From: lindsay+@cs.cmu.edu (Donald Lindsay)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: It's True For You (LONG)
Summary: satan and ufos and thetans could be the same thing
Keywords: satan, hypnotism, auditing, memory
Date: 15 Nov 92 16:45:34 GMT
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon


This newsgroup hears about "whole track" memories, that is, memories
of previous lives. It also hears about out-of-body experiences,
thetans, and similar material involving subjective evidence.
Objective evidence is unavailable, and various Scientologists have
made statements on this newsgroup indicating that it will remain
unavailable.

[John Holifield - if I'm not in your kill file - could you try, while
exteriorized, to learn a fact that wouldn't be known to your body?
You seem honest: I'd like to hear your report.]

I understand that some auditing sessions involve relaxation
techniques, and hence are related to hypnotism. [I'd appreciate input
on this point.] I know that Hubbard studied hypnotism and
self-hypnotism in the 1940's.

Hmm. Relaxation. Hypnotism. Memories and perceptual effects. Wait,
haven't I heard something about that, recently?

What follows is kinda long, and I'm sorry about that. You might
prefer to skim it. The meat, to me, is the clear evidence that
hypnotism can *cause* false UFO-abduction memories, and that
hypnotism can *cause* false Satanic-ritual memories. [What the UFO
people said about the Satanic memories, and vice versa, is also
richly funny.] 

SO. I guess my question is, how are Thetans and whole-track memories
different from Satanic rituals and UFO abductions?

---------------------< START >------------------------------------
Article 33236 of sci.skeptic:
From: revpk@cellar.org (Brian 'Rev P-K' Siano)
Subject: "Bad Satan Psycho-Juju" from Phila. City Paper
Date: 24 Oct 92 22:34:53 GMT
Organization: The Cellar BBS and public access system

Satanism article  - Part 1 of 1

Brian Siano
4404 Walnut Street 3F
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Internet Email: revpk@cellar.org

The following is the original text of an article just publoshed inthe
Philadelphia City Paper. Since the topic also involves recent discussions of
the False Memory Syndrome Foundation on soc.men and soc.women, I'm
cross-posting it there as well. (Oddly enough, the discussions cropped up on
the Net the very week I'd set up my interview with Pam Freyd.)


Bad Satan Psycho-Juju
False Memories, Broken Families, Child Sacrifice 
and the New Satanic Panic

by Brian Siano

     <"To what end or purpose is this sacrilegious offering of>
<children, and how does it benefit the devils?. . . The first reason>
<arises from their pride, which always increases; as it is said: 'They>
<that hate Thee have lifted up the head.' For they try as far as>
<possible to conform with divine rites and ceremonies. Secondly, they>
<can more easily deceive men under the mask of an outwardly seeming>
<pious action. . . And the third reason is, that the perfidy of witches>
<may grow, to the devils' own gain, when they have witches dedicated to>
<them from their very cradles.">

                    From the <Malleus Maleficarum>, the Inquisition's
                    official reference on witchcraft (circa 1484)

     <20/20> and Geraldo Rivera notwithstanding, the incidence of
exorcisms and witch-burnings has dropped off appreciably since the
days of Torquemada. To most of us, this represents progress;  if we're
accused of bewitching the cattle, we won't have to choose between
Repent While Suffering or Die Horribly. We don't start mustering up
infidels for an <auto da fe> when the crops go bad anymore. We <hope> that
five hundred years of progress has taught us to approach our problems
with a degree of sophistication. 
     But the temptation to see Satan lurking in the woodpile has
stayed with us, and over the past ten years or so, talk shows, law-
enforcement training programs, and parents' seminars have been
organized to discuss a so-called epidemic of occult-related crime. As
a result, some therapists are treating Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) as a
distinct psychiatric disorder-- caused by <real> Satanic Rituals.
     However, a growing number of experts have raised strong

objections to these theories, describing them as a modern-day version
of the Salem witch hunts. Researchers argue that claims of Satanic
Ritual Abuse have created a climate of suspicion over minority
religious faiths, mainly for evangelical and political purposes.
Therapists and psychology researchers question the methods used to
elicit what they term "false memories" of childhood cult abuse,
incest, rape, murder, infanticide, and even abduction by UFOs. The
courts are now dealing with these accusations of abuse, brought by
adults against their parents.
     It's a tricky field to navigate, and it could be littered with
broken families and confused victims in the near future.

