This piece was written in collaboration with Sarah Ponto Rivera

Where the Witch-hunters are: Satanic Panic and Mental Health Malpractice

By Douglas Mesner and Sarah Ponto Rivera

“I have met many demons, devils, evil characters, representatives of Satan, and Satan himself in my MPD [Multiple Personality Disorder] work.”

— Colin Ross, MD, 1994

Past President, International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD)

“I remain troubled about the matter of transgenerational satanic cults.”

— Richard Kluft, MD, 2014 Past President, ISSTD

It is with an ironic sense of disdain that we can now look back upon the day-care sex-abuse hysteria of the 80s and 90s, with its imaginary conspiracy of pedophilic Satanic cult activity, and remark that one of its primary instigators was a devout Catholic. A foundational text for the “Satanic Panic”, as it came to be called, was co-authored by the pious psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder who, with his client-turned-wife, Michelle Smith, wrote of Smith’s alleged early ritual abuse at the hands of a secret Devil-worshipping society. Michelle Remembers (1980), billed as a true story and humored as such within the talk-show circuit of the time, was a ludicrous supernatural horror story in which both Christ and Satan made dramatic guest appearances. The senseless, confabulatory ramblings upon which the “facts” of the book were constructed, were gleaned from hypnotic regression sessions, in which Pazder claimed Smith had recalled horrific events that had previously been “repressed” deep within her unconscious mind.

It doesn’t take any lofty credentials in psychology to whiff some air of projection in Catholic claims, that yet persist, against their imaginary enemy’s loathsome proclivities. And while the Satanic Panic witch-hunt extended well beyond the Catholic Church, and beyond political boundaries — even at times finding its paranoid claims prosecuted, without credible evidence, in the hallowed halls of secular “justice” — one can still easily sense that same guilty projection in all of the twisted, grotesquely detailed child abuse fantasies of that era. In passionate tones of moral outrage, self-appointed occult crime authorities and Ritual Abuse experts gathered at informational meetings and conferences to revel in sadistic child abuse tales, similar in transparent latency to angered pulpit-pounding outcry against the “homosexual agenda”.

Those who remember the more laughably dated ideas that arose from the panic — e.g. the demonization of Dungeons & Dragons as a gateway to secretive underworld depravity, or the fear of insidious ‘backward masked’ subliminal calls to suicide and Satanism in popular music — will find it hard to believe when we say that the Satanic Panic is still alive and well… in fact it’s never gone away. But this is the case. The Satanic Panic never died, it just faded from mainstream attention. Many of the old purveyors still propagandize to insular, dedicated groups and, in another twisted irony, they mostly spread their delusions in the name of mental health itself.

Just last year, an eating disorders clinic known as “Castlewood”, in St. Louis, MO, settled four lawsuits brought against them by former clients who claimed that during the course of their “treatment” at the center, they had been led to believe that they had repressed memories of traumatic abuse, including that of the ritualistic, Satanic kind. The author of these delusions, it was claimed, was one Mark Schwartz, co-founder and former clinical co-director of the facility. In 2004, on his Curriculum Vitae, Schwartz listed “Dissociative Disorders” as one of his “Clinical Specialties”. Where one finds “Dissociative Disorders”, one tends to find a belief in the mythic “Multiple Personality Disorder” (MPD), now rebranded as “Dissociative Identity Disorder” (DID). And where one finds this alleged disorder, one invariably finds notions of concealed, “repressed” trauma, and therapies devised to draw forth hidden memories from the unconscious. Where one finds such therapies, one finds the most hysterical subcultures of conspiracist delusion imaginable.

Just a few years ago, in 2012, Satanic Ritual Abuse charges against a family in Missouri were eventually dropped, with the prosecutor, Kellie Wingate Campbell stating to the Associated Press, “Whether or not I believe the allegations is an independent question from whether or not I believe I can prove each and every element of the case beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.” Clearly she felt she could not. What Campbell failed to mention is that many charges were already disproven when alleged physical evidence, including buried bodies, failed to manifest in a massive excavation of the family’s property. Medical records subpoenaed from the accusers also failed to provide record of alleged injuries that the Judge himself noted “would have certainly required critical care.” Also left unsaid was that the accusations were the result of the accusers’ “recovered memories”.

The accused, financially ruined by legal fees, and stigmatized by the accusations, can never recover from the episode. Campbell, of course, need have no fear of being so much as reprimanded for prosecutorial misconduct. Even Lael Rubin, the prosecutor in the seminal Satanic abuse daycare case of McMartin Preschool — the longest, most expensive case in American history, marred by false testimony and concealed exonerating evidence — escaped any official censure. Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts Attorney General who, as District Attorney, fought hard to keep a clearly innocent victim of the hysteria, Gerald Amirault, in prison for 18 years, just barely lost a bid for Governor in the most recent election.

The perpetrators and purveyors of the Satanic Panic, who destroyed countless lives and families, never experienced justice for their cruel stupidity, and many of them still operate with smug impunity exactly as they did during the height of the hysteria.

Just a year ago, Nov. 26th, 2013, a former day-care worker named Fran Keller was finally released from prison after 21 years spent for crimes she could not possibly have committed by any reasonable interpretation of reality. With no physical evidence to support the accusations (which included claims of graveyard rituals, cannibalism, and medically undetected limb transplants) Fran, and her husband, Dan, were convicted on the most dubious of child testimony drawn from coercive and incompetent interrogations by zealous witch-hunters. The children were ignored when they claimed they were not abused at all (as happened even in testimony) — and the impossibility of the claims was dutifully ignored as irrelevant to claims of a greater truth.

Dr. Randy Noblitt’s expert testimony was instrumental in the conviction of the Kellers. Noblitt, an old-school anti-Satanist buffoon of the subliminal message-divining kind, explained away the lack of physical evidence by invoking the conspiracy’s magnitude: police officers and other officials were involved in the cover-up. The children had been systematically traumatized as a means to brainwash them into repressing the memories. Following the trial, Noblitt revealed in an interview that he had caught Mr. Keller using vague hand signals in an effort to communicate to secret fellow Satanists in the jury.

