Psience Quest

(2023-07-04, 06:45 PM)Max_B Wrote: [ -> ]From Haroldsson's paper, the medium Indridi Indridason made 4 specific claims:

1. There was a fire in one of the streets of Copenhagen.
2. The fire was in a factory.
3. The fire started around midnight on 24 November 1905.
4. The fire was brought under control within an hour.

Now look at the brief newspaper report I found published later in the Danish Newspaper Berlingske Tidende

Last night at around twelve o’clock the Fire Brigade was called to Store
Kongensgade 63, where fire had broken out in a house in the backyard in the
warehouse of the Copenhagen Lamp Factory. The fire had spread considerably
when the fire brigades arrived from the Main Fire Station and Adelsgade
Station. Still, the firemen managed to get the fire under control in about an
hour. The damage was substantial.

Its not just close, it's amazingly close, it's the same report. All Indridi Indridason has done is report the contents of an even shorter telegraph news item from the Marconi feed, and made a sensational claim about it.

How do you know that it is the same report just because it includes the same information? If Indridi could see what was going on, either through clairvoyance or through the spirit Jensen seeing what was happening in Copenhagen, then he should have been aware of these four things. It is the kind of information about the fire that is relevant for the newspaper to report, so of course they reported it. How can you know that Marconi carried this information just because it was printed in a danish newspaper? The newspaper does not mention that it would be a telegraph news item, and it does not mention that this information would ever have been caried by the Marconi feed. Since Berlingske Tidene was published in the same city that the fire was taking place, I don't think they would need to get the information by telegraph in the first place.

(2023-07-04, 06:55 PM)Max_B Wrote: [ -> ]the following morning (25th Nov 1905) the weekly edition of Björn Jónsson newspaper 'Isafold' printed the following column entitled 'Marconi Messages'

This column does not mention any fire in Copenhagen. Here is an english translation of it from Google Translate.
https://imgbox.com/Fn08ea0V

(2023-07-05, 03:21 PM)RViewer88 Wrote: [ -> ]Your debunking pretty much annihilates the entire Indridi mediumship because IIRC basically all the testimony we've got that matters was reported through these people who lied about the lack of any telegraph communication that could bring in info about Denmark to beef up the Copenhagen fire case. How can we trust them on anything else then? And if they were actively lying about Indridi's mediumship it's not really a reach to conclude that they may have assisted in hoaxing outside observers.

Haraldsson must have been aware of these quotes by Níelsson and Kvaran, because he included them in the psi-encyclopedia article for the Copenhagen fire case. https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/artic...hagen-fire He did not consider the quotes a problem. Why? Perhaps because one does not need to interpret the quotes as lies. Perhaps they just meant that they did not have a telegraph that could get messages from other places than the Poldhu station in Cornwall or that they did not have telegraphs that could get the information in question.
All the testimony about the Indridi mediumship that matters does not come from these people. There was an big investigation made by an independent investigator called Gudmundur Hannesson in 1908-1909. https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/artic...son-medium
And as I has shown elsewhere, it was not possible for anyone on Iceland to be aware of the fire, since the Poldhu station in Cornwall only transmitted major world news to Iceland, so we do not have to blindly trust Níelsson and Kvaran in the Copenhagen Fire case either.
If they would have wanted to make the Copenhagen fire case more impressive, then why didn't they attempt to verify the information about Emil Jensen and then tell people about the verified veridical information? It was only in 2009 that Haraldsson verified the information.

(2023-07-07, 04:54 PM)RViewer88 Wrote: [ -> ]Looking back over this, something that's really suspicious is what looks like a lack of contemporaneous reports. The earliest source Haraldsson cites on the Jensen/Copenhagen fire event is from 1910, 5 years after it allegedly happened. Another is even later: 1922. You'd think if they'd witnessed such an amazing mediumistic communication and it was confirmed to be fully accurate the very next day, the Indridi group would've immediately spread the news far and wide in Iceland and published the documentary proof. The fact, if it's a fact, that they didn't do that makes it seem like they had something to hide and restricted the whole thing to the witnesses at the seance they were hoaxing.

They got the confirmation that the information was correct only one month later when the danish papers arrived with the boat. It was only then that they became aware that there was any veridical information involved in the case, so before that they had no reason to tell anyone about the case. But after the papers had come with the boat there was no reason to tell anyone either, because they could have been accused of making it up after reading the paper where the veridical information appeared. The seances was restricted to the members of the Experimental Society and their invited guests, so why would the skeptics trust these persons if they would claim that the things had been said during the seances? The Experimental Society did invite an independent professional investigator, but those investigations took place in 1908 and 1909, and this case happened in 1905. Also, one can wonder whether the case really seemed so extraordinary to the people involved. If it would have, then they would have at least tried to verify the information about Jensen, which they did not. There was after all many times that Indridi told veridical information. What makes this into a "perfect case" is the fact that there were veridical information regarding Jensen which no one made any attempt at verifying and which was verified by Haraldsson in 2009.

(2023-07-07, 04:54 PM)RViewer88 Wrote: [ -> ]Probably if it'd been made public an Indridi skeptic affiliated with a different newspaper would've pointed out the Marconi transmission that we know thanks to Max was published in at least one newspaper on the 25th reporting the fire.

