Remote Viewing didn’t begin as mystery. It began as history: a Cold War question, a handful of disciplined minds, and a search for how human perception truly works.

Pictured above at the ASPR reception held in his honor, Ingo Swann with Ruth Hagy-Brod, Zelda Suplee, and Buell Mullen (among those who, in ways both small and great, helped shape the circumstances of his life. In his memoir, Remote Viewing: The Real Story, he refers to them as “Buell-central,” “Ruth-central,” and “Zelda-central,” and as part of the “Gang of Five”) women he described as wonderfully different, yet united by a mature, experienced, and tested female determination against which it was best to simply throw in the towel from the start.

________

As the early experiments at SRI unfolded, Ingo became increasingly aware that much of what he was witnessing (the breakthroughs, the mistakes, the politics, the scientific struggles, and the personalities involved) would never be fully understood if left only to official reports or secondhand retellings. Determined that the true history of remote viewing should be preserved in his own words, he began writing Remote Viewing: The Real Story in 1995, publishing each chapter on his Superpowers of the Human Biomind website as he completed it. By the time of his passing in 2013, he had written fifty-eight chapters, with more undoubtedly still in his mind.

About this project Ingo wrote:

An (eventual) full-length book (currently being serialized on the Internet), revealing the actual history of Remote Viewing and its developments. Four general categories are interwoven throughout: the Discoveries; the Political and Technical History; the Rise and Fall; the Saga and the Soap Opera. Although the topic of Remote Viewing has attracted media and speculative attention at various times, the real and detailed insider story has never been presented before.

For anyone seeking to understand how remote viewing truly emerged (its scientific origins, its government involvement, and its internal complexities), Ingo’s unfinished memoir remains the most direct and unfiltered record of its early development.

________

In discussions of Ingo’s life and work, his association with Scientology is often highlighted, and at times the label “Scientologist” is used in ways that can oversimplify or frame his work through a single interpretive lens. In practice, his intellectual and experiential background was considerably more multifaceted, drawing on a wide range of ideas, disciplines, philosophies, communities, and systems for understanding human experience, perception, and consciousness. A fuller overview of these intersecting strands of thought, experience, and exploration can be found on the Influences page.

This association has also led to claims that Scientology played a defining or formative role in the development of remote viewing.

At the same time, it is important to distinguish between Scientology as one influence within Ingo’s wider intellectual and personal exploration and the separate question of whether it was structurally embedded in remote viewing or in the later methodology of Controlled Remote Viewing (CRV).

In The Search for Superman, Russell Targ pushed back against treating Scientology either as a singular defining identity or as a complete explanatory framework for understanding the SRI milieu: 

“Scientology is basically a therapeutic, personal rehabilitation psychiatric activity. I don’t think a person is a Scientologist any more than he’s a Freudian or a Jungian.”

Whether one agrees with Targ’s characterization or not, the remark captures an important historical issue: how much explanatory weight should be assigned to Scientology within a much broader landscape of consciousness research, psychotronics, philosophy, spirituality, human potential exploration, and competing frameworks through which people sought to understand mind, perception, and lived experience.

Ingo’s own descriptions often framed Scientology less in terms of institutional identity than in terms of perception, awareness, and human potential. In writings and lectures from this period, he discussed the reduction of “programmed blocks” affecting awareness, perception, and understanding. It is language situated within broader efforts to understand how human beings perceive the world, construct meaning, and expand the range of conscious experience.

Yes, Ingo was involved with Scientology. Yes, he communicated with L. Ron Hubbard. Yes, Scientology formed part of the wider background of ideas he was engaging with during this period. But that is not the same as demonstrating that specific Scientology concepts, practices, or organizational structures were built into remote viewing or CRV itself.

Claims about Scientology’s relationship to remote viewing therefore require a different level of evidence: not simply association, timing, shared vocabulary, or biographical overlap, but a clear demonstration of how particular Scientology methods or concepts map onto the actual structure, stages, procedures, and functioning of remote viewing.

To date, that connection has often been asserted more strongly than it has been demonstrated.

For that reason, Scientology is best understood as part of the broader field of ideas Ingo explored, rather than as a settled or singular explanation for the origin or structure of remote viewing.

Ingo’s unusual consistency in early perception experiments shifted intelligence interest from possibility to application.

