Ingo Swann views Jupiter (April 1973)

On the afternoon of April 27, 1973, an artist and Scientologist named Ingo Swann sat down with two physicists in a windowless room at Stanford Research Institute. The physicists, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, were running a small CIA-funded program that asked whether a person could mentally describe a place they had never visited. The target that afternoon was the planet Jupiter. NASA was eight months away from the first Pioneer flyby.

Swann's notes from the session, later released through the Stargate document collection, described a planet with bands of cloud, a high-altitude haze, and what he called "a ring around the planet, very low, similar to but very much smaller than the rings of Saturn." He drew a sketch. He said the ring was made of bright crystals or small particles, and that it was difficult to see except at certain angles.

Pioneer 10 reached Jupiter in December 1973. Its instruments did not return clear evidence of a ring. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, six years later, did. In March 1979, Voyager's narrow-angle camera captured a faint, dust-grain ring around Jupiter at about 122,000 kilometers from the planet's center. It is much smaller than Saturn's. It is hard to see except at certain angles.

Stargate Project advocates, including Puthoff in his later writing, treat the Swann session as one of the program's strongest results: a description of a planetary feature months or years before mainstream science confirmed it. Critics point out that Swann also described mountains and a possibly solid surface, which Jupiter does not have. They note that the existence of a possible Jovian ring had been speculated in the scientific literature before 1973, including a 1969 paper by Sergei Vsekhsvyatsky that Swann may or may not have encountered.

What is not in dispute is that the session happened, that the notes were written before Voyager, and that the CIA was paying for it. The agency continued funding remote-viewing research at SRI for the next sixteen years.