Bernard Haisch

Bernard Michael Haisch was born on August 23, 1949, in Stuttgart, West Germany, to Gertrud Dammbacher Haisch and Fredrich Wilhelm Haisch. He had one brother, Klaus Dieter Haisch. When Bernie was three years old the family emigrated to Indianapolis, Indiana, where he grew up.

From an early age he was drawn to life's biggest questions. His family recalled that he first believed his calling was the Catholic priesthood, and that as a child he would line up his stuffed animals on his bed and give them communion so he could practise becoming a priest. He attended the Latin School of Indianapolis, a minor seminary, and later Saint Meinrad Seminary, where he studied for the priesthood during his freshman year of college. Haisch later credited those years with his lifelong interest in spiritual questions.

After leaving the seminary path, Haisch studied astrophysics at Indiana University in Bloomington, graduating with a Bachelor of Science with high distinction in 1971. He went on to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned a Ph.D. in astronomy in 1975. He then held research associate posts at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) at the University of Colorado, Boulder (1975 to 1977 and 1978 to 1979), with a year in between as a visiting scientist at the Astronomical Institute of Utrecht University in the Netherlands (1977 to 1978). He read Dutch, French and Latin and spoke German.

In 1979 Haisch joined the Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory of Lockheed (later Lockheed Martin) in Palo Alto, California, where he worked as a staff scientist until 1999. His research covered solar and stellar flares, coronae of cool stars, and observational X-ray and ultraviolet astronomy. He was a principal investigator in NASA guest investigator programmes on IUE, HEAO-1, HEAO-2, Exosat, ROSAT, EUVE, ASCA and XTE.

Among his best-known papers are "Flares on the Sun and other stars" (Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 1991, with K. T. Strong and M. Rodono), "Disappearance of coronal X-ray emission in stars with cool dense winds" (Nature, 1992, with J. H. M. M. Schmitt and A. C. Fabian), and "Solar-like M-class X-ray flares on Proxima Centauri observed by the ASCA satellite" (Science, 1995). He co-edited Solar and Stellar Flares (Kluwer, 1989) and The Many Faces of the Sun, a summary of results from NASA's Solar Maximum Mission (Springer, 1999).

He was a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany (1991 to 1994), and deputy director of the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley (1992 to 1994). He co-chaired International Astronomical Union Colloquium 104 on solar and stellar flares at Stanford in 1988 and IAU Colloquium 152 on astrophysics in the extreme ultraviolet at Berkeley in 1995. He served as scientific editor of The Astrophysical Journal (1993 to 2002) and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration (1988 to 1999), and sat on NASA review panels including the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics panel in 1999. Later he taught part-time in the Physical Science, Math and Engineering division of Foothill College in Los Altos.

In the early 1990s Haisch, with physicists Alfonso Rueda and Harold E. Puthoff, proposed that inertia, the property that makes matter resist acceleration, could arise from the interaction of charged particles with the electromagnetic zero-point field, the sea of quantum fluctuations that fills empty space. Their paper "Inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force" appeared in Physical Review A in 1994 and was discussed in Science and Scientific American that year. Haisch and Rueda extended the idea in Foundations of Physics (1998) and Annalen der Physik (2001 and 2005), the last addressing gravity. The hypothesis remained controversial and drew published critiques, but it attracted interest from NASA's breakthrough propulsion work, and Arthur C. Clarke named the "SHARP drive" in 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997) after Sakharov, Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff.

In 1999 Haisch founded the California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics (Calphysics Institute) in Palo Alto, a privately funded research centre devoted mainly to the quantum vacuum, and served as its director until 2002. He held U.S. Patent 7,379,286 for quantum vacuum energy extraction, as well as an earlier patent for an anchor bolt extractor. In his final years he explored, through the energy science company Jovion Corporation, whether the quantum vacuum and the Casimir effect might one day provide a new way to generate energy.

In 2002 Haisch became chief science officer of ManyOne Networks, and from 2004 he was president of the Digital Universe Foundation, which set out to build a free, expert-reviewed online encyclopedia as an alternative to Wikipedia. The project was profiled in Nature Medicine in 2007. Haisch was also an active member of the Society for Scientific Exploration, where many of his later lectures were recorded.

Haisch married Marsha Sims in August 1986. The couple were partners in life, science and music for forty years: they ran the Journal of Scientific Exploration together for about a decade, wrote more than one hundred songs (Haisch worked as a semi-professional songwriter and producer under the name Bernie Sims), performed together in operettas, shared a love of opera, and co-wrote books. He had earlier been married to Pamela Eakins. His children were Elizabeth, Taylor and Kate, and he had two grandsons, William and James. For many years he lived in Redwood Shores, on the San Francisco Peninsula.

Haisch argued that science and spirituality need not be in conflict. In The God Theory (2006) he proposed that consciousness is fundamental and matter derivative, writing that "it is not matter that creates an illusion of consciousness, but consciousness that creates an illusion of matter." He described an infinite conscious intelligence whose ideas become the laws of physics and whose purpose is "the transformation of potential into experience", and he stressed that this view was compatible with the Big Bang and evolution and had nothing to do with intelligent design. He did not equate the zero-point field itself with God.

In 2006 he also proposed that the quantum fields pervading space could give rise to consciousness in any sufficiently complex system, an idea NBC News later described as taking Roger Penrose's ideas "a big step further". In his later books and talks he explored panpsychism, the fine-tuning of physical constants, near-death experiences and the idea that the universe may be a consciousness-created simulation. He also took a scientific interest in UFO reports and maintained a website on the subject.

Haisch's books include The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind It All (Red Wheel/Weiser, 2006), The Purpose-Guided Universe: Believing in Einstein, Darwin, and God (2010), Proof of God, and The Miracle of Our Universe: A New View of Consciousness, God, Science and Reality, written with Marsha Sims. He also co-edited the scientific volumes Solar and Stellar Flares (1989) and The Many Faces of the Sun (1999).

He was a frequent guest on radio and podcasts, including Art Bell's late-night radio show in December 2006, The Moore Show, Next Level Soul and OMTimes, and gave recorded lectures at the Society for Scientific Exploration such as "A Radically Different Theory of Everything" and "Is the Universe a Consciousness-created VR Simulation?".

Haisch was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a member of the International Astronomical Union, the American Astronomical Society, the European Astronomical Society, the Society for Scientific Exploration, Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi and Phi Kappa Phi. He was listed in American Men and Women of Science, Who's Who in America and Who's Who in Science and Engineering, and served on the editorial boards of Solar Physics and Speculations in Science and Technology.

Haisch lived with Parkinson's disease for sixteen years. He died peacefully in the early morning of September 3, 2026, at the age of 77. Eleven days earlier he had celebrated his 77th birthday and his 40th wedding anniversary with Marsha on the same day. Colleagues in the UAP research community, including Ted Roe of NARCAP, paid tribute to him as a thoughtful and serious scientist who combined scientific scepticism with an open mind. His family wrote that he spent his life asking what the universe is made of, why we are here, and what consciousness is, and that they hoped he had finally found some of those answers. Marsha Sims said she hoped to continue his quantum vacuum energy research with the scientists and engineers who had worked alongside him.