Ingo Swann

Ingo Douglas Swann was born on September 14, 1933, in Telluride, Colorado, then a depopulating silver-mining town high in the San Juan Mountains. His father was a Norwegian immigrant who worked in the mines. The family moved to Salt Lake City when Swann was a boy. He attended Westminster College there, graduating in 1955 with a degree in biology and art. He spent the next two years in the U.S. Army, posted to Korea as a staff artist for the Eighth Army.

In 1958 Swann moved to New York City. He took a job at the United Nations Secretariat, where he worked as a clerk for the next eleven years, and pursued painting in his nights and weekends. He showed work in small Manhattan galleries through the 1960s. His paintings tended toward the cosmological: planets, nebulae, deep-space scenes rendered in oils. He sold some of them.

In the late 1960s Swann began volunteering as a research subject at the American Society for Psychical Research, then run by the parapsychologist Karlis Osis on West 73rd Street. The ASPR research involved sealed-target experiments, telepathy tests, and what Osis called "out-of-body" experiments in which Swann attempted to describe rooms and objects he was not in. The ASPR notes from this period describe Swann as an unusually consistent subject. Around the same time he became involved with the Church of Scientology, eventually reaching the higher training levels of that organization.

In May 1972, the physicist Harold Puthoff, then at Stanford Research Institute, visited the ASPR to observe Swann in a magnetometer-influence experiment. Swann produced a measurable deviation in the magnetometer's output. Puthoff invited him to SRI for a longer evaluation. Within weeks the CIA's Office of Technical Service had funded the contract that would become Project SCANATE, with Swann as its sole initial subject. The remote-viewing program that ran for the next twenty-three years began as a research project on whether the things Ingo Swann appeared to do could be reproduced by others.

The April 1973 Jupiter session was Swann's most-cited single result. Asked to describe the planet before the first close NASA flyby, he reported among other things a ring of small particles low above the cloud tops. The Pioneer 10 flyby in December 1973 did not confirm any such ring. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, in March 1979, did.

In the early 1980s Swann worked with the Army viewer Edward May and others to standardize a training protocol called Coordinate Remote Viewing, designed to make the SRI methodology teachable to new viewers without prior demonstrated ability. The CRV protocol shaped the Army remote-viewing unit's training pipeline through the SUN STREAK and STAR GATE eras.

Swann continued painting throughout his life. He published several books on his experiences, including Natural ESP in 1987 and Penetration in 1998. He kept a Manhattan studio on Bowery for more than thirty years. He died of cardiac failure at Bellevue Hospital on January 31, 2013. He was 79.