Ingo Swann’s remote viewing of Jupiter

With Juno in orbit around the planet Jupiter, I felt like going back and looking at another space probe that visited Jupiter, only this time, it was the mind of a psychic that travelled, not a piece of high-tech equipment.

By the Spring of 1973 the SRI research into remote viewing, funded by the CIA and lead by physicists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, had been going for around half a year.

Ingo Swann, a psychic who worked extensively on the project, was tired of Earth-bound co-ordinates and wanted to see if it were possible to remote view extra-terrestrial locations. With that in mind, Ingo arranged with another psychic, Harold Sherman, to remote view Jupiter and then compare their findings to the data from the probe Pioneer 10 which would fly by that planet in November/December of that year.

Although it wasn’t part of the CIA-funded work, Targ and Puthoff agreed to carry out the session with Swann according to SRI protocols. Sherman carried out his session in Arkansas, many hundreds of miles from SRI in California. The sessions took place simultaneously at 6.00pm PST on 27 April 1973.

This session has been reported as a great success for Ingo Swann as he saw a ring of rocks circling the planet: something that no one had even imagined at that time. As far as astronomy was concerned, Saturn was the only planet with a ring system.

There are many different versions of this story. Most get confused between Pioneer 10 (which did not detect Jupiter's ring in 1973) and Voyager 1 (which was the first to detect them, but that wouldn't happen for another six years, in 1979). Also, some versions of events specifically state that Ingo describes a ring of rocks, and that after the session was over they took this information to astronomers who all dismissed it as nonsense.

The original transcript is available online at this site linked to in this sentence. Although this is dated 1995, the section containing the transcript is very close to the version given in Mind Reach (1977) by Targ and Puthoff, and is also broadly similar to the version as told in Swann's book To Kiss Earth Good-bye (1975), so I think that part is pretty reliable.

EDIT 29/01/17: this contemporary transcript is now available on the CIA site (links to a pdf).

The passage that is usually quoted with reference to rings around Jupiter is:

"Very high in the atmosphere there are crystals... they glitter. Maybe the stripes are like bands of crystals, maybe like rings of Saturn, though not far out like that. Very close within the atmosphere."

This phrase “maybe like rings of Saturn” together with a sketch of a ringed planet, is considered evidence that Ingo Swann saw Jupiter's rings before they were scientifically detected.

However, this is not a “ring of rocks” as some versions state. It's a band of crystals. And this raises the question if this “band of crystals” was actually recognised as a ring of rocks at the time, or if that interpretation was only arrived at after the data from Voyager 1 was known in 1979.

It is instructive to look for reports on Swann's remote viewing session before 1979, to see if it mentions Jupiter's ring system.

The first I found was an article in the National Enquirer, 9 September 1975. In the paragraph where it talks about Swann's findings, it reads:

“Swann said Jupiter possessed a poisonous “bitter cold” atmosphere “of myriad colors – yellow, red, violet, some greens, like a giant fireworks display.” He said that he saw what looked like a “tornado” and also observed “winds of terrific velocity”. He detected “powerful magnetic forces.”

No mention of any rings around Jupiter, even though the story claims that science later confirmed all of his findings.

The next one I found was from the San Fransisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle for 10 April 1977. It read:

“Each [ie, Swann and Sherman] spoke of glittering ice crystals, winds of terrific velocity, great mountain ranges and powerful magnetic forces.”

Again, no mention of any rings.

Also in 1977, Targ and Puthoof's book “Mind Reach” was published. This described some of their (non-classified) work into remote viewing. One of the episodes they wrote about was Swann's mission to Jupiter, but they don't mention any ring system, either. In fact, quite the opposite. They wrote:

“The descriptions sounded reasonable; nothing was particularly at variance with any known facts.”

I doubt they'd say that if Swann had just told them that Jupiter had a ring system. So this source, too, doesn't include Swann's prediction.

Swann wrote about this session himself in 1975 in his book To Kiss Earth Goodbye. His version of the famous sentence comparing Jupiter to Saturn reads: "maybe the stripes of Jupiter are like bands of crystals, like rings of Saturn" which doesn't sound like a description of a ring system.

It's difficult to find an exact point where the claim begins to be made. The best I can make is in 1982-83. In 1982 James Randi wrote about Swann and Sharmer's session in his book Flim-Flam, but there is no mention of any rings. Meanwhile, in 1984 in the Skeptical Inquirer, we find a quote:

“Earlier, they had discovered the rings around Jupiter years before their existence was scientifically established by satellite photographs.”

