Ingo Douglass Swann (September 14, 1933 – January 31, 2013) was an American psychic, artist, and author, whose claims of clairvoyance were investigated as a part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Stargate Project. Swann is credited as the creator of the term "Remote Viewing," a term which refers to the use of extrasensory perception to perceive distant persons, places, or events.
Early life Swann was born in Telluride, Colorado, on September 14th, 1933. Swann claimed to have out-of-body experiences beginning at three years of age, during a tonsil removal operation, after which he began to see colorful 'auras' around certain objects. These experiences continued throughout childhood, and eventually prompted Swann to volunteer as a participant in parapsychology research at the age of 37.
Remote viewing Before severing his ties with the organization in the late 1970s, Swann was a prominent celebrity Scientologist, having attained the level of Operating Thetan through Scientology auditing. It is purported that the attainment of the level may extend one’s psychic abilities including controlled out-of-body experiences, called "exteriorization" in Scientology. In 1972, Swann first demonstrated his exteriorization skills at the Stanford Research Institute in experiments that would come to be known secularly as remote viewing. These experiments caught the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency. He is commonly credited with proposing the idea of controlled remote viewing, a process in which viewers would view a location given nothing aside from its geographical coordinates, which was developed and tested by Puthoff and Targ with CIA funding.
Uri Geller Due to the popularity of Uri Geller in the seventies, skeptics and historians basically overlooked a critical examination of Swann's paranormal claims. Uri Geller commented very favorably on Swann, saying, "If you were blind and a man appeared who could teach you to see with mind power, you would revere him as a guru. So why is Ingo Swann ignored by publishers and forced to publish his astounding life story on the Internet?" Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, two experimenters, tested Geller and Swann and concluded that they had unique skills. Others have strongly disputed the scientific validity of Targ and Puthoff's experiments. In a 1983 interview, magician Milbourne Christopher remarked that Swann was "one of the cleverest in the field".
Out-of-body experiment In 1972, in the newsletter of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), their director of research Karlis Osis described his personal controlled out-of-body (OOB) experiment with Swann. The targets that Swann was to attempt to describe and illustrate were on a shelf two feet from the ceiling and several feet above Swann's head. Osis did describe the height of the ceiling. Swann suggested that the ceiling was 14 feet tall. Two kitchen-style overhead fixtures illuminated the room. Swann sat alone in the chamber, wires from electrodes fastened to his head running through the wall behind him. Swann sat just beneath the target tray. He was given a clipboard to use for sketching. Any movement while drawing did not result in "artifacts" in the brain readout. In Swann's book To Kiss Earth Goodbye there is a photograph of the objects on the shelf. Swann wrote that he knew most of the objects on a shelf above his head, but he did not know it held four numbers on a side that would not have been visible if a reflecting surface had been angled near the end. Psychological scales were developed to rate the quality and clarity (as subjectively described) of Swann's OOB vision, which varied from time to time. The results were evaluated by blind judging. A psychologist, Bonnie Preskari or Carole K. Silfen, was asked to match up Swann's responses without knowing which target they were meant. She matched all eight sessions. Osis stressed the odds of Swann being correct were forty thousand to one. There is no record of any experiments being performed in the dark. Silfen and Swann prepared an unofficial report of later out-of-body experiments and circulated it to 500 members of the ASPR before the ASPR board was aware of it. According to Swann, Silfen had disappeared and could not be located. While searching for her, he also sought help from the general public. Swann claimed that in April 1972, the ASPR in New York attempted to discredit him and expel him due to his affiliation with Scientology.
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