The larger experiment referred to, in which coordinates were used (called at the time Project SCANATE), was a test situation, devised by myself, to see if psychic perception responded more easily to abstract targets, as contrasted to physical objective targets.

                                                                                                                                   — Ingo, private letter

In Simpler Terms:

Is the mind less constrained when the target is abstract?

Do symbols (like numbers) interfere less than concrete objects (photos, locations, people)?

Does psychic perception work better when the conscious mind has nothing familiar to latch onto?

Then the question for U.S. intelligence became:

Can anomalous perception be studied, structured, and used for intelligence gathering?

To explore this, the CIA sponsored the first formal remote viewing research program conducted at Stanford Research Institute (SRI): Project SCANATE (“scan by coordinate”).

The program ran from May 1973 to June 1974 under the Office of Technical Services (OTS) and the Directorate of Science and Technology.

SCANATE’s objectives were twofold:

1. Determine whether remote viewing (then called “remote seeing”) could be reproduced under controlled laboratory conditions. 
2. Assess whether this ability could be operationally useful for real intelligence tasks.
    

The core team included:

• Ingo, principal viewer and perceptual modeler. 
• Dr. Puthoff, SRI physicist and principal investigator. 
• Dr. Kenneth “Ken” Kress of the CIA (later referenced as “Richard Kennett”). 
• Dr. Targ, physicist who joined soon after the quark-detector tests.
   

SCANATE became the first U.S. government effort to treat anomalous perception as a researchable cognitive skill rather than an oddity or superstition.

Ingo's Controlled Laboratory Sessions

Ingo’s sessions at SRI were conducted under observable, scientific conditions:

• real-time monitoring; 
• recorded transcripts; 
• blind or double-blind target selection; 
• immediate documentation; and 
• later comparison to feedback data.
   

A declassified CIA assessment later stated that Ingo’s work went “well beyond chance expectation” and showed evidence of “genuine information transfer.”

One of the defining SCANATE sessions occurred when Kress sent a set of coordinates as a blind target. Sitting in a monitored SRI conference room, Ingo produced impressions of rolling hills, a northern town, a circular driveway, fences, and hints of underground features, sketching maps in real time. He spontaneously repeated the session at home the next morning, producing similar sketches. All materials were forwarded to CIA evaluators.

The Arrival of Pat Price

Around this time, Patrick “Pat“ H. Price, a former Burbank City Councilman,* made contact with Puthoff. Several researchers have noted that Price maintained significant ties to Scientology during this period, including associations with individuals linked to the Church’s intelligence division, the Guardian’s Office.

Prior to his later involvement with SRI, Price’s initial contact with Puthoff appears to have occurred in an informal, public context in Los Angeles. At that time, Price was not affiliated with SRI and was not yet participating in structured laboratory research.

In an impromptu decision, Puthoff provided Price with the same set of target coordinates that had been used in Ingo’s controlled session.

A few days later, Price mailed in a packet of handwritten descriptions and sketches.

Unlike Ingo’s work (documented in real time under controlled laboratory conditions) Price’s session was:

• unobserved;
• delivered by mail days later; and
• far more elaborate than could be independently verified.

This contrast became important as the data moved up the intelligence review chain.

*Patrick H. Price: A Brief Background

Contemporary records show that Price held a variety of occupations before becoming involved in Burbank city government. The 1940 U.S. Census listed him as a film washer in the film-reclaiming business. His 1940 draft registration named Horn Jefferys and Co. as his employer. Burbank City Directories subsequently listed him as a Post Office clerk in 1942, a cement contractor in 1946, and, by 1952, a Burbank City Councilman, with his occupation separately given as a salesman for Albert S. Hill.

Burbank historical records identify Price as a City Councilman from 1950–1953. Later accounts have described him as a former “Vice Mayor” of Burbank, but no contemporary municipal record examined for this chronology has yet been found identifying him by that title.

Later accounts have also described Price as a former Burbank Police Commissioner. Records supplied by the City of Burbank do not support that description. According to the City, the Police Commission was established in 1952. The City provided a historical list of 78 people who served on the Police Commission, covering appointments from 1952 through 2017, with terms extending through 2021. Price does not appear anywhere on that list.

Sources

1940 U.S. Census; WWII draft registration, Patrick Harold Price, October 16, 1940; Burbank City Directories, 1942, 1946 and 1952; Burbank municipal and historical records; City of Burbank Police Commission records.

