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Ingo Swann, born September 14,1933, in Telluride, Colorado, passed away on February 1, 2013, in New York, New York.
Ingo's contribution to parapsychology is incalculable. His early activity in what eventually became known as remote viewing was in 1971-1973 when he participated in out-of-body trials at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York. In these experiments, Ingo was asked to describe the content of a sealed box a meter or so above his head.
His early work, in what is now known as Star Gate-the U.S. government's 20-year, 20-million-dollar program to study and use ESP as a collection asset for intelligence during the Cold War, is well documented in Mind-Reach (Targ & Puthoff, 1977). Rather than enumerating all of Ingo's significant contributions to the field, I thought I would tell a personal narrative to illustrate this remarkable and complex individual.
I first met Ingo at a party in his flat near 3rd Street in Manhattan, during which Ingo learned of my own interest in psi and that I was halfway through a lengthy research adventure in India. Later we met for dinner in the Village, where Ingo told of his work in California in rather vague terms. I did not know it at the time, but he was unable to provide specifics given that the ESP program at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) at the time was highly classified.
I returned from India in the spring of 1975 and began working at Maimonides Medical Center with Chuck Honorton, mainly on RNG studies. Ingo was quick to volunteer for some of those studies. He was always a willing and intently curious participant. In particular, he was fascinated with the random number generator (RNG) work coupled with the idea of separately counting trials and hits when he was in a particular EEG alpha bandwidth and power. We reported this work at an American Physical Society meeting that year. Ingo expressed great interest in that I was an experimental physicist...