All the Babies You Can Eat

     So why should accounts of violent, bloodthirsty Satanists be so
credible? After all, the popular conception of devil worship was more
like <The Devil's Rain>, a B-movie that climaxed with Ernest Borgnine
and John Travolta melting into steaming goop. But Satanism has
suddenly reasserted itself as the Ultimate Evil, requiring legions of
purported occult experts on <Geraldo> to talk about a range of influence
spanning from Charles Manson to heavy metal music. Aren't there <worse>
things to worry about?
     "In the 1880s," says Gerry O'Sullivan, "there was a Parisian
publisher named Leo Taxil who was famous for his scurrilous anti-
Catholic tracts. Then one morning he proclaimed his conversion to
Catholicism. Shortly thereafter, he declared that he had unearthed the
doings of the Satanic Masonic sect called the Paladins. He began
publishing the memoirs of a woman named Sophia Walden, who claimed to
have left the order. For two years this fed into an anti-Masonic
hysteria in Europe, and there was even a Papal Benediction given to
Sophia Walden, whom no one had even met. After a few years, Taxil
broke down and confessed that he'd made it all up. It's interesting
that one hundred years ago, you also saw nativist stories in the
United States about Masons, Catholics and Mormons who were allegedly
kidnapping children and holding them as slaves. And a hundred years
later, we seem to be experiencing more of the same."
     If anyone should be able to summarize the history of Satan rumor-
panics, it's O'Sullivan. He is a co-author of <Satanism in America>, the
first critical examination of the various claims of Devil-worship
circulated in the mid 1980s. He is also co-author (with Edward S.
Herman) of <The Terrorism Industry>, another jaundiced look at how a set
of claims are circulated by a small culture of mutually-reinforcing
experts. (Currently, O'Sullivan is an instructor in the humanities at
the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science-- and in the spring,
he'll be teaching a course on, surprise, surprise, New Religions.)
     The Leo Taxil story is typical of our conversation, which runs
over a landscape of arcane and obscure subjects that have little to do
with car bombs, right-wing think tanks and lit crit. There's the
theology of Anton LaVey's Church of Satan ("Basically, it's ritualized
Social Darwinism; very law and order, socially conservative, with a

carefully cultivated image of outrage"), the first Satanist in America
("Herbert Sloan. He operated his church out of his barbershop, and he
used to serve apple juice and cookies during his services"), and the
role of "liminal spaces" like abandoned houses and graveyards in
folklore.
     "The Satanic panic," as O'Sullivan terms it, "has evolved out of
a subgenre of evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian literature--
namely, the conversion narratives of allegedly former occultists and
Satanists. Over time, these conversion narratives gained an incredible
amount of popularity in evangelical and fundamentalist circuits."
There were, in fact, three seminal documents that shaped the modern
Christian folklore on Satanism-- Mike Warnke's <The Satan Seller>,
Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith's <Michelle Remembers>, and Lauren
Stratford's <Satan's Underground>. Most of this material has been
substantially discredited, even within the Christian community.
     <The Satan Seller>, first published in 1973, purported to tell of
Warnke's college days as a high-ranking Satanist in the mid-1960's.
Warnke, a proteg of evangelist Morris Cerullo, also claimed to have
been a member of that ultraconspiracy, the Illuminati during this
time. (But it wasn't until he found Jesus that he began making real
money; his ministry currently grosses two million dollars a year. The
IRS recently revoked his tax-exempt status.) The Christian magazine
<Cornerstone>, in a fine display of a movement policing its own, reports
that college friends of Warnke's remember him as a likeable, not-very-
offensive storyteller. Beyond a little Ouija board play, Warnke's
circle of friends had never gotten anywhere near the Satan worship,
gang rape, and major-league drug dealing that Warnke describes. When
told of Warnke's current claims of those days, most of his friends
from the period responded with laughter or questions like "Is this a
joke?"
     During the 1970s, Jack Chick Publications-- the people behind
those wallet-sized comic book tracts we've all been handed on street
corners-- was one of the main sources of lurid, no-middle-ground
accounts of how Satanists Are Lurking Everywhere. One of their major
authorities was John Todd who, like Warnke, claimed membership in the
Illuminati. Between a spat with Warnke over who-claimed-what-first,
and his increasingly terrifying and grandiose conspiracy theories,
Todd's star fell as Warnke's soared.
     The Satanists in Chick's comic books not only have magic powers
that< really work>, but they control the news media, the local police,
and even the Catholic Church. Satanists, like most Chick unbelievers,
are drawn with wattled and depraved faces, and they have subtle, pop-
culture names like "Sabrina," "Endora," and "Mrs. Damien" so readers
get the point. In <Spellbound>, Sabrina and her pals are called into
recording studios to fuse a netherworld demon into the master tapes of
rock albums. <Dark Dungeons> tells how fantasy-gamer Debbie is initiated
into using the <real> spells, until she finds Jesus and heroically burns
her Dungeons and Dragons equipment. Little Mandy learns to levitate
tables at a slumber party in <The Poor Little Witch>, and before long,
she's knocking back infant's-blood cocktails with the rest of the