The Sugar Grove Controversy

When analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency reviewed both sets of material, they observed that elements described by both viewers appeared to resemble features not of the intended decoy target, but of the nearby National Security Agency facility at Sugar Grove, West Virginia, a highly sensitive signals-intelligence site.

The apparent correspondence of certain broad features (hills, circular drives, cleared lawns, underground structures) triggered an internal review, as officials were required to rule out the possibility of unintended information exposure.

The critical distinctions noted were:

• Ingo’s descriptions were cautious, sensory-based, time-stamped, and produced under tight laboratory controls.
• Price’s descriptions were expansive, unverifiable, and generated outside established protocol.
   

Price's URDF-3 Attempt and Further Concerns

In 1974, Pat Price attempted to describe the Soviet research site known as URDF-3 during remote viewing sessions conducted at SRI. A later CIA technical analysis of the experiment, “Experiment of URDF-3” (Dec. 4, 1975) by Daniel Stillman of Los Alamos, reviewed the session transcripts, tapes, and sketches and ultimately judged the experiment unsuccessful.

While one of Price’s sketches showed a resemblance to the rail-mounted gantry crane at the site, the report noted that several critical details were incorrect: Price described multiple cranes interacting with an above-ground building, whereas the facility actually had a single crane operating over an underground structure. He also reported a number of features that did not exist at the site, including structures and landmarks that could not be confirmed.

The analysis further observed that Price had been given the target coordinates and geographic context before the session began, and that the crane sketch itself was produced while Price was alone and not under controlled observation. Because the experiment lacked strong controls, the analyst wrote that it was impossible to rule out the possibility that outside information might have influenced the result.

Under observation, Price’s accuracy declined sharply, and he failed to identify the site’s primary underground structure, which was the facility’s central feature. The analyst recommended tighter experimental protocols for future work and suggested that Price’s taped sessions be reviewed using voice-stress analysis to determine whether his descriptions reflected genuine perception or possible contamination.

(CIA Reading Room: CIA-RDP96-00791R000200240001-0)

CIA program manager Kress later wrote that Price continued to work with intelligence personnel “on and off,” but often outside SRI’s structured laboratory setting .

(CIA Reading Room: CIA-RDP96-00791R000200030040-0)

Separately, Jacques Vallée, in Forbidden Science, Vol. 2, cites what he describes as material recovered during the FBI’s 1977 raids on Scientology’s Guardian’s Office. Vallée recounts that seized documents indicated Price may have acted as an infiltrator within intelligence contexts on behalf of Scientology (Forbidden Science 2, p. 626). Vallée presents this as information contained in the recovered documents; it was not a conclusion reached by SRI researchers or by CIA personnel managing SCANATE.

Kress later described related concerns in his retrospective account of the government’s parapsychology programs, ”Parapsychology in Intelligence: A Personal Review and Conclusions,”  Journal of Scientific Exploration 13, no. 1 (1999, pp. 82–83). Kress recalled that an individual identifying himself as an FBI agent warned him that Pat Price was ”a member of an organization that was recently raided for documents indicative of illegal activity” and alleged that Price had leaked information connected to the affair. Kress further stated that, after the raid, he reviewed documents recovered during the investigation, including files containing debriefings by Price concerning his CIA remote viewing activities. According to Kress, the files indicated that Price reported details of his meetings, the identities of participants, and his remote viewing work to superiors within the organization despite having signed a secrecy agreement. 

These concerns, raised internally by a CIA analyst and later reported by Vallée and Kress, added complexity to how Price’s background was viewed. They did not, however, determine SCANATE’s scientific evaluation, which relied primarily on Ingo’s controlled, time-stamped, and independently verifiable laboratory sessions.

What SCANATE Ultimately Proved

Despite the complications surrounding Price, SCANATE’s central conclusion (based on Ingo’s controlled sessions) was clear:

Some form of anomalous perception appeared to exist and could be studied under scientific protocols.

This was enough for the CIA to continue funding Remote Viewing research under new contracts after SCANATE ended in 1974.

While some individuals later associated with early remote viewing research had connections to Scientology, the development of remote viewing as a structured, researchable process took place within controlled laboratory settings at SRI.

The protocols, documentation methods, and perceptual modeling that formed the foundation of remote viewing emerged from these monitored experiments, not from any external doctrine or belief system.

The historical record shows that its development was driven by experimental conditions, not ideological frameworks.

