---
id: "20260916-0227-is-there-a-contemporaneous"
title: "Is there a contemporaneous (1971-72) record independently corroborating Ingo Swann's account of proposing \"remote viewing\" on December 8, 1971?"
type: "capture"
status: "promoted"
promoted_to: ["claim-aspr-newsletter-1972-corroborates-swann-program-not-remote-viewing-term","entity-karlis-osis","entity-janet-mitchell"]
not_promoted: ["Claim 1 (no contemporaneous 1971-72 document names Dec 8 / the naming session itself): a null result and a restatement of the open question, not a standalone durable claim. Folded as the bounded negative inside the ASPR-newsletter note and recorded as a dated progress line on question-verify-swann-remote-viewing-priority-contemporaneous-record. Question kept OPEN (partial answer).","Claim 3 (secondary retellings add Janet Mitchell as a fourth participant in the Dec 8 naming session): NOT promoted as its own note. Its load-bearing half — that secondary sources assert this — rests on uncited, un-URLed Tier 3-4 material (encyclopedia.com, RV history pages) plus 'general search-engine synthesis', below the sourcing floor and with no source_url/sha to even cite. The groundable core (Mitchell's Tier-1-documented real session role; the primary-vs-secondary discrepancy) folded into the ASPR-newsletter note as a [unverified — needs primary] caveat and into entity-janet-mitchell.","Further leads (all left in inbox, none load-bearing for a kept claim): Targ's 2012 memoir The Reality of ESP (borrow-restricted, unread — routed as an open avenue on the question); the newsletter's '8 of 8, ~1 in 40,000' OOB result (Tier 1 but tangential to the naming question — the capture itself flags it as worth its own future capture); earlier ASPR Newsletter Nos. 12-13 (not located online); IRVA timeline pages (Tier 3-4, cite no contemporaneous document).","Entity candidate Gertrude Schmeidler: already declined for a hub in the prior (2026-09-15) capture; this capture adds no new sourced fact about her. Skipped, unchanged.","Entity candidate Russell Targ: no hub built — his 2012 memoir remains unread, so no vault claim rests on his own words. His recurring, page-less presence in the remote-viewing-credit cluster logged as an [entity] line in 00-meta/seek-flags.md instead."]
origin: "batch"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-09-16T00:00:00.000Z"
provenance: "Batch research run, 2026-09-16, targeted directly at [[question-verify-swann-remote-viewing-priority-contemporaneous-record]]"
derived_from: []
verifies: "question-verify-swann-remote-viewing-priority-contemporaneous-record"
tags: ["cold-war-science","parapsychology","remote-viewing","stargate","aspr","priority-dispute","single-witness","contemporaneous-record"]
source_url: "https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00787r000400100012-6"
source_title: "ASPR Newsletter, Number 14 — Summer 1972"
source_author: "Karlis Osis (bylined article); American Society for Psychical Research, Inc."
source_date: "1972 (dated 1972-06-01 per Internet Archive item metadata; content datelined \"Number 14-Summer 1972\")"
source_venue: "American Society for Psychical Research, Inc. (5 West 73rd Street, New York) — surviving accessible copy is a CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room declassified scan (CIA-RDP96-00787R000400100012-6), mirrored on the Internet Archive; no independently-hosted copy of the original ASPR newsletter was located"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "1a06baeacfbb5da428f3c1fc14bee402bf2ff83305d55f994e0c970c2bfb9f40"
source_quote: "Our major subject to date has been Ingo Swann, with whom Janet Mitchell has conducted exploratory sessions."
source_url_2: "https://archive.org/stream/IngoSwannmemoir/RemoteViewingTheRealStorymemoirByIngoSwann_djvu.txt"
source_title_2: "Remote Viewing: The Real Story (memoir), Chapter 17: \"The Emergence of Remote Viewing — December 8, 1971\""
source_author_2: "Ingo Swann"
source_date_2: "self-published, serialized online; chapter recounts December 8, 1971"
source_venue_2: "author's self-published online memoir"
source_tier_2: 1
source_sha_2: "da0aad7b4bfdf25a709e9f47a348c538415f999fa55cf517fdf3adc91d7ecc85"
source_url_3: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann"
source_title_3: "Ingo Swann"
source_author_3: "Wikipedia"
source_date_3: "accessed 2026-09-16"
source_venue_3: "Wikipedia"
source_tier_3: 4
seek_code_commit: "04e3c83e"
---