gang. In other Chick tracts, occultists are depicted putting razor
blades in Halloween apples, eating human fingers, and abducting unwary
hippie chicks for sacrifice. Even Old Scratch himself holds up a board
meeting in Hell to gloat over the TV show <Bewitched>. 
     "Keep in mind that this is a very Manichean world view," says
O'Sullivan, "and for them, Satanism is simply reverse Christianity.
Now, the literature suggests that most child sexual abuse occurs
within the home, and there's an increasing number of incidents of
pastors and priests who are accused of abusing children. But in this
central mythology of the family besieged and fortified, the people who
threaten your children are <outside> the family, and <outside> of
Christianity. There's a certain win-win logic involved where some
Fundamentalists have decided that no Christian could abuse children to
this extent-- ergo, they're really Satanists.
     "The Satanist has taken the place of the mythical stranger in a
raincoat-- and scapegoating day-care centers is part of the whole
Christian right crusade. It's a war to get women back into a purified,
insulated home."
     But it wasn't until the 1980 publication of <Michelle Remembers>,
by Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith, that hypnotically-enhanced
accounts of torture and ritual murder began circulating. "The kind of
religious folklore involving Satanism and spiritual warfare, that had
long been believed and listened to in church basements, was eventually
picked up as truth by the news media, police officers, psychological
paraprofessionals and social workers," says O'Sullivan.
     <Michelle Remembers> is based on Michelle Smith's narratives of
SRA, gathered when she underwent hypnotic therapy under Pazder's
direction. Efforts by both the Committee for the Scientific Evaluation
of Religion and <MacLean's> magazine to verify Smith's stories turned up
nothing-- even though Smith's Satanists cut off the middle finger of
their left hands as an offering to the Devil, which should make them
pretty conspicuous. Psychiatric anthropologist Sherril Mulhern, after
reviewing Pazder's transcripts, noted that the Satanic themes were
introduced by Pazder himself during the therapy while Michelle was
under hypnosis.
     <Satan's Underground> by Lauren Stratford (real name: Laurel
Wilson), published in 1988, continued the trend toward more lurid
stories. According to <Cornerstone>, Stratford was a woman with severe
and tragic psychological problems-- one friend recalls her
compulsively cutting her own arms with a paring knife to gain
sympathy, and another reports that Stratford was retelling stories
from the book <Sybil> as though they'd happened to her. Eventually,
Stratford was claiming she'd been present during the Satanic rituals
allegedly conducted at the McMartin Preschool, but her videotaped
testimony-- with elaborate accounts of having been a breeder of babies
for ritual sacrifice-- was deemed Not Credible by the McMartin
parents. (On talk show appearances, Stratford also gave different
estimates as to how many babies she gave birth to for sacrifice.)
     These books were the beginning of a flood of "Satan seminars" and
educational materials for parents and police that constituted, in