SCANATE established the foundation for:

• structured perceptual modeling; 
• the first systematic laboratory protocols; 
• the notion of signal vs. noise; 
• the recognition of viewer-specific strengths and limits; 
• operational tasking experiments; and 
• the future development of a teachable method. 

Some of the events discussed above take on a different significance when viewed alongside what happened before and after Price’s death.

Postscript: Who Killed Pat Price?

Pat Price’s role in the early history of remote viewing did not end with questions about experimental controls, Sugar Grove, URDF-3, or his relationship with Scientology.

His sudden death in Las Vegas in July 1975 became another part of the story, and, over the years, the subject of considerable speculation. So what does the surviving record actually tell us?

The place to start is with where the story of his final hours actually comes from.

The only detailed published account located so far is Terry Milner’s 2001 article, The Very Strange Death of Top Remote Viewer Pat Price. Milner’s story relies largely on the recollections of a man he identifies only by the pseudonym “Frank Pearlman,” described as a close associate of Price.

According to Milner, Price arrived in Las Vegas in July 1975 carrying documents and told Pearlman that if anything happened to him, the papers should be secured and sent to Hal Puthoff before police got them.

By the following morning Price was seriously ill. Milner says he was sweating, struggling to breathe, and suffering severe stomach and back pain before becoming rigid, convulsing, and stopping breathing.

Pearlman reportedly contacted Puthoff and removed Price’s SRI-related papers from his luggage before hotel security collected his belongings. Milner later says a man presented as Price’s doctor attributed the death to a myocardial infarction and said Price had a history of heart trouble.

So that is where the detailed story of Price’s final hours comes from: Terry Milner, writing in 2001, relating the recollections of an unidentified “Frank Pearlman.”

And this is where things get more interesting.

U.S. federal court records from the Scientology cases separately identify a Terry Milner as Deputy Guardian for Intelligence in Scientology’s United States Guardian’s Office (DGIUS).

That Milner appears in the documented campaign against journalist Paulette Cooper, author of the critical 1971 book The Scandal of Scientology. A federal sentencing memorandum states that in February 1972 Jane Kember instructed “the DGIUS (then Terry Milner)” to obtain information about Cooper so that she could be “handled.”

What happened to Cooper is worth understanding.

Guardian’s Office operatives obtained her fingerprints and used them in connection with bomb threats sent to Scientology, resulting in Cooper being indicted. The charges were eventually dropped.

Later Guardian’s Office plans known as Operation Freakout went even further, contemplating impersonating Cooper, manufacturing apparent threats, and trying to get her jailed or committed to a mental institution.

The court record connects Milner to the earlier 1972 intelligence-gathering directive concerning Cooper, not to authorship of the later Operation Freakout plans.

Whether this Guardian’s Office intelligence official and the Terry Milner who wrote about Price were the same person remains unresolved.

But Price himself had a documented connection to Scientology at the time of his death.

His Los Angeles Times death notice, published July 17, 1975 (p. 31), identifies him as Patrick Harold Price, says he died July 14, 1975, and lists his wife Elizabeth Anne, daughters Patricia and Elizabeth, sons Patrick and Christopher, his mother Odile Price, two sisters, two brothers, and four grandchildren 

It announced a graveside service at Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood... and then something particularly relevant to this story: Scientology services that same evening at Fifield Manor in Hollywood.

Fifield Manor, at 5930 Franklin Avenue, is known today as the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre International.

And that same location turns up again.

Just two years after Price’s Scientology service there, Fifield Manor was one of three Church of Scientology premises searched by the FBI on July 8, 1977, along with the Cedars-Sinai Complex in Hollywood and Scientology’s premises in Washington, D.C.

According to the federal appellate decision in United States v. Heldt, FBI agents searched the area around Guardian’s Office official Henning Heldt’s sixth-floor office at Fifield Manor (including file cabinets, desks, closets, and piles of documents) and seized approximately 430 documents from that location alone.

And there is another piece of the story.

In a 1999 postscript to Parapsychology in Intelligence: A Personal Review and Conclusions,  published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, CIA officer Kenneth A. Kress wrote that an FBI agent contacted him after a raid on an organization to which Price had belonged.

According to Kress, the seized files contained debriefings of Price’s CIA remote viewing work, including objectives Kress had given him, Price’s results, meeting locations, and the identities of people present.

