Jack Sarfatti
Jack Sarfatti (born c. 1939) is an American theoretical physicist who has advanced claims connecting retro-causal quantum mechanics, quantum consciousness, room-temperature superconductivity, and the propulsion physics of UAP. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics, trained under Hans Bethe and other physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project at Cornell University. Sarfatti is associated with the 1970s Fundamental Fysiks Group and has been a figure in the intersection of fringe physics and UAP research for several decades.
Background
Sarfatti grew up in Brooklyn, New York, raised largely by his grandparents after his parents divorced. His grandfather worked for the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps in Manhattan's Garment District, and Sarfatti, as a child of eight or nine, recalls being taken there after school and spoken to by army officers about flying saucers in the late 1940s — two or three years after Roswell — one of whom he later came to believe was Colonel Philip Corso.
In high school, Sarfatti was allegedly recruited into what he describes as a "Super Kid" after-school program run through Columbia University and funded by Eugene McDermott — a co-founder of Texas Instruments — which, he says, tested gifted students in mathematics, physics, and psychic abilities including telepathy. He graduated high school at age 16 and received scholarships to MIT, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago, ultimately attending Cornell.
At Cornell, Sarfatti studied under Hans Bethe, Phil Morrison, and other physicists from the Manhattan Project-era faculty; he describes also spending the summer of 1966 with Werner Heisenberg and John Archibald Wheeler at a NATO summer school at the Max Planck Institute in Munich. He subsequently held an assistant professorship in physics at San Diego State University, where he also ran a college education program for the U.S. Navy and sailed on the USS Ticonderoga, during which a naval intelligence officer discussed UFOs with him at length.
CIA funding and public profile
Sarfatti is publicly characterised in podcast media as a "CIA-funded physicist" — a designation he does not dispute — reflecting his connection to CIA-adjacent funding networks active in parapsychology and consciousness research during the 1970s. His recurring appearances on UFO and physics podcasts characteristically address three themes together: the retrocausal structure of quantum mechanics, the propulsion physics of UAP, and his own biography as a physicist recruited through an intelligence-connected network — framing the three as aspects of a single program of non-human technological transfer.
Intelligence connections and SRI
In early 1973, Sarfatti describes being drawn into what he believes was a CIA-organized network connecting him to Stanford Research Institute (SRI) researchers, including Hal Puthoff, Brendan O'Regan, and Edgar Mitchell. He says the CIA tape-recorded that meeting, and that a portion of the recording — in which he and others discussed flying saucers as time machines from the future — was later made available on Soundcloud.
Childhood contact claim
Sarfatti reports that at age 13 (c. 1952–53) he received a series of unusual telephone calls, which he says were from what identified itself as a "conscious, artificial conscious computer on board a spacecraft of the future," claiming he was one of a group of children being selected to be taught the craft's technology. The voice told him he would meet "the others" in twenty years; Sarfatti interprets his 1973 arrival at SRI as the fulfillment of that prophecy. He characterizes the entire sequence — from the childhood phone calls to the 1973 SRI meetings — as evidence of non-human intelligence manipulating events backwards through time.
Retrocausal physics
Sarfatti's central theoretical framework holds that the quantum wave function carries two components: a "psi history" from the past and a "destiny" wave propagating backwards from the future, and that both are required to explain consciousness and explain why UAP seem to defy conventional physics. He traces the intellectual ancestry of retrocausality through Wheeler's 1940s work on advanced electromagnetic potentials, Fred Hoyle's 1986 book The Intelligent Universe, David Bohm's pilot wave theory, and Yakir Aharonov's weak measurement framework.
Sarfatti argues that LLMs and conventional AI cannot be conscious because consciousness requires the "destiny" signal from the future, which he describes as the mechanism by which post-selection imposes a boundary condition on the present quantum state.
UAP propulsion model
Sarfatti's propulsion model proposes that UAP hulls function as room-temperature metamaterial superconductors that create macro-quantum coherent order parameters — analogous to a Bose-Einstein condensate — which allow the craft to engineer the local gravitational metric. By tuning the phase parameter θ of the coherent wave function Ψ = √N · e^(iθ), the effective sign of gravity can be reversed — producing anti-gravity without requiring negative mass. The amplification factor arises because the dielectric permittivity of the metamaterial at resonance scales as N (the number of coherent quasi-particles), making the effective Einstein coupling constant Gm enormously larger than its vacuum value.
He connects the radiation-sickness cases reported by witnesses near hovering UAP — such as those at Skinwalker Ranch — to the blue-shift of the gravitational field, which he identifies as a source of ionizing radiation. The warp-drive aspect of this scheme, Sarfatti notes, is a geodesic warp drive in which the crew's internal clock remains synchronized with clocks outside the ship, avoiding the time dilation paradox of conventional Alcubierre drive proposals.
Engagement with military witnesses
Sarfatti has also engaged with military witnesses to UAP, hosting interviews on his podcast with active-duty and recently separated service members. In a 2024 podcast episode titled "Why Aerospace Scientists Are Wrong about UFO Propulsion," Sarfatti interviewed Ryan Graves-adjacent Navy F/A-18 pilot Danny Jones, who described the pattern of UAP encounters off the US East Coast from approximately 2013–2015. Jones described how his squadron began detecting objects on an upgraded APG-79 radar that were invisible on the older APG-73, with the objects also emitting concentrated infrared energy visible on the FLIR — leading the pilots to conclude they were physically present. Jones described a colleague's naked-eye sighting of a "dark gray cube or black cube inside a clear sphere" passing between two aircraft — a morphology distinct from the Tic Tac reported by Commander David Fravor.
Jones also provided an account of filming the Gimbal video, which he described as occurring during a workup cycle off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida in late 2014 or 2015, with the filmed object performing an instantaneous directional reversal — a "vertical Jay hook" — with no visible radius of turn, while five additional objects flew in a wedge formation on the situational awareness page. Jones stated he had been told by a superior that the reason he was given last-minute orders to appear at the Pentagon in uniform before his Congressional visit was to prevent him from being arrested.
Sarfatti used the discussion to apply his propulsion framework: when Jones described the absence of any visible exhaust or conventional lift mechanism, Sarfatti observed that space-time metric engineering — in which local gravity is manipulated rather than mass expelled — would produce exactly that profile, consistent with the five observables documented by the UAP Task Force.