Life has a meaning that we are quite unaware of. From the extrasensory phenomena we can ascertain that reality is pointing away, beyond itself, towards something grander and more amazing.





The laws of nature were put out of play



Conversations with Sune Stigsjöö


Book publisher Sune Stigsjöö at Zinderman Publishing in Gothenburg at one time published - among other titles - "Den gåfulla vägen" (The enigmatic way) by Fridegård, the UFO books by K. G. Rehn and "Liv efter döden?" (Life after Death?) by Nils-Olof Jacobson.

Olle Jönsson His interest in books about the paranormal was not strictly commercial. When he was young, for ten years he engaged himself heavily with parapsychological phenomena both in Sweden and abroad, while studying psychology and other subjects at the University of Gothenburg.

Stigsjöö became a close friend of the so called miracle man Olle Jönsson (see picture) and together they performed thousands of experiments. The phenomena that Jönsson brought about, provoked Stigsjöö's curiosity, and he felt a need to explore them and to arrive at an opinion of his own. In no other situations that he encountered during his research did he witness such advanced phenomena as those that Jönsson produced.

Stigsjöö told SÖKAREN:

- It all started when I was at the age of twenty. During the whole summer of 1947, when I was working as a freelance journalist in Stockholm, I met with Olle Jönsson practically every night. The two of us worked for hours, night after night, for three months, and we did all kinds of conceivable experiments. I really saw the laws of nature being put out of play. It was quite a show. Objects were transported through closed doors, and paintings were rotating around their hooks, sometimes even days after a visit by Jönsson.

- I took every possible control measure. There are those who say that a magician can easily deceive people, using magnets, threads and mirrors etc in their own homes. But the experiments that I did with Jönsson took place in rooms where he had never been before and where he had not been allowed to enter before the experiment.

- At least 5.000 experiments were performed between the two of us, at conditions that I decided upon myself. Most often it was in a relaxed and private situation that he flourished and achieved the really big things. I suppose the most fantastic things were the apport phenomena. Once a hyacinth in a pot was transported to the next room. I gazed at the hyacinth until it was suddenly gone; and then it was found in the next room where the door had been locked. It was also remarkable that it withered within fifteen minutes.

It was in december 1946 that Stigsjöö met Olle Jönsson for the first time. He then wrote an article in the magazine Husmodern. After that, during the following years, there were a good many articles by him about the phenomenon Jönsson, despite the fact that things like this could not easly be published in Swedish media at that time. Vecko-Journalen had a big, illustrated article in 1949, Hemmets Journal had a series in 1957, and the evening papers Aftonbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, among others, had several articles.

Stigsjöö speaks with resentment about the treatment that Olle Jönsson had to endure in Sweden from some parts of the press and from some scientists.

- Some papers, among those Expressen and Se, hunted him like an outlaw, and finally he emigrated from Sweden and settled down in the United States. At any price people wanted to expose him as a fraud, and there were also fabricated "disclosures" published in some papers. Once the reporters from Expressen and Se came to Varberg, where Jönsson lived. One experiment was set up so that Jönsson gave the magician Cubiz from Gothenburg paper and pencil and urged him to write down 20 letters and 20 digits in the order that he himself wanted to. Triumphantly the magician took the piece of paper and quickly jotted down his line. After he had done so, Jönsson said: Lift the table cloth! Cubiz lifted the cloth - and there he found another piece of paper showing the exact line of digits and letters that Cubiz had just written. Both documents were photographed to exclude the possibility of suggestion or hypnosis, and I later saw the developed picture - both the written lines were identical! So Jönsson had telepathically made Cubiz write what he wanted him to write. But afterwards you could read in Expressen that "a mirror in the table helped the miracle man". Of course no such mirror was ever found. The disclosure was a indeed a fabricated fantasy. Even so, how could a mirror have helped at that experiment? It is no wonder that Jönsson later left this country!

