Fridays with Ingo: Scientist and Psychic
by Debra Lynne Katz, Ph.D.
PUBLICATION: MindField, www.parapsych.org, published by the Parapsychological Association. December 30, 2021.
When I first began volunteering in the Ingo Swann archival collection, located in the basement of the University of West Georgia’s Ingram’s Library (which doubles as the university’s tornado shelter), I thought of Swann mostly as a talented psychic. I was aware he had exhibited convincing evidence of PK and was the creator of the controlled remote viewing (CRV) methodology, which I had been studying and practicing for several years. By the time I left campus after spending most Fridays with Ingo (posthumously) for two and a half years, my view of him had dramatically changed. From what I had learned through cataloging his correspondence files, followed by an independent study of his SRI files as part of my doctoral work, I was convinced Ingo was not just a psychic subject - he was as much a scientist in his own right as anyone he had worked with at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the laboratory overseeing the clandestine U.S. governmental remote viewing operational programs that spanned two decades. I’d classify Swann as both an experimentalist and a social scientist. I also discovered he was not merely a naturally gifted psychic, but rather had spent an exorbitant amount of time developing his skills and then trying to figure out how he could pass on his knowledge to others, even while continuing to hone his own.
