Puthoff's own 2026 account names his role as Robert Bigelow's chief science advisor, not any Stargate-era tie, as the channel that brought DIA's AATIP work to him

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In a 2026 recorded conversation (Steven Bartlett's Diary Of A CEO podcast, with filmmaker Dan Farah), Hal Puthoff gives his own account of how he came to work on the Defense Intelligence Agency's UAP program, three decades after founding the Stargate remote-viewing program: "As part of my technical work, I was also a consultant, chief science advisor to Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace... As a science advisor to him, it turned out that the Defense Intelligence Agency came forward and said, we need to find out really what's going on in this so-called UAP area." The channel he names is his later relationship with Robert Bigelow's aerospace firm, not any lingering tie to the Stargate-era CIA/SRI relationship — the two recruitments, in his own telling, ran through two unconnected doors.

Puthoff goes on to generalize his own recurring role without naming the 1972 pattern directly: "So that's how somebody like me gets pulled in. They say, okay, these pilots are out there and they suddenly see craft coming out of the ocean and making right-angle turns at 6G or whatever. And they say, oh my God, this is way beyond our physics. So I and other physicists sort of dug into what could be responsible for this." The common thread he himself identifies across both eras is a standing institutional need for a physicist willing to investigate phenomena mainstream physics treats as beneath serious inquiry — not one unbroken institutional relationship. This complicates a reading of the AATIP antigravity-report series as a direct institutional continuation of Stargate: by Puthoff's own account, it was not.