- Once I witnessed experiments, when the author and journalist Olle Strandberg was present. The conditions for the experiment were ideal. On the floor in a room there was a vase containing Easter twigs with feathers (this was during Easter in 1947) and Jönsson was not allowed to enter that room; the door was locked. Look out! he called through the door - and suddenly the feathers started to quiver like before a storm and they stood up erect. The Easter twigs in the vase flew out and landed on the floor. This happened in full view of Olle Strandberg. After that he wrote an article in the magazine Vecko-Journalen, where he "exposed" Jönsson and claimed that he had used wires. But I was there from beginning to end. Jönsson never entered the room, while this happened. Normally the intelligence of these people is working, but when they are confronted with phenomena like these, they tell themselves: this is impossible - therefore he must cheat!

- It also happened that physicians and scientists, who participated at experiments and were quite enthusiastic, later repudiated all of it. At Easter, 1947, two doctors witnessed some telekinetic experiments. May I write about this in the paper Dagens Nyheter and mention your names? I asked them. Sure! they said. But when they were later confronted with this by others, they would not stand up to it. It has also occurred that people who may have met Jönsson occasionally, maybe at some party late at night where some uncontrolled experiment was performed, (because he was far too permissive in agreeing to any experiment conditions) may have misinterpreted whatever they saw. And later they came forward to say that Jönsson was cheating. However, I personally did lots of experiments like these with Jönsson, so if anyone I should know what he is like, and I never discovered any cheating. But if occasionally, under the pressure from people who had great expectations for various phenomena, he may have been tempted to simplify some phenomena, like for instance telepathy, I only find it very human. I suppose he could not always work at the top of his capacity.

- I have not met Jönsson for 16 years and consequently I don't know from my own experience how he is doing nowadays. (Jönsson died recently. SM) Judging by his many letters to me and by the testimony of other witnesses, he is still performing well under well-structured experiments (and I don't consider the TV show "Hyland's USA Corner" among those!). However, it sometimes happens that phenomena like these don't stay with someone for their whole life. They may occur during a certain time period, and they may then be weakened or cease completely. But at the time when I knew him, he performed the most unbelievable things. To really test him I once went into a second-hand bookshop to buy an old German book of about 6-700 pages. I did not open it. I just put it on my bookshelf. I had not read it, and neither had Jönsson. If, against all odds, Jönsson would have read it, he could not have learnt it by heart. I asked him to tell me what was on a certain line, on a certain page. He wrote it down in old-fashioned German, I compared with the book, and it was correct! Either Jönsson could see the concealed text of the book, or it was pre-recognition, so that he knew beforehand what I would find, when I later opened the book.

So, after having seen the laws of nature apparently being put out of play by an ordinary Swedish engineer having paranormal abilities, what does Sune Stigsjöö conclude that all this means? What does it mean to our view of reality, our world view and our religion? Stigsjöö replies that of course it means that reality is "far trickier than the scientists imagine".

- Reality is a mystery, that works according to "laws" that we don't know anything about. I am not a religious-minded person, so it is not that these things have served to support some religious need of mine. Instead, being very skeptical, I have been faced with paranormal occurences, that are quite inescapable. I cannot deny that I have observed reality being "dissolved" under experiments, in front of which a professor of natural science would appear much like a little child sitting in a park hammering with a spade on a little bucket. Evidently, the accepted laws of nature are little more than children's language about a reality, that is enormously more fantastic and incomprehensible than what you can read in text-books in for example physics.

- It is conceivable that the persons who are you and me do not survive death - may be it is even probable - but that which we call life and reality has a meaning that we don't have a clue about. Now that reality is designed the way that the paranormal phenomena imply, it is pointing away, beyond itself. It is in itself something else, something grander and more amazing. Matter - what is that? It is just a word. Laws of nature - what are they more than statistical probabilities? Maybe everything is "mental" after all, so that what we are experiencing with our crude senses may be a more or less biologically conditioned simplification, a kind of "surface". Maybe reality is not more "material" than a dream, not more tangible, however real and logical it may appear to the dreamer. But I will not draw any definite philosophical or religious conclusions from the phenomena that I have witnessed. I just know that they exist and I feel certain that, in say 100 years, science will have arrived at quite another view of reality than the present one.