In a letter to the Court on behalf of the Keller’s eventual successful appeal, Associate Professor Dr. Evan Harrington, of the Chicago School of Professional Psychology noted that “the world portrayed by Dr. Noblitt is one in which thousands of cult abusers have infiltrated respectable society, and specifically daycare centers, in order to operate a clandestine subculture engaged in massive levels of felonious criminality, all based on mind control triggered by secret handshakes and hand signals.” The letter, bearing signatures of support from various esteemed social and behavioral scientists, concludes by stating that Noblitt’s “opinions have been scientifically discredited, and are not shared by the vast majority of clinicians and researchers within the field of psychology.”

But where is Randy “L’il Knob” Noblitt today, now that social conditions aren’t nearly so amenable to the tin-foil hat Torquemada whose doctoral thesis was on The Celestial Concomitants of Human Behavior, more colloquially known as Astrology? He’s a professor of Clinical Psychology at Alliant University where his faculty profile lists his primary expertise as “Cult and ritual abuse”, and among “courses taught” we find “Ritual Abuse” as one of but three.

L’il Knob could be found in attendance at last month’s conference of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD), “an international, non-profit, professional association organized to develop and promote comprehensive, clinically effective and empirically based resources and responses to trauma and dissociation and to address its relevance to other theoretical constructs.”

Despite its inclusion in the 5th edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V), DID doesn’t enjoy general support among psychiatric professionals as a legitimate disorder. Before its publication, the DSM-V task force received a letter signed by top psychiatrists, urging them to remove the condition from the manual. Dr. Allen Frances, task force chair of DSM-IV, lamented the continued inclusion of DID in the DSM, referring to the disorder as “complete bunk” in a 2013 Wall Street Journal interview. Nonetheless, it remains.

The ISSTD struggles to maintain the appearance of an “empirically based” outfit, despite zero scientific support. Retrospective surveys of the DID-diagnosed are quantified into statistics, and presented as evidence of the condition’s legitimacy. Bad data is used, and good data is abused. In his 2003 book, Remembering Trauma, Dr. Richard McNally of Harvard University meticulously debunks primary DID literature. The actual substance of his findings are dutifully ignored by the faithful.

Some among the ISSTD utilize treatments insurance companies won’t even cover, leading therapists like Sebern Fisher (MA, BCN), to recommend creative billing. (“Stop recording…” Fisher demanded at the conference before confiding to the audience, “I bill psychotherapy code…I don’t want that on the record. …There’s a code for biofeedback, assisted psychotherapy, which no insurance company acknowledges.”)

Su Baker (MEd), also speaking at the recent ISSTD conference, recognizes that DID is quickly being recognized as a simple renaming of the debunked MPD, so she recommends easing new minds into the concept through courses in “complex trauma”. “We can’t use the word dissociation… So we use complex trauma knowing that down the road you lead people into the dissociative field and the way of thinking about that.”

Colin Ross, an ISSTD past president and recipient of their “Distinguished Achievement Award”, has devised standardized interview schedule to make DID sound ‘sciency’. With the Dissociative Disorders Interview Schedule (DDIS), according to Ross, one can say, “Well, I made a clinical diagnosis and I confirmed it,”… “And so, in the United States, that is a little bit […] legally protected.”

Ross fully understands the importance of legal protection. In Manitoba, he was accused of malpractice — the worst case of medical malpractice one expert witness claimed to have ever seen — by a former patient, Roma Hart. She claimed Ross had instilled her with bizarre and perverse delusions, including the belief that her family was involved in a Satanic crime-ring, and that Hart herself had been forcibly impregnated by extraterrestrials, even birthing a hybrid infant. Overmedication brought Ms. Hart to the precipice of death on several occasions. Ross relocated to Texas where almost identical claims were brought against him by one Martha Tyo. The hospital settled, and Ross now runs his own research foundation “to further the understanding of psychological trauma and its consequences.”

In 2008, Ross beclowned himself by claiming he could demonstrate “paranormal” eye-beams, measured in EEG. When it was pointed out (by a real scientist) that his readings were merely picking up artifact from blinks and muscle movement, Ross agreed, though he continued to insist his eye-beams were real.

The DDIS contains a series of questions related to “Supernatural/Possession/ESP Experiences/Cults” which, if authored by anybody but Ross, one might reasonably assume to be an attempt to measure delusional beliefs. However, given Ross’s history, and the history of “dissociative disorder” studies in general, it’s not outrageous to wonder if the supernatural claims are taken at face value.

In 2012, a book entitled 22 Faces carried a forward by Ross and an endorsement from ISSTD past president Joyanna Silberg. Marketed as the “true story” of a woman who recovered memories of Satanic abuse, the book was an absurd tale of superstitious paranoia. In it, the protagonist experiences ESP, demonic possession, is abused by levitating Satanists, and is ultimately saved by way of divine intervention when Jesus himself intercedes on her behalf. Silberg writes that she and her peers “are all too familiar with the kinds of crimes and disorders described in 22 Faces.”

And this is where today’s Western, somewhat secularized, witch-hunters currently reside: among psychology’s pseudoscientific fringe; feeding delusion to the mentally vulnerable behind the protection of therapist-client privilege, and under the guise trauma therapy. While they revel in their disturbed pornographic fantasies of child-rape and extreme abuse, they proclaim their critics to be demented defenders of pedophilic assault. They co-opt the narrative of victim’s rights to conceal their absurd conspiracy theories from criticism and scrutiny. To question the validity of DID, or even the reality of a Satanic conspiracy, is — according to this defensive ploy — to question the very existence of child abuse itself. In this way, actual victims of abuse are used as human shields to defend our modern inquisitors as they engage in the most outrageous and under-investigated mental health scandal of our time.

Between the two of them, the authors have attended conferences, seminars, and workshops, spanning Recovered Memory subcultures from Alien Abduction support groups, Ritual Abuse seminars, Past-Life regression sessions, and ISSTD lectures. As they sift through their findings and transcribe their audio, the results will be posted at www.dysgenics.com. They hope to bring reform to the Mental Health field, and promote general awareness of Recovered Memory quackery.

I feel it important to make note of his dubious beginnings so one might recognize that this tin-foil hat Torquemada never, at any point in his professional career, seems to have become unhinged… he never exhibited a firm grasp of reality to begin with. Thus, when reading the barrage of lunacy attributed to “Little Knob” below, the question isn’t: where did this professor of Clinical Psychology at Alliant University go wrong?, instead, the question should be: how is it that this man ever became a professor of Clinical Psychology at all? And, worse, How is it that his testimony, as a man of Science, was considered favorably in a situation where personal liberties were at stake?

