My Library

OF QUANTUM ELECTRONICS which quickly became a standard volume in physics in general. The field of laser physics was on a great upswing by then, and by all accounts, as many later told me, Hal Puthoff was destined for laser engineering limelight, a field in which his scientific reputation had already achieved luminosity. A short while earlier in New York, Cleve Backster had advised me that Puthoff was a genius. Others I later met in the Silicon Valley area said so, too, and I accepted this as a matter of fact, albeit somewhat intimidated by being in the near proximity of a genius.. How and why it was that Hal's interests changed from laser physics to biofield measurements was never clear to me, and so I'll not be able to articulate much in this regard. We did discuss the matter, but somehow whatever we discussed has faded. In any event, Hal had quit teaching at Stanford University and had moved over to Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which was where I found him in the summer of 1972. SRI was known as the nations largest "think tank" after the Rand Corporation, and for a long time had constituted the research arm of Stanford University whose funding came largely from government contracts, often of the military research kind. I'm now going to ask the reader to accept one thing on my say-so. As you will see in the chapters ahead, the "relationship" between Dr. H. E. Puthoff and Ingo Swann was to be punctuated by many remarkable - how shall we say it - FIGHTS. Even so, these hardly ever extended past our "work." As a person Hal and his perceptive wife, Adrienne Kennedy (of whom I'll have more to say later,) ALWAYS treated me personally with respect, kindness, warmth, and sometimes undeserved graciousness, and both often went out of their way to do so.