Ingo Swann

From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 👤 Person

Contents 7
Ingo Swann
Illustration of official papers and files
Illustration: official papers and files. An artist's impression drawn for this site, not a photograph of the event.
TypePerson
Also known asSwann
On the Timeline2 events, 1972–1995

Ingo Douglass Swann (14 September 1933 – 31 January 2013) was an American psychic, artist and author, credited with coining the term "remote viewing". His experiments at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1972 drew CIA interest and helped start the government program later known as Stargate.[1]

Early life

Illustration of an open book about flying saucers
Illustration: an open book about flying saucers. An artist's impression drawn for this site, not a photograph of the event.

Swann was born in Telluride, Colorado. He said he had out-of-body experiences from the age of three, and volunteered for parapsychology research in his late thirties. He was for a time a member of the Church of Scientology, which he left in the late 1970s.[1]

SRI experiments

Harold Puthoff: Hal Puthoff
Harold Puthoff: Hal Puthoff Photo: CIA · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

In 1972 Swann took part in tests at the American Society for Psychical Research and then at SRI with physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ. He is credited with proposing "coordinate remote viewing", in which the viewer is given only map coordinates of a target, which Puthoff and Targ developed with CIA funding. Swann and SRI claimed high accuracy rates, but critics argued that results were selectively reported; in one series only the last of ten runs was published.[1][2]

Jupiter session

Russell Targ
Russell Targ Photo: photo was taken by subject's wife (Patricia Targ) · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

On 27 April 1973 Swann attempted to "view" the planet Jupiter in a session recorded by Targ and Puthoff, years before the Voyager probes visited it in 1979. He described crystal bands that supporters compare with Jupiter's faint rings, discovered by Voyager; the rings are not in the planet's atmosphere as he described, though NASA's Galileo probe later found ammonia ice clouds there. His later account of the session differs from the transcript published in 1977.[1]

Stargate

Illustration of an observer watching the sky
Illustration: an observer watching the sky. An artist's impression drawn for this site, not a photograph of the event.

Swann was associated with the U.S. government's remote-viewing program and is reported to have trained U.S. Army officers and a civilian for the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1983. He said that of 25 criminal cases he worked on between 1972 and 1979, three were successes and 22 failures.[1][3]

UFOs and later books

Illustration of a military base at night
Illustration: a military base at night. An artist's impression drawn for this site, not a photograph of the event.

Swann was a supporter of ufology. His 1998 book Penetration claimed that extraterrestrials lived on Earth in human form, that he had remotely viewed a secret base on the far side of the Moon, and described a UFO encounter in Alaska; these claims are unverified. He died in New York City in 2013.[1]

On the UAP Timeline

The headquarters of SRI International in Menlo Park .
The headquarters of SRI International in Menlo Park . Photo: Coolcaesar at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

References

This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.

Discuss the article: missing sources, mistakes, or what should be added.

No discussion yet.

BrowseFeedArticlesTimelineOfficial filesMapTonight’s SkyStatsFavorites