This sentence is referenced to the November 1984 issue of a sci-fi magazine named Analog. This appears to be the earliest I can find of the claim. Unfortunately, SI is only in snippet view on Google Books, and I can't find Analog magazine for 1984 at all, so I can't check out their references.

I think this inability at recognising Ingo's “band of crystals” as a “rings of rocks” tells us that this is an example of a bit of creative interpretation. Also, it's worth mentioning that later in the transcript from 1973 Ingo Swann talks about “those cloud layers, those crystal layers” so I think it's safe to assume the “bands of crystals” were referring to the bands of colours already seen across Jupiter's visible surface from Earth and had nothing to do with any as-yet-undiscovered ring system.

Jupiter, from a 1961 illustration (From Astronomy by Patrick Moore)

An older version of the Earth

Today I found this old world map dating from the early 1600s.

See the Wikipedia page for more details, and a far bigger version.

And I decided to see what it would look like mapped onto an actual globe. Since the free astronomy program Celestia allows you to do that quite easily. I spent a little time in photoshop to get the image to the right size and shape, and pasted it in. I was very pleased how well it turned out, even if some of the edges didn't quite match up. I felt like I was seeing the Earth as it would have been imagined by someone in the 1600s.

Europe and Africa...

The USA and Central America...

The Far East...

And India...

The ISS, heading towards the Nile Delta...

An old Earth at night...

More about Signals from Space

A sort-of-sequel to my post about the signals from Mars.

It’s not often that something happens on an internet forum that is worth remarking about to other people, but just today my attention was brought to something that I thought I’d like to share.

Someone posted a link to an article from the National Security Agency Technical Journal which describe how to decipher a number of extra terrestrial messages discussed in a previous issue.

The person from the forum wanted to know if it was true. Well, the site was certainly real, and the article definitely seemed to be talking about messages from outer space. It was hard to believe, but it seemed to be genuine.

I took a look through the list of declassified articles on the site, and soon found the answer. The "extra-terrestrial messages" began in an article where a writer, Lambros D. Callimahos, discussed what a message to an extraterrestrial intelligence might look like: what universal codes could be used.

Following this, the Callimahos offered a few examples as puzzles and then in the next issue Howard H. Champaigne added some more. The article above, that had caused all the confusion about the NSA decoding extraterrestrial messages, was in fact the key to solve the puzzles.

It was interesting to see how a solution page to a puzzle could be so confusing: it was written in a dry style with no indication of its less-than-serious subject and also some joker in the NSA had slipped the word “UFO” into the url. It had me fooled for a while.

References:

Callimahos, L.D. “Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence”
Champaigne, H.H. “Extraterrestrial Intelligence”
Champaigne, H.H. “Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages”

Late sun rises and missing satellites

A short-lived but entertaining rumour occurred in October 1736. In the Ipswich Journal for October 15-22, they stated that the “News-letters” for October the 19th reported that the Royal Observatory in Paris had discovered two strange phenomena. One, that the sunrises and sunsets for the past ten days had been quarter of an hour later than expected, and also that one of Jupiter’s satellites had disappeared.

Quite what the implications would have been had this rumour spread is never discovered. After just a week, retractions were being published in those newspapers that carried the initial story.

Where this story came from, a misunderstanding or deliberate misinformation, is never made clear. Pity. It would have been interesting to see the effect if it had been given more time.


References
Ipswich Journal, 15-22 October 1736
Derby Mercury, 28 October 1736

Museums that threw away their meteorite collections

Since I'm writing about meteorites, I thought I'd post this up. It's from something I wrote on the JREF forums some years ago.


Several times over the years, I've read the claim that in the late 18th century the scientific establishment so comprehensively rubbished the eye-witness reports of meteorites, that museums across Europe threw out their collections of meteorite specimens. Two examples of this are:

"So great was the prestige of the committee and so convincing its arguments that museums all over Western Europe threw away their meteorite specimens."
Chris Carter, “Parapsychology and the Skeptics”, 2007

“Museums all over Europe had thrown out their cherished meteorite specimens with the rubbish as humiliating reminders of a superstitious past. Today scarcely a single specimen is known that predates 1790, except for the 280-pound stone that fell in Alsace in 1492, that is kept in the town hall of Ensisheim, and that proved too heavy for even the Academie Francaise to dislodge.”
Richard Milton, “Alternative Science: Challenging the Myths of the Scientific Establishment”, 1996

And this claim pops up on the occasional web site as an example of why mainstream science can't be trusted. It was such an interesting claim, that I wanted to find out more.