In 1992, at the height of a social hysteria now commonly referred to as “the Satanic Panic”, Dr. Noblitt — believing he could disentangle the coercive subliminal sounds of secret demonic code within popular music, as well as decrypt the hidden meanings behind seemingly mundane occurrences — testified for the prosecution, as an “expert” in the field of “ritual abuse”, against one Fran and Dan Keller, a couple accused of engaging in child abuse at their home-based day care center. With no physical evidence to support the accusations (which included claims of graveyard rituals and medically undetected limb transplants) the couple was convicted on the most dubious of testimony. The children themselves — ignored when they claimed they were not abused at all (as happened even in testimony) — were led by coercive and incompetent interrogations to produce claims of abuse which are nearly impossible to credit [see footage and analysis of one such interrogation embedded below]. Noblitt’s own fantastical testimony, of course, was no more credible than Noblitt himself.

21 years later, the Kellers still sit in prison, their case on appeal.

Dr. Evan Harrington, Associate Professor at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, wrote the below letter [following the embedded videos] — on behalf of the Kellers’ recent appeal — to the 14th District Court in Travis County, Texas, outlining the absurdities, shoddy methods, and scientific ignorance demonstrated by Dr. Randy Noblitt, concluding, “His opinions have been scientifically discredited, and are not shared by the vast majority of clinicians and researchers within the field of psychology.” The letter, bearing signatures of support from various esteemed social and behavioral scientists, reveals a disturbing portrait of Dr. Noblitt as a delusional man obstinately oblivious to any and all facts that serve to disconfirm his paranoid theories. The letter is a damning indictment against the institutions that would recognize such a clearly problematic character for an “expert”. The letter further raises grave doubts regarding the credibility of Alliant University, where Dr. Noblitt serves on faculty, still purveying the irrational narrative of a long discredited, thoroughly debunked hysteria.

The Power of Suggestion: Video interviews of Frances Keller and psychology professor James Wood, by The Austin Chronicle

Dr. Randy Noblitt explaining in a flat humdrum tone (while occasionally giggling) how Satanists utilize music in their mind control tactics.

[Note: The following letter has been altered from the original in that — although the information is relatively easily found elsewhere — I decided to remove the telephone numbers and email addresses of the signatories.]

***********************************

In Regards to the Expert Witness Testimony and Qualifications of Randy Noblitt, Ph.D.

Evan Harrington, Ph.D.

 Dr. Randy Noblitt’s expert testimony was instrumental in securing the convictions of Fran and Dan Keller at their criminal trial in 1992. Specifically, Dr. Noblitt gave credence and claimed empirical support for the children’s involvement in such hard-to-hide activities as murders and dismemberments, grave robbing, airplane flights, and kidnappings. Dr. Noblitt testified that these were typical behaviors associated with so-called cult ritual abuse. With the promise of empirical support, Noblitt’s expert testimony encouraged jurors to believe the accusations despite the many outlandish elements associated with the actual charges.

The signers of this document present the court with evidence that Randy Noblitt, Ph.D. is not qualified to serve as an expert on the topic of “ritual abuse” or recovered memories and that such testimony lacked any empirical support at that time. This Letter to the Court has been written with the intent of illustrating the reasons why Dr. Noblitt is not qualified. Certainly, the points made below illustrate that it is highly unlikely that any court in the country would today permit Dr. Noblitt to testify today on the topic of “ritual abuse.”

1. The Scientific Status of Theories of Satanic Ritual Abuse. At this point in time, and even in 1992, virtually no mainstream psychologists would accept the theories of ritual abuse that Dr. Noblitt puts forward.

At trial, Dr. Noblitt testified about the existence of cults using ritual abuse and of organized satanic networks engaged in wide-ranging criminal enterprises including child abuse. The picture painted by Dr. Noblitt in his testimony at trial is one where criminal cults are common across the United States, and that these alleged cults typically engage in torture and murder of both adults and children. Furthermore, Dr. Noblitt opined that these cults are experts in a form of mind control or brainwashing in which victims are so heavily traumatized that they develop total and complete amnesia until the victim enters therapy and recovers the memory. His descriptions of these cults involved rape, murder, torture, grave robbing, and ceremonial animal and human sacrifice.

Furthermore, he alleged that these activities took place at churches, involved police officers and other professional individuals. Lurid media coverage of this issue at the time additionally invoked the specter of widespread cannibalism. In order to explain the lack of physical evidence for these outrageous crimes, Dr. Noblitt explained to the jury that these cults will frequently lead their victims to believe in something preposterous, so that if they ever told of their tortures the stories would involve elements that would be so far-fetched that the victims would necessarily be disbelieved. This, according to Dr. Noblitt, was done intentionally by the cults as part of the mind control programming in order to discredit their victims.

In an interview shortly after the trial in a local newspaper, Dr. Noblitt was described as having been the prosecution expert witness in many ritual abuse cases, including the Keller case (Dickinson, 1993). He stated in that interview that Dan Keller, while in court, used a mysterious hand signal to mind-control people within the courtroom. Further, he asserted that cults use severe torture on victims and that all memory of the torture is repressed. In a direct quote from this news article, Dr. Noblitt stated: “I believe they use a technique of mind control unknown in legitimate psychology. It’s akin to hypnosis, created through abuse…the state of shock is so severe that it sends the victim into a deep trance state. Then cult members use different signals or triggers…” to control the victims.

In his 1995 book, Dr. Noblitt went into more detail regarding Dan Keller’s mysterious hand signal: A reporter had given Dr. Noblitt a videotape of Mr. Keller appearing in court, where Mr. Keller appeared to hold his fingers briefly in the form of a letter “C”. When interviewed by the reporter, Dr. Noblitt opined for the television audience that Mr. Keller had attempted to use mind control in the courtroom in an attempt at jury nullification, just in case any secret Satanists were on jury (see Noblitt & Perskin, 1995, pp. 150-152). Relatedly, in 1996 I heard Dr. Noblitt speak at another conference. In his presentation, Dr. Noblitt stated that he uses the MMPI test to diagnose ritual abuse (the MMPI is a standardized test that has never been approved for this use), and stated that in his clinical practice he has uncovered “secret cult handshakes” and that he uses these special handshakes with his patients in order to “access” buried cult-mind-control-programming. He uses the information gleaned in this way as evidence for the existence of ritual abuse cults. Furthermore, he stated that he “strokes people’s faces to access the ritual abuse victim’s [memories] and make them dissociate”. At this point, he said, “if they give you a different name, this is scientific evidence for dissociation.” In summary, the world portrayed by Dr. Noblitt is one in which thousands of cult abusers have infiltrated respectable society, and specifically daycare centers, in order to operate a clandestine subculture engaged in massive levels of felonious criminality, all based on mind control triggered by secret handshakes and hand signals.