Kress said Price had signed an agreement not to divulge the work, but nevertheless reported it to his superior in that organization.

Kress didn’t name the organization. Jacques Vallée did. In Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica, The Journals of Jacques Vallee 1970-1979, Vallée identified it as Scientology.

And that matters because of what was happening inside Scientology at the time.

Its Guardian’s Office maintained an intelligence apparatus whose activities eventually became known through Operation Snow White. And this was not some tiny operation involving one or two government offices.

Guardian’s Office operatives penetrated U.S. federal offices and obtained government records, with the IRS and Department of Justice among the targets.

The operation was also international. Published accounts of Operation Snow White describe efforts involving more than 30 countries and as many as 136 government agencies, embassies, consulates, and other organizations.

The Guardian’s Office itself operated through an international hierarchy rather than as a purely American organization.

The 1977 FBI searches described above resulted in an enormous seizure of records. Federal litigation describes tens of thousands of documents being seized; the appellate record gives a range of 23,000 to 47,000 documents from the Cedars-Sinai search alone, in addition to the approximately 430 from Fifield Manor.

Senior Guardian’s Office officials were subsequently convicted.

So Kress’s story becomes particularly interesting in that context. He was describing sensitive information about Price’s CIA work turning up in files seized from an organization Price belonged to (an organization Vallée identifies as Scientology) while its Guardian’s Office was operating a large domestic and international intelligence network engaged in the covert acquisition of government information.

But there is another side to the Price story, and it isn’t only about information Price may have been giving away. There are also questions about information that may have been flowing toward him.

A CIA analysis of Price’s four-day remote viewing experiment against the secret Soviet site known as URDF-3 ultimately judged the experiment unsuccessful. Price described numerous structures and landmarks that simply weren’t there or did not accurately reflect the site as it then existed. (CIA Reading Room: CIA-RDP96-00791R000200240001-0)

But he also produced one remarkable result: A strikingly accurate drawing of the site’s enormous rail-mounted gantry crane.

And here’s where that famous result gets more complicated. Price wasn’t operating in an informational vacuum.

After the first day, Puthoff telephoned Price and specifically instructed him to concentrate on the crane, its relationship to Building 1, and the security fence. The crane, Puthoff told him, was “really top priority.”

The striking crane drawing was then produced during the intervening period rather than while Price was continuously observed in the experimental setting.

The CIA analyst found the resemblance so remarkable that he considered two possibilities:

• Price had actually perceived the crane through remote viewing.
• Or someone knowledgeable about URDF-3 had told him what to draw.

Because Price’s outside communications hadn’t been controlled, the analyst even considered whether information might have been supplied to Price for KGB disinformation purposes.

And interestingly, this wasn’t the first time an extraordinary Price result emerged during an uncontrolled interval.

Jim Schnabel recounts in Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies that Price wasn’t yet part of the SRI program when he called Puthoff “out of the blue.” The two already knew each other: Schnabel describes Price as an old friend of Puthoff’s whom he had met through a mutual acquaintance some years earlier and who would call him from time to time with psychic impressions. During this particular call, Puthoff impulsively gave Price coordinates that had come from CIA officer Kress (“Richard Kennett” in Schnabel’s account). 

A few days later, Price’s results arrived by mail, in an envelope postmarked the very next day.

The coordinates were actually for a cabin in West Virginia, but Price described what was nearby: the highly classified activity at the Sugar Grove facility, ostensibly a Navy communications installation but staffed in part by NSA personnel and involved in sensitive signals-intelligence work. Schnabel says Price described it “in much more detail” than Ingo Swann had, including information sensitive enough to trigger a Pentagon security investigation. 

Investigators initially suspected the obvious explanation: someone had leaked classified information. 

According to Schnabel, they investigated Kress, Puthoff, and Targ but failed to establish that anyone at SRI or Kress’s office had deliberately stolen or leaked the information.

So once again, the question wasn't simply whether Price had produced something extraordinary... it was where the information came from.

Which brings us back to the question that started all of this: “Who killed Pat Price?”

There were certainly a lot of players in this game:

• CIA.
• SRI.
• Scientology.
• The Guardian’s Office.
• Intelligence interests we may still know very little about.
• And, of course… Pat Price himself.

Could someone have had a hand in his death? Maybe. 

Maybe several players had a hand in the strange circumstances surrounding his life and work... but not his death. 

Or perhaps no one killed him at all.