O'Sullivan's view, "evangelism posing as criminology." Informational
materials provided by these sources frequently failed to make any
distinction among Satanists, neo-Pagans, fans of Aleister Crowley,
punk rockers, headbangers and modern Druids; even Islam, Buddhism and
Hinduism were characterized as <Satanic> at one point or another.
Telltale signs of devil-worship to look for in teenagers included
falling grades, hateful stares, the word REDRUM, and the flaunting of
hierarchy. Symbols such as the anarchists' circle-A, the peace sign,
the Blue Oyster Cult's inverted-question-mark, and even Mr. Spock's
Live-Long-and-Prosper" handsign were interpreted as ancient Devil-
worship glyphs at one time or another.
     Tax monies were used to send law-enforcement officials to these
seminars and subscribe to their materials-- O'Sullivan mentions <File>
<18>, a newsletter published by Larry Jones's Cult Crime Impact Network,
which operated out of the basement of the Trinity Fellowship Church of
Boise, Idaho. "When you're concerned about the separation of church
and state, these are important points to ponder." Another perennial
source of Satan-crime claims are the minions of Lyndon LaRouche, whose
magazine <Investigative Leads> is circulated to police departments
around the country.
     From a somewhat more secular source, a training video from AIMS
media <Ritual Crime: Guidelines for Identification> purports to discuss
telltale signs of ritual crime (inverted pentagrams, 666, the
backwards "NATAS" and even the <absence> of blood) as well as the
rapidly growing category of "systematic child abuse, often in pre-
schools or other child care situations." "The officers note behavioral
changes in children which may be tip-offs to ritual abuse, and they
outline the proper procedures for investigations that will lead to
successful prosecutions." These delicate and subtle issues in
forensics are discussed on a videotape that runs all of <eighteen>
<minutes>. . . and costs your local police department $345.00 per copy.
Rentals are $75.00.
     And subtlety and caution are certainly needed, especially when it
comes to mystical symbology. "Back in Control," an Oregon program
currently offering Family Training Workshops, once issued a booklet
that included the Star of David as a diabolic symbol. Their reasoning?
"If you know anything about the occult, you'll know that it's the
exact opposite of Christianity. That's what the occult is."
     "Back in Control" was endorsed by Parents' Music Resource Center
founder (and prospective Second Lady) Tipper Gore in her book <Raising>
<PG Kids in an X-Rated Society>. The PMRC bills itself as an information
resource for concerned parents; for twenty dollars, they provide a
thick stack of news reports and clippings on Satanism and rock-related
crimes. Included in this material are lyrics of heavy metal songs, the
suicide notes and pledges to Satan written by disturbed teenagers, and
news accounts of suspected Satanic crimes from around the nation. Many
of the materials are ads for guidebooks and seminars from such
partisan sources as Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD), the
American Family Foundation, and the International Cult Education
Program. Only <one> article that expresses any doubt on the matter is

included-- a brief notice about the release of the <Satanism in America>
report. If the PMRC is an information resource, it's certainly a
selective one.
     This demonization of different subcultures, linking them to
harmful mental and physical effects, has become a popular tactic these
days. It's not enough to just <dislike> something; one has to show that
it's as physically or psychologically <harmful> as dioxin or PCP. In a
notorious passage in <The Closing of the American Mind>, Allan Bloom
described, in lurid Humbert Humbert detail, twelve-year-olds forsaking
Plato and Aristotle and throbbing sexually to rock music on their Sony
Walkmans. More recently, Michael Medved has portrayed the film
industry as a decadent, soul-sick coterie of dissolute leftists in
<Hollywood Vs. America>-- an image that isn't very different from Jack
Chick's caricatures of gays, Satanists, and secular humanists. If one
is convinced that a rotten elite is polluting our society with garbage
culture, then it's a lot easier to believe in clandestine groups of
baby-killers and blood-drinkers. Or, as Gerry O'Sullivan puts it, "Boo
Radley's always living somewhere."
     In striking contrast to the Satan hysteria, Ed Maxwell, a
Delaware police officer, conducts workshops on occult beliefs and law
enforcement that stress understanding and restraint. "We're
responsible to maintain people's ability to worship, as long as they
don't break local laws. In the past, if a police officer saw a group
of Pagans holding a ritual around a bonfire in the woods, they might
automatically think, 'Oh, this is Satanic, a baby's about to be
killed.' In reality, it's their First Amendment right to practice
that, as long as no laws are broken."
     Maxwell's seminars are designed to avoid the kind of subculture-
demonization that many of the Satan-mongers encourage. "We do an
awareness type of thing, saying, 'This is what the occult is.' We try
to break down the areas of Paganism, Afro-Cuban Religions, give a
little background, and say as long as they don't cross that imaginary
line, they're protected by the First Amendment. When they cross that
line, you're dealing with a crime. You don't go arrest a Satanist. You
arrest a criminal."
     O'Sullivan points out that accounts of Satanic rituals and child
abuse became progressively more baroque as time went by, almost trying
to outdo each other in a spiral of horrors. Warnke's 1973 account (<The>
<Satan Seller>) does not describe any ritual killings; but twenty years
later, and after the precedents of Stratford and Smith, he suddenly
managed to recall child murders and ritual torture for his 1991 book
<Schemes of Satan>.
     By 1985, <20/20> had done a program on the subject with Mike Warnke
as a consultant, and the <Geraldo> show had brought on Dr. Rebecca
Brown, author of <He Came to Set the Captives Free>, and who could have
stepped whole and breathing from Ken Russell's film <The Devils>.
"Brown" was the pseudonym of Ruth Bailey, a former physician who'd had
her license revoked in Indiana for a variety of professional
transgressions. These included diagnosing brain tumors and cancers as
the work of demons, telling her patients that other physicians were

actually demons and devils, addicting her patients to Demerol, and
medicating herself on the stuff as well.
     Five hundred years after the Inquisition, the mainstream culture
was back to hunting witches again. . . and it was no longer
unreasonable to believe in blood-drinking devil cults lurking in every
neighborhood.

