---
title: "Wikipedia's \"Remote viewing\" article credits Targ and Puthoff with coining the term in its infobox, then concedes in its own body that Targ attributes it 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."
tags: ["wikipedia","contested-credit","remote-viewing","stargate","citation-genealogy","tertiary-sourcing"]
seek_code_commit: "04e3c83e"
---


Wikipedia's "Remote viewing" article lists, in its infobox, "Original proponents: Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff" under a year of 1970, and states in its lead that they "are generally credited with coining the term." One sentence later, the same article concedes: "According to Targ, the term was first suggested by Ingo Swann in December 1971" — attributing the coinage, in Targ's own reported words, to the person the infobox above never names.

The contradiction sits entirely inside one Wikipedia article, between its structured summary (an infobox, built for at-a-glance attribution) and its prose (which states the caveat once and never resurfaces it). 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