I started reading Ingo Swan's PDF, but I never got through it. What specific claim do you think is so amazing? Can you provide an exact quote?
Yeah, I'm curious as well, I can't find much out there on this specific viewing that isn't on some kooky RV type site, I went looking for information about this from a skeptical POV and found that none other than Isaac Asimov himself did a comparison between what was predicted by the remote viewers and what was actually found, 46% of what they predicted was completely and utterly wrong. For example, Swann claimed that he saw a 30,000 ft mountain range on Jupiter when in reality there's no such thing. He later changed his claim and said that his particular brand of astral travel is so fast that he must have been seeing not Jupiter, but another planet in another solar system. Right....
I know many don't like James Randi and, to be honest, he's not exactly a favorite of mine when it comes to skeptics, but he also examined the claims made by the remote viewers and found that only one of the 65 claims made by the remote viewers of Jupiter was a fact that was either not obvious or not obtainable from reference books. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence in remote viewing as being accurate or even particularly useful, at least imo.
I also found this on wikipedia, since Asimov and Randi's numbers appear to be different I imagine that there have been developments since Asimov did his analysis and that these are the current stats:
Swann's Jupiter rings
Swann proposed a study to Targ and Puthoff. At first they resisted, for the resulting descriptions would be impossible to verify. Yet, on the evening 27 April 1973 Targ and Puthoff recorded Swann's remote viewing session of the
planet Jupiter and
Jupiter's moons,
[35] prior to the
Voyager probe's visit there in 1979.
Swann asked for 30 minutes of silence. According to Swann, his ability to see Jupiter took about three and a half minutes. In the session he made several reports on the physical features of Jupiter, such as its surface, atmosphere and weather. Swann's statement that Jupiter had
planetary rings, like
Saturn, was controversial at the time. The Voyager probe later confirmed the existence of the rings.
[36]
The following are Swann's exact statements:
6:06:20 "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."(Unintelligible sentence.) "I bet you they'll reflect radio probes. Is that possible if you had a cloud of crystals that were assaulted by different
radio waves?"
[37]
Analysis and observations
The
Rings of Jupiter are not inside the atmosphere and rather than being made of crystal, Jupiter's rings are formed by charged (dust) particles of various sizes. Most of these particles are very tiny (about 1 micrometre across). There are two forces that are exerted on these particles by Jupiter: a
gravitational force and an
electromagnetic force. The gravitational force is stronger than the electromagnetic force for particles with size of 1 micrometre and it provides the
centripetal acceleration that is required to keep these particles in circular motion around Jupiter.
Throughout their lifetimes these particles are ground down by the energetic particles that are abundant in
Jupiter's magnetosphere and eventually they become so small (about 0.03 micrometre across) that the electromagnetic force overpowers the gravitational force and the particles leave the rings and fall into Jupiter's atmosphere. The average lifetime of these particles is about 1000 years, a very short time by
cosmological standards.
However, Jupiter's rings are a permanent feature because these tiny particles are regenerated continually by collisions of interplanetary
Micrometeoroids with boulder-size objects within the rings.
[38]
Swann's total observations lasted for about 20 minutes. He made no mention of the many
moons of Jupiter, which as of February 2004 counted 63.
[39] The raw data comprised only four pages. But according to Swann the confirmatory data appeared throughout the published scientific and technical articles and papers. It was decided that all of these should be included in their entirety to ensure that no scientific passage was inadvertently used out of context. The feedback data therefore amounted to about 300 pages.
[37] Swann states, "Only the mountains remained unconfirmed. When skeptics elected to amuse themselves regarding the Probe it was this single item they focused on."
[40]
An examination by
Randi of the 65 statements made by Ingo Swann and Harold Sherman concluded that 37 percent of the statements were incorrect.
[41] Of the statements, 7 were correct yet obvious, 11 were correct and available widely in reference books, 5 were probably true (scientific speculation), one was correct but not available from reference books, 9 were too vague to verify, 2 were probably incorrect and 30 were certainly incorrect.
[41] Randi's evaluation of the 31 claims about Jupiter by Swann identified 6 as true, 1 as very likely, 3 as probable, 4 as obvious, 1 as "probably not," 11 as wrong, 1 as "not known," and 4 criticized for being vague or nonspecific in various ways, e.g., "it's liquid" and "surface gives high infrared count, and heat is held down."