To be clear, at the time of the trial the hypothesis outlined above was considered to be a fringe belief held by a small number of clinicians, who believed these things solely because of the statements of their patients – not because of any physical evidence that had surfaced. By the time of the trial there had been highly skeptical journalistic essays about ritual abuse (e.g., Nathan, 1990,1991; Rabinowitz, 1990), criminologists had written articles debunking the ritual abuse hypothesis (e.g., Jenkins & Maier-Katkin, 1991), social anthropologists had traced causal pathways explaining the issue as a social panic purveyed by moral entrepreneurs (e.g., Mulhern, 1991; Victor, 1991). In summary, outside of a small band of psychologists interested in multiple personality disorder, the field of psychology was at that time generally dismissive of claims of ritual abuse.

Prior to 1992, psychologists had offered skeptical accounts of certain types of memory claims, and certainly had offered viable alternative explanations of memory errors that could explain ritual abuse allegations. The breadth of coverage by experimental psychologists is beyond the scope of this Letter, but it is fair to say that by 1992 a substantial body of published research existed regarding errors in adult memory (e.g., Loftus & Ketchum, 1991) and with regard to the suggestibility of children (e.g., Ceci, Ross, & Toglia, 1987; Ceci, Toglia, & Ross, 1990).

In a study I recently conducted (Harrington, Stone, & Guss, 2011), I collected a sample of 118 abnormal psychology textbooks spanning the years 1886 to 2011. Abnormal psychology textbooks are very useful in gauging the level of acceptance within the field of psychology for any issue related to mental health, and they serve as a training instrument which all new members of the profession must be exposed to within their required college courses. This sample of textbooks included 29 texts dating from 1980 (the beginning of the ritual abuse panic) to 1992 (the time of the Keller trial). Of these 29 texts, not one contained a reference to ritual abuse. In contrast, all of the texts covered the topic of multiple personality, and 97% covered the topic of child sexual abuse. This definitively illustrates the fact that “ritual abuse” or “satanic ritual abuse” was NOT accepted within the mainstream psychological community at the time of the trial of Fran and Dan Keller. Had it been accepted, it would have been covered in abnormal psychology textbooks.

Perhaps most importantly, at the time of the trial the 43-page report on ritual abuse by FBI Special Agent Kenneth Lanning was available, having been released in January, 1992 (see also Lanning, 1989, 1991). Lanning, a member of the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI, served as a consultant in numerous cases of alleged ritual abuse. The “Lanning Report” described his detailed review of hundreds of such cases. The cases described by Lanning involved human sacrifices and cannibalism, and seemed to come directly from Dr. Noblitt’s repertoire of ritual cult concepts. As Lanning described it, believers in the ritual cult hypothesis asserted that satanic ritual cults murder some 50,000 people each year in the United States, yet leave no evidence of the crimes because of their advanced expertise and organizational skills. However, unlike Noblitt, Lanning ultimately concluded that there was no legal-level evidence for the alleged ritual cult abuse claims. Lanning suggested that it is up to the mental health community to determine why these individuals believe in things that have not happened. As Lanning stated: “For at least eight years American law enforcement has been aggressively investigating the allegations of victims of ritual abuse. There is little or no evidence for the portion of their allegations that deals with large-scale baby breeding, human sacrifice, and organized satanic conspiracies. Now it is up to mental health professionals, not law enforcement, to explain why victims are alleging things that don’t seem to have happened” (Lanning, 1992, January, p. 40). Lanning’s conclusions were widely available within the field at the time, as they were published in multiple locations, including the journal Child Abuse & Neglect. Any psychologist interested in the topic of ritual abuse at the time of the Keller trial would have been aware of Special Agent Lanning’s failure to find any corroboration for ritual abuse claims. An explanation for Dr. Noblitt’s failure to reference this important work in his trial testimony perhaps stems from the fact that believers in satanic ritual abuse had concluded that FBI Special Agent Lanning was himself a satanic high priest (Bottoms & Davis, 1997; Lanning, 1992), in part because the report had a red cover.

In light of the critiques regarding ritual abuse accusations that were available in 1992, coming from multiple disciplines (including law enforcement), and in light of the lack of general acceptance within the field of psychology proper (as shown by the total absence of the topic in abnormal psychology textbooks), it is bewildering why Dr. Noblitt opined at trial that there was little controversy regarding ritual abuse (p. 147 of his testimony).

Further, at pages 158-159 of his testimony, Dr. Noblitt described attending a conference where most attendees raised their hands in belief at the existence of ritual abuse, which he used as evidence of general acceptance of his ideas. The problem with this scenario is that the conference described by Dr. Noblitt was one that specialized on the very issue he was polling. A similar result could be obtained if a political pollster went to a rally for candidate X and asked how many people supported candidate X – it would not be surprising if everyone raised their hands, and an honest pollster would refrain from using this as evidence that the majority of eligible voters also supported candidate X.

Another area of knowledge that was available at the time of the Keller’s 1992 trial involved the relationship of multiple personality disorder and ritualistic abuse. For example, Nicholas Spanos (1996), a highly respected researcher in the field of hypnosis and memory, argued strenuously that multiple personality was a social construction, and that claims of satanic ritual abuse could be entirely explained through the ordinary mechanisms of social influence and cognitive psychology. Much of the research cited Spanos was available in journal articles prior to 1992. His book lists 74 published articles where he was first author; 58 of these articles were available before 1992, and this body of research clearly called into question the veracity of claims of multiple personality, demon possession, hypnotism, and ritual abuse as well as providing a plausible alternative explanation for these wild claims.

