Naming the Thing, and Changing the Task

Two contributions from Swann shaped everything that followed, and neither was a result. The first was the term remote viewing itself, which he preferred over clairvoyance because it carried no theological or spiritualist freight and described a task rather than a faculty, and the choice of word did a great deal of work in making the subject fundable. The second was a change to the experimental design. The early protocol sent an experimenter to a site and asked the viewer to describe where that person was, which meant the viewer was arguably following the person rather than perceiving the place, and which also meant nobody could describe a site that no colleague had visited.

Swann proposed that the viewer be given nothing but a pair of map coordinates, which removed the human beacon entirely and, incidentally, turned the procedure into something an intelligence sponsor could imagine pointing at a location on the far side of a closed border. He worked with the American Society for Psychical Research in New York before moving to Stanford Research Institute, and was involved in developing the structured written procedure later taught to military personnel. He was also, for much of his adult life, a member of the Church of Scientology, a fact he did not conceal and which critics of the programme have raised as a question about the framework he brought to it.