Claim: A UFO crashed in 1933 Italy and the US Recovered it

[John J.]

Puthoff's PhD is in electrical engineering, not physics.

Where his theories have ventured into pure physics, they sometimes result in extraordinary claims and they have been criticized, e.g.

Massimo Pigliucci called Puthoff's hopes to extract zero-point energy as running contrary to the laws of physics: "a proposition... that violates basic principles of thermodynamics and that is considered pseudoscience by credentialed physicists."

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_E._Puthoff

In fairness to @owntheissue, I think they meant claimed "government level ET conspiracies" (Please correct me if I'm wrong!)

 

[FatPhil]

I don't know Sarfetti and Pais off the top of my head, but Puthoff is famous for believing that Uri Geller could bend spoons with his mind (rather than stage magic). Puthoff's judgment about what is (im)possible or not is clearly not reliable.

A PhD does not confer common sense onto a person.

The work of Jack Sarfatti was very well known to readers of sci.physics, and, by crossposting, sci.math, where I encountered it. The sane posters never wasted any time with his stuff, filing it in the not-even-wrong bucket almost immediately. Search engines suck nowadays, and google took over and eviscerated DejaNews, so there's little hope of finding any examples thereon. However a sane scientist (Peter Woit) has once or twice made reference to Sarfatti on his /Not Even Wrong/ blog:

Here's a story from the boundaries of conventional physics of the sort I normally try to resist paying any attention to, but couldn't quite help myself this time:

Last week I noticed amongst the e-mail from Jack Sarfatti that clutters my (and many other people's) mailbox some forwarded messages about a kerfuffle involving the withdrawal of a conference invitation to Brian Josephson. [...]

This mini-scandal has now made it to a Times Higher Education story today, which starts off:

An extraordinary spat has broken out after a Nobel prizewinning physicist was "uninvited" from a forthcoming conference because of his interest in the paranormal. [...]

The current situation seems to be that Josephson, David Peat and Jack Sarfatti were un-invited, but now Josephson and Peat have been re-invited.

-- https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=2914

Which admittedly doesn't say much about Sarfatti, but I believe says enough.

EDIT: here's another Woit reference to him, and how he was effectively barred from publishing by a journal editor:

... an editorial in the July 15, 1973 issue of Physical Review D (Particles and Fields) written by Samuel Goudsmit, the editor-in-chief. The editorial is entitled "IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: Regarding Papers about Fundamental Theories". Goudsmit does not specifically refer to quantum foundations papers, but writes:

The subject matter of these papers usually concerns a fundamental aspect of theoretical physics. Extreme verbosity and vagueness of expression makes these papers hard to read and understand. A paucity of mathematics as compared to wordage distinguishes them from the more conventional theoretical papers. The author proposes new theories, but their specific assumptions are usually hidden behind very lengthy arguments. Sometimes the paper contains a reinterpretation of existing theories which the author considers more satisfactory than the prevailing views, though no new experimental consequences are expected.

[...]
Update: In the comments Blake Stacey suggests that the 1972 experiment of Freedman-Clauser may have been what led to papers being submitted to Physical Review that inspired Goudsmit's July 1973 editorial. Looking more into this, it's quite possible that the kind of thing Goudsmit was concerned about were the sorts of papers Jack Sarfatti was writing around this time.

-- https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11263