(This interview was done in 1971.)




What did the illusionist Truxa and professor Laurent have to say about Olle Jönsson?



Truxa


Erik Truxa was a clever illusionist. As a team, the Truxa couple achieved what may have looked like clairvoyance, or rather telepathy: For example, Gulli, while blindfolded, was able to correctly tell the name and the number of a driver's licence, that her husband was holding in his hand. But it is considered to have been nothing more than imitated ESP, and there have been guesses - among others - that they used some form of code system.

I suppose nobody really could explain Gulli Truxa's phenomenal ability of apparent clairvoyance. Professor Olle Holmberg considered that must be a question of trickery - and his explanation for this was the performances never failed. Genuine "mediums" can succeed to some extent, but they are not infallible.

So how did the Truxa couple work? Did Gulli see something, although she was blindfolded? She said the she could "swear by anything holy" that she did not. Did her ear-drops contain a radio receiver? Erik said that "it is good when there are those who think that Gulli has a radio receiver in her ear-drops or that we have some odd signaling system with hand movements, because that helps keeping the discussion about us going".

A code system using words is another hypothesis. But nobody managed to find any concealed language in their verbal communication on stage. The words that Erik Truxa used were few and simple.

Erik Truxa did not think that Olle Jönsson achieved genuine phenomena. In an interview for the paper "Folket" in Eskilstuna on March 23, 1971, he said:

- Olle is a big bluff. I exposed him many years ago! It is sad that even reputed scientists say that they believe in him.

Truxa said that once Jönsson got the assignment to find a murderer. Then he let himself be photographed together with the local policeman. He never found any murderer - but later he could read in the papers that the policeman was the murderer!

We wrote to Jönsson in USA and mentioned Truxa's statement. He replied:

- It has repeatedly appeared that people with very little understanding of parapsychology are the first to speak about the existence of a phenomenon. Unfortunately I have only met Truxa quite hastily a couple of times in Stockholm, so I don´t understand what kind of exposure he is talking about. I takes years of study and experiments to establish these things. Maybe he is thinking of so called warm-up experiments? Truxa may be a very competent magician with his clever code systems, but when it comes to parapsychology his statements reveal that he doesn't know anything. I have been subjected to tests at 100 percent watertight experiments thousands of times, both by competent magicians and by scientists from all parts of the world.

Olle Holmberg writes about what Jönsson calls "warm-up experiments" in his book "Den osannolika verkligheten" (The improbable reality). "With a smile he explains in various ways why he is cheating: he needs to warm up at the start of a séance, to give the spectators some confidence, to give them the sensations that they are after, to save on the concentration that might give him a headache until the times when it is needed."

Holmberg also writes that the scientists in America often was irritated with Jönsson because he so often was cheating.




Laurent


In the publication "Årsbok för kristen humanism" (Yearbook for Christian Humanism), 1969, three gentlemen Laurent give review of Holmberg´s "Den osannolika verkligheten". They discuss at depth the extraordinary abilitites of Olle Jönsson, which they had witnessed and which professor Torbern Laurent in particular had studied.

They say that Jönsson always performed his telekinetic (or psychokinetic) experiments - where one influences physical objects with one's thoughts - in darkness and accompanied by music, which of course made visual and auditory control more difficult. "In spite of that cheating could be discovered. Enough said about telekinetics".

The Laurent gentlemen claim that Olle Jönsson does not possess any ESP or PK-ability, but that he is instead a clever illusionist and hypnotist, who can throw dust in people's eyes. He is blocking their memory function to make them immediately forget what they have heard or seen and also makes them experience a new statement as a memory or experience hallucinations. At the card guessing experiment they judge the finally shown card as the correct one, even though it is not.