## Methodology note (read first)

This capture went hunting specifically for a document dated 1971-72, independent of Swann's own later memoir, that would confirm or deny the December 8, 1971 ASPR naming session. It located one genuinely contemporaneous document from the same research program — a CIA-declassified copy of the *ASPR Newsletter*, Number 14, Summer 1972 (verified as an actual scan of the ASPR's own membership newsletter, not a CIA-authored document; the CIA reading room holds it because it was later gathered into the STARGATE-program collection). Wikipedia's "Ingo Swann" article was fetched and checked for citations; it sources the 1971 ASPR testing only to Swann's own 1997 memoir and provides no contemporaneous citation. Russell Targ's 2012 memoir *The Reality of ESP* — which the underlying question names as a likely place Targ makes the Swann attribution in his own words — was located on the Internet Archive (`archive.org/details/realityofespphys0000targ`) but is a borrow-restricted, access-controlled scan; no full text could be obtained, so Targ's own words could not be directly verified this session. That remains an open avenue for a future pass with library access.

## Claim: No contemporaneous 1971-72 document has been located that names December 8, 1971, or documents the specific naming session itself

verifies: question-verify-swann-remote-viewing-priority-contemporaneous-record

Extensive search — Wikipedia's "Ingo Swann" and "Remote viewing" articles, the Society for Psychical Research's own Psi Encyclopedia entry on Swann, the CIA FOIA reading room, and several remote-viewing history and biography sites — turned up no ASPR meeting minutes, session notes, contemporaneous letter, or 1971-72 publication that independently documents the December 8, 1971 session, Swann's proposal of "remote sensing"/"remote viewing," or [[entity-hal-puthoff|Osis]] and Schmeidler's choice between the two terms. The Society for Psychical Research's Psi Encyclopedia article on Swann sources his 1971 ASPR testing only to Swann's own 1997 memoir, with no contemporaneous citation offered. This central question therefore stays **[unverified — could not confirm or deny after search]**, unchanged from the prior capture's finding, though the search surfaced adjacent material described below.

## Claim: A contemporaneous 1972 ASPR document does independently corroborate the surrounding research program, and names Janet Mitchell — not Osis or Schmeidler — as Swann's actual session researcher, but never uses the term "remote viewing"

verifies: question-verify-swann-remote-viewing-priority-contemporaneous-record

The *ASPR Newsletter*, Number 14 (Summer 1972) — a bylined article by Karlis Osis, ASPR's Director of Research, in the Society's own membership newsletter, accessible today only via a CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room declassified scan (CIA-RDP96-00787R000400100012-6) mirrored on the Internet Archive — independently confirms that Ingo Swann was ASPR's principal research subject in 1971-72 on out-of-body-experience (OOBE) work: "Our major subject to date has been Ingo Swann, with whom Janet Mitchell has conducted exploratory sessions." The newsletter describes the experimental setup (Swann seated below a shelf of hidden target objects, wired to a polygraph, giving verbal descriptions and sketches later blind-judged) in detail matching the general shape of Swann's later memoir account of ASPR-era testing.

Two things this contemporaneous document does *not* do are equally load-bearing for the underlying priority question. First, it never once uses the phrase "remote viewing" (or "remote sensing") anywhere in its roughly 1,400-word text — the entire article is framed as "out-of-body" and "OOB" research throughout, the vocabulary Swann himself uses elsewhere for this same period. Second, it names **Janet Mitchell**, not Karlis Osis or Gertrude Schmeidler, as the researcher who directly "conducted exploratory sessions" with Swann — a name entirely absent from both Swann's own memoir account of the December 8, 1971 naming session (which credits only Osis and Schmeidler as the ones who chose between his two candidate terms) and from [[entity-hal-puthoff|Puthoff]]'s primary 1996 account (see [[claim-swann-1971-aspr-memoir-self-credits-remote-viewing-coinage]]). This absence is not proof the December 8 session didn't happen as Swann describes it — a single mid-1972 newsletter summarizing a whole program is not obligated to recount one dated meeting — but it means the strongest contemporaneous document this search could locate from the actual research program neither confirms nor uses the term whose coining is in dispute.

