Stephan A. Schwartz - applied remote-viewing researcher and UAP-adjacent author

• Type: named-figure source of record
• Subject: Stephan A. Schwartz
• Fields: remote viewing, parapsychology, underwater archaeology, consciousness studies
• Credibility: ~38 composite; documented career and project participation ~70, research transparency and protocol design ~50, evidence for reliable remote viewing ~30, claim handling ~25, alien claims ~15
• Principal organization: Mobius, founded in 1977
• UAP relevance: remote-viewing network, nonlocal-consciousness claims, and the alien material in his novel Awakening

Stephan A. Schwartz is an author and early applied remote-viewing project leader whose teams used purported psychic impressions to guide archaeological searches. His field reports preserve tasking, maps, dates, named participants, and failures more fully than most paranormal research. They document real expeditions and some interesting apparent matches. They do not establish that remote viewing caused the discoveries because the projects lack predeclared scoring, controlled search comparisons, and independent blind evaluation, and several prominent claims depend on selecting a discovery and matching it to flexible descriptions afterward.

Schwartz's later public summaries are materially stronger than the earlier record. Contemporary sources described the Alexandria identifications as tentative, while he now says his team found Cleopatra's palace, Mark Antony's Timonium, and the Pharos lighthouse. His long-range future project is described as having predicted major events, but no frozen pre-event prediction set and scoring record was found. His alien conclusions are based on remote-viewing sessions he says he cannot prove objectively.

Career and credentials

Schwartz's July 2024 curriculum vitae lists him as a Distinguished Consulting Faculty member at Saybrook University, a Distinguished Associated Scholar at the California Institute for Human Science, and the founder and research director of Mobius. CIHS currently lists him among its Distinguished Scholars. The International Remote Viewing Association lists him among its founders, and he served as its president from 2004 to 2006.

The CV says Schwartz served as Special Assistant for Research and Analysis to Chiefs of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt and James Holloway from 1971 to 1975, consulted for the Oceanographer of the Navy through 1976, and joined a Massachusetts Institute of Technology group serving the Secretary of Defense. These appointments are repeated in biographies based on his account, but this review did not locate an independent personnel record that verifies their titles and scope. A 1978 SRI report in the CIA archive independently confirms a narrower point: Schwartz arranged use of the Taurus submersible for a 1977 underwater remote-viewing experiment.

No earned degree appears in the current CV or the reviewed institutional biographies. This does not bear on whether he organized the projects he documents, but it makes labels such as scientist or archaeologist easy to overread. Researcher, author, and project leader are more precise. The CV describes more than 200 technical reports and peer-reviewed papers, but its bibliography combines empirical articles with technical reports, proceedings, invited chapters, and many short columns. The publication total is not a count of 200 peer-reviewed experiments.

Schwartz was an early applied researcher rather than the creator of remote viewing

Schwartz began field experiments in the 1970s and developed a consensus method in which several viewers independently supplied locations and descriptions. He belongs to the early history of applied remote viewing and helped establish IRVA. His 2022 interview goes further, calling him one of the people who created remote viewing.

The IRVA timeline places the term's adoption around Ingo Swann's American Society for Psychical Research work in 1971 and traces the best-known government-funded program to Swann, Hal Puthoff, and Russell Targ at SRI. Schwartz built a separate applied program after that work began. Early applied researcher and method developer fits the public record; creator of remote viewing does not without a narrower definition.

The field reports preserve useful evidence but evaluate it too flexibly

Schwartz's reports contain features worth preserving: viewers were often separated from field teams, original material was notarized or placed with third parties, sessions were filmed, multiple viewers were compared, and archaeologists or other specialists participated. Those practices make the work more inspectable than a retrospective anecdote.

The remaining problem is how success was defined. The projects searched large, artifact-rich regions. Descriptions included many concepts of varying specificity, and experts later decided which observed features matched them. There was no predeclared hit rule, no comparison with equally plausible control locations, and no independent evaluator blinded to which descriptions belonged to the selected site. The papers explicitly treat expert judgment rather than a chance comparison as the endpoint of applied remote viewing. That permits genuine-looking correspondences, misses, and interpretive adjustments to coexist without a reliable estimate of what an ordinary search plus flexible matching would produce.

The Marea building was a real find with cued and partly incorrect details

In the Marea report, viewers George McMullen and Hella Hammid were asked to locate a building containing tile, fresco, or mosaic decoration. McMullen marked corners and a doorway before excavation. Digging exposed a Byzantine building near the marked area, including walls, rooms, a doorway, ledges, subfloor material, and small mosaic pieces. The location and doorway are the most specific apparent matches.

The task itself supplied the decoration category, so later tile and mosaic material cannot be treated as an uncued prediction. Some details failed: no wall tiling was recovered apart from one loose green piece, McMullen's square-tile description was wrong, and ledges interpreted as seating were not seats. The report suggests wall tiles may have been stripped and attributes some misplaced decoration imagery to the interviewer's task wording. Its concluding discussion says apparent remote-viewing failures may instead be failures by the researchers. These explanations may be possible, but they make the method harder to falsify because a miss can be reassigned to an adjacent site, past removal, analytical overlay, or task design after the result is known.

