Ingo Swann and the Breach of Two Double Steel Walls
By June Hargrove ·
Intelligence assets sought to turn a psychic into an applied specialist capable of influencing secure data through hardened physical barriers.
Ingo Swann sat in a sound-attenuated room, isolated from the target by two layers of double steel walls. He was not there to study the nature of the soul or the mechanics of the afterlife; he was there to see if a human mind could reach through physical shielding to manipulate the mathematical randomness that secures modern communications.
The document, titled "A DYNAMIC PK EXPERIMENT WITH INGO SWANN," records a session where the boundaries between academic inquiry and operational testing dissolved. It describes a study intended to assess whether a human subject could exert psychokinetic influence over a "noise-driven binary random generator." The stakes were not merely scientific. If a person can influence a random stream, they can influence an encrypted one.
The Applied Specialist
The record describes the subject, Ingo Swann, with a phrasing that moves far beyond the typical language of psychological observation. Swann, an American artist and author who would later become a central figure in the CIA’s Stargate Project, is described in the document as an "applied specialist in this area." This is not the language used for a passive subject of study; it is the language used for a tool.
According to the public record, Swann was the creator of the term "Remote Viewing," a practice used to perceive distant persons or events through extrasensory perception. But this specific experiment, conducted for a meeting of the American Physical Society in New York in February 1976, was not about seeing distant places. It was about doing.
Standing beside him were the researchers: Edwin C. May and Charles Honorton. May, a researcher who later shifted his professional affiliation to the physics department at City College of San Francisco, and Honorton, an American parapsychologist who led efforts to apply scientific methods to "anomalous information transfer," worked out of the Maimonides Medical Center. Maimonides is a non-profit medical and academic center in Brooklyn, and its role here was to provide the institutional weight required to present these findings to the American Physical Society—the professional organization dedicated to the advancement of physics.
By presenting this as a physics paper, the researchers framed the attempt to manipulate physical systems as a legitimate inquiry into "experimenter-instrument interaction." But the document's presence in the CIA's files suggests the framing was a mask.
A Physics Approach
The experiment utilized an instrument the researchers called PSIFI. To ensure the subject understood the task, May and Honorton did not merely provide instructions; they performed a partial autopsy on the machine. They "partially dismantled the sensitive sections of the instrument for [Swann's] inspection, pointing out internal data paths and the source of the random noise."
This was a calculated briefing. The researchers were teaching the specialist how the target functioned before he was asked to break it. The machine generated events at a rate of 50 per second, alternating between '0' and '1'. The goal was simple: deviate from the expected mean of 500 matches per 1,000 trials.
The results recorded in the document show that Swann did exactly that. Across 29 runs, the mean score was 493, a result the record labels as "statistically significant." The most telling data, however, came during the final ten runs. During this period, Swann was being monitored via EEG while seated in a sound-attenuated room, adjacent to the instrument. The mean score dropped to 491.8, a result the record describes as "independently significant."
Two Double Steel Walls
The most striking detail in the record is not the statistical deviation, but the environmental conditions under which the performance improved. The researchers noted that performance was not only significant but actually improved with increased distance from the instrument. Specifically, the record highlights that during the final runs, "Mr. Swann was separated from the instrument by distance and by two double steel walls."
This is where the academic veneer of the paper fails. In a standard laboratory setting, a researcher might test if a psychic effect works through a glass partition or a wooden door. To specify "two double steel walls" is to move from the realm of general parapsychology into the realm of hardened facilities.
If the goal were merely to prove the existence of psychokinesis, the walls would be a nuisance. But if the goal were to test the utility of a human asset, the walls are the entire point. In the world of intelligence, double steel walls are the components of a secure bunker or a high-security signal intelligence (SIGINT) facility designed to prevent electronic leakage or unauthorized access to data streams.
The Systematic Research Effort
The pattern suggests that the "systematic research effort" mentioned in the document was never intended to remain a matter of academic debate at the American Physical Society. The document explicitly states that the objective was to "assess the feasibility of developing a systematic research effort that would utilize Mr. Swann's insight and ability to maximum advantage."
The desk's reading is that the binary random generator—the PSIFI—was a laboratory proxy for encrypted electronic communications. In a world where digital security relies on the unpredictability of random number generators to create cryptographic keys, a person who can influence that randomness is a master key.
If the pattern holds, the researchers were not just studying a phenomenon; they were training an operative. The mention of Swann’s belief that his performance is "susceptible to learning" is the most chilling aspect of the report. It suggests that the intelligence community saw the potential for a repeatable, trainable, and improvable human tool capable of bypassing the physical and electronic shielding that protects the world's most sensitive data.
The document shows the transition from observation to application. It shows that by 1976, the intelligence community was already looking past the question of whether the mind could influence matter, and was instead focused on how that influence could be weaponized against the very hardware designed to keep the mind out. The "maximum advantage" they sought was the ability to turn the randomness of a machine into a predictable, and therefore exploitable, stream of information.