Further Comments about Kai Mugge's Alleged Mediumship and Recent Developments

In 2014, I published an article on the Felix Experimental Group, its medium Kai Mugge (KM) and my involvement in following the development of the phenomena reported around KM (Nahm 2014) In that article, I showed convincingly (in my opinion) that KM had cheated in the past, in particular with regard to producing a red "spirit" light with a magician's LED device, and with regard to producing (self luminous) ectoplasm with the help of Halloween spider web while pretending to be in a trance. Recent developments and publications render it recommendable to summarize a few aspects of the aftermath of that previous publication. Comment on Recent Publications and the Role of the FEG's Former Circle Leader Accusing a purported medium explicitly of producing fraudulent phenomena is a grave act, and it is only tolerable if it is supported 100% by facts. With regard to the repeated and purposeful use of the aforementioned red LED, KM's fraud is established by 109 photographs that show how he used it during seances, by the discovery of such an LED device in KM's travel bag by his former Circle Leader Jochen Soederling (pseudonym, JS) and by KM's admission to JS of having used this device. Consequently, in response to KM's recurrent public assertions that the conclusions presented in my report (Nahm 2014) were naively false and perfidious, I informed the members of Robin Foy's forum "Physical Mediumship for You" (PM4U) on December 18, 2014, that KM had confessed to having used an LED device in a telephone conversation on April 2, 2014, with his former Circle Leader, and that JS informed not only me about it (compare also Nahm 2014:266, Braude 2014:331, Braude 2016 in this issue) Still, KM aggressively denied that this conversation and his confession had ever taken place, accused me again of spreading lies, and, curiously, he announced that his Circle Leader will defend the phenomena of his mediumship in the not too distant future.1 Journal of Scientifi c Exploration, Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 56 62, 2016 0892 3310/16 Kai Mugge's Al leged Mediumship 57 Early in 2015, Leo Ruickbie, the Editor of the Paranormal Review, asked me to contribute an article about KM for that magazine. He stated that there were still many rumors about KM that needed to be countered by advancing a balanced scientific view on the matter. After hesitating for quite some time, not wanting to become engaged in this cumbrous debate again, a number of reasons convinced me eventually that it might still be worthwhile to contribute a short comment on what I call "Promissory Mediumship" (in reference to Karl Popper's concept of "promissory materialism" A key characteristic of promissory mediums is to make promises that never come true. Promissory mediums aim at keeping the interest in their mediumship alive by announcing developments of phenomena and control methods that are ultimately never kept or are kept in only such a way that they still remain unsatisfying. This behavior was exemplified by KM's repeated promise that his former Circle Leader JS will eventually vouch for the genuineness of KM's phenomena. In fact, JS has stressed on numerous occasions in personal conversations via emails and telephone conversations, with me and with several other persons, that he is very disappointed because of KM's cheating and thus not willing to defend KM in public. Moreover, JS stressed that he has hardly been in contact anymore with KM for many months, and that he was only interested in arranging one more followup investigation with Stephen Braude. Drawing from my many conversations with JS, I explicitly addressed him as the "former" Circle Leader in my article, and argued that those who still await a defense of KM's mediumship from him will have a long wait ahead of them. Prior to its publication, I sent the article draft to JS for his inspection. He didn't oppose anything I had written, and the article was duly published in the Paranormal Review, Issue 74 (Nahm 2015) Yet, when I read Ruickbie's second article about KM in the very next issue of the Paranormal Review, Issue 75 (Ruickbie 2015a) I was struck with utter astonishment. In this article, Ruickbie described how "Circle Leader" JS was present on both occasions when he visited the Circle, as if nothing had happened, seemingly being still in good contact with KM. Moreover, JS talked with Ruickbie at length on both occasions, describing numerous phenomena, and he vouched for their genuineness thus, openly defending the mediumship of KM just as the latter had announced he would several times on PM4U and elsewhere. As a result, Ruickbie's article appeared to prove KM right, and to disprove the core argument of my article on Promissory Mediumship in the previous issue of the Paranormal Review. Attentive readers might even have suspected that I had purposefully misled them with fictitious claims to debunk KM, and that consequently, other parts of my writings are not entirely credible, to say the least.