Eric Haseltine is an American neuroscientist, engineer and former intelligence official who served as director of research at the National Security Agency and then as the first associate director for science and technology in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Much of his later work has been popular writing about the brain, innovation and intelligence history. In 2024 he published The New Science of UFOs, and in 2026 a series of long-form interviews made him one of the more senior former intelligence officials to speak at length about unidentified aerial phenomena.

Haseltine earned a bachelor's degree in economics and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in physiological psychology at Indiana University, followed by postdoctoral brain research at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He spent 13 years at Hughes Aircraft, rising to director of engineering, before joining the research and development group of Walt Disney Imagineering in 1992 to work on large-scale virtual reality. He became a senior vice president in 1998 and executive vice president in 2000, and he led Imagineering research and development until 2002.

That year he moved to the NSA as director of research. From 2005 to 2007 he held the new science and technology post at ODNI, describing himself to U.S. News & World Report as "the CTO of the intelligence community." He received the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal. His books include Long Fuse, Big Bang, Brain Safari, The Spy in Moscow Station and Riding the Monster, and he writes a column for Psychology Today, where in September 2026 he published two pieces disputing the mass-hysteria explanation of Havana syndrome.

In April 2026, Jesse Michels's American Alchemy released a long interview with Haseltine and his wife and collaborator, Dr. Chris Gilbert, covering UAP analysis, intelligence tradecraft, anomalous health incidents and exotic propulsion. In clips promoted by the show, Haseltine said of UFOs that "it isn't one phenomenon" but several, that most reports have ordinary explanations while a small fraction appear genuinely unexplained, and that an ancient advanced civilization on Earth is one of the more credible hypotheses. He also argued that laser-generated plasma could reproduce much of what Navy crews reported in the 2004 USS Nimitz encounter, suggesting the event could even have been staged, and recalled that Disney chief executive Michael Eisner declined to pursue such plasma effects after seeing them. A June 2026 episode featured his account of Disney-funded research into telekinesis.

The plasma suggestion drew sharp disagreement from researcher Joe Murgia, who wrote that it made him question Haseltine's judgment, while other UAP accounts circulated his remarks as an insider's endorsement of the phenomenon. Haseltine's career across Hughes, Disney's research labs, the NSA and the first intelligence-community technology office gives his views unusual reach. His stated position, that a few cases remain unexplained while some famous ones may have human-made explanations, sets him apart from both firm skeptics and advocates of a single non-human answer.