The inner life
Ingo Swann
Direct answer
Ingo Swann (1933 to 2013) was an American artist who took part in psychic experiments from 1971, helped to devise remote viewing and wrote the method later taught to military viewers.
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At a glance
- Also called
- coordinate remote viewing
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Remote Viewing, Stargate Project, Clairvoyance, Parapsychology
Ingo Swann (1933 to 2013) was an American artist who took part in psychic experiments from 1971, helped to devise remote viewing and wrote the method later taught to military viewers.
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Who was Ingo Swann?
Swann was a painter living in New York when he volunteered as a subject for psychical researchers there. He is credited with suggesting the experiment, and with a colleague the name, of remote viewing: describing a distant place from nothing more than a cue. In 1972 he went to the Stanford Research Institute in California to work with the physicist Harold Puthoff, and the funding that followed from intelligence agencies began the programme later known as Stargate.
His own contribution was a procedure. He proposed giving the viewer only map coordinates, and in the early 1980s he and Puthoff wrote a staged method, coordinate remote viewing, which he taught to army personnel. Supporters regard him as the most gifted subject of the programme. Critics hold that the judging of the early trials at the institute was flawed, and note that no one has repeated them under tight conditions.
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What sets Ingo Swann apart
Swann was unusual among psychic subjects in refusing the passive part. He argued with his experimenters about design, proposed tasks of his own and ended by writing the manual. His claim was that remote viewing is a skill with stages that can be taught to ordinary people, not a rare gift, and that claim is what turned a set of laboratory trials into a training course for soldiers and, after 1995, into a commercial one.
- Lived: 1933 to 2013; born at Telluride, Colorado
- Trade: painter and writer, based in New York
- First tested: 1971 to 1972, at the American Society for Psychical Research
- Stanford work: from 1972, with Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ
- His method: coordinate remote viewing, written with Puthoff in the early 1980s
Often mistaken for something else: Remote viewing is the protocol; Ingo Swann is the subject who helped to devise it and whose staged method later courses descend from.
The story behind Ingo Swann
He was born at Telluride, Colorado, in 1933. In 1971 and 1972 he was tested at the American Society for Psychical Research and at City College in New York. In June 1972, at Stanford, he was reported to have disturbed the reading of a shielded magnetometer, an episode that was never repeated under controls. He worked with the Stanford programme through the 1970s and 1980s, wrote several books, and died in New York in 2013. The programme was closed in 1995.
Why Ingo Swann matters
The method, the vocabulary and much of the lore of remote viewing trace to him, so judging the practice means looking at his trials.
How to read Ingo Swann
Teachers of remote viewing cite him as the founder of their method; historians of the Stargate programme treat him as its first subject.
Ingo Swann in practice: an example
A course that teaches remote viewing in numbered stages, starting from a quick scribble, is using a descendant of the procedure Swann wrote.
Where readings of Ingo Swann go wrong
The reports of his successes come mainly from the experimenters and from Swann himself, and independent repetition is lacking.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- who was ingo swann, ingo swann remote viewing, ingo swann stargate, coordinate remote viewing, ingo swann sri
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
Who was Ingo Swann?
He was an American artist and author who became the best known subject of government-funded psychic research in the 1970s. He helped to create the remote viewing protocol used at the Stanford Research Institute.
Did Ingo Swann invent remote viewing?
He is credited with proposing the experiment and, with a colleague in New York, the term, about 1971. The idea of seeing at a distance is far older; what he added was a laboratory task and later a step-by-step procedure.
Was Ingo Swann's remote viewing ever verified?
Experimenters who worked with him reported striking results. Outside critics reported problems in how the institute's early trials were judged, and the 1995 review of the programme concluded that it had produced nothing of use for intelligence.
