Ingo Douglass Swann was born on September 14, 1933, and passed away on January 31, 2013. He was an American psychic, artist, and writer. His claims about having the ability to see things without using his normal senses were studied by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of a program called the Stargate Project. Swann is known for creating the term "Remote Viewing," which describes the practice of using special mental abilities to observe people, places, or events that are far away.
Early life
Swann was born in Telluride, Colorado, on September 14, 1933. At the age of three, Swann experienced an out-of-body feeling during a tonsil removal surgery. After this event, he began to see colorful 'auras' around certain objects. These experiences continued throughout his childhood and led him to help with parapsychology research when he was 37 years old.
Remote viewing
Swann was a well-known Scientologist in the 1970s who reached a high level in Scientology called Operating Thetan through a process called auditing. It is said that reaching this level may improve certain abilities, such as controlled out-of-body experiences, which are referred to as "exteriorization" in Scientology. During this time, Swann showed these abilities at the Stanford Research Institute in experiments that became known as remote viewing. These experiments interested the Central Intelligence Agency. He is often credited with suggesting the idea of controlled remote viewing, a method where people would observe a location using only its geographical coordinates. This method was later developed and tested by Puthoff and Targ, who received funding from the CIA.
Uri Geller
In the 1970s, the popularity of Uri Geller caused skeptics and historians to largely ignore a detailed review of Ingo Swann's paranormal claims. Uri Geller praised Swann, stating, "If a blind person met someone who could teach them to see using mental power, they would regard that person as a spiritual teacher. So why is Ingo Swann not published by traditional companies and instead forced to share his remarkable life story online?"
Scientists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff tested both Geller and Swann and reported that they possessed unusual abilities. However, other researchers have questioned the scientific reliability of Targ and Puthoff's experiments. In a 1983 interview, magician Milbourne Christopher described Swann as "one of the most skilled individuals in the field."
Out-of-body experiment
In 1972, the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) published a newsletter. In it, Karlis Osis, the director of research, described a controlled out-of-body (OOB) experiment he conducted with Swann. The objects Swann was asked to describe and draw were placed on a shelf two feet below the ceiling and several feet above Swann’s head. Osis mentioned the ceiling’s height, and Swann said it was 14 feet tall. Two overhead lights, similar to those in a kitchen, lit the room. Swann sat alone in a chamber, with wires from sensors attached to his head running through the wall behind him. He sat directly below the shelf holding the objects. He was given a clipboard to use for drawing. Any movement while sketching did not cause errors in the brain readings. In Swann’s book To Kiss Earth Goodbye, there is a picture of the objects on the shelf. Swann wrote that he recognized most of the items on the shelf above his head, but he did not know that the shelf held four numbers on each side, which would not have been visible if a reflective surface had been placed near the end.
Psychological tools were created to measure the quality and clarity of Swann’s OOB vision, as described by him. These ratings changed over time. Results were judged by people who did not know which target Swann was describing. A psychologist, Bonnie Preskari or Carole K. Silfen, was asked to match Swann’s responses to the correct targets without knowing which ones they were. She correctly matched all eight sessions. Osis noted that the chance of Swann being correct was 40,000 to 1. There is no record of any experiments being done in the dark.
Silfen and Swann prepared an unofficial report about later OOB experiments and shared it with 500 ASPR members before the ASPR board learned about it. Swann said Silfen disappeared and could not be found. He asked the public for help locating her. He also claimed that in April 1972, ASPR in New York tried to harm his reputation and remove him from the group because of his connection to Scientology.
Magnetometer psychokinesis tests
When Swann arrived at SRI, Harold Puthoff decided to test him for PK first. On June 6, 1972, Swann and Puthoff visited Dr. Arthur Heberd and his special device, a magnetometer, at the Varian Physics Building. The magnetometer was protected and had a small magnetic probe inside a vault five feet below the floor. The magnetometer ran silently for about an hour, showing a steady pattern on the chart recorder. Puthoff asked Swann if he could change the magnetometer’s magnetic field. Swann said he focused on the device but felt nothing.
