injured. I have seen the physiological consequences of the harm they’ve endured. He agrees with Kit Green that in many cases it looks as if it is an electromagnetic field of some sort. “It has led to inflammation and other biomarkers in their bodies that can be seen in MRIs, tissue, blood. We are now working on both the genetic and epigenetic components,” Nolan says. “I am relatively certain we are the only individuals in the field doing this.” Using mapping technology the Nolan Lab is renowned for, technicians are mapping Green’s patients’ DNA and their immune systems. They are looking for patterns among the patients, using biological data to create an integrated theory.
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