A reference, when one is given, points us to Paneth, “Science and Miracle”, Durham University Journal, 1949. Keen to find out more about this travesty of science, I paid for a copy of the paper, where I read:

“it is a sad reflection that in those days many public museums threw away whatever they possessed of these precious meteorites; it happened in Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy and Austria.”

So, not quite “all over Europe”, but across five countries. But still quite an event.

Still wanting to know more, I kept searching periodically until recently I found this quote from the book “Cosmic Debris: Meteorites in History”, by John G. Burke (available on Google Books)

From Chapter 6:
“Chladni, in his Uber Feuer-Meteore (1819), decried the fact that some meteorites in collections were discarded in the eighteenth century, terming their removal “Enlightenment vandalism.” These acts, he wrote, occurred at five places: Dresden, Vienna, Copenhagen, Bern and Verone; and they involved meteorites from two sixteenth-century and four seventeenth century falls”

So the claim has changed from a mass deletion of data entailing museums from across Europe, to it happening in just five museums, concerning the collections from six falls. Not so dramatic. Burke goes on to explain that museums didn't really exist in the way we understand them in the late 1700s, and he points out some questionable aspects of these collections, before adding:

“Yet of the twenty seven falls in the eighteenth century that are now considered to have actually occurred, specimens of eighteen (two thirds) still exist in collections.”

So if you do find yourself faced with someone who uses this as an example of how dishonest science is in the face of new data, you can explain to them how it's an example of how lazy new age writers are in chasing up their references.

On meteorites

It is not often that something I'm already researching becomes front page news, but yesterday's dramatic meteor storm over Russia has prompted me to post up this article.

As any textbook will tell you, initial reports of stones falling from the sky were treated as superstitious nonsense. Stones in the sky were considered an impossibility, and most of the witness reports were from ancient history or from the uneducated classes. I was interested to know more about how the theory (that these stones came from outer space) went from instant dismissal to final acceptance.

Throughout the 1700s, meteor sightings were reported in newspapers and scientific journals. However, it was not taken seriously as a field of research until 1792 when a German scientist Ernst Chladni put together a review of all the reports he could find and concluded that they had an extra-terrestrial origin.

This theory, although widely publicised, was not taken seriously. An encyclopaedia entry from 1803 writes about this new theory as if it is an amusing curiosity.

"[A] new and very singular hypothesis has been framed by Professor Chladni of Wittenberg, who maintains it by argument, which, however fanciful, are yet worthy of the reader's notice."

After a lengthy and even-handed explanation of Chladni's ideas, the author ends with a reference to the atheism that had recently spread throughout France after the Revolution.

"Whether Chladni be a philosopher of the French school we know not; but some parts of his theory tend strongly towards materialism; and the arguments by which he attempts to prop those parts are peculiarly weak. [...] but how absurd would it be to say, that the system of general laws, by which the Author and Governor of the universe connects together its various parts, and regulates all their operations, possesses, independently of him, the power to produce worlds and whole systems, to destroy them, and from their materials to form new ones!"

This section taken from an encyclopaedia published in 1810

In the years following Chladni's work, an English scientist called Edward Charles Howard managed to obtain samples from various meteorites and concluded that (a) they were all similar in composition and (b) they were all unlike any known terrestrial rock.

In 1818, A System of Chemistry summarises the current arguments:

"Chladni endeavoured to prove that the meteors from which they fell were bodies floating in space, unconnected with any planetary system, attracted by the earth in their progress, and kindled by their rapid motion through the atmosphere. But this opinion is not susceptible of any direct evidence, and can scarcely be believed, one would think, even by Dr. Chladni himself."

Meanwhile, the most supported theory for the origin of meteorites is described as:

"The greater number of philosophers consider them, [...] as concretions actually formed in the atmosphere. This opinion is undoubtedly the most probable of all; but in the present state of our knowledge, it would be absurd to attempt any explanation of the manner in which they are formed."

Interest in meteorites had meant increased observations such that by 1841 Chladni's hypothesis is described as "that which appears to have met with most favour" although the article by Rosina Zornlin lists a number of objections to Chladni's theory.

Finally, in 1864 it appears that Chladni's theory has all but won the day, as Alexander Herschel writes that "Observations of luminous meteors have now divided themselves into three classes, for each of which a separate investigation leads to the uniform result that the hypothesis of Chladni is the only one which bears upon its face the stamp of truth."

A fair amount has been written about the controversy surrounding meteorites, and I may return to this in the future. However, the claim that researching it could end a scientist's career in ridicule doesn't seem to have been the case, since Chladni went on to become even more famous for his work in acoustics.