There are different accounts of what happened next. Puthoff said after about five seconds, the frequency of the recorder’s pattern doubled for about 30 seconds. Heberd said the delay was longer, between 10 to 15 minutes, and the change was likely due to problems with the shared helium line to the lab. Heberd said when the pattern changed, Swann asked, “Is that what I am supposed to do?” Swann said he responded, “Is that an effect?” Heberd said Swann left the room, while Swann said he stopped thinking about the machine and began drawing. Others watched the recorder and saw the pattern change again. Puthoff asked Swann, “Did you do that too?” Swann said, “Is that an effect?” Swann later said he felt tired and could not “hold it any longer,” and the pattern returned to normal.
Some sources support Puthoff’s account, saying Heberd agreed with him and suggested Swann should try stopping the field change completely. Heberd denied telling James Randi he never made that suggestion. Swann said Puthoff asked, “Can you do that again?” Swann said some doctoral students were frightened by his actions, with two running from the room and one bumping into a visible support structure.
Puthoff wrote that Heberd suggested the equipment might be faulty. The next day, the magnetometer was confirmed to be malfunctioning. “The equipment was acting strangely; it was impossible to get a stable signal for testing.” Because of this, the experiment was not repeated. Swann later wrote about this event in his book, Remote Viewing: The Real Story. In a CIA report, Dr. Kenneth A. Kress did not mention Heberd’s claims about the equipment. Kress wrote, “These changes were never seen before or after this visit.” Though Swann stayed at SRI for a year, Targ and Puthoff wrote no further details about the experiment, and Swann did not mention other PK tests with the magnetometer.
After the experiment, Puthoff wrote a short paper in draft form. Instead of publishing it in a scientific journal for review, he shared it by hand with research and academic groups across the U.S. Puthoff also gave talks about the experiment. The paper caught the attention of the CIA, and two agents visited Puthoff at SRI and met with Swann. Later, the paper was published as part of a conference report.
EarlyCoordinate Remote Viewingexperiments
Targ and Puthoff described their early tests, "We could not ignore the chance that Ingo might have known about Earth's geography and its approximate latitude and longitude. (Swann is the one who suggested these Coordinate Remote Viewing tests, not the experimenters. He had control over the process.) 'Or it was possible that we accidentally gave Swann hints, since we, the experimenters, already knew the answers.'"
Later, Targ and Puthoff conducted more tests with Swann. They made the tests more careful to avoid mistakes. This time, Swann was given the latitude and longitude of ten targets. There would be ten total runs, for a total of 100 attempts. Only the results from the tenth run, the final one, were shared. The results from the first ninety runs (runs 1–9) were not used. In the tenth run, Swann correctly identified seven targets, had two neutral responses, and missed one. The experiments ended. Targ and Puthoff stated, "Something was happening, but we are not sure what it is." (This method of using only a small number of answers from a larger, sometimes hidden group is called the free response method in remote viewing. It is sometimes referred to as cherry picking.) According to Swann and Stanford Research International, his remote viewing was correct about 95% of the time. His students, who were personally trained by him, had remote viewing results that were correct about 85% of the time. See: Stargate Project.
Swann's descriptions of Jupiter
Swann suggested a study to Targ and Puthoff. At first, they were hesitant because the results could not be proven. However, on the evening of April 27, 1973, Targ and Puthoff recorded Swann’s remote viewing experiment of Jupiter and its moons before the Voyager probe visited Jupiter in 1979.
Swann requested 30 minutes of silence. He said it took about three and a half minutes for him to see Jupiter. During the session, he described physical features of Jupiter, including its atmosphere and the surface of its core. Swann claimed to see bands of crystals in the atmosphere, which he compared to clouds and possibly to the rings of Saturn. Later, the Voyager probe confirmed the existence of Jupiter’s rings, though these rings are not in the planet’s atmosphere. Swann’s claim about crystals in the atmosphere was supported by observations from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, which found clouds of ammonia ice crystals in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.