"Getting in Touch" with Cotton Mather

     Gerry O'Sullivan believes that we're entering another resurgence
of the Satanic Panic. Claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse are being
circulated among those he diplomatically describes as "well-
intentioned, but misinformed" therapists, who are more impressed with
the apparent sincerity, consistency, and narrative quality of
repressed memories than with forensic verification of the stories.
Rather than passing muster in peer-reviewed scientific journals, the
standard documents on Satanic cult claims-- rituals, robes, chants and
prayers, shapes of daggers, kinds of torture, etc.-- are circulated at
conferences in a kind of <samizdat> of photocopied papers, outlines and
standard questionnaires.
     The charge is corroborated in part by George Ganaway, Director of
the Ridgeview Center for Dissociative Disorders in Atlanta. "Many of
the clinicians in my field began to attend seminars held by
authorities around the country, who were reporting that their patients
seemed to be telling similar stories about transgenerational mega-
cults involved in human sacrifices. The people who attended these
seminars would go back to their practices with lists of questions for
their patients in the trance state, and began to report stories from
their own patients."
     Rev. Kathleen Roney-Wilson, of the Somerset County Chaplaincy
Council in New Jersey, presents accounts of children being forced into
animal sex and mind-shattering rituals in her article "Healing
Survivors of Satanic Sexual Abuse." She warns that the article "is not
intended as a horror story. . . nor is it intended to conduct a witch
hunt" before leaping right into accounts of child torture. Roney-
Wilson rhapsodizes about "pain corridors" and the Great Darkness
before asserting that "If there is any hope for those who have been
abused by satanic groups, it lies at the foot of the Cross of Jesus
Christ."
     Multiple Personality Disorder crops up a lot in the Satan
literature. An extremely rare syndrome, MPD is related to childhood
abuse, and is perhaps the only psychological mechanism that could
explain why survivors fail to remember several <years'> worth of
traumatic events. It also begs the question as to how someone with
multiple personalities can also be integrated enough to conduct
complex rituals, as well as conceal multiple murders. In many guides,
it is suggested that Satanists, through a process of ritual torture,
murder, and mind games, actually <instill> MPD in children to ensure
cult control over their minds and to discredit their testimonies later
on!

     The Rev. Dr. Gary Lee of Heartways Counseling and Consultants
(formerly Heartways Ministries), who works with SRA survivors in
Illinois, estimates that perhaps two to three percent of the United
States' population-- that's five to eight <million> people-- are
actively involved in Satanic ritual abuse. According to Lee, a typical
satanic group will kill between seven and twenty people a year. He
also claims that these sacrifices tend to be babies kidnapped from
hospitals, and that abortion clinics allow cults to use aborted
fetuses in their rituals.
     Locally, Rosalind Dutton, a therapist and senior partner of the
Wissahickon Counselling Associates, has been holding monthly support
group meetings for Satanic Ritual Abuse survivors for three years.
Unlike many of the sources of SRA claims, she describes a non-hypnotic
process where an adult first experiences some kind of anxiety or fear,
begins to remember traumatic incidents later on, and details about
sexual abuse and Satanic rituals emerge through later therapy.
     Supporting Gary Lee's 2-3% figures, Dutton says that "There are
animals that are sacrificed, and children are made to eat parts of the
animal. Children have to kill other children in order to live: they're
told that if they don't do this, they will die. They're put in cages
and sold to other groups." Dutton also supports the claims of
infanticide, child murder, ritual torture, and breeders that others
have circulated.
     In response to these horror stories, Gerry O'Sullivan says, "The
great thing about Satanists-- at least, as they're depicted by
evangelicals and therapists-- is that they don't exist. They're not
going to come forward and say, 'We only killed two children last year,
not twenty. Get it right!'"