In conclusion, Dr. Noblitt stated in testimony at trial that there is little controversy about his descriptions of ritual abuse. This statement was not factually true in 1992, and is less true today. Dr. Noblitt’s expert testimony did not represent any type of consensus within the field of psychology, but rather represented a fringe group of therapists who specialized in treating patients who believed they had been ritually abused. This is reflected in a survey that was conducted contemporaneously with the trial, but which was not published until later (Bottoms & Davis, 1997; Bottoms, Shaver, & Goodman, 1996), in which the researchers surveyed clinicians who were members of the American Psychological Association regarding clinical experiences with patients who believed they had experienced ritual abuse. Only 13% of the sample had “seen” an adult case of ritual abuse, but a far more telling statistic was that the overwhelming majority of ritual abuse cases were seen by only 2% of their respondents, who averaged hundreds of such cases. When asked about actual evidence in any of their clients’ cases, in only a handful of cases did the clinicians report that evidence existed to support the allegations, and in these instances the “evidence” was “usually ‘scars’…one respondent wrote ‘scars on right hand’” (Bottoms, Shaver, & Goodman, 1996, p.23). The authors of this study concluded that a small minority of therapists were involved in massive numbers of ritual abuse cases, and that there was an overwhelming lack of evidence to support these claims. These data strongly support the view that, in the early 1990s, although psychologists tended to believe their clients’ ritual abuse claims when they encountered them, psychologists’ activities in treating ritual abuse was relegated to a fringe, and that therapists’ belief in ritual abuse was based primarily on stories provided by patients in therapy.

In order to provide additional evidence about the unscientific and unaccepted views of Dr. Noblitt, I described a conference hosted by Noblitt in 1995 (see Harrington, 1996) for a full description. This article has been submitted in full to the court by Keith S. Hampton, Esq. The conference took place in March, 1995, and I attended this conference as a participant observer in order to learn about the beliefs of the individuals within the ritual abuse psychotherapeutic community.

The major impression after leaving the conference was that the entire event is best characterized as having been anti-scientific. Normally, at academic conferences, presenters give different views about issues and provide data, which are interpreted. In the behavioral sciences, this is accomplished through experimentation and debate over the meanings of results of those experiments. The scientific enterprise proceeds largely through attempts to discredit hypotheses (see, e.g., Daubert v Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, 1993), and in this way we see which hypotheses can withstand the test of skeptical scrutiny. Then, with sufficient replication and variation in tests and methods, a hypothesis or theoretical perspective may be endorsed by the relevant scientific community at large. Much of this scaffold of the scientific enterprise was described by Karl Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which dates to 1935. In spite of epistemological differences between philosophers, this outline has remained quite useful, and forms a portion of the logic behind the Daubert ruling. Contrary to this scientific approach, the milieu at the conference hosted by Dr. Noblitt can best be described as paranoid and anti-scientific. At no point did the conference presenters attempt to seriously engage with their critics, but rather they simply resorted to ad hominem attacks on all who disagreed with the ritual abuse perspective. Dr. Noblitt went to great lengths to accommodate the holocaust deniers, representatives of the American militia movement, and charlatans who claimed that they had been mind-controlled (as described in the self-published books they were selling). However, at no point during this entire conference was there any effort to critically and scientifically address the very real and very numerous criticisms of the ritual abuse hypothesis that had accumulated by 1995. All manner of preposterous claims regarding ritual abuse were permitted, and any skepticism, no matter how bland, was met with a clearly aggressive social response (see my 1996 article for details). Far from being a scientific conference, this was a conference at which zealots and true believers pushed their views on others. To me, the most disturbing aspect was certainly the fact that mental health patients were encouraged to attend and learn of the threat posed by satanic ritual cults, cults that were in fact nonexistent.

2. Since 1992, there is an enormous scientific literature to explore the generation of beliefs and statements about ritualistic abuse. In the intervening years, literally hundreds of professional journal articles and books have been published either criticizing the ritual abuse hypothesis (as exemplified by Dr. Noblitt), or exploring how false memories may be generated in adults and children. It is fair to say that at the current time, belief in ritual abuse within the psychological community is at an all-time low. Abnormal psychology textbooks today sometimes cover the topic, but they do so in a skeptical light as an example of false memory (e.g., Alloy, Riskind, & Manos, 2005, who incredulously described a woman who alleged attending 850 satanic ceremonies involving crimes such as infanticide). The research by highly regarded psychologists Gail Goodman and Bette Bottoms was instrumental in stemming the satanic panic within the professional psychological community. After conducting several surveys, which were funded by a grant from the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, their research team concluded that religion-related abuse (such as deprivation of medication on religious grounds, or injury during exorcism) was an important issue for society to face (Bottoms, Shaver, & Goodman, 1996), but that virtually no legal-standard evidence existed for claims of ritual abuse, and such claims were likely the result of false memories (Bottoms & Davis, 1997). Furthermore, Bottoms and Davis (1997) argued that conferences (of the type hosted by Dr. Noblitt) were a likely vector or pathway in the genesis of these false memories (cf., Mulhern, 1991). At the time, the research team was considered impartial in the sense that they had no stake in the ritual abuse controversy and they had extensive experience in research on child abuse.

Other very notable scientists have also critiqued the concept of ritualistic abuse, by presenting empirical evidence. For example, Harvard psychologist Richard McNally opines that the evidence that some people develop false memories is overwhelming, and “the strongest evidence comes from the strange saga of satanic ritual abuse” (2003, p. 259), which he also describes as “extravagant” (p. 258). The work of Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist at UC Irvine, is equally impressive. Rather than exploring the quality of memories of traumatized individuals as McNally does, Loftus produces in the laboratory false memories in her participants for a variety of life events, some of which are highly incredible. A number of developmental psychologists (e.g., Bruck & Ceci, 1995; Poole & Lindsay, 1995) have shown how commonly-used interview techniques can bring children to make very bizarre statements that sometimes seem ritualistic in nature. In conclusion, it is fair to say that the scientific psychological community today does not endorse the types of beliefs about ritual abuse expressed by Dr. Noblitt.

3. Dr. Noblitt’s belief in ritualistic abuse continues into the 21st Century. Dr. Noblitt’s staunch beliefs expressed in 1992 were not abated by the tide of history and science. This reflects the possibly that his testimony was based on an unchangeable belief that was immune to arguments of logic and science. This does not make for a reliable expert witness.