References:
CHLADNI, E. (1792) "Über den Ursprung der von Pallas gefundenen und anderer ihr ähnlicher Eisenmassen und über einige damit in Verbindung stehende Naturerscheinungen"
HERSCHEL, A. (1864) “The Chemical News and Journal of Physical Science”, Vol.1 (American reprint), Crookes, W. (ed.) p.286
THOMAS, T. (1818) "A System of Chemistry in Four Volumes", vol 3 p160-161
WILKES, J. (ed.) (1810) "Encyclopaedia Londinensis", vol 7, p.386
ZORNLIN, R., (1841) "The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science," Brewster, D., Taylor, R., Phillips, R., Kane, R., Brayley, E.W. (eds.), vol 19, July- December 1841, p547-548

"Supplement to the Encylopaedia, or Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature in three volumes", vol 2, 1803, p40-42

A previously unforeseen peril of meteorites

While searching for early articles on meteorites, I was looking though the contents page of a copy of Philosophical Transactions when I found these three articles listed together.

"Excellent," I thought as I scrolled down, hoping to find others. The first two lines of the next title seemed to offer more of the same, but...

It doesn't specifically say that the stones didn't fall from the sky, but for the sake of that poor man, I hope they didn't.


References:
Philosophical Transactions, Vol 51, Part 1, 1759

Professor Todd and the signals from Mars

The astronomer, Professor David Peck Todd (1855-1939), will probably go down in history as the husband of Mabel Loomis Todd, the mistress of Emily Dickinson's brother and eventual editor of Emily's poetry.

He is also notable for dreaming up ambitious schemes regarding astronomy, that became increasingly eccentric as he got older, and he spent his last 17 years in a series of hospitals and nursing homes during which time he became worried that the sun would split in two, or he spent his time working on his plan for eternal life called “Vital Engineering”.

But as a man whose dreams far outweigh his capabilities, I have quite a lot of sympathy with David Todd. Not so much with the whole open marriage thing, nor with the way he kept track of his masturbating habits in his diaries. More to do with his ideas of detecting radio signals from Mars.

His plan, as reported in the New York Times, May 2, 1909, was to ascend to the highest possible altitude that a man could go in a balloon, with some radio equipment in order to hear any radio signals from Mars at a time when it was at its closest. At this time, the debate of life on Mars was still raging since, in 1905, Lowell had published his first photographs of the famous canals of Mars and then in 1907 Alfred Russell Wallace's book “Is Mars Habitable” which debunked the arguments for Martian life was released.

I can find no report about Professor Todd actually achieving his balloon flight (a book “Transmitting the Past” mentions that Todd did not achieve the desired altitude, but gives no reference for this), but it seems that the idea never left him, and he must've been encouraged in May 1910 when balloons were used to observe Halley's Comet.

In the April 15, 1920 issue of the New York Times there is a story concerning Todd's planning finally being carried out in the forthcoming week, after “five years of planning”. I can find no further mention of Todd's flight, but by now his ideas had clearly caught some people's imagination since at least one other attempt to hear signals from Mars (albeit without a balloon) was reported that year, although the debate about intelligent life on Mars had been dismissed by now in astronomical circles. Furthermore, in 1919 Marconi had suggested that some unfamiliar signals he'd received were possibly coming from another world until three years later when he discovered they were coming from the General Electric Company in Schenectady.

The attempt in 1920 by Drs Milliner and Gainer found no signals, but in 1924 another attempt recorded a “face” signal at half-hour intervals. Professor Todd, who was by now in a nursing home and had been for two years, said

“Three years ago Marconi was reported as saying he had heard signals from Mars. A few days ago he was quoted as saying he was too busy to listen to possible messages from Mars and that it was a ridiculous idea to do so. He changed his mind, and no one knows what he heard the first time. With our photograph, however, it is not a question of what one man heard. It is a permanent record, which all can study.”

However, the wavelength chosen was a frequency that would probably be blocked by the Earth's ionosphere so it can't have come from outer space and the “face” picture just looks like some dots to me.

References:

“The Vigil on the Continent,” The London Times, 20th May, 1910

“No Messages from Mars”, The London Times, 24th April, 1920

Alfred Russell Wallace, “Is Mars Habitable”, MacMillan and Co., London, 1907
http://archive.org/details/cu31924012312017

“Weird “Radio Signal” Film Deepens Mystery of Mars,” Washington Post, 27th August, 1924, from http://www.shorpy.com/node/12482

Longsworth, P., “Austin and Mabel: the Amherst affair & love letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd,” Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984

“From Schenectady not Mars”, Literary Digest, August 5th 1922