Psychic Spy | Artist | Writer | Visionary

Project SCANATE (short for scan by coordinate) was relatively short — it ran for about a year, from May 1973 to June 1974.

It was the CIA’s very first formal remote viewing program, set up under contract with Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The key participants were Ingo Swann (principal viewer), Dr. Harold (Hal) Puthoff (scientist at SRI), and CIA officer Dr. Kenneth (Ken) Kress (referred to under the pseudonym “Richard Kennett” in Jim Schnabel’s Remote Viewers).

Its purpose was exploratory: to test whether coordinate-based clairvoyance could yield actionable intelligence. By mid-1974, the CIA concluded that the results were interesting enough to warrant follow-on work, but SCANATE itself ended and was replaced by new contracts under the Directorate of Science and Technology (ORD/OTS).

Ingo was at the center of these trials, working at SRI under carefully structured conditions. His sessions were conducted with observers present, transcripts recorded in real time, and targets chosen so that feedback could be assessed. A declassified CIA report on SCANATE later concluded that Ingo’s results went “well beyond chance expectation” and demonstrated that some genuine information transfer was taking place.

In 1973, during the SCANATE period, Ingo was tasked with coordinates passed to Puthoff by Kress. They were intended as a blind test target. Sitting in a monitored SRI conference room, Ingo quickly produced impressions of rolling hills, a nearby town to the north, a flagpole, and a circular drive, sketching maps of the area in real time. The following morning, he spontaneously repeated the session at home, again producing sketches of fences, circular buildings, and even impressions of something underground. His results were immediately documented and sent forward for evaluation.

Shortly afterward, however, Pat Price — who had only met Puthoff years earlier at a lecture in Los Angeles and was not part of the SRI program (Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies, 1997) — telephoned him “out of the blue.” On impulse, Puthoff gave him the same coordinates. A few days later, Price mailed in his descriptions and sketches. Price’s report was far more elaborate: he described underground storage areas, records, microfilm, and even claimed to see placards with names (Flytrap, Minerva) and details of Army engineers working in the facility.

The contrast was stark. Ingo’s session was observed and carefully documented in real time, while Price’s was unobserved, delayed, and mailed in after the fact.

When the material reached CIA headquarters, it sparked controversy. Both Ingo and Price seemed to have homed in not on the intended decoy target but on the nearby NSA facility at Sugar Grove, West Virginia — a highly sensitive communications and satellite interception site with underground installations. Their descriptions were accurate enough to trigger a hostile Pentagon security investigation, with officials suspecting a leak of codeword-level classified material. Ingo’s careful sketches of roads, open lawns, and underground hints were cautious and verifiable; Price’s florid details went much further but were impossible to validate.

Notably, this entire episode took place in 1973 — the same year Scientology’s Guardian’s Office launched Operation Snow White, its massive infiltration of U.S. and foreign government agencies.

In 1974, Price attempted to describe the Soviet site URDF-3. A CIA analyst who reviewed his transcripts and sketches ultimately deemed the experiment unsuccessful. The report noted that while Price’s gantry crane sketch was striking, he might have been “informed of what to draw by someone knowledgeable of URDF-3.” More importantly, when Price was tested in person under observation, his accuracy declined. He failed to recognize the site’s underground Building 1—the key feature—misdescribing it as several above-ground buildings. The analyst recommended that future experiments be more tightly controlled and even suggested subjecting Price’s recordings to a voice-based lie detection tool to check for deception. As the analyst concluded:

“After careful analysis of the data presented to me, I consider Price’s remote-viewing experiment of URDF-3 to be unsuccessful.” The report further noted that the lack of controls left open the possibility that Price could have discussed the material with outsiders, “such as the Disinformation Section of the KGB.” — CIA Reading Room, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200240001-0

According to CIA program officer Kress, even after Price was moved out of the central SRI program, his involvement with intelligence remote viewing continued “on and off.” This irregular participation, often outside strict protocols, contrasted sharply with Ingo’s consistent role within SCANATE’s structured framework. — CIA Reading Room, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200030040-0

Adding to the concern, Jacques Vallée in Forbidden Science 2 later suggested that after the FBI’s 1977 raids on Scientology’s Guardian’s Office during Operation Snow White — when millions of stolen government documents were seized — some authorities suspected that Price may have been spying against the CIA on behalf of Scientology.

Ingo, meanwhile, went on to produce some of the strongest and most enduring results in remote viewing. To learn more about his methods and legacy, visit the CRV page on this website. 

Prior to studying what he called L. Ron Hubbard's teachings, Ingo pursued a diverse spiritual education that included studies at Alice Bailey's Arcane School, Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical center, and explorations of the Fourth Way teachings. At the Arcane School, Ingo engaged with esoteric philosophy rooted in Theosophy, focusing on meditation, soul science, and service to humanity through the “New Group of World Servers,“ guided by the teachings of the Tibetan master Djwhal Khul. His time at Steiner’s center exposed him to Anthroposophy, a spiritual science emphasizing intuitive cognition, spiritual hierarchies, and a metaphysical Christian perspective, distinct from Theosophical concepts like Masters or Rays, which he also studied in depth. Additionally, Ingo explored the Fourth Way, a system developed by G.I. Gurdjieff, which emphasizes self-awareness, conscious effort, and balancing the physical, emotional, and intellectual centers to achieve spiritual awakening. In fact, ancient astronaut author Raymond Drake called Ingo a “New Age Prophet,” dedicating a book to him, while Ingo co-edited Cosmic Art. This eclectic blend of teachings shaped Ingo’s understanding of consciousness and psychic phenomena, influencing his later work in remote viewing and esoteric research.

Therefore to understand Ingo’s Scientology link, it’s important to consider the context of what Scientology stood for in the 1970s and its relevance to Ingo’s continuing exploration of what he called the “psychic humanoid.“ This concept was largely uncharted and rarely discussed at the time outside of Scientology. More directly the reasons behind Ingo’s attraction to Scientology are likely best understood through the paper he presented in Prague in 1973, a copy of which is preserved in his archives. A link to this paper can be found in the box to the right.

At this time too, Ingo’s network was remarkably diverse, encompassing far more than his Scientology ties. While he was connected with Hubbard and Hubbard's aide Virginia Downsborough, Ingo's circle extended to non-Scientologists like Harold Sherman (Urantia enthusiast), psychiatrist Shafica Karagulla (Higher Sense Foundation), medium Viola Pettit Neal (Brunner Research Foundation), and psychiatrist Jan Ehrenwald. He also supported by real estate magnate Trammel Crow, Edgar Cayce supporter Lucille Kahn, artist Buell Mullen, journalist Ruth Hagy-Brod, and Erickson Foundation’s Zelda Suplee. In addition to these eclectic connections, Ingo maintained close ties with his Presbyterian and Southern Baptist family.