Indridi Indridason's contact with Emil Jensen

Thanks for figuring that out. The original Marcus translation seemed to make sense because one of Jensen's sisters had the name Julie, so the idea that one brother, Ferdinand, and one sister, Julie, were involved seemed to make sense because the names are given as "Ferd. Jensen" and "Jul. Jensen." But now it looks far more likely that it was Jensen's brothers Ferdinand and Julius who wrote the obituary, saying they were also acting on behalf of their sisters. This means my argument that a fraudster in possession of the obituary would've probably had the fake Jensen incorrectly say that he had a sister and a brother is wrong. For me the main problem with the idea that the obituary or maybe other documents about Jensen were used by fraudsters is how vague the information in the communication is, along with the fact that Haraldsson's book quotes Kvaran as saying as late as 1934 they never found out who Jensen was, when you'd think they'd make something of all their efforts to perpetrate the fraud based on info they collected about a real guy.

Also, as you said earlier in the thread, they could not have used the obituary information to figure out all the information. The obituaries does not give one enough information to say that he was a bachelor, that he had no children, that he was "not so young" when he died or that he had no deceased siblings. The obituaries are compatible with Jensen being a widower, a bachelor, a divorcee, that he had dead children, no children or that his children were too young to be involved in the obituary's composition. The obituaries is written by two living brothers and mentions living sisters, but it is possible that he had deceased siblings. It is also possible that some of the siblings could have passed away during the seven years between the obituary was written and the sittings took place. His age or year of birth is not mentioned in the obituaries either, so they do not tell anyone that he was "not so young" when he died.

Something that undermines the cryptomnesia possibility is that Indridi didn't know Danish other than being able to speak a few words. Since he was in Iceland his whole life at that point, it seems unlikely he could've innocently encountered info about Jensen through any means other than Danish text, which he couldn't have read.

Haraldsson writes this in the "A Perfect Case?" paper, page 222:
"On the other hand Copenhagen was the capital of the Danish kingdom
of which Iceland was a part at that time. Konrad Gislason (1808–1891),
brother of Indridi’s grandfather, had been professor of Old Icelandic/
Nordic literature in Copenhagen, and was a prolific and highly respected
scholar. He was the chief control in Indridi’s mediumship, and lived
most of his life in Copenhagen, where he died when Indridi was eight
years old. There is no evidence of any contact between the scholar
Konrad Gislason and the merchant and manufacturer Emil Jensen."
So one possible source of cryptomnesia is maybe Konrad Gislason. There was 367262 persons living in Copenhagen in 1890 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Copenhagen so it is unlikely that Gislason and Jensen out of all the persons in Copenhagen would by a coincidence have known each other, but I suppose not impossible. What do you think about that possiblity?

There is one very interesting fact I only just now appreciate the significance of. Kvaran in 1910 and possibly Nielsson in 1922 stated that Jensen manufactured clothes. But Haraldsson says he couldn't find any documents stating what Jensen manufactured. The obituary describes him only as a "manufacturer." I know you read several other obituaries though. Do any of them say that Jensen manufactured clothes? If not this could be the one piece of information about Jensen that the Experimental Society thought they had that has a very high probability of not having been available in 1905 from a normal source in Iceland.

I've been thinking some more about Jensen's supposed after-death communications and the obituary for him, as the obituary thing seems to be the basis for the best evidence based argument skeptics can make for fraud. One thing is Jensen said he was "not so young" when he died. Weird as it sounds it doesn't look like his obituary gives any information on his age at the time of his death. All that is given is the date of his death. Neither his date of birth nor age is given. @Wanderer I know you said you read other obituaries for Jensen. Does any give his age or date of birth?

There are two different obituaries for Jensen. The longer one can be viewed here: https://imgbox.com/DPYPkvdG
I found it published three times, in Dannebrog on August 4 and August 6 and in Den til Forsendelse med de Kongelige Brevposter privilegerede Berlingske Politiske og Avertissementstidende on August 8. The shorter obituary lists him together with other people that has recently passed away in Copenhagen, and lists him as "Fabrikant Thomas Emil Jensen", in other words "Manufacturer Thomas Emil Jensen". Nothing else is mentioned about him. It was published in many different danish newspapers. I don't know if the shorter obituary does even count as an obituary, since it is just a mention in a list of people that has recently died.
I have also found three proclamations for people that could have something to inherit from Jensen to contact the superior court prosecutor handling Jensen's will within three months. In those it is mentioned that Jensen was "med-indehaver af Firmaet 'F. Jensen & Son'", in other words co-owner of the company "F. Jensen & Son". I also found two proclamations of when and where the funeral will be held. I also found an proclamation from the factory that the factory will be closed during the funeral day.
None of the obituaries or other mentions of Jensen in the danish newspapers in August 1898 says anything about what his age was when he passed away or when he was born. They don't say that he manufactured clothes either. They say that he was a manufacturer and that he was a co-owner of the company "F. Jensen & Son", not what he manufactured.
I found the obituaries and other mentions of Jensen in the danish newspapers when I searched at the Danish Royal Library's website for thomas emil jensen in danish newspapers from the day that he passed away, 3 August 1898, to 31 August 1898. They can all be read here: https://www2.statsbiblioteket.dk/mediest...1898-08-31

Most researchers of mediumship regard the "spirit controls" not as spirits at all but expressions of the medium's unconscious mind. This is because almost never is there veridical information or other features to suggest the "controls" are spirits of deceased people but usually many things to suggest they are part of the medium's psychology. This contrasts with communicators that provide real evidence of being dead people.

