EarthTech International, Inc. is a privately funded research company in Austin, Texas, founded and led by the physicist Hal Puthoff. Its research arm, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, which Puthoff founded in 1985 and incorporated under EarthTech in 1991, describes itself as "a privately-funded research organization exploring novel ideas in basic and applied physics and engineering." Its stated aim is to translate those ideas into laboratory experiments, with a focus on new kinds of space propulsion and energy sources. The institute is unrelated to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

The company lists research in spacetime, gravity and cosmology, the quantum vacuum, modifications of electrodynamics, interstellar flight and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, along with a life-sciences program. It also offers consulting, in-house experimentation and a Maverick Inventors Program. Puthoff is president and chief executive. Its principal team includes the physicist Eric Davis as senior science adviser, Collin Puthoff as chief operations officer and director of life sciences and clinical medical research, Brendan Puthoff as chief financial officer, and the experimentalists Scott Little and Marissa Little. In 1998 Puthoff and EarthTech received a U.S. patent for transmitting information with a modulated potential lacking electric or magnetic field components. Puthoff's zero-point-energy theories, which underlie much of that agenda, have been disputed by physicists including Steve Carlip.

EarthTech's best-documented government work came through the Defense Intelligence Agency's Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, the roughly $22 million effort contracted to Robert Bigelow's BAASS. The program commissioned 38 technical studies on future aerospace technologies, and six credit EarthTech International authors. Puthoff wrote "Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering." Davis wrote five, on traversable wormholes and negative energy, antigravity, extracting energy from the quantum vacuum, laser lightcraft nanosatellites and quantum tomography of negative energy states. The DIA released the list of titles in January 2019 under a request by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, and several of the reports have since been released or leaked.

The company's two senior scientists are also central to modern UAP claims. Puthoff co-founded To The Stars Academy with Tom DeLonge in 2017. Davis is the reported author of the Wilson–Davis memo, notes dated 2002 that describe a conversation with retired Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson about a compartmented contractor program allegedly holding nonhuman technology, an account Wilson has denied. In mid-2026 Davis appeared on The Good Trouble Show, which introduced him as EarthTech's senior science adviser and said he had used the words "off-world vehicles not made on this earth" to describe retrievals he briefed to a Defense Department agency and to Senate committee staff.

EarthTech has remained a small private laboratory, but its staff produced a sixth of the technical studies behind AAWSAP, the Pentagon-funded program whose 2017 disclosure helped open the modern U.S. debate over UAP. Its senior scientists' statements about recovered craft keep the Austin company in that debate in 2026.