To evade the influence of suggestion professor Laurent in his time designed a so called robot secretary, a device that automatically records results during Rhine type experiments. The authors inform us that many "mediums" have been tested with this device, among others Olle Jönsson and "clairvoyant Karlsson". "In all the cases only pure chance results were obtained". Considering this and other things they conclude that "Rhine did not know how to ward off the influence of suggestion in his experiments".

Once professor Torbern Laurent watched Jönsson do the kind of card tricks that he is a specialist in. We read: "Olle Jönsson asked one of the persons present to name a card, any card. I seem to remember that he said the queen of spades. I had brought a deck of cards of my own, and I had put on the table in front of me. Olle Jönsson asked my wife how many cards I would have to draw in order to get the queen of spades out of my deck. She suggested seventeen. Finally Olle Jönsson asked med to shuffle my deck thoroughly and then to draw seventeen cards. I have never before shuffled a deck of cards as thoroughly as that. Then I took one card at a time and put it on the table. Card number seventeen was the queen of spades. This experiment was repeated once more with the same good result. After a few days, when I thought about this incident, I found it to be most probable that the card mentioned was not the queen of spades after all, but that Olle Jönsson had made us think so by hypnosis."

These writers find that their suggestion hypothesis is supported by results from experiments where no manipulation of the memory function had been possible, and where no "hits" were achieved. For example, Jönsson was asked to write on the outside of an untransparent enevelope what card he thought was in the envelope. The card was then photographed together with Jönsson's note. These experiments failed. And the writers claim that "as soon as you take quite effective control measures the experiments fail". This led Torbern Laurent to present the suggestion hypothesis as the final result.

One objection here, obviously, is that the suggestion hypothesis still has not been tested satisfactorily. Of course notes should have been taken down about what card Jönsson was first talking about in his successful experiments, and that could later have been checked against the card that was finally shown. If it could really be proven that this was not the same card, then there had been a solid foundation for the suggestion hypothesis.

This hypothesis must be regarded as unconfirmed and not very convincing. The difficulties that follow with it can for example be illustrated by this statement from the three gentlemen Laurent: "According to our experience the participants in his sessions also never disagree about the actual result of some particular experiment - either it is seen as successful by everybody or as a failure by everybody. The suggestion hypothesis therefore presupposes that Olle Jönsson has an effective control over all the participants; and this is something that could be seen as opposed to the fact that unsuccessful experiments are common even in the most successful series of experiments. However, you should not forget that failures are in themselves easy to fake."

One may wonder: why would Jönsson, assuming that he is an uncommonly gifted hypnotist and illusionist (and not more than that), repeatedly place himself at the disposal of scientists, pretending (falsely, in that case) to be able to produce genuine paranormal phenomena, and also be confronted with doubts and scorn - instead of making it a point of honour to be an eminent illusionist and make money doing so? There are certainly psychological difficulties with the hypothesis of the gentlemen Laurent.

Within parapsychology there are, as the writers of the article mention, primarily two alternative explanations for phenomena of this kind: either Jönsson could mentally control the shuffling of the card deck so that the chosen card came to be in the predicted place, or he could predict where in deck the card would be after the shuffling, and then telepathically transfer this to the person who should decide the order.




How people think that they expose Olle Jönsson


Sune Stigsjöö commented on the information about Olle Jönsson from Erik Truxa and the three gentlemen Laurent in this way:

- I don't have any need whatsoever to "defend" my own view on Jönsson's experiments. Probably nobody else has had the same possibility as I have to form an opinion about the genuineness of these "phenomena" during several years and at thousands of experiments (performed according to my own conditions). I just want to show how carelessly many people try to "explain away" the parapsychological results in common and those of Jönsson's in particular.

