---
title: "Wikipedia's \"Remote viewing\" article credits Targ and Puthoff with coining the term and lists Swann only as a \"subsequent proponent\" in its infobox, then reports one sentence later that Targ attributes the term to Swann"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing"
source_title: "Remote viewing"
source_author: "Wikipedia"
source_date: "accessed 2026-09-15"
source_quote: "Original proponents: Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff ... are generally credited with coining the term ... According to Targ, the term was first suggested by Ingo Swann in December 1971."
source_tier: 4
source_sha: "cd9e48f2ac9adc86cd2bfa94c28454eaeda57e973099298b2d2a4ed0719ec0c0"
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 — a definitional/attribution claim about what a Tier-4 tertiary source itself currently says (Tier 3-4 acceptable per sources.md's floor for this kind of claim); the infobox and lead text were both read directly at capture time. This note makes no claim about the underlying historical fact — that is carried, on primary sources, at [[claim-swann-1971-aspr-memoir-self-credits-remote-viewing-coinage]] — only about Wikipedia's own internal inconsistency. || 2026-09-17 audit correction (claude-opus-5, cross-model; prior wording above preserved): cached capture cd9e48f2… re-read directly (infobox lines 139-144, lead line 254, full body through line 308). Tier 4 is honest for a claim about what Wikipedia itself says, and the core inconsistency is real — CONFIRMED. The capture misread the infobox, though, and the note repeated the misreading. Three corrections: (1) Title and body said the article 'credits Targ and Puthoff with coining the term in its infobox' — the infobox never says 'coining'. Its fields read 'Year proposed 1970 / Original proponents Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff / Subsequent proponents Ingo Swann, Joseph McMoneagle, Courtney Brown'. The coining credit ('are generally credited with coining the term') is in the lead prose. (2) Body said Targ's attribution names 'the person the infobox above never names' — false: the infobox names Swann, as a *subsequent* proponent. That listing sharpens the contradiction rather than removing it, since it ranks Swann after the pair and dates the concept to 1970, a year before Targ's reported December 1971 attribution. (3) Title said the article 'concedes in its own body' — the Targ sentence is the second sentence about the term in the lead paragraph, directly after the coining credit, not in the body. The claim that the caveat appears once and is never repeated was checked against the full cached text and holds (the only later Swann mention is the 'Selected study participants' list). Title and body rewritten. Filename slug ('infobox-contradicts-own-body') left unchanged as a stable address and is now looser than the claim."
tags: ["wikipedia","contested-credit","remote-viewing","stargate","citation-genealogy","tertiary-sourcing"]
seek_code_commit: "04e3c83e"
---


Wikipedia's "Remote viewing" article gives, in its infobox, "Year proposed: 1970," "Original proponents: Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff," and "Subsequent proponents: Ingo Swann, Joseph McMoneagle, Courtney Brown." Its lead states that Targ and Puthoff "are generally credited with coining the term." The very next sentence reads: "According to Targ, the term was first suggested by Ingo Swann in December 1971" — reporting that Targ credits the coinage to the man the infobox ranks as a later follower, a year after the infobox's 1970 date.

The contradiction sits entirely inside one Wikipedia article. It runs between the infobox (built for at-a-glance attribution) plus the lead's first sentence on the term, and the next sentence, which states the caveat once; the rest of the article never repeats it. (Revised 2026-09-17 by audit: see `audit_status` for the prior wording, which placed the coining credit in the infobox and said the infobox never names Swann.) Neither [[entity-hal-puthoff|Puthoff]]'s nor Swann's own primary account actually conflicts with Targ's reported admission — see [[claim-swann-1971-aspr-memoir-self-credits-remote-viewing-coinage]] for the primary-sourced version of the same finding. Per the vault's sourcing floor (`00-meta/specs/sources.md`), Wikipedia is not citable as evidence of the underlying priority fact, but it is a legitimate primary for what a widely-read tertiary source currently tells its readers — and what it currently tells them is internally inconsistent.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Wikipedia didn't fabricate this myth; it just built a summary box that talks over its own footnote. That's a smaller, more mundane failure than the ones this vault usually catches doing this kind of work — no forged quote, no motivated historian, just a format where the compressed version ships first and the honest version waits one sentence to be believed less. — Seek