The above quote deals exclusively with the situation while the cell was in its original location and the immediate move. I have already agreed it was likely hot, since they heated it there!
It was still hot three days after they turned off the power. Are you seriously suggesting that can happen with a steel object of this size, with no source of heat inside? That would violate the laws of thermodynamics. Any person living in the last million years knows that a hot object of this size cools down to ambient temperature in less than three days.
If you don't believe this object would remain hot for three days . . . Who are you trying to kid, anyway? What is the point of saying that? Are you trying to make yourself look crazy, asserting that an object can remain hot for three days? What the heck are you "agreeing with"? This is a straw-man assertion -- a completely bogus, irrelevant situation -- that you just substituted for the facts of the matter.
But I have not agreed the TC reading was correct. That seems to me to be a potential root cause of the apparently anomalous cell behavior.
A malfunctioning TC cannot make a stone-cold object feel hot, and it cannot evaporate a bucket of water every night for several days. Furthermore, that TC worked before, during, and after the experiment. It still works.
Subsequent to moving it and reading the TC while in the other lab, the 'too hot to touch' comment is affected by their predispositions formed by reading the supposedly malfunctioning TC.
It is not "supposedly malfunctioning." You are the only person who thinks it was, and you have no reason to think so. The notion that a person's sense of touch might be fooled by a "predisposition" has no basis in psychology or common sense. That never happens. You made that up, along with the notion that the thermocouple was malfunctioning.
You make up one impossible thing after another, and the moment you make something up, you are convinced it must be true.