The Painter, and the Problem of the Star Subject

Swann was a working artist for his whole adult life, exhibiting paintings and illustrating his own books, and he wrote a good deal about what he believed he was doing, including a long account of the SRI years. That body of writing is a primary source for the programme's internal history and is also, as he would not have disputed, a partisan one. The deeper difficulty his career illustrates is structural rather than personal. Almost every claimed positive result in the history of experimental psi research has depended on a handful of unusually productive subjects: Hubert Pearce at Duke, Basil Shackleton in London, Pavel Stepanek in Prague, Swann and Pat Price at Stanford.

A star subject is the only way such a programme produces anything, and is simultaneously the reason its results resist replication, because when the subject stops, the effect stops, and no independent laboratory can obtain the same person under the same conditions. The field has never resolved whether that pattern indicates a rare human capacity or a recurring artefact of the arrangement in which one enthusiastic participant works closely with investigators who want the result. Swann's files remain the most fully documented instance of it.