(2023-07-08, 10:14 PM)RViewer88 Wrote: [ -> ]It looks like he never addressed the fact that Björn Jónsson's own newspaper published on November 25th a Marconi transmission about the Copenhagen fire. That could be reasonably interpreted as actively misleading if that info was brought to his attention and it seems Max did show him that. Obviously that reflects badly on Haraldsson.

Björn Jónssons newspaper Isafold did, like Max showed, publish a Marconi transmission the following morning, but it did not say anything about the fire. Here is an english translation of it from Google Translate. https://imgbox.com/Fn08ea0V
 

I think I have responded in an adequate way to all the criticisms that has been made in this thread. In my humble opinion, "the perfect case" is indeed perfect, and Indridi has been proven to have had real paranormal abilities.

Welcome to the forum Wanderer!

(2023-07-22, 10:28 AM)Wanderer Wrote: [ -> ]I think I have responded in an adequate way to all the criticisms that has been made in this thread. In my humble opinion, "the perfect case" is indeed perfect, and Indridi has been proven to have had real paranormal abilities.

Wow! Thanks very much for putting such effort into assessing and responding to the criticisms here. I will carefully review all of your posts, hopefully later today, and respond with any thoughts. I'd be happy to have been wrong in my change of mind, believe me!

(2023-07-22, 10:28 AM)Wanderer Wrote: [ -> ]I think I have responded in an adequate way to all the criticisms that has been made in this thread. In my humble opinion, "the perfect case" is indeed perfect, and Indridi has been proven to have had real paranormal abilities.

Having read through all of your posts and the material you've provided, I think you've shown that the Copenhagen fire case stands. It can be regarded as evidence of paranormal cognition. Very well done. The biggest blow you dealt to the debunking was revealing that the Marconi transmission published on the 25th says absolutely nothing about the Copenhagen fire. Unwisely, I simply assumed that it did. That tears the foundation of this debunking out practically all by itself. I also see that the investigations of Indridi by Hannesson provide much better evidence than I originally realized. This is because Hannesson not only very carefully investigated the experimental house in which Indridi primarily worked for things that would enable fraud, such as trap doors, but also held a seance with Indridi in his (Hannesson's) own house, to remove possible uncontrolled or unknown factors in the experimental house that Indridi or accomplices could exploit to perpetrate fraud. This definitely undermines Max's hypothesis that to a large extent at a minimum the Indridi phenomena depended on special arrangements/equipment in the experimental house for the fraudulent production of effects. Btw Hannesson's attentiveness to the possible role of accomplices in the Indridi case is impressive, especially because in other investigations of physical mediums this factor did not always seem to get the attention it should have received.

At this point, though I could be missing things, the only thing that stands out as a remaining but not very strong possible problem has to do with newspaper deadlines. I quote the following from this post:

>The Copenhagen fire happened earlier, a night before the séance took place. It probably started late in the night of Thursday, November 23, when the fireman got alarm. The fire was extinguished early in the morning of Friday, November 24, around 2 am. And fireman left the scene around 4 am just to come again because the fire started again. The Danish newspapers reported about the fire on November 25. That would be only possible if the fire happened on the night of 23/24.11.1905., one night before the séance took place, because of the newspaper printing deadlines. For example, on November 25 the Horsens Social Demokrat newspaper writes about the fire with all the important details in the telegram column dated on 24.11.1905. Horsens is 172 kilometres away from Copenhagen. So, if the fire happened the same night when the séance took place that means that the Horsens newspapers issue for November 25 should had been printed the same day, and only after the editor got telegram form Copenhagen – probably later in that day! And that is not possible because of the printing deadlines. As a former journalist I know that the printing deadline is around midnight. So, if you want to have your newspaper on the streets early in the morning you must close it by midnight. In the 19. century that deadline would have to be even earlier because all the letters had to be adjusted manually because of the printing technology. The same telegram feed about the fire was published in other newspapers published in cities of Aarhus and Fredericia, which are not close to Copenhagen.

The argument here seems to be that information must have been circulating about the fire prior to its publication in papers on the 25th, so the fire must have been quite a bit earlier, and this opens the possibility of that information having circulated through Marconi transmission in time for Indridi or an accomplice to have gotten it by normal means. On the other hand Haraldsson does quote directly from the fire report and it seems to rule out this scenario. A presumably different critic at the White Crow blog maybe realizes this problem and so seems to suggest some kind of error or lack of detail in the fire report, which had the effect that the report ended up wrongly suggesting that the fire only happened later than when it actually started:

>The Copenhagen fire happened earlier, a night before the séance took place. It probably started late in the night of Thursday, November 23, when the fireman got alarm. The fire was extinguished early in the morning of Friday, November 24, around 2 am. And fireman left the scene around 4 am just to come again because the fire started again. The fire report was written on November 25.

I'd be happy to get your thoughts on this remaining possible problem.

Btw, I sent you a private message on here, which you can access from the "Conversations" link at the top of the page. There are some other things I'd like your thoughts on that I wrote about in that message.

Thanks for the praise. I will have to think a while about the remaining problem. I will write a post about it here when I have thought it through.