Can Sephiroth use Mind Control?

This came into a discussion with my friend and we need to settle this:

Can Sephiroth use mind control and cast powerful illusions on people?

I do know that there is that famous scene were he recreates the Nibelheim incident with Zack showing Cloud that he is just a puppet, but there is no other instance that is brought in the game and in other media. He does have control over Jenova clones and other experiments that have Jenova cells.

My hypothesis is that since everyone is close to the Northern Cavern and Lifestream is abundant there, Sephiroth was able to materialize from the memories he had the whole town to the party. The only way I can back that up was back into the Temple of the Ancients where Aeris talks to the Lifestream and uses it to show what happened with Sephiroth and the Turks before their arrival.

Anyone?

Beyond the observations you've made -- he does conjure illusions, and he can exert control over people with Jenova cells inside them -- it's difficult to do anything but speculate.

Barret/Red XIII gave the Black Materia to Sephiroth, believing him to be Cloud, that was a deliberate illusion not a memory.

Jenova, being a variant on Carpenter's "The Thing", (which blew my mind when I first realized all the similarities) has the ability to take the form of any human...and, I suppose, by extension, other types of creatures. Ifalna describes in the Icicle Inn tapes how it took the forms of deceased relatives in order to get close to and destroy the Cetra. Since Sephiroth is acting via Jenova, he has these abilities too. As for mind control? From what I can tell, thats limited to those that have the Jenova cells inside them, and using them as a sort of 'puppet switch' to fuck around with them.

I always had the impression Jenova didn't appear in person to the Cetra until the "she came as a friend" and "gave them the virus" part of the story of the fall of Knowlespole, I guess because it makes sense that it would take physical contact to spread a virus, and that the 'dead relatives' phase before that was a mental projection to soften them up, like the one used to fake being Tifa to get the Black Materia.

Minato makes a great point, but more precisely the way that sequence goes is everybody left outside the grotto spontaneously passes out, someone seeming to be Tifa runs up to whoever has the Black Materia and tells him Cloud needs him urgently, and he goes running off to help.

'Tifa' then cackles, turns into gloating Sephiroth, and we cut to everybody else waking up to find the person with the materia is gone. Barret-or-Nanaki gives the Black Materia to actual Cloud, even though they really shouldn't because he is fairly nakedly in the midst of a full-scale mental breakdown, and then he gives a semi-coherent speech, apologizes, is verbally abused by Hojo, levitates, walks around upside-down looking baffled for a while while Hojo monologues some more, and THEN gives the doom materia to Sephiroth-in-his-chrysalis.

There is definitely some psychic stuff going on, not limited to people with Jenova cells. Whether the Crater was necessary or Sephiroth just didn't bother until then, whether Jenova got into his head before he died...who knows.

The actual physical shapeshifting powers of Jenova don't get really conclusively demonstrated on-camera except via Sephiroth's final forms until Genesis and Angeal in Crisis Core. Sephiroth brings them up in the OG, but in the context of claiming Jenova cells allow shapeshifting and that's why the Frankenstein's monster clone Hojo built in his lab looks so much like Cloud, because it transformed to be the way Tifa wanted it. We are pretty damn sure that part is not true.

I always assumed the Copies in the black cloaks were periodically possessed by Sephiroth and shifted to look like him then, but it's been pointed out to me by someone who's been in the fandom since the original game dropped that we don't get confirmation of that, and it's possible all Sephiroth's appearances are him possessing bits of Jenova's corpse and shifting those to look like him, or alternately absolutely none of it was Sephiroth just Jenova impersonating him, and he never actually talks at any point in the game. I'm not convinced, especially of the latter idea, but the point is all this stuff is really ambiguous.