“No, sir! I was not under any hallucination, nor was I deceived! I saw with these eyes and I heard with these ears! I know whereof I speak!’
Thus David Whitmer, when a group that included Joseph Smith III interviewed him at Richmond, Missouri, in July 1884. One of them, a non-believer named “Col. Giles,” asked him if it were possible that he “had been mistaken and had simply been moved upon by some mental disturbance, or hallucination, which had deceived [him] into thinking he saw the Personage, the Angel, the plates, the Urim and Thummim, and the sword of Laban.”
The interview was originally published in the 28 January 1936 issue of The Saint’s Herald. It’s also cited in Richard Lloyd Anderson, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1981), 88.
(For the background of the colorized photograph above, which is the work of Bryce Haymond, see here.)
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