Grand Guignol Romper Room

     Apart from the say-so of former Satanists, is there any solid
evidence that these horrible events are going on? If a Satanic group
averages twenty members, Gary Lee's figures would give us, <at least>,
250,000 separate Satanic groups in the United States, responsible for,
<at least>, 1.75 million murders every year. This is a death rate higher
than that of the Vietnam War by several orders of magnitude. (Using
Lee's <higher> estimates, we'd have 7.5 million Satanists committing 7.5
million murders a year-- nearly three times the population of
Philadelphia.) If we charitably estimate an average Satanic group at a
thousand members, this would provide 5,000 groups committing a low-end
yearly estimate of 35,000 murders-- a number well in excess of the 20-
23,000 murders, solved and unsolved, that are committed every year.
     "Where do we get rid of 35,000 bodies?" asks Ed Maxwell. "That's
700 bodies per state. In a state like Delaware, in a bad year, you
might have twenty murders. Delaware's a small state-- we'd <notice> 700
fresh graves." 
     Have any SRA survivors, flush with vivid memories of Satanic
masses and multiple infanticides, ever provided enough verifiable
evidence to convict anyone for these thousands of murders? In a word,

<no>. In over twenty years, Mike Warnke has never provided police with
any information about the Satanists and drug dealers he claims to have
known. Michelle Smith's and Lauren Stratford's allegations haven't led
to anyone being convicted for several hundred infant murders. And not
one Satanic Ritual Abuse survivor has provided any evidence that would
expose this nationwide conspiracy of Satanists, who ostensibly have a
track record of butchery that beats out Hitler's.
     To explain this, Rosalind Dutton says, "It's very
complicated. . . No one has been found guilty when it's been brought
to the legal system because people don't believe it. The people who
are involved in this are at every level. There are doctors who do not
record the fact that babies are born because they're being killed.
There are doctors that do not record the hospital work that they do.
There are judges who are part of the Satanic cult who would never
convict anybody. There is hardly anywhere where we as people could
really find a fair hearing."
     To George Ganaway, this is a familiar story. "In <Michelle>
<Remembers>, sacrifices involved burning bodies in open fires. When
forensic experts pointed out that an open fire isn't hot enough to
completely burn a body, the stories began to change. It became that
bodies were being burnt up in crematoriums, and undertakers were part
of this cult. Those stories were checked out and shown that they
couldn't be true. Then they came up with stories of portable
crematoriums on wheels that they'd keep out of sight. When someone
presented information that would contradict that belief [such a
crematorium would need massive amounts of fuel, and it'd be the size
of a Mack truck], the individual would come up with a new
explanation." There are reports that some therapists wish to change
the designation of Satanic Ritual Abuse to <Sadistic> Ritual Abuse--
possibly because the stories of baby-murders have met with so much
disbelief and so little substantiation.
     "I understand that it boggles the mind," says Dutton. "It's not
something our brains can assimilate. It's something that's happened
for centuries. It isn't a recent phenomenon. Satanic Ritual Abuse has
its origins in Europe, a long time ago. Historians talk about it
happening in the Middle Ages." Gerry O'Sullivan points out that many
of these accounts were blood libels against Jews and slanders against
heretics-- and supported by confessions obtained through torture by
the Inquisition. "It's very interesting, three hundred years after the
Salem witch hunts, to see a small group of rather credulous mental
health professionals resurrecting old myths," he says.

Those Weren't the Days

     Outside, it could be the last warm Saturday of the year. But
Pamela Freyd is sitting in a windowless room at the University City
Science Center, assembling a mass mailing for the False Memory
Syndrome Foundation. During our interview, she hands me Xeroxed
reprints of articles and scientific papers discussing the dynamics of
hypnosis, group therapy, survivor stories and the impact of <Courage to>

