Puthoff took an interest in the
Church of Scientology in the late 1960s and reached what was then the top
OT VII level by 1971. In 1974, Puthoff also wrote a piece for Scientology's
Celebrity magazine, stating that Scientology had given him "a feeling of absolute fearlessness". Puthoff severed all connection with Scientology in the late 1970s. In the 1970s and 1980s, Puthoff directed a program at the
Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to investigate
paranormal abilities, collaborating with
Russell Targ in a study of the purported
psychic abilities of
Uri Geller,
Ingo Swann,
Pat Price,
Joseph McMoneagle and others, as part of what they called the
Stargate Project. Both Geller and Swann convinced Puthoff and Targ that they possessed psychic powers, though Geller employed
sleight of hand tricks. Puthoff and Targ studied
Uri Geller at SRI, declaring that Geller had psychic powers, though there were flaws with the controls in the experiments, and Geller used
sleight of hand on many other occasions. According to
Terence Hines: Psychologists
David Marks and Richard Kammann attempted to replicate Puthoff and Targ's
remote viewing experiments. In a series of thirty-five studies, they could not replicate the results. While investigating the procedure of the original experiments, Marks and Kammann discovered that the notes given to the judges in Puthoff and Targ's experiments contained clues as to which order they were carried out. Examples included referring to yesterday's two targets or the inclusion of the date of the session written at the top of the page. They concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment's high hit rates. Terence Hines has written: Marks noted that when the cues were eliminated the results fell to a chance level.
James Randi noted that controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cueing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests, produced negative results. Students also solved Puthoff and Targ's locations from the clues that had inadvertently been included in the transcripts. Marks and Kamman concluded: "Until remote viewing can be confirmed in conditions which prevent sensory cueing the conclusions of Targ and Puthoff remain an unsubstantiated hypothesis." According to
Martin Gardner, Puthoff (and Targ) "imagined they could do research in parapsychology but instead dealt with 'psychics' who were cleverer than they were". == Business ventures ==