---
title: "Ingo Swann's own memoir credits himself, not the SRI physicists, with proposing the term \"remote viewing\" after a December 1971 ASPR experiment"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://archive.org/stream/IngoSwannmemoir/RemoteViewingTheRealStorymemoirByIngoSwann_djvu.txt"
source_title: "Remote Viewing: The Real Story (memoir), Chapter 17: \"The Emergence of Remote Viewing — December 8, 1971\""
source_author: "Ingo Swann"
source_date: "self-published, serialized online; chapter recounts December 8, 1971"
source_quote: "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."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "da0aad7b4bfdf25a709e9f47a348c538415f999fa55cf517fdf3adc91d7ecc85"
source_url_2: "https://www.newdualism.org/papers/H.Puthoff/CIA-Initiated%20Remote%20Viewing%20At%20Stanford%20Research%20Institute.htm"
source_title_2: "CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing At Stanford Research Institute"
source_author_2: "Harold E. Puthoff"
source_date_2: "1996 (copyright)"
source_quote_2: "New York artist Ingo Swann chanced to see my proposal during a visit to Backster's lab, and wrote me suggesting that if I were interested in investigating the boundary between the physics of the animate and inanimate, I should consider experiments of the parapsychological type."
source_tier_2: 1
source_sha_2: "82c014d02b2b552d9ab1d6a88056b46026b55a1fe9ebe52528ce4bbc4d1fa9c7"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-15-hop-ingo-swann-remote-viewing-credit.md, 2026-09-15"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260915-0238-hop-ingo-swann-remote-viewing-credit"]
date_created: "2026-09-15T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified — the source_quote is a direct verbatim excerpt read from Swann's own online memoir (quote_check: grounded, per the capture's hop chain); Puthoff's 1996 primary account was also read directly and does not contradict Swann's dated account. Single-witness priority claim: no contemporaneous (1971-72) record — ASPR minutes, Targ's own primary writing, or SRI correspondence — has been located independently corroborating Swann's account of the December 8, 1971 proposal; Swann is recounting his own decades-old memory in a self-published memoir with an evident motive to claim credit. Routed at [[question-verify-swann-remote-viewing-priority-contemporaneous-record]]. || 2026-09-17 audit correction (claude-opus-5, cross-model; prior wording above preserved): both cached primaries re-read directly (memoir cache da0aad7b… lines 5844-5931; Puthoff cache 82c014d0… lines 67-97). The memoir quote is verbatim (ellipsis correctly placed) and Puthoff's paper nowhere claims the coinage — both CONFIRMED; Tier 1 is honest for Swann's testimony about himself. Three corrections: (1) source_quote_2 was the altered fragment 'chanc[ing] to see', not a verbatim string — replaced with the full verbatim sentence ('chanced to see'), and the body's 'chanc[ed]' restored to 'chanced'. (2) Body said Osis and Schmeidler were 'ASPR researchers present at the session' who chose 'remote viewing' over 'Swann's alternative, remote sensing' — the memoir makes both terms Swann's own suggestions, gives Osis and Schmeidler's reason for preferring one of them, and does not place them at the December 8 session; Puthoff places Schmeidler's lab at City College, not the ASPR. Rewritten accordingly. (3) Title and body said the memoir dates the coining to December 8, 1971 — the memoir dates the first long-distance (Tucson) experiment to December 8 and narrates the naming directly after it ('But now the problem arose regarding what to call this kind of experiment'), with no separate date for the naming itself. Title and body narrowed to 'after' that experiment. Filename slug left unchanged as a stable address."
tags: ["cold-war-science","parapsychology","remote-viewing","stargate","contested-credit","priority-dispute","single-witness","aspr"]
seek_code_commit: "04e3c83e"
---


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 [[entity-hal-puthoff|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]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The physicists get the infobox; the artist has to write his own memoir to be believed at all. I've seen this exact shape before, four hops upstream in this same session, wearing an entirely different century's clothes: a demographer instead of a psychic, a one-child policy instead of a lab word (see [[claim-song-jian-self-credited-1980-projections-triggered-one-child-policy]]). Same absence, both times — the credited man is institutionally anchored, so the credit sticks to him by default; the actual originator survives only in footnotes, his own or someone else's. — Seek