In an article written by Noblitt, dated 2007, located on an internet web site (http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/an-empirical-look-at-the-ritual-abuse-controversy-randynoblitt-phd/) (downloaded January 31, 2013), Dr. Noblitt offered an expanded version of a paper he presented in 1998. An examination of this article reveals that Noblitt fails to be aware of or to acknowledge many important scientific advances in understanding of the nature of recovered memories or ritual abuse accusations. His article contains a lengthy list of convictions obtained in ritual abuse cases, many of which involved accusations by children in day care settings. Although the cases are not identified by name, but rather by location, many of the cases can easily be matched to the high-profile trials at those locales. For example, the Kelly Michaels trial is readily identifiable within the list. Although the conviction in the Kelly Michaels case was reversed (in part for testimony similar to that given by Dr. Noblitt in the Keller case – testimony regarding using behavioral indicators as diagnostic of abuse), the case is retained in Noblitt’s analysis as a true ritual abuse case. He additionally fails to note the amicus brief of concerned social scientists, describing the suggestibility of children, that had been entered on behalf of Kelly Michaels, and which was subsequently published as a journal article in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law (Bruck & Ceci, 1995). The amicus brief was prepared by developmental psychologists Maggie Bruck and Stephen Ceci, and signed by 45 social scientists, representing the fields of developmental, social, experimental, and clinical psychology. In fact, while Dr. Noblitt goes to some length in describing child victims of ritual abuse cults, he does not cite a single critic regarding the suggestibility of children.

In the same article by Noblitt (2007), he stated: “it has never been shown that people who report ritual abuse are particularly suggestible.” In contradistinction to this assertion, individuals with recovered memories of child abuse have been found to be more suggestible (Clancy, Schacter, McNally, & Pitman, 2000; Geraerts, Smeets, Jelicic, van Heerden, & Merckleback, 2005) and to exhibit a tendency for poor source monitoring of information (McNally, Clancy, Barrett, & Parker, 2005). This illustrates a misreading or ignorance of recent research on clinical characteristics of those with recovered memories.

To cover one last example, again from the same paper, Dr. Noblitt cites a journal article by Dr. Bette Bottoms and her colleagues (described earlier in this document), with regard to the prevalence rates for clinicians believing their patients’ accounts of ritual abuse. As is typical of believers in ritual abuse, Dr. Noblitt selectively uses the information obtained by Bottoms and her colleagues by citing only the parts of their work related to prevalence of clinical encounters with alleged ritual abuse victims. Dr. Noblitt failed to mention that the paper specifically highlighted: (1) the lack of evidence for ritual abuse allegations, (2) the importance of social transmission of these concepts from therapist to client, (3) the general lack of skepticism evidenced by clinicians who encountered ritual abuse cases, and (4) the research team’s general conclusion that there is an overall lack of support for ritual abuse claims. Interestingly, Dr. Noblitt has self-published an edited volume (Noblitt & Noblitt, 2008) in which this same error is made by four different contributors: They cite the work of Dr. Bottoms and her colleagues as support for the existence of ritual abuse, when in fact their research demonstrated lack of support for ritual abuse. In this Topsy-Turvey world of pseudoscience, anything goes.

In 2007, Dr. Noblitt made a presentation at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, titled Use of Sodium Amytal in Psychological Diagnosis and Treatment. In a text accompanying the presentation, Dr. Noblitt describes “my own clinical experience conducting over 200 sodium amytal interviews” with patients who had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorders. The use of sodium amytal as a memory retrieval tool is highly controversial. As far back as 1994, Piper reviewed twelve published studies on the use of sodium amytal interviews, and concluded that there was substantial evidence of memory distortion, sometimes involving gross distortions of factual material. Furthermore, evidence exists that sodium amytal is highly suggestive (and addictive). In a number of court cases, memories refreshed by amytal were found inadmissible (e.g., Ramona v. Ramona, 1997) because it contaminates memory. The fact that Dr. Noblitt has frequently used a technique that is considered dangerous in both medical and legal circles, and that he has apparently used it on individuals suffering from dissociative identity disorder, is deeply disconcerting. This may very well fall into the purview of psychological treatments that cause harm (Lilienfeld, 2007).

In conclusion, Dr. Noblitt has demonstrated that: (1) he is uncritical of anyone whose views coincide with his own, (2) he is dismissive of “gold standard” scientific research that disconfirms his views, and (3) he misrepresents the scientific findings of others in an effort to advance his own agenda. These three points constitute an approach that is antithetical to the scientific accumulation of knowledge. Aspects of his clinical practice illustrated here further demonstrate that his beliefs and therapies fall far outside the mainstream of psychology and may have harmful effects for patients and others whom he considers to be victims of cult ritual abuse. His views are fringe views which only impede the efforts of the trier of fact, and may actually be overly prejudicial if presented to a jury.

Evan Harrington, Ph.D. March 18, 2013

Associate Professor

Research Ethics (IRB) Committee Chair, Chicago Campus

The Chicago School of Professional Psychology

Please refer to following pages for the list of social scientists in agreement with this Letter

We, the undersigned list of concerned social and behavioral scientists, agree that Dr. Noblitt’s views regarding ritual abuse, as illustrated in his trial testimony as well as his writings and speeches, as represented in this letter, are deeply problematic for the reasons outlined above. His opinions have been scientifically discredited, and are not shared by the vast majority of clinicians and researchers within the field of psychology.