Yes, but I want to add that many researchers of mediumship also thinks that the controls can be "overshadowed" by a real spirit. According to Gauld in Mediumship and Survival page 117-118:
"It would seem, therefore, that we have to abandon the idea that the controls of trance mediums are the spirits of deceased persons temporarily controlling a living body. Are we then forced to adopt some form of the super-ESP hypothesis, to suppose that Mrs Piper and Mrs Leonard were able to inject into their dramatic representations of various deceased persons correct and appropriate information obtained telepathically from the minds of living persons or clairvoyantly from existing records? Mrs Sidgwick did not think so. She eventually came to believe that behind Mrs Piper’s dramatic rendering of communication from the dead, overshadowing it and |118| somehow directing its course, there might sometimes lie those same deceased persons who figure as characters in the drama. The medium writes many of the speeches, and ensures continuity in the plot; but some of the lines (perhaps the most important ones) are filled in by outside authors. Let us call this theory the theory of ‘overshadowing’. It seems to be a version of it towards which William James moves at the end of his report on Mrs Piper’s Hodgson-control (74, p. 117):
Extraneous ‘wills to communicate’ may contribute to the results as well as a ‘will to personate’, and the two kinds of will may be distinct in entity, though capable of helping each other out. The will to communicate, in our present instance, would be, on the prima facie view of it, the will of Hodgson’s surviving spirit, and a natural way of representing the process would be to suppose the spirit to have found that by pressing, so to speak, against ‘the light’, it can make fragmentary gleams and flashes of what it wishes to say mix with the rubbish of the trance-talk on this side. The wills might thus strike up a sort of partnership and reinforce each other. It might even be that the ‘will to personate’ would be comparatively inert unless it were aroused to activity by the other will." https://www.esalen.org/ctr/mediumship
So the Jensen control, who was a part of Indridi's subconsciousness, can perhaps have been overshadowed by the real spirit Jensen.

I can understand why many people would think that a medium that once cheats is always a cheater, but consider this: If the investigator has not done everything necessary to make commiting fraud an impossiblity then it is possible that fraud is taking place, no matter whether the medium has been discovered commiting fraud before or not. If on the other hand the investigator has done everything necessary to make commiting fraud an impossiblity, then it is impossible for fraud to take place, and in that case, it does not matter whether or not the medium has commited fraud before.

One thing that I have been thinking about is whether there could have been any possibility that the Copenhagen fire case could be a fraud created after the news about the fire came to Iceland with the boat one month later. In this scenario, the seance on the night when the fire happened never involved any veridical information about the fire, and instead the people involved that wrote about the Copenhagen fire fraudulently created the case many years later and said that the veridical information had been given by Indridi one month before the news about the fire came to Iceland. I think that the strongest argument against this are that there were many people present at the séances, as Haraldsson writes in "A Perfect Case?" paper: "Exactly how many attended on November 24th is nowhere stated, but there usually were a few dozen sitters at the séances of the Experimental Society and numbers ranged from thirty to seventy". Everyone that was visiting the séances on a regular basis cannot have been in on any fraud, because why would they come there on a regular basis to watch what they knew was a fraudulent medium? Seems like a complete waste of time. So any of these people that was present on the day that the séance where the veridical information about the fire was claimed to be given took place could easily say that there was no veridical information about the fire on that night. It would have been a big risk to make such a lie. On the other hand, perhaps Kvaran and Nielsson decided to only mention it in books and papers that would be published in other languages in other countries in order to reduce the risk to get caught. If I understand things correctly the earliest paper by Kvaran is from 1910 published in Sandhedssøgeren, which according to this swedish website is a danish journal: https://libris.kb.se/bib/10937662 Nielssons earliest paper is from 1922 and read at a danish congress in Copenhagen. What do you think about this possibility, @RViewer88 ? You made an in my opinion very good argument that the Indridi proponents documented his case of fraud, and for that reason was very likely not helping him commit fraud. Do you think that there is any more reason to think that Kvaran and Nielsson did not fraudulently create the Copenhagen fire case in 1910?

