Ingo Swann

Ingo Douglas Swann (September 14, 1933 – January 31, 2013) was an American artist, author, and parapsychology subject whose reported clairvoyance was studied under CIA contract at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the 1970s, where he co-developed with physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ the protocol that became known as remote viewing — the alleged use of extrasensory perception to describe distant persons, places, or events. Swann is credited with coining the term "remote viewing" and with proposing the coordinate remote viewing (CRV) protocol adopted for the CIA- and DIA-funded SCANATE/Stargate programs. In exopolitics his 1998 autobiography Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy is the text most cited for his claim of a 1975 off-books operation, run through an intelligence handler he called "Mr. Axelrod," in which he was allegedly taken to a classified underground facility and tasked with remote viewing a non-human installation on the far side of the Moon.

Early life

Swann was born in Telluride, Colorado on September 14, 1933. He reported out-of-body experiences beginning at age three during a tonsil operation, after which he said he began to see colored "auras" around certain objects — experiences he described as continuing through childhood and ultimately prompting him, at age 37, to volunteer for parapsychology research. During the 1970s Swann was a prominent Scientologist who had attained the level of Operating Thetan, a status whose associated practice of controlled out-of-body experiences — called "exteriorization" — was widely cited by later commentators in connection with his remote-viewing ability.

Out-of-body experiments at the ASPR (1972)

In 1972, American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) director of research Karlis Osis ran a series of controlled out-of-body experiments with Swann in which target objects were placed on a shelf two feet from the ceiling, several feet above Swann's head; Swann, wired to electrodes and seated beneath the tray, sketched what he reported seeing. A photograph of the target shelf appears in Swann's 1975 book To Kiss Earth Goodbye; Swann wrote that he did not know the tray also contained numbers on a side not visible without a reflecting surface. Psychological scales were developed to rate the subjective quality of Swann's alleged OOB vision, and blind judging by psychologist Carole K. Silfen reportedly matched all eight of his sessions to their targets; Osis gave the odds as forty-thousand to one. Swann and Silfen subsequently circulated an unofficial report of later experiments directly to 500 ASPR members, which Swann said led the New York ASPR board to attempt to expel him in April 1972 over his Scientology affiliation.

Introduction to SRI

Swann's path to Stanford Research Institute began with a chance encounter in New York City: polygraph researcher Cleve Baxter mentioned Swann to Hal Puthoff — then a physicist at SRI designing a laser-linked experiment to test whether remote algae cultures could be perturbed at a distance — who invited Swann west for a weekend demonstration after reading Swann's documented temperature-manipulation experiments. In the initial SRI test Swann was presented with a superconducting quantum chip inside multiple layers of electrical, magnetic, and acoustic shielding, and reportedly produced measurable signals within the device without physical contact — a demonstration Puthoff has said brought the CIA to his door within weeks.

Magnetometer psychokinesis test (June 1972)

On June 6, 1972, Puthoff took Swann to Dr. Arthur Heberd's quark-detector magnetometer in the Varian Physics Building, where the well-shielded instrument had been running a stable trace for about an hour with a small magnetic probe in a vault five feet below the floor. Puthoff asked Swann to affect the magnetometer's field; accounts diverge on the delay, but after some interval the frequency of the trace-recorder oscillation allegedly doubled for about 30 seconds, and a second similar excursion reportedly followed when Swann re-focused. Heberd later said variations of that kind had never been seen before or since that visit, according to Dr. Kenneth A. Kress's internal CIA review; in James Randi's testimony the equipment was simply malfunctioning. Puthoff's short draft paper on the session circulated hand-to-hand across U.S. research institutions and — rather than peer review — produced an invitation from two CIA officers who visited SRI and met Swann; the paper was later published in the proceedings of a 1974 Geneva conference on quantum physics and parapsychology.