 
David F. Bjorklund, Ph.D.
Professor
Editor, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
http://ees.elsevier.com/jecp
Department of Psychology
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, FL 33431
 
Maggie Bruck, Ph.D.
Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
550 North Broadway Suite 204
Baltimore, MD 21205
 
Terence W. Campbell, Ph.D., ABPP
Diplomate in Forensic Psychology
Private Practice
 
Stephen J. Ceci, Ph.D.
H. L. Carr Professor of Developmental Psychology
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
 
Frederick Crews, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus of English
University of California at Berkeley
636 Vincente Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94707
Author of The Memory Wars (1995)
 
Mary deYoung Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Grand Valley State University
Allendale, MI 49401
 
Elke Geraerts, associate professor
Institute for psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences,
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Burg Oudlaan 50
Rotterdam, the Netherlands
 
David S. Holmes, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
University of Kansas, Lawrence
Lawrence, KS 66045-7556
 
Mark L. Howe, Ph.D., CPsychol, FBPsS
Professor
Associate Editor, Developmental Review
Editor: Memory
Chair in Cognitive Science
Department of Psychology
City University, London
Northampton Square
London, EC1V 0HB United Kingdom
 
Professor Michael E. Lamb Ph.D
Department of Psychology
University of Cambridge Free School Lane
Cambridge CB2 3RQ, United Kingdom
Editor, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law
 
Richard A. Leo, Ph.D., J.D.
Professor of Law and
Dean’s Circle Research Scholar
University of San Francisco
15 Ashbury Terrace
San Francisco, CA 94117
 
Scott O. Lilienfeld, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Psychology
Emory University
Associate Editor, Journal of Abnormal Psychology
Psychology and Interdisciplinary Sciences Building
36 Eagle Row
Atlanta, GA 30322
 
D. Stephen Lindsay, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Psychology
University of Victoria
P.O. Box 3050 STN CSC
Victoria, B.C. V8W 3P5
 
Elizabeth Loftus, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor
Psychology & Social Behavior
Criminology, Law & Society
Cognitive Sciences
School of Law
University of California, Irvine
2393 Social Ecology II
Irvine, Calif. 92697-7080 USA
 
Kamala London, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
University of Toledo
2801 W Bancroft St Toledo, OH 43606
 
Steven Jay Lynn, Ph.D., ABPP (Clinical, Forensic)
Distinguished Professor, State University of New York
Inaugural Editor: Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and
Practice (APA)
Psychology Department
Binghamton University
Binghamton, NY 13902
 
Bradley D. McAuliff, J.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
California State University, Northridge
18111 Nordhoff Street
Northridge, CA 91330-8255
Associate Editor, Law and Human Behavior, journal of the American Psychology-Law
Society
 
Richard J. McNally, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
Harvard University
1230 William James Hall
33 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA 02138-2044
Web: http://mcnallylab.com
 
Amina Memon C Psychol FBPsS
Professor of Psychology
Royal Holloway University of London
Egham Hill
Surrey TW20 0EX
 
Harald Merckelbach, Ph. D.
Professor
Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience
Maastricht University, Maastricht
PO Box 616 6200 MD The Netherlands
 
Timothy E. Moore, PhD, C Psych
Associate Editor, Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice
Professor and Chair Department of Psychology
York University
Glendon College, York University
2275 Bayview Ave.
Toronto, Ontario Canada M4N 3M6
 
Debbie Nathan
Investigatory Journalist
Co-author (with Michael Snedekor) of Satan’s Silence
680 W. 204th St. #5B
New York, NY 10034
 
Richard J. Ofshe, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Socoiology
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-1980
 
Yael Orbach, Ph.D
Adjunct Scientist
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
(NICHD)
 
Loren Pankratz, Ph.D.
Clinical Professor
Department of Psychiatry
Oregon Health Science University
 
Kristine A. Peace, Ph.D.
Experimental Forensic Psychology
Assistant Professor and Honours Advisor
Department of Psychology
Grant MacEwan University
City Centre Campus, Rm 6-329H, 10700 – 104 Avenue
Edmonton, Alberta T5J 4S2
 
Harrison G. Pope Jr., M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School
Director, Biological Psychiatry Laboratory
McLean Hospital
Belmont, MA 02478
 
Russ Powell, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Grant MacEwan University
City Centre Campus, Rm 6-329H, 10700 – 104 Avenue
Edmonton, Alberta T5J 4S2
 
J. Don Read, Ph.D.
Professor
Director, Law and Forensic Psychology Program
Law and Psychology Area Coordinator
Simon Fraser University
RCB 5246-8888 University Drive
Burnaby BC, Canada V5A 1S6
 
James T. Richardson, J.D., Ph.D.
Foundation Professor of Sociology and Judicial Studies
Director, Grant Sawyer Center for Justice Studies
Director, Judicial Studies Program
Mail Stop 311
University of Nevada, Reno
Reno, NV 89557
 
Susan P. Robbins, Ph.D., LCSW
Associate Professor
University of Houston
Graduate College of Social Work
110HA Social Work Building Room 201
Houston, TX 77204-4013
 
Nadja Schreiber Compo, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Co-Director Legal Psychology Graduate Program
Florida International University
University Park Campus
DM-288
Miami, FL 33199
 
Matthew H. Scullin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
The University of Texas at El Paso
500 West University Avenue
El Paso, TX 79968
 
Carol Tavris, Ph.D.
Social psychologist, writer
Co-author (with Elliot Aronson) of Mistakes were made (but not by me)
and (with Carole Wade) of two leading textbooks in psychology
Editorial board, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Association for Psychological Science
1847 Nichols Canyon Road
Los Angeles, CA 9004
 
Jeffrey S. Victor, Ph.D.
Department of Sociology
State University of New York
Jamestown Community College
Jamestown, New York, 14701
 
Elaine F. Walker, Ph. D.
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Editor, Psychological Science in the Public Interest
Department of Psychology
Director, Development and Mental Health Program
36 Eagle Row
Emory University
Atlanta, Ga. 30322
 
Amye Richelle Warren, Ph.D.
Patricia Draper Obear Distinguished Teaching Professor
Department of Psychology
The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Chattanooga, TN 37403
 
Charles A. Weaver, III, Ph.D.
Professor Director of Undergraduate Studies
Dept. of Psychology & Neuroscience
Baylor University
One Bear Place 97334
Waco, TX 76798-7334
 
James M. Wood, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Psychology
University of Texas at El Paso
El Paso, TX 79968
 

References

Alloy, L.B., Riskind, J.H., & Manos, M.J. (2005). Abnormal psychology: Current perspectives (9th Ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill.

 Bottoms, B.L., & Davis, S.L. (1997). The creation of satanic ritual abuse. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 16, 112-132.

Bottoms, B.L., Shaver, P.R., & Goodman, G.S. (1996). An analysis of ritualistic and religion-related child abuse accusations. Law and Human Behavior, 20, 1-34.

Bruck, M., & Ceci, S.J. (1995). Amicus brief for the case of State of New Jersey v. Michaels presented by committee of concerned social scientists. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 1, 272-324.

