Ingo Swann was an American artist, author and psychic test subject who became the best-known figure in the U.S. government's experiments with remote viewing, the claimed ability to describe distant targets through mental impressions alone. He is commonly credited with coining the term, and he devised the structured method later taught to military personnel as coordinate remote viewing. His later writing about extraterrestrials carried his name from the history of the Stargate program into UFO and consciousness circles.

Swann was born in Telluride, Colorado, on September 14, 1933. He earned a biology degree from Westminster College in Salt Lake City in 1955, served in the Army in Korea and the Far East, and worked at the United Nations Secretariat until 1968 before settling in New York as a painter. In his late thirties he began volunteering for parapsychology experiments. In 1972 Karlis Osis of the American Society for Psychical Research reported out-of-body tests in which a judge matched Swann's responses to hidden targets, and that year Swann went to Stanford Research Institute, now SRI International.

At SRI the laser physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ ran sessions with him that drew CIA interest and funding. One, on April 27, 1973, asked him to describe Jupiter before the Voyager flybys; supporters cite his mention of a ring, while critics note that his transcript differs between published versions. Swann proposed giving viewers only geographic coordinates as targets, and in 1983 he was contracted to train four Army officers and a civilian in his method. The government effort ran under names including Grill Flame, Center Lane and Sun Streak before it was consolidated as Stargate in 1991. The University of West Georgia, which holds his papers, dates his SRI work from 1972 to 1990.

The program ended in 1995 after a CIA-commissioned evaluation by the American Institutes for Research. Its panel found that hits in laboratory studies occurred more often than chance but that it was unclear whether a paranormal ability had been demonstrated; the statistician Jessica Utts read the results as support for psychic functioning, while the psychologist Ray Hyman disputed that conclusion. On operations, the report found the viewings vague and inconsistent, stated that "in no case had the information provided ever been used to guide intelligence operations," and concluded that continued use "is not warranted."

Swann's 1998 autobiography, Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy, claims that a secretive figure he called Mr. Axelrod had him remote view a hidden extraterrestrial base on the Moon, and that he later saw a humanoid extraterrestrial woman in a Los Angeles supermarket; the book rests these stories on his own word. He passed away in New York on January 31, 2013. In 2026 his name kept resurfacing: the former Army viewer Lyn Buchanan told Jesse Michels that the final stages of Swann's method were kept secret, and an old recording circulated in which Andrija Puharich claimed NASA had asked him to remote view the Moon before Swann. Half a century after his first SRI sessions, Swann remains the central figure in both the documented history of government psychic research and the extraterrestrial claims that grew around it.