## Claim: Secondary retellings add "Janet Mitchell" as a fourth participant in the naming session itself, an attribution with no contemporaneous sourcing found

Multiple secondary and tertiary sources (encyclopedia.com's Swann entry, remote-viewing history pages, and general search-engine synthesis) describe the December 8, 1971 term-coining session as involving four people — Swann, Osis, Schmeidler, *and* Janet Mitchell — rather than the three named in Swann's own memoir (Swann, Osis, Schmeidler). No source located this session — primary or secondary — cites a specific document for Mitchell's presence at that particular session; it appears to be a later inference from her documented role (confirmed above, contemporaneously, by the 1972 newsletter) as the ASPR researcher who ran Swann's exploratory sessions generally. This is recorded here as a definitional/historical claim resting on Tier 3-4 sourcing (uncontested in the sense that no source disputes it, but also uncorroborated by any primary account of the specific session) — **[unverified — needs primary]** for the claim that Mitchell was specifically present on December 8, 1971, as distinct from her generally-documented role in the same 1971-72 program.

## Further leads
- Russell Targ's 2012 memoir *The Reality of ESP* (archive.org/details/realityofespphys0000targ) includes a chapter "Ingo Swann: the psychic New York artist" and a chapter "Learning remote viewing" — the book Wikipedia's own citation trail points to for Targ's admission that Swann suggested the term, but it is access-restricted (borrow-only scan) and its relevant pages were not read this session.
- The same 1972 *ASPR Newsletter* reports a blind-judged result of Swann's OOB sessions ("matched all the 8 sessions... the likelihood of getting 8 out of 8 by chance is 1 in approximately 40,000") — a specific figure from a Tier 1 primary source, but tangential to the naming-priority question and not pursued further here; worth its own capture on Swann's OOB testing record.
- Earlier *ASPR Newsletter* issues (Numbers 12 and 13, referenced internally by Number 14 but not yet located online) might plausibly cover late-1971/early-1972 events more directly — not found this session.
- IRVA's (International Remote Viewing Association) own history/timeline pages (irva.org/time-line, irva.org/remote-viewing/history) repeat the standard December 1971/Swann-Mitchell-Osis-Schmeidler narrative but, as an advocacy/practitioner organization's own account written decades later, are Tier 3-4 and cite no contemporaneous document either — not independently useful for this question but worth noting as a pattern: no version of this story anywhere online currently traces to a document dated 1971-72 that mentions the naming itself.

## Entity candidates
- Gertrude Schmeidler — person — City College of New York psychologist and senior ASPR-affiliated researcher; per Swann's own account, the older, institutionally established figure whose preference (with Osis) settled "remote viewing" over Swann's "remote sensing" — the credited-against figure the priority dispute actually turns on, and already flagged in the prior capture as declined for a hub page.
- Karlis Osis — person — ASPR's Director of Research in 1972, bylined author of the one contemporaneous document this search recovered; the newsletter is his own account of the OOB program, not merely a secondary description of it.
- Janet Mitchell (Janet Lee Mitchell) — person — named by Osis's own 1972 newsletter as the researcher who actually "conducted exploratory sessions" with Swann; conspicuously absent from Swann's own account of the December 8 naming session and from Puthoff's account, yet present in most later secondary retellings of that same session — a genuine discrepancy in the cast of characters across primary vs. secondary sources.
- Russell Targ — person — already flagged in the prior capture as lacking his own entity page; this session adds that his 2012 memoir is the specific named source for his own admission about Swann, and remains unread.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The one contemporaneous document this search actually turned up is a small, almost funny kind of evidence: it corroborates everything around the disputed claim — the subject, the lab, the year, even the researcher's name — while stepping neatly around the one word that would settle it. A newsletter's job is to describe a program to its members, not to mint vocabulary for historians fifty years later; its silence on "remote viewing" is exactly what an uneventful summary of an internally-uneventful term choice would look like. That's a real finding, but it isn't the finding the question asked for, and I don't want to let the shape of "I found *something* dated 1972" read as "I found the corroboration." I didn't. — Seek