Chapter 44
PUTHOFF SPREADS THE WORD
Sometime soon after the Fourth of July, 1972, I received from Puthoff a
copy of a letter he had sent to Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler, dated June 30,
1972. I will quote its entirety -- for a reason you’ll shortly understand.
"To introduce myself, I am a physicist at
SRI working primarily in the area of lasers and quantum physics. I also
have obtained a contract to investigate the primary perception hypothesis
of Cleve Backster (sponsored by Wm. Church, Scientific Unlimited Research
Foundation of San Antonio, Texas) from a quantum physics viewpoint, so you
can see my physics is broad by my definition.
"As you probably know, I recently had the pleasure of hosting Ingo
Swann’s visit to the West Coast. I had earlier heard of the very impressive
work you had done with him (from Ingo himself), so that’s why I invited
him out. As part of my work to determine the nature of the communication
link in this general area I wanted to test Ingo out on some equipment which
I know to be very well shielded against ordinary electromagnetic signals.
"Enclosed is a writeup of the experiment. Basically, it would appear
that Ingo manipulated magnetic fields inside of a superconductive-shielded
magnetometer device which is known to be extremely well-shielded. As a physicist
I am cautious enough to consider this an observation rather than an experiment,
since we did not test for direct control of the recording equipment, etc.
However, the demonstration was impressive enough for me and my colleagues
that further experimentation in this area is planned, and I personally consider
that Ingo did in fact produce an amazing result, and there is a lot of agreement
on this from other observers who signed the data sheet on this basis.
"Should you visit the West Coast, I hope that you would get in touch
with me and we could trade some shop talk on that and other items."
Enclosed with the letter was a full report on the
"observation," together with graphs.
Referring to the full report, Hal had scribbled
to me: "Ingo -- spreading the word. 10 copies went out today alone
-- and many agencies are interested."
From Ingo to Hal, 15 July. "Dear Hal, thanks for sending along the stuff you did. Everyone is impressed, and so good luck with getting your project going. I haven’t received the reimbursement for the airfare yet? Is there some delay?"