<Heal>, an influential book in the incest recovery movement. It's been
Pam Freyd's job since March, as the Foundation's Executive Director,
to try to clarify some very arcane issues of human memory and trauma.
     "Parents were calling therapists with stories that they'd been
falsely accused, by their adult children, of things the parents
vehemently denied," she explains. "About twenty percent of them were
accused of Satanic ritual abuse, and as many as a third of the parents
we've surveyed had no idea <what> they'd been accused of. Their adult
children had gone into therapy of some sort and recovered repressed
memories.
     "The stories we're documenting are limited to those that come out
of a particular circumstance: when there are people who claim that
they've never had any awareness of something, who go into a
therapeutic setting, and who recover memories that other people say
are not true. The first step as a group was to see if, indeed, there
was such a problem." And since March, the Foundation has been in
contact with 1,400 families that are facing accusations and/or
lawsuits based on recovered memories. (These families include Pamela
Freyd's; her adult daughter has made similar accusations against
Freyd's husband.) "What's at issue are the methods used to elicit
those memories, and what happens as a consequence of the memories."
     Some of the memory-recovery methods that the Foundation considers
warning flags include hypnosis, the use of sodium amytal, trance work,
body massages, group sessions and reading self-help books. Remember,
two of the seminal books on Satanic Ritual Abuse-- <Michelle Remembers>
and <Satan's Underground>-- were based on the hypnotically-recalled
memories of cult survivors.
     Freyd points out that "None of those methods are known to provide
memories of a kind that are necessarily reliable. In fact, if a memory
is enhanced by hypnosis, it's not allowed as testimony in a criminal
trial. Although these memories are extremely vivid and compellingly
real to the people who have them, they're not necessarily based on
events that actually happened."
     In the 1950s, a federal research mandate to understand hypnosis--
prompted by dramatic stories of "brainwashed" wartime prisoners, a la
<The Manchurian Candidate>-- led to a quantification of what
psychologist Herbert Speigel termed the Grade Five Syndrome. Grade
Fives were highly suggestible, extremely susceptible to trance states,
compliant with the directions of their therapists, and vulnerable to
introspective therapy techniques. 
     As Pam Freyd points out, people enter a therapy situation
"expecting to find an answer, seeking help." Indeed, Grade Fives seem
to thrive in therapy situations-- there's a marked tendency to
confabulate, to create fantasies that the person believes as being
real. Even non-directed group therapy can encourage this; especially
when the people getting the healing attention are the ones with the
most sensational stories.
     "There is virtually no reliable way to differentiate accurate
from inaccurate memories without outside corroboration," says George
Ganaway. "Experimental hypnosis studies have shown that one can induce

the individuals to confabulate memories and experiences that never
happened, and to make up details that are just as vivid and
accompanied by intense emotions."
     To illustrate this, Ganaway cites an experiment by the
aforementioned Speigel. "He hypnotized an otherwise healthy volunteer
to believe that there was a Communist conspiracy afoot to take over
the country. When the subject was interviewed by a local news
broadcaster, in order to sound more convincing, he began <making up>
details of attending the hatching of the plot in a theater in Sheridan
Square, with details about the theater, the loft, the posters on the
wall, the beer they drank, and the people involved. None of those
people ever existed. The subject didn't know where this belief came
from, so in order to explain it, he had to invent more and more
convincing details to support it."
     George Ganaway may have caught a glimpse of the future of the
debates over false memory syndrome. While attending a conference on
UFO abductions at MIT, he "described to them the Satanic ritual abuse
experiences, and how closely they parallel the UFO abduction
experience-- including the entire baby-breeding phenomenon and the
idea of serial abductions. The people at the conference had never
heard anything about the Satanic Cult experiences. They thought that
was so bizarre.
     "They said that, obviously, the Satanic Ritual Abuse memories
have to be screen memories for actual alien abductions, and the aliens
had planted their memories of the cult experiences. Now, if you go to
the Satanic Ritual Abuse seminars, they'll tell you the opposite;
they'll say that the UFO abduction experiences are all screen memories
for actual satanic cult experiences."
     The issue of child sexual abuse virtually guarantees the
Foundation some degree of controversy. Even the question of how often
it happens is open to debate. The most widely-circulated estimate is
that it happens to one in four people. A study from the National
Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, estimates that two-tenths of one
percent of the population has been sexually abused as a child. Another
study, from the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse,
states that estimates have ranged between 6% and 62%; the Foundation's
newsletter says this variance "tells us we do not have reliable
information on the problem." "If people are genuinely concerned about
addressing the issue of child sexual abuse," says Freyd, "collecting
accurate data should be a top priority."
     Add to this a certain ambiguity over what constitutes rediscovery
of repressed memories in adults. <Courage to Heal> states that "If you
are unable to remember any specific instances. . .  but still have a
feeling that something abusive happened to you, it probably did." 
     In the wake of the McMartin Preschool scandal, the battle cry
"Believe the Children" has become the name of a national organization
for parents who believe their children's testimonies of sexual and
Satanic abuse-- despite the lack of corroborative evidence. And
Believing the Children isn't easy when adults have acted as mediators,
as the case of Seattle's Bill and Kathleen Swan demonstrates. The <San>