SRI, SCANATE, and coordinate remote viewing

Swann worked at SRI from 1972 onward, collaborating with Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ in the CIA-funded remote-viewing program — initially called SCANATE, later Project Stargate. According to Puthoff, when the CIA pressed them to rule out experimenter-subject collusion and produced geographic coordinates as a control, Swann proposed that he would simply read off what he saw at any latitude/longitude given to him — the procedure that became known as coordinate remote viewing (CRV). Targ and Puthoff's published pilot series gave Swann ten sets of coordinates per run; on the final run, only the results of which were released, he reportedly scored seven hits, two neutrals, and one miss — a use of the "free response" method that skeptics have described as a form of cherry picking. Puthoff has said the operational follow-on came when deputy director John McMahon ordered a Soviet target — an R&D facility at Semipalatinsk — where Swann and Pat Price reportedly described a giant crane that rolled across the roof of a building, details later declassified in the CIA's Stargate file release. In 1983 Swann personally trained the first class of U.S. Army CRV operators — Capt. Tom McNear, Capt. Edward Dames, Capt. Paul Smith, Capt. Bill Ray, and civilian Charlene Cavanaugh — for the Defense Intelligence Agency's Stargate unit.

Jacques Vallée, who worked at SRI during the same period, knew Swann personally and recalled that Swann insisted remote viewing should be applied rigorously to science and to intelligence collection — not treated as a parapsychological curiosity — and that he was frustrated at being regarded as merely a "psychic" when he was trying to establish a formal discipline with measurable parameters. Among the documented applied results of the Stargate program, a lost Soviet spacecraft was allegedly located in an African jungle through psychic intelligence collection — an operational success Vallée cited as evidence for the program's practical value.

Swann's descriptions of Jupiter (27 April 1973)

On the evening of 27 April 1973, Targ and Puthoff recorded a remote-viewing session in which Swann purportedly described the planet Jupiter before the Pioneer 10 flyby in December 1973 and the subsequent Voyager encounter of 1979. Swann requested 30 minutes of silence and took roughly three and a half minutes to "see" Jupiter; his transcribed observations reportedly included bands of high-atmospheric crystals he likened to the rings of Saturn, rolling yellow gas layers lit by rainbows, surface "sand dunes" of large polished grains, tremendous winds, and an enormous mountain range, with a persistent impression of liquid beneath. The Voyager probes later described the existence of the rings of Jupiter, though they are not in the atmosphere; NASA's Galileo spacecraft subsequently imaged ammonia-ice crystal clouds near the Great Red Spot, which Swann's supporters have cited as corroborating his "crystal" report. Swann did not mention any of Jupiter's 95 known moons. A 1995 re-transcription by Swann differs in small but documented ways from the 1977 Mind-Reach version, which omits the "sand" language and states "I feel there is liquid somewhere … liquid like water."

The Faraday cage and longitudinal-wave interpretation

Swann's reported ability to cause a remote flame to light while his consciousness was purportedly directed from inside a Faraday cage attracted the attention of researchers studying the physics of consciousness. Dan Winter has cited the result as alleged evidence that longitudinal (scalar) waves, unlike transverse electromagnetic waves, pass through a Faraday cage — a framework he later applied to the study of Jean-Charles Moyen's bilocation and the Soviet military remote viewer Vassiliev Korev.

In November 2001, Michael Persinger published a study in The Journal of Neuropsychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences reporting bipolar electroencephalographic activity over Swann's occipital, temporal, and frontal lobes during remote-viewing sessions, and concluding that there was "significant congruence" between stimuli and Swann's EEG activity.

Uri Geller and psychic detective work

Because of the enormous public attention paid to Uri Geller in the 1970s, a number of skeptics argued that critical examination of Swann's paranormal claims was largely overlooked at the time. Geller himself commented favorably on Swann, writing that "if you were blind and a man appeared who could teach you to see with mind power, you would revere him as a guru." Targ and Puthoff tested both Swann and Geller and concluded each had unique skills; critics including C. E. M. Hansel disputed the scientific validity of the SRI experiments. In a 1983 interview the magician Milbourne Christopher called Swann "one of the cleverest in the field." Between 1972 and 1979 Swann worked twenty-five criminal cases, reporting that twenty-two had been failures and three successes; he said he recoiled from the emotional and physiological toll of psychically contacting violence and did not consider himself a suitable psychic sleuth.