Haraldsson writes this in the "A Perfect Case?" paper, page 222:
"On the other hand Copenhagen was the capital of the Danish kingdom
of which Iceland was a part at that time. Konrad Gislason (1808–1891),
brother of Indridi’s grandfather, had been professor of Old Icelandic/
Nordic literature in Copenhagen, and was a prolific and highly respected
scholar. He was the chief control in Indridi’s mediumship, and lived
most of his life in Copenhagen, where he died when Indridi was eight
years old. There is no evidence of any contact between the scholar
Konrad Gislason and the merchant and manufacturer Emil Jensen."
So one possible source of cryptomnesia is maybe Konrad Gislason. There was 367262 persons living in Copenhagen in 1890 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Copenhagen so it is unlikely that Gislason and Jensen out of all the persons in Copenhagen would by a coincidence have known each other, but I suppose not impossible. What do you think about that possiblity?

I think it wouldn't be a helpful explanation because it requires two frauds or cryptomnesia episodes, since Jensen died in 1898, after Gislason had been dead for 7 years. So Indridi would have to first have gotten information from Gislason about Jensen and forgotten about it and also have through some independent means learned of Jensen's death and forgotten about it, or else have fraudulently used both sources of info. Also he would've needed to figure out about Jensen's still living siblings possibly through a third way or else riskily inferred from the obituary, riskily because as we've been saying any of them could've died from 1898-1905 and that wouldn't be known from the obituary. It seems more reasonable to suggest he got all the information from a single different person who was alive after Jensen's death, maybe someone who could read the obituary in Danish. But then it has to be asked how the Jensen information seamlessly combined with the Copenhagen fire. Had he planned the Jensen fraud in advance and by luck on the same day he wanted to reveal fake Jensen the fire broke out and Jensen was merged with the Copenhagen fire fraud basically on the spot? And also it was a lucky coincidence that Jensen lived so close to the fire? This scenario seems very ridiculous and not plausible. A combination of cryptomnesia and fraud makes little sense and can be rejected without much thought.

One thing that I have been thinking about is whether there could have been any possibility that the Copenhagen fire case could be a fraud created after the news about the fire came to Iceland with the boat one month later. In this scenario, the seance on the night when the fire happened never involved any veridical information about the fire, and instead the people involved that wrote about the Copenhagen fire fraudulently created the case many years later and said that the veridical information had been given by Indridi one month before the news about the fire came to Iceland. I think that the strongest argument against this are that there were many people present at the séances, as Haraldsson writes in "A Perfect Case?" paper: "Exactly how many attended on November 24th is nowhere stated, but there usually were a few dozen sitters at the séances of the Experimental Society and numbers ranged from thirty to seventy". Everyone that was visiting the séances on a regular basis cannot have been in on any fraud, because why would they come there on a regular basis to watch what they knew was a fraudulent medium? Seems like a complete waste of time. So any of these people that was present on the day that the séance where the veridical information about the fire was claimed to be given took place could easily say that there was no veridical information about the fire on that night. It would have been a big risk to make such a lie. On the other hand, perhaps Kvaran and Nielsson decided to only mention it in books and papers that would be published in other languages in other countries in order to reduce the risk to get caught. If I understand things correctly the earliest paper by Kvaran is from 1910 published in Sandhedssøgeren, which according to this swedish website is a danish journal: https://libris.kb.se/bib/10937662 Nielssons earliest paper is from 1922 and read at a danish congress in Copenhagen. What do you think about this possibility, @RViewer88 ? You made an in my opinion very good argument that the Indridi proponents documented his case of fraud, and for that reason was very likely not helping him commit fraud. Do you think that there is any more reason to think that Kvaran and Nielsson did not fraudulently create the Copenhagen fire case in 1910?

The main additional reason would be that the timeline of events that Kvaran and Nielsson and others give for the Indridi mediumship overall matches with what we have from the minutes books. I say that going off of Haraldsson's presentation of things because obviously I can't read the original Icelandic sources as much as I'd like to and confirm for myself. If Kvaran, Nielsson, &c. were embellishing and making things up to impress non-Icelanders who couldn't check their claims it wouldn't be expected that the contemporaneous minutes books would align with the accounts written later. Another thing is that Kvaran and Nielsson's accounts of the Copenhagen fire veridical info from Jensen are very modest in what they claim. If they were lying based on a hoax accomplished with access to newspapers they easily could have claimed that Jensen got the right address, the name of the factory, the nature of the factory, the name of the factory owner, &c. because that was all available from newspapers after the fire. They didn't do any of that however. In their accounts they say Jensen gave a small amount of info: that there was a factory fire in Copenhagen, that firemen got it under control, that his name was Jensen. Kvaran and Nielsson only bring up strong specific information when they describe what they read in newspapers the next month that confirmed Jensen's statements. That looks like they were being very responsible and honest when they could've easily fudged things and entered details of the confirmation into the prediction to make it a lot more impressive to their outsider audiences.