In 1995, Swann described his 1973 experiment in the following way:
[6:06:20] Very high in the atmosphere, there are crystals that glitter. Maybe the stripes are like bands of crystals, similar to Saturn’s rings, but much closer to the planet. I wonder if they could reflect radio signals. Could a cloud of crystals react to different radio waves?
[6:08:00] Now I will move downward. It feels pleasant there. I have said this before. Inside the cloud layers, the crystal layers look beautiful from the outside. From the inside, they appear like rolling gas clouds with eerie yellow light and rainbows.
[6:10:20] I get the impression that there is liquid, though I do not see it.
[6:10:55] Then I passed through the cloud cover. The surface looks like sand dunes made of large, smooth crystals that slide easily. Strong winds blow, similar to Earth’s winds, but close to Jupiter’s surface. The horizon appears orangish or rose-colored, while the sky above is greenish-yellow.
[6:12:35] To the right, there is a huge mountain range.
[6:14:45] I feel there is liquid somewhere. The mountains are very large but do not break through the crystal cloud cover. I once dreamed of a cloud cover that formed an arc across the sky. The sand that gives the dunes their orange color is large and smooth, resembling amber or obsidian but yellowish and lighter. The wind moves them, causing them to slide.
[6:16:37] If I turn, the surface appears very flat. If a person stood on the sands, I think they would sink into them. This might explain the feeling of liquid.
In a version of the experiment recorded in the book Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, Swann did not mention sand. Instead, he said, “I feel there is liquid somewhere… liquid like water.”
Swann’s total observations lasted about 20 minutes. He did not mention Jupiter’s 95 moons. The raw data included only four pages, but Swann stated that supporting information appeared in many scientific and technical articles and papers. To avoid using any scientific information out of context, all related materials were included. The total feedback data amounted to about 300 pages.
Brain activity during remote viewing
In November 2001, Michael Persinger wrote an article that appeared in a scientific journal called The Journal of Neuropsychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences. His work with a person named Swann showed that Swann's brain activity changed in measurable ways during remote viewing. The brain's occipital, temporal, and frontal lobes showed electrical activity that was similar to patterns seen in bipolar brain wave recordings. Persinger concluded that there was a strong match between the stimuli Swann experienced and the brain activity recorded during the experiment.
Psychic detectives
Swann said that of the twenty-five criminal cases he worked on between 1972 and 1979, twenty-two did not work, and three were successful. Swann described Gerard Croiset and Peter Hurkos as very sensitive detectives. In their 1991 book The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime, authors Arthur Lyons and Marcello Truzzi Ph.D.—who also founded the International Remote Viewing Association—wrote that the cases involving Croiset and Hurkos were "not true."
Ufology
Swann supported the study of UFOs and James W. Moseley's newsletter called Saucer Smear. Swann wrote that although some readers might see Saucer Smear as a humorous source of UFO-related news, it actually provides important insights into the social aspects of UFO research. He stated that the collected issues of the newsletter form a valuable historical record.
In his 1998 autobiography Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy, Swann described his work with people in an unknown organization that studies extraterrestrials (E.T.). He wrote about using a technique called remote viewing to observe a secret E.T. base on the far side of the Moon. He also described a surprising experience in a Los Angeles supermarket with a female extraterrestrial who was dressed in revealing clothing. Swann concluded that extraterrestrials live on Earth in human-like forms. He suggested that many of these beings are "bio-androids" and that they are aware their main opponents on Earth are people with psychic abilities.
Later, Swann and a man named "Mr. Axelrod" traveled to an unknown northern location, which Swann believed might be Alaska. Along with two bodyguards who looked identical, they tried to secretly observe a UFO that repeatedly appeared near a lake and pulled water from it. Mr. Axelrod explained that the silent, moving triangle-shaped object was scanning the area and harming nearby animals. He said the object's invisible beams were causing animals like deer or porcupines to be pushed out of the woods. The bodyguards realized they had been discovered, and the group was attacked by the UFO. Swann was moved to safety by his companions and suffered a minor injury.