Folks, It’s Hog Wash: The Tall Tale of Ingo Swann and the Myth of Remote Viewing

By Dan Conderman

Let’s put a fork in it—remote viewing isn’t real. It never was. And the sooner we stop treating it like a government secret wrapped in mystic fog, the better off we’ll be. Because once you strip away the incense, the Cold War paranoia, and the self-published memoirs, what you’re left with is the same thing you find at the bottom of every snake oil bottle: hustle and hope in equal measure.

🎨 Enter Ingo Swann: The Artist Formerly Known as Psychic

Ingo Swann was a painter. A dreamer. A man with a flair for the esoteric and an eye for a good pitch. He wasn’t a scientist, wasn’t a soldier, wasn’t a sage—he was a guy who realized early on that if you speak with enough confidence and sprinkle in government acronyms, people will listen.

He got himself into the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s, talked about “seeing” things with his mind, and suddenly we had physicists and bureaucrats asking him what he saw on Jupiter. And guess what he said? Rings.

Sounds like a win until you realize that by the early ’70s, astronomers were already predicting rings around gas giants based on starlight flickers and gravitational logic. It wasn’t prophecy. It was a well-educated guess, filtered through an artsy type who said a dozen other things that turned out to be dead wrong.

But no one remembers the misses—because believers never catalog the failures. They canonize the lucky hits.

🛰 Project Stargate: Bureaucratic Woo at Taxpayer Expense

The CIA, the DIA, and the Pentagon did fund Project Stargate, a remote viewing research program. Not because they believed it worked, but because the Soviets might have been dabbling in psychic espionage and we couldn’t afford to fall behind in even the dumbest arms race imaginable.

For over 20 years, millions were spent on people staring at maps, scribbling shapes, and claiming psychic visions. In all that time, the program generated exactly zero actionable intelligence. That’s not speculation—it’s in the CIA’s own post-mortem.

The program was shut down in 1995. The best it could muster was anecdotal weirdness and vague sketches that only made sense after the target was revealed. Like reading a horoscope backwards and pretending it predicted your day.

🧠 Let’s Use Some Logic

If remote viewing worked, we’d see:

• Bank vaults emptied from prison cells
• Missing children found with stunning regularity
• Stock trades based on psychic market reads
• A lottery winner with an aura of smug enlightenment

Instead, we get none of that. You know what we do get? Books. Speaking tours. YouTube videos. People selling belief, not results. And if you think prison inmates wouldn’t already be using remote viewing to get early parole or dig up offshore accounts, you’re living in fantasy land.

There are two million people behind bars in the U.S. right now, many with nothing but time and desperation. If anyone had psychic ability, we’d have seen it manifest in prisons decades ago—with real-world consequences.

But you don’t. You won’t. Because it’s hog wash.

🛑 Belief is Not Evidence

The human brain is a meaning-making machine. It wants patterns. It craves stories. That’s why people still believe this nonsense—because it feels magical, especially when the world seems senseless.

But science doesn’t care how magical something feels. It demands proof. Repeatable, measurable, objective proof. And remote viewing has failed that test every single time.

So the next time someone brings up Ingo Swann, Project Stargate, or “psychic soldiers,” tell them this:

“If remote viewing were real, it wouldn’t be hiding in documentaries and Reddit threads. It’d be Wall Street’s nuclear weapon. It’d be the FBI’s secret sauce. It’d be everywhere. Instead, it’s just another Cold War con that refuses to die.”

Folks, it’s hog wash.