Other spiritually gifted people
Swann, Ingo
Category: Other spiritually gifted people
Ingo Douglas Swann (1933 – 31 January 2013) was born in Colorado where “he recalls that his favourite childhood game was to zoom out of his body and go into the earth”.
After these out of body and other ‘levels of awareness experiences’, he decided to train as a biologist and then worked for some years at the UN before shifting his attention to painting and parapsychology.
Swann cooperated with a number of American research institutes as a ‘guinea pig’ in their attempts to research these sorts of experiences in a more scientific way. He worked with the American society of Psychical research, the City College of New York and at the Stanford research Institute.
But he became somewhat dis-enamoured of the approach taken, as scientists attempted to repeat experiments which were clearly not repeatable and gave him tasks which were not only mundane but somewhat pointless. He started to devise his own experiments and in this was extraordinarily successful.
Read a number of books on the subject of the out of body experience and you will find all sorts of myths repeating themselves – some true some not – shaking, humming, shaking, rolling over. Ingo Swann could just do it…..
Of course [I] seemed to have broken all the rules. Who ever heard of a psychic attempting a near mystical event from within a cloud of cigar smoke? And he did not go into a trance or sit in fabulous meditation to "float" up and out. When he attempted to "perceive" the targets, he did not manifest in an "astral" form nor quiver and shake as his "consciousness" separated from the physical body. And the "event" usually lasted only a few seconds, hardly profitable enough to try to capture on closed circuit TV tape.
One scientist Gertrude R Schmeidler of the Department of Psychology in the City College of the City University of New York was an exception in this however and their collaboration proved far more useful and eventful. I have added both an observation of their experiments and a comment from her.
Gertrude R Schmeidler
Ingo Swann is a remarkable man. He has extraordinarily strong psychic ability; he is thoughtful; he is fluent. Hearing him speak is a special experience ……As with other complex persons, one grows to know Ingo only slowly. He gives and withholds different parts of himself at different times. When I first met him, he withheld.
We were in a group of his friends and acquaintances and he sat monolithic in a chair, letting conversation swirl around him - a large man who watched pleasantly but seldom joined in the chatter or the activity. From that first meeting I had only two impressions of him: that the others thought he had outstanding psychic gifts, and that I knew nothing of what he thought.
He and his collaborators Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff coined the term ‘remote viewing’, to mean viewing remote objects and being able to describe them. But this is actually just another term for out of body. He was involved as a consequence with the Stargate Project. He wrote several books on remote viewing and related topics – the principle one being To Kiss the Earth Goodbye.
His ability was inherited, although I think he may have got an extra jolt when he was a child, by a very nasty experience during a tonsillectomy operation where he went out of body – from gas and from fear. Both his grandmothers had psychic ability. His family came from Sweden.
References
The principle book in which Ingo documents his experiences is to Kiss the Earth Goodbye, but I would like to also mention another book that he wrote.
Star Fire is, on a superficial level, promoted as a work of fiction and anyone looking on Amazon will see that the readers of the book tend to be sci-fi enthusiasts who rather condescendingly assume that Swann had lots of flights of fancy about infrasound and ultrasound weapons, that tend to detract from the gripping story line. But as you will see from the list below, 'Ingo Swann' was capable of out of body travel and was involved in a number of the USA’s DoD’s projects.
So you can read it at two levels, as a gripping, very good work of fiction about a hero called Daniel Merryweather who has vastly enhanced skills as a psychic and who becomes aware of research programmes around the world which seek to harness infrasound, ultrasound and the powers of the mind as weapons. Or you can read it as an historical account of what Swann found and abhorred and hoped he could change by developing his skills – he wanted to be Daniel Merryweather. I, for one, wished he could have achieved it.
Observations
For iPad/iPhone users: tap letter twice to get list of items.
- Swann, Ingo - A premonition
- Swann, Ingo - Affecting distant objects
- Swann, Ingo - In the quark detector
- Swann, Ingo - Out of body during tonsillectomy
- Swann, Ingo - Out of body over Central Park
- Swann, Ingo - Out of body to Cairo
- Swann, Ingo - Out of body to Europe
- Swann, Ingo - Out of body to Jupiter
- Swann, Ingo - Out of body to Lake Victoria
- Swann, Ingo - Out of body to Mercury
- Swann, Ingo - Sees the aura
- Swann, Ingo - The story of the chinchilla