Ingo Swann's own memoir credits himself, not the SRI physicists, with proposing the term "remote viewing" after a December 1971 ASPR experiment

cold-war-scienceparapsychologyremote-viewingstargatecontested-creditpriority-disputesingle-witnessaspr

In his self-published memoir Remote Viewing: The Real Story, Ingo Swann dates his first long-distance experiment — a sealed-envelope target of Tucson, Arizona — to December 8, 1971, at the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) in New York, and narrates the naming of the new kind of experiment directly after it. That places the term months before he had any contact with Hal Puthoff or Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the institution popularly credited with it. By his own account: "I suggested the term 'remote sensing' or 'remote viewing' — since a distant city was, after all, remote from the experimental lab in New York. Osis and Schmeidler, however, preferred the term 'remote viewing'... So the term 'remote viewing' stuck." Both candidate terms were Swann's own; Karlis Osis and Gertrude Schmeidler picked between them, preferring "remote viewing" "since it was viewing which was the object of study." The memoir gives no separate date for the naming discussion and does not place either of them at the December 8 session.

Puthoff's own 1996 primary account of founding the SRI parapsychology program — see claim-hal-puthoff-bridges-1972-stargate-and-2010-aatip-antigravity-research, which he says he founded in early 1972 — never claims to have coined the term himself, and describes Swann initiating contact by letter only after he "chanced to see" an unrelated Puthoff proposal (on quantum biology) at Cleve Backster's lab. The two primary accounts do not conflict on any fact; they describe different, sequential events, with Swann's naming episode preceding any Puthoff contact.

The claim rests on a single witness recounting his own decades-old memory in a self-published, self-interested memoir, with no contemporaneous 1971-72 record yet located to corroborate the date or the room. (Revised 2026-09-17 by audit: see audit_status for the prior wording on the date, the room, and Osis and Schmeidler's role.) See question-verify-swann-remote-viewing-priority-contemporaneous-record.