Ingo Swann

Two contributions from Swann shaped everything that followed, and neither was a result. The first was the term remote viewing itself, which he preferred over clairvoyance because it carried no theological or spiritualist freight and described a task rather than a faculty, and the choice of word did a great deal of work in making the subject fundable. The second was a change to the experimental design. The early protocol sent an experimenter to a site and asked the viewer to describe where that person was, which meant the viewer was arguably following the person rather than perceiving the place, and which also meant nobody could describe a site that no colleague had visited.

Swann proposed that the viewer be given nothing but a pair of map coordinates, which removed the human beacon entirely and, incidentally, turned the procedure into something an intelligence sponsor could imagine pointing at a location on the far side of a closed border. He worked with the American Society for Psychical Research in New York before moving to Stanford Research Institute, and was involved in developing the structured written procedure later taught to military personnel. He was also, for much of his adult life, a member of the Church of Scientology, a fact he did not conceal and which critics of the programme have raised as a question about the framework he brought to it.

Swann was a working artist for his whole adult life, exhibiting paintings and illustrating his own books, and he wrote a good deal about what he believed he was doing, including a long account of the SRI years. That body of writing is a primary source for the programme's internal history and is also, as he would not have disputed, a partisan one. The deeper difficulty his career illustrates is structural rather than personal. Almost every claimed positive result in the history of experimental psi research has depended on a handful of unusually productive subjects: Hubert Pearce at Duke, Basil Shackleton in London, Pavel Stepanek in Prague, Swann and Pat Price at Stanford.

A star subject is the only way such a programme produces anything, and is simultaneously the reason its results resist replication, because when the subject stops, the effect stops, and no independent laboratory can obtain the same person under the same conditions. The field has never resolved whether that pattern indicates a rare human capacity or a recurring artefact of the arrangement in which one enthusiastic participant works closely with investigators who want the result. Swann's files remain the most fully documented instance of it.