The Story of Ingo Swann

Ingo Swann (1933 – 2013), was the world’s foremost psychic. A visionary, an artist, a writer and an emblem of the downtown New York scene in the 1970s and 80s, Ingo is best known as the father of remote viewing, the ability to see distant events or places through extrasensory perception. He was a pioneer of the out-of-body experience — the act of perceiving the world from a location outside one’s physical body. In 1973, he viewed Jupiter’s rings, discovering them remotely years before NASA confirmed their existence.

In 1978, Ingo was involved in remote viewing experiments established by the U.S. Army and the CIA in collaboration with the Stanford Research Institute. This clandestine initiative — code-named Project Stargate — later became the basis for the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats, starring George Clooney and Jeff Bridges. For Stargate, Ingo and a group of psychics used their abilities to spy on Russia from Palo Alto, California, even remotely discovering a downed Soviet spy plane under jungle canopy in the African country of Zaire after the U.S. Department of Defense had deemed it lost.

Ingo and his pet chinchilla lived on the Bowery where he created cosmic art that can be found in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian. Many of his paintings — as well as his eclectic furniture, book and record collections — have a home in the rooms and public spaces of The High Line Hotel.

Raise a glass — and your cosmic consciousness — at our outdoor cocktail garden, which features a menu inspired by Ingo!

Painting:
Pollution Encroaching on the Source of All the Pure Water (1986)
Ingo Swann, 1933-2013