The Odd Gifts of Ingo Swann

Ingo Swann, who worked with the CIA in the 1970’s to spy on Russia via remote viewing and co-created the agency’s Stargate Project, died earlier this year. Famous for powerful psychic abilities and government-funded parapsychology experiments, his life story reads like a Fringe script. Except weirder.

Swann’s life was a paradox. Believing that his psychic/telekinetic powers were a natural ability, he decried the mystical  trappings surrounding the field and encouraged rational study of the subject. And to prove his power, Ingo famously announced the existence of planetary rings around the planet Jupiter in 1973 — six years before the Voyager probe confirmed his findings.

However, no matter how hard he worked to make parapsychology seem legitimate, Ingo’s tireless and profound eccentricity cancelled out the effort. Scientists tend to not take you seriously when you spend your down time creating impossibly cheesy “psychic” art  and claiming to have had sexy encounters with a lady space alien in your autobiography, which has the in-no-way-deranged title: “Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy.”

So, basically it’s a draw. Thanks for nothing, Ingo.

Pictured: Credibility.