Alexandria combined genuine survey work with disputed priority and identification claims

The Alexandria report describes 11 viewers, map-based predictions, notarized session material, side-scan sonar, diving, and field archaeology. It credits the project with locating or describing Antirhodos, Mark Antony's Timonium, the ancient shoreline, palace remains, and structures associated with the Pharos. The paper also records limits that later summaries omit: sites had varying degrees of blindness, the general location of the Pharos was known, ordinary background knowledge or luck could explain some material, most remote-viewing locations did not produce sonar targets, and analytical labels such as an association with Mark Antony could be wrong.

The historical priority claim is weaker than Schwartz's current CV suggests. The Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities' history says Kamel Abou El-Saadat began modern exploration in 1961, found major objects and structures, and produced the first preliminary map. It credits Franck Goddio's team with a comprehensive topographic survey beginning in 1992 and with identifying Antirhodos, the Timonium, and probable royal-palace ruins. The Honor Frost Foundation also records a UNESCO survey in 1968 that confirmed submerged structures and parts associated with the Pharos.

Contemporary language was cautious. A 1980 Washington Post report said the team believed or suspected it had located relevant ruins. A 1983 Kirkus review of The Alexandria Project observed that Schwartz did not claim the famous structures had actually been found and judged the reported resemblances modest. By 2022, Schwartz said flatly that his team found Cleopatra's palace, Mark Antony's palace, and the lighthouse. Later archaeology supports the broad geography, but it does not retroactively establish that each label or priority claim was proved by the remote-viewing work.

The American brig probability calculation uses the wrong comparison

The American brig report describes 12 viewers guiding a survey of a 579.15-square-mile Bahamian license area. The team found a wreck in the 11.81-square-mile Consensus Zone C and identified it as probably the brig Leander. It reports 193 descriptive concepts, of which 145 or 148 were treated as evaluable in different passages, with about 84 percent scored correct. The report also says several sites were found and presents this wreck because it best illustrates the method, preservation, and possible identity.

Its reported p = 0.00009 does not measure the probability of the actual search result. The paper estimates 6.12 wrecks should lie in Zone C, divides that by the number of 5,000-square-foot cells in the zone, and treats the discovered wreck's cell as though it had been selected in advance. The protocol instead directed a search within a broad zone already expected to contain wrecks, after which one of several finds was chosen for analysis. A valid comparison would need the searched area, survey effort, all prospective target zones and finds, a rule fixed before the search, and performance on matched control zones. Dividing by post hoc grid cells makes an ordinary wreck discovery appear far less probable than it was.

Remote-viewing participant Keith Harary later disputed the project's presentation in Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research papers published in 1990 and 1992. A secondary account with the citations says the original objective involved a different treasure wreck, that many buoys were deployed, and that Leander was selected later. The original Harary papers remain a priority source because the accessible summary alone cannot settle the dispute.

The 2050 project lacks a frozen prediction record

Schwartz says he interviewed about 4,000 people between 1978 and 1991 and asked them to describe the same calendar date in 2050. In 2022 he said every consensus finding had either happened or was happening, naming the Soviet Union's collapse, AIDS and other pandemics, terrorism, social division, solar energy, and climate effects.

His 2021 description of the later 2060 project says Phase One entered 538 viewings from the 1991-1996 portion of the 2050 project for comparison. That date range conflicts with the 2022 account that says he collected the 2050 material from 1978 through 1991. The article proposes concept coding, consensus extraction, later expert scoring, and archival deposit for the new study. This is a more testable plan than the retrospective 2050 claims, but it does not provide a complete frozen 2050 dataset, the original prediction wording, thresholds for consensus, the denominator of failed predictions, or an evaluation completed before the named events.

The earliest accessible public discussion located in this review is an August 2001 Art Bell interview, after the Soviet collapse, AIDS epidemic, and rise of modern terrorism were already observable. Broad social forecasts can also be matched flexibly over a 59- to 72-year horizon. The current public record therefore cannot test the claim that all consensus forecasts succeeded.

Deep Quest does not establish a non-electromagnetic mechanism

Project Deep Quest placed viewers in the Taurus submersible and had them describe distant targets while underwater. The archived SRI report corroborates the experiment and Schwartz's logistical role. Schwartz argues that performance beneath seawater showed the process could not be electromagnetic and therefore supported nonlocal consciousness.

Underwater performance would count against some proposed electromagnetic transmission mechanisms if the information effect itself were first established under controls. It cannot establish nonlocal consciousness from an experiment whose target selection, scoring, sensory isolation, and statistical result remain disputed. It also cannot exclude every ordinary information path merely because seawater attenuates some electromagnetic frequencies.

