---
title: "Robert L. Forward"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Robert L. Forward"
aliases: ["Robert Forward"]
first_seen: "2026-10-22T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Casimir effect","zero-point energy propulsion","Hal Puthoff","Phillips Laboratory / US Air Force"]
---


American physicist and science-fiction author at Hughes Research Laboratories, credited as one of the first researchers to propose using the Casimir effect as a potential energy source, and author of the US Air Force's 1996 "Mass Modification Experiment Definition Study" (Phillips Laboratory).

Matters to this vault as the institutional-precedent figure Hal Puthoff's own 2010 DIA-era paper cites directly: Forward's Air Force study is named as the prior federal research line Puthoff's zero-point-energy propulsion work extends, making him a second named physicist (alongside Andrei Sakharov on the purely theoretical side) in the vault's DoD fringe-physics-funding thread.

## References
- [[claim-puthoff-2010-zpe-antigravity-paper-continues-research-program-since-1989]]