Penetration and the Axelrod operation (1998)

Swann's 1998 autobiography Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy describes a 1975 approach by an intelligence figure he identifies only as "Mr. Axelrod," who allegedly recruited Swann for a classified operation outside the normal SCANATE/Stargate chain of command. Per Swann he was reportedly driven to an underground facility where, through the windows of an indoor pool, he first saw a large disc-shaped craft — convincing him that what he had been remote viewing was physically real — and was subsequently tasked with remote viewing the far side of the Moon. The resulting session record reportedly described tunnels, large dome structures, dark machinery, and humanoid beings with large eyes who allegedly detected his psychic presence and became hostile; Swann wrote that his CIA contacts told him the session matched classified data. Penetration further claims that extraterrestrials live on Earth in humanoid form as "bio-androids" whose principal adversaries are psychics; that Swann had a "shocking" encounter with a scantily-dressed female extraterrestrial in a Los Angeles supermarket; and that on a flight to a northerly location Swann deduced to be Alaska, he, Axelrod, and two "twin" bodyguards purportedly observed a silent triangular UFO drawing water from a lake and eliminating wildlife, before being detected and briefly "attacked."

AJ Gentile, creator of The Why Files, has summarized the Swann/Axelrod moon session as a keystone of the classified-lunar-NHI narrative: "Ingo Swann remote viewed the moon and saw aliens up there and he said aliens are not our friends … there are bases up there, they're watching us, they're all over it." Gentile has connected Swann's descriptions to the later Karl Wolfe testimony on structures in NASA lunar survey imagery, arguing that remote-viewing and photographic accounts describe the same alleged infrastructure.

Steven Greer, who knew Swann personally, has said that Swann was among the remote viewers selectively recruited for classified programs through a screening process targeting individuals with measurable psionic capability regardless of conventional profile — noting that Swann was "brilliant" and "gay" and that neither factor was disqualifying, because selectors were looking for ability, not military fit.

Swann was also a longtime supporter of James W. Moseley's Saucer Smear newsletter, which he described as "a profound 'window' opening up onto the sociology of ufology" and "a precious historical archive."

Publications

• To Kiss Earth Good-bye: Adventures and Discoveries in the Nonmaterial, Hawthorne Books, 1975
• Star Fire (novel), 1979, ISBN 0-7221-8303-8
• What Will Happen to You When the Soviets Take Over?, 1980
• Everybody's Guide to Natural ESP: Unlocking the Extrasensory Power of Your Mind, J. P. Tarcher, 1991, ISBN 978-0874776683
• Your Nostradamus Factor — Accessing Your Innate Ability to See Into the Future
• The Great Apparitions of Mary: An Examination of Twenty-two Supranormal Appearances, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996
• Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy, Ingo Swann Books, 1998, ISBN 0-9667674-0-3
• Psychic Sexuality: The Bio-Psychic "Anatomy" of Sexual Energies, Ingo Swann Books, ISBN 978-0966767414

See also

• Remote viewing (UAP applications)
• Coordinate Remote Viewing
• The Men Who Stare at Goats

Further reading

• Buchanan, Lyn, The Seventh Sense: The Secrets of Remote Viewing as Told by a "Psychic Spy" for the U.S. Military, ISBN 0-7434-6268-8
• McMoneagle, Joseph, The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy, Hampton Roads 2002, ISBN 1-57174-225-5
• Ronson, Jon, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Simon & Schuster, 2004, ISBN 0-7432-4192-4
• Schnabel, Jim, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies, Dell, 1997, ISBN 0-440-22306-7
• Smith, Paul H., Reading the Enemy's Mind: Inside Star Gate — America's Psychic Espionage Program, Forge Books 2005, ISBN 0-312-87515-0

References