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

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In his self-published memoir Remote Viewing: The Real Story, Ingo Swann dates the coining of "remote viewing" to December 8, 1971, at the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) in New York — months before he had any contact with Hal Puthoff or Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the institution popularly credited with the term. 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." Karlis Osis and Gertrude Schmeidler, ASPR researchers present at the session, chose "remote viewing" over Swann's alternative, "remote sensing."

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 having "chanc[ed] to see" an unrelated Puthoff proposal 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. See question-verify-swann-remote-viewing-priority-contemporaneous-record.