<Jose Mercury News> reports that, on October 2 of 1985, Lisa Conradi was
hired as a substitute teacher at the pre-school of the Swans' three
year old daughter, Kimberly. Inside of her first half-hour on the job,
Conradi had interrogated Kimberly-- no notes were taken, so what
really was said is unknown-- and pegged her as a victim of child
sexual abuse. 
     Within three days, Kimberly was taken into protective custody,
and a month later, the Swans were arrested. They were eventually
convicted of child sexual abuse, mainly because the jury and the
courts of appeal decided that three year-old children do not make up
stories about sexual abuse. No physical evidence of sexual abuse was
ever found, but as of this writing, the Swans are serving a 50-month
sentence, and awaiting a circuit court ruling in the summer of 1993.
(In July, Kathleen was allowed to see her daughter-- the first time
since 1986.)
     It has since turned out that Lisa Conradi, the substitute teacher
who first accused the Swans, had a history of finding allegedly abused
children in several other day-care centers where she'd worked.
Claiming to be a survivor of child sexual abuse, Conradi has also
boasted, "I've turned in at least 20 kids," and of going from door to
door, accusing her neighbors of having abused her own children. There
are people, Conradi said, "who would say I'm on a witch hunt and am a
fanatic because I don't like to see kids abused, and when I see it, I
turn it in."
     Laura Davis, one of the co-authors of <Courage to Heal>, sees the
Foundation as part of a backlash, saying that "We have become
effective enough to make an impact on people who have an investment in
abusing children, hiding abuse they're committed, denying their
spouse's abuse. . . Add the people who don't want to believe that so
many children are abused, and there's a sizable number to oppose
us. . ."
     Freyd takes the critics very seriously, although she admits that
some of it is "just off-target. There is not an issue whether there
are such things as repressed memories. It's known that there are." She
acknowledges that "For many years, people couldn't look at the issue,
and incest is so horrendous that people shut it off. But people who
ordinarily would use their skills of critical analysis have suspended
them just because the topic is sexual abuse."
     But the prospect of well-meaning therapists discrediting the
issue through bad methodology raises Freyd's concern. "I have seen a
tremendous change for women in being able to come forth to say you've
been abused or assaulted in some way. The awareness of abuse has come
to the fore. I would hate to see us lose that."
     In the meantime, a lot of families have been shattered, and at
least one person is currently in prison over the matter. Paul Ingram,
the former Chief Civil Deputy of Thurston County, Washington, is
currently serving twenty years in prison for rape-- on the basis of
what could be false memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse.
     In September of 1988, Ingram's 22-year-old daughter Ericka
attended a Christian retreat, where she claimed that Ingram had raped

her when she was five years old. Within a few weeks, Ericka was
accusing Ingram of having raped her nearly every night for the past
seventeen years. Her younger sister Julie, also at the retreat, began
a similar series of accusations.
     When confronted, Ingram maintained his innocence at first. But,
in keeping with his church's doctines on "Satanic deception," Ingram
acknowledged to the interrogators that his memories of the events
might have been blocked. According to Dr. Richard Ofshe in <The>
<International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis>, Ingram
was repeatedly told that sex offenders frequently repress their
memories, and the interrogators promised him that, if he admitted his
guilt on the matter, his memories would return. 
     The records of subsequent interrogations (23 sessions, over a
five-month period) demonstrated how those memories eventually <did> come
back. A psychologist whom Ofshe calls "Dr. Smith" participated in the
interrogations; Dr. Smith led Ingram through a series of relaxation
techniques that, in Ofshe's estimate, "dramatically heightened
suggestibility and trance logic." While Ingram was in this
dissociative state, the interrogators made helpful suggestions to
visualize the events that Ingram was accused of.
     During this time, Ericka Ingram-- prompted by a reading of
<Satan's Underground>-- was claiming that 25 babies had been murdered by
Satanic cults, and Julie was talking about having nails driven through
her flesh and arms of dead babies being inserted into her vagina. Both
daughters claimed that they'd been forced to attend hundreds of
Satanic rituals where these horrible events took place. No evidence
was ever found to support these claims, but Paul Ingram had no trouble
'visualizing' them under Dr. Smith's interrogation.
     In May of 1989, Ingram, at the urging of the prosecutor, pleaded
guilty to six counts of rape. The visits by the interrogators and Dr.
Smith stopped, and within a month Ingram's confidence in his pseudo-
memories had evaporated. He is, however, still in prison.
     Like we said, it's a good thing we don't burn people at the stake
these days.

                                 -30-

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brian "Rev. P-K" Siano                                  revpk@cellar.org
Servo: "Dianetics, by L. Ron Hubbard."
Joel:  "Why is my life messed up? Page 74."
Servo: "When will this movie end? Page 155."
Crow:  "How much money can we get out of Tom Cruise? Page 85."
                                       "Mystery Science Theater 3000,"
                                       during a volcano scene in
                                       "Hercules and the Moon Men."
---------------------< END >------------------------------------
-- 
Don		D.C.Lindsay	Carnegie Mellon Computer Science