Ingo Swann is an artist who helped develop the supposed process of remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency, and has become well known as a remote viewer himself. PRG (Stanford) would seal a target in an envelope.

This envelope would be given to a group of people who would enter a car. Once they were in the car the envelope would be opened and the target they were to drive to would be revealed. They would then drive to the target and try to visually send an image back to Ingo. He would then try to pick up on the target and reveal what it was. His success rate was incredible.

It got to the point where he would tell the controller where the people were heading sometimes before they opened the envelope. "I remember once when given co-ordinates on a world map he drew a perfect picture of the island which was the target." (David Garner, PRG, 1967-1976) In 1972, Ingo Swann read a paper by Dr. Hal Puthoff while visiting Backster's laboratory, and wrote back suggesting that he should instead study parapsychological effects. He described a number of such studies that he had been involved with at the City College of New York.

Puthoff was interested and invited Swann to SRI for a week in 1972. Prior to the meeting Puthoff had set up test equipment below the room in which Swann demonstrated his talents, all of which recorded anomalies. As a result of this meeting, Puthoff became convinced the matter was worth additional study, and published a short report on the meetings.

Swann, Puthoff, and other members of their team were all high-level Operating Thetan members of the Church of Scientology and the connection between Scientology and the CIA has raised concerns from many critics of all involved. Swann is commonly accredited with proposing the idea of Coordinate Remote Viewing, a process in which viewers would view a location given nothing but its geographical coordinates, which was developed and tested by Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ with CIA funding.