---
title: "Is there a contemporaneous (1971-72) record independently corroborating Ingo Swann's account of proposing \"remote viewing\" on December 8, 1971?"
type: "question"
status: "open"
date_raised: "2026-09-15T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["remote-viewing","stargate","priority-dispute","cold-war-science","single-witness"]
---


[[claim-swann-1971-aspr-memoir-self-credits-remote-viewing-coinage]] rests entirely on Ingo Swann's own self-published memoir — a single witness recounting his own decades-later memory of a dated event, with an evident motive to inflate his own role in a widely told story. Per `00-meta/specs/sources.md`'s oral-history guidance, "dates, priority claims, and figures drawn from oral history need a contemporaneous record before they carry a quantitative or priority-bearing claim" — and this is exactly that shape: a priority claim (who first proposed a now-famous term) resting on retrospective self-testimony.

What would resolve it: any 1971-72 document independent of Swann's own later memoir — ASPR meeting minutes or session notes from December 1971, a contemporaneous letter or publication by Karlis Osis or Gertrude Schmeidler describing the naming session, or Russell Targ's own primary writing making the same attribution in his own words (Wikipedia currently reports Targ's admission only secondhand — see [[claim-wikipedia-remote-viewing-infobox-contradicts-own-body-on-coining-credit]] — not as a direct quote from Targ). Targ's own memoir (*The Reality of ESP*, 2012) or SRI's internal program records are the most likely places to check first.

Until then, the claim stays `seedling` — well-sourced as an account of what Swann says, not yet verified as an account of what happened.