Case file · Remote viewing & psi research

Ingo Swann

A New York artist and psychic whose tests at the American Society for Psychical Research and at SRI launched remote viewing.

1973 CE · 40.78, -73.97 · status: disputed

The account

Swann developed the structured method later called Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV), which was used to train military viewers. In 1973, in a session run jointly with Harold Sherman and questioned by Harold Puthoff, he gave a 'remote viewing' of Jupiter that supporters say anticipated its faint ring, discovered by Voyager in 1979. The Jupiter session took place on 27 April 1973 and was run jointly with Harold Sherman of Mountain View, Arkansas, who 'probed' at the same moment. Swann's transcript (Experiment 46) shows Hal Puthoff asking him questions. Swann compares bands of crystals to the rings of Saturn, 'though not far out like that, very close within the atmosphere'. The two men's write-up says neither claimed validity for the results. A year earlier, Puthoff had written that Swann appeared to disturb a shielded magnetometer at Stanford, which he called 'an observation, not a controlled experiment'. The CIA kept that letter. The ASPR's Summer 1972 newsletter reports that in Karlis Osis's out-of-body tests a blind judge matched all eight of Swann's target descriptions, about 1 in 40,000 by chance (p.2). In 1978 he coached the Army's Grill Flame test group at Aberdeen on cueing, 'overlay' and session timing, and in 1984 Army viewers were still being trained in his six-stage coordinate method under an SRI subcontract in New York and Menlo Park (AMSAA memo, 30 Oct 1978; INSCOM training plan, 22 Oct 1984). The Jupiter-ring story in the atlas appears in a 1988 Air War College paper, which takes it from Ron McRae's book 'Mind Wars', not from a session record (p.28-29).

The sceptical view

His Jupiter description also contained errors (the SRI transcript places his 'ring' of crystals inside the atmosphere rather than standing off the planet), and a ring had been speculated about before. Program scientist Edwin May later stopped using him.

Connections in the atlas

Sources

Open it in the living atlas