Over the years, no respectable illusionist could be made to admit the existence of parapsychological phenomena. Like Truxa, many have tried to put and end to "the myth about Jönsson", and many claim to have exposed him after "thorough study". However, the truth is that none of them has had more than a very superficial contact with Jönsson. Truxa is no exception. The "telepathy" of the Truxa couple is a fantastic technical achievement, obviously based on a brilliant code system in the verbal communication between them. Nobody has ever heard mrs Truxa read anyone's mind without the assistance of her husband's chatter. They have never displayed any true telepathic phenomena, and they have never claimed that. I am full of admiration for their stage show. But they should not speak about parapsychology and Jönsson's achievements. They know nothing about this.

Professor Laurent's comment is more interesting. In the late 40's Laurent performed a series of successful experiments with Jönsson at Tekniska Högskolan (The Institute of Technology in Stockholm). But nowadays it is said that Jönsson distorted the vision of those present, he was blocking their memory function so that they forgot what they had seen and saw what they had not seen! This is a typical "explanation", when certain professors want to safeguard their mechanical world view. In my opinion I find that explanation considerably more complex and improbable than the pure parapsychological. Furthermore, in Jönsson's case it is not applicable.

Professor Laurent presents his explanation more than 20 years after the experiments. Evidently he has changed his mind completely during these years. A few months after the experiments I wrote an article about Jönsson in the Vecko-Journalen, and there I also interviewed professor Laurent. To avoid misunderstandings he wrote down his comments himself. His contribution was very enthusiastic and it ended with the hope that a lectureship could be established at Uppsala University, so that the Jönsson experiments could be scientifically investigated. Today Laurent is calling this same Jönsson "a clever illusionist".

There was no lectureship, and Jönsson shortly thereafter moved to the USA, partly as a result av the foul lies that were circulated about him.

Below you will find an excerpt from professor Laurent's testimony given more than 20 years ago (quoted from the Vecko-Journalen, number 47, 1949). Compare what he then said with his statements now in the Sökaren!

"At one experiment he asked me to shuffle my deck of cards, to spread it on my desk face down, to pick a card at random without looking at it, to put it in an envelope (I had envelopes in my desk drawer), to seal it and to put the envelope on the desk. Meanwhile Mr. Jönsson went out of the room, permitting me to be free to check that there was nothing wrong with the deck of cards. When I was finished, Mr. Jönsson was called in, and then he asked to borrow one of my dice. I gave him one, that was uncommonly small, and he threw it on the envelope. It turned out to be a five. Mr. Jönsson then said: 'The card is a five of hearts, please see for yourself'. And, to be sure, it appeared to be the five of hearts. The card and the die was photographed, and after developing the picture we could ascertain that we had not been victims of suggestion. The experiment was performed twice with the same successful results. Mr. Jönsson claimed that he knew what card it was through clairvoyance and that he influenced the die by telekinetics.

During a fourth experiment, performed in the home of one of my colleagues, we shuffled the deck and spread it out on a table with the face of the cards down. Mr. Jönsson asked us to name a card, and with the tips of his fingers he gently touched the back of the cards until he stopped at a card, which he picked up. It appeared to be the correct card. He repeated the experiments several times with the same results. It looked so simple that my colleague asked to try and perform the same thing himself. So I asked my colleague to pick a seven of spades. He picked up half the deck to no avail and then asked Mr. Jönsson for help. Mr. Jönsson then said: the fifth card that you will pick is the seven of spades. My colleague then picked five cards, and the fifth was the seven of spades."

Since cards and die were photographed, suggestion could be ruled out, as professor Laurent remarked himself. Has Laurent forgotten about this 20 years later, when he is now presenting the suggestion hypothesis "as a final result"?

The experiments were performed during a series of nights in professor Laurent's office at Tekniska Högskolan. He himself had put the cards and dice that were used at Jönsson's disposal. The control measures consisted of photographing and sound recording to rule out the possibility of suggestion.

(All according to Sune Stigsjöö 1971.)

SM


Translation 1998 by Curt Jonsson.


Swedish text

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