The broader government program did not reach Schwartz's operational conclusion. The CIA's summary of the 1995 independent review says reviewers found some results that were difficult to attribute to chance but judged remote viewing inconsistent and unreliable for intelligence use. The full American Institutes for Research evaluation concluded that operational remote viewing had not supplied consistently accurate, specific, actionable intelligence.

The healing literature extends the premise without establishing clinical efficacy

Schwartz also writes that intention and nonlocal consciousness can affect health and living systems. His indexed 2017 paper Therapeutic Intention: Into the Next Generation is a short journal article categorized under faith healing, mental healing, meditation, and parapsychology; PubMed provides no abstract and it is not a reported clinical trial. A 2015 review of distant-healing intention studies by researchers favorable to studying the subject found occasional significant effects but concluded that the evidence did not support confidence in clinical efficacy. This literature shows that Schwartz's nonlocal-consciousness thesis extends beyond archaeology, but it does not independently validate the mechanism used to explain his field results.

The alien account is explicitly unproved remote-viewing material

Schwartz's novel Awakening depicts a government official learning that a telepathic alien is held at a secret facility. In the 2022 interview he calls the novel “everything I know about aliens and consciousness” and says he used fiction because he could not prove the material objectively. He says he asked people to remote-view aliens and concludes that alien visitors behave like anthropologists observing humanity during a social and environmental transition.

This is useful for tracing Schwartz's beliefs and makes him a plausible narrative candidate in the search for Jacques Vallée's “Gilbert”. It does not establish a captive being, government facility, extraterrestrial presence, or personal encounter. Schwartz's explicit admission that he cannot verify the material is appropriately cautious; the confident anthropological interpretation has no disclosed data or protocol that permits an outside test.

Credibility assessment

What raises Schwartz's credibility

1. He led real expeditions with named collaborators, institutional participants, and physical fieldwork.
2. His reports preserve maps, tasking, dates, photographs, contemporary materials, and many procedural details.
3. Some sessions were conducted with meaningful viewer blindness, notarization, separation of viewers, and pre-excavation marks.
4. He distinguishes the alien material in Awakening from objectively proved fact.
5. His long participation in remote-viewing organizations and the 1977 submersible project is independently documented.

What lowers Schwartz's credibility

1. The applied projects lack fixed success criteria, matched controls, independent blind judging, and a complete prospective accounting of searches and misses.
2. The brig probability calculation treats a post-search discovery as a preselected cell and greatly overstates the statistical evidence.
3. Misses can be reassigned to nearby sites, stripped materials, interviewer error, analytical overlay, or researcher failure after the result is known.
4. His Alexandria language hardened from tentative contemporary identification to an unqualified claim that his team found several famous structures.
5. The 2050 success claim lacks the archived pre-event prediction set and scoring record needed to test it.
6. His creator claim, first-mapping claim, and publication count are broader than the independently supported record.
7. The alien conclusions depend on remote-viewing material he says cannot be objectively verified.

Net assessment

Schwartz rates about ~38 overall. His documented career and project participation rate around ~70: Mobius, IRVA, the field expeditions, the submersible experiment, and his current CIHS affiliation are real, although the government appointments remain mainly self-reported and his academic preparation is unclear. Research transparency and protocol design rate around ~50 because he preserved unusually substantial records and used some real blinding, but did not build the comparisons needed to distinguish remote viewing from selection and flexible matching. Evidence for reliable remote viewing rates around ~30. Claim handling rates around ~25 because the most famous archaeological and forecasting claims became stronger over time while failures remained easy to reinterpret. His alien claims rate around ~15 because he identifies them as unproved but offers no public evidence beyond remote-viewing interpretation.

Schwartz sits near Hal Puthoff (~35), above him on field documentation and below him on conventional scientific credentials. He sits below Keith Harary (~50), whose later public corrections directly weakened claims he had helped promote, and below Gary O. Langford (~48), whose government-program role and conventional technical career are better documented. His strongest use as a source is reconstructing what Mobius did and what its participants recorded. His conclusions about efficacy, famous-site priority, the future, consciousness, and aliens require independent support.

Role-category placement

Schwartz belongs among paranormal researchers and project organizers. In UAP research he is primarily a source for the remote-viewing network and the development of alien interpretations from that method, rather than a first-person UAP witness.

Followup items

• Retrieve Keith Harary's 1990 and 1992 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research critiques and Schwartz and Randall De Mattei's response.
• Obtain the complete original 2050 archive, dated consensus rules, and any predictions publicly deposited before the events used as successes.
• Verify Schwartz's Navy and MIT appointment titles through personnel, archival, or contemporary institutional records.
• Compare original Alexandria maps against later archaeological maps through an evaluator blinded to Schwartz's site labels.
• Locate a publication or archive containing the complete 2060 hypotheses and notarization record before 2060 outcomes become known.

Related

• Remote Viewing the Future interview
• Who was Jacques Vallée's “Gilbert”?
• Hal Puthoff
• Keith Harary
• Gary O. Langford