Ceci, S.J., Ross, D.F., & Toglia, M.P. (1987). Age differences in suggestibility: Narrowing the uncertainties. In S.J. Ceci, D.F. Ross, & M.P. Toglia (Eds.), Children’s eyewitness memory (pp.79 – 91). New York: Springer-Verlag.

Ceci, S.J., Toglia, M., & Ross, D. (1990). The suggestibility of preschoolers’€™ recollections: Historical perspectives on current problems. In R. Fivush, & J. Hudson (Eds.), Knowing and remembering in young children (pp. 285 – 300). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Clancy, S.A., Schacter, D.L., McNally, R.J., & Pitman, R.K. (2000). False recognition in women reporting recovered memories of sexual abuse. Psychological Science, 11, 26-€“31.

Geraerts, E., Smeets, E., Jelicic, M., van Heerden, J., & Merckelbach, H. (2005). Fantasy proneness, but not self-reported trauma is related to DRM performance of women reporting recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Consciousness and Cognition, 14, 602-€“612.

Harrington, E. (1996). Conspiracy theories and paranoia: Notes from a mind-control conference. Skeptical Inquirer, 20, 35-42.

Harrington, E., Stone, A., & Guss, A. (2011). Sybil, Eve, and Miss Beauchamp: Dissociative identity disorder, recovered memories, and skepticism in abnormal psychology textbooks. Poster presented at the annual conference of the American Psychology-Law Society, Miami, FL.

Jenkins, P., & Maier-Katkin, D. (1991). Occult survivors: The making of a myth. In J.T. Richardson, J. Best, & D.G. Bromley (Eds). The Satanism scare (pp. 145 – 174). New York: Aldine DeGruyter.

 Lanning, K.V. (1989, October). Satanic, occult, ritualistic crime: A law enforcement perspective. The Police Chief, 62-83.

Lanning, K.V. (1991). Ritual abuse: A law enforcement view or perspective. Child Abuse & Neglect, 15, 171-173.

 Lanning, K.V. (1992, January). Investigator’s guide to allegations of €œritual child abuse. Quantico, VA: National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, FBI Academy.

Lilienfeld, S.O. (2007). Psychological treatments that cause harm. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2, 53-70.

Loftus, E., & Ketchum, K. (1991). Witness for the defense: The accused, the eyewitness, and the expert who puts memory on trial. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

McNally, R.J. (2003). Remembering trauma. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

McNally, R.J., Clancy, S.A., Barrett, H.M., & Parker, H.A. (2005). Reality monitoring in adults reporting repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 114, 147-152.

Mulhern, S. (1991). Satanism and psychotherapy: A rumor in search of an inquisition. In J.T.

Richardson, J. Best, & D.G. Bromley (Eds). The Satanism scare (pp. 145 – 174). New York: Aldine DeGruyter.

 Nathan, D. (1990, January 12). The ritual sex abuse hoax. The Village Voice.

Nathan, D. (1991). Satanism and child abuse: Constructing the ritual abuse scare. In J.T. Richardson, J. Best, & D.G. Bromley (Eds). The Satanism scare (pp. 75 – 94). New York: Aldine DeGruyter.

Noblitt, R. (2007a). An empirical look at the ritual abuse controversy. Retrieved from: http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/an-empirical-look-at-the-ritual-abuse-controversy22randy-noblitt-phd/

Noblitt, R. (2007b). Use of sodium amytal in psychological diagnosis and treatment. Paper presented at the 115th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, CA.

Noblitt, R., & Noblitt, P.P. (2008). Ritual abuse in the twenty-first century: Psychological, forensic, social, and political considerations. Bandon, OR: Robert D. Reed Publishers.

Piper, A. (1994). Amytal interviews and “recovered memories” of sexual abuse: A note. IPT Journal, 6. Retrieved from: http://www.ipt-forensics.com/journal/volume6/j6_1_3.htm

Poole, D.A., & Lindsay, S. (1995). Interviewing Preshoolers: Effects of nonsuggestive techniques, parental coaching and leading questions on reports of nonexperienced events, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 60, 129-154.

Rabinowitz, D. (1990, May). From the mouths of bases to a jail cell: Child abuse and the abuse of justice: A case study. Harpers, 280, 52 – 63.

Ramona v. Ramona (1997, 57 Cal.App.4th 107)

Victor, J.S. (1991). The dynamics of rumor-panics about Satanic cults. In J.T. Richardson, J. Best, & D.G. Bromley (Eds). The Satanism scare (pp. 221 – 236). New York: Aldine DeGruyter.

Castlewood Treatment Center. Photo: ABC News

The bizarre nature of the lawsuits created a minor, short-lived sensation among the national press at the times of their filings. The first, dated November 21, 2011 — Lisa Nasseff vs. Castlewood Treatment Center, LLC. — alleged to gross malpractice suffered while undergoing “treatment” at the St. Louis eating disorders clinic. To quote directly from the suit:

“defendant carelessly and negligently hypnotized plaintiff at a time when she was under the influence of various psychotropic medications and said hypnotic treatment directly caused or contributed to cause the creation, reinforcement, or increase in plaintiff’s mind, of false memories including the following:

a) Plaintiff suffered physical and sexual abuse;
b) Plaintiff suffered multiple rapes;
c) Plaintiff suffered satanic ritual abuse;
d) Plaintiff was caused to believe she was a member of a satanic cult and that she was involved in or perpetrated various criminal and horrific acts of abuse;
e) Plaintiff was caused to believe that she had multiple personalities at one time totaling twenty separate personalities.”

By November 09, 2012, four total lawsuits had been filed, all of a similar nature, all of which are still yet to go to trial. The allegations claim that among the false memories cultivated under the influence of Castlewood’s systematic narcosis “therapy” are disturbed, traumatizing delusions of ritual murder. No doubt, such “memories”, even when recognized as delusions, must exact a severe emotional toll, nor could the intentional cultivation of such delusions be considered anything but malpractice.

(The four lawsuits represent only some patients who now recognize their “memories” of abuse as false. Numerous families — some having started an online support network under the name of Castlewood Victims Unite — claim that they may have forever lost their daughters to false memories of Ritual Abuse that have caused them to withdraw from contact, and reason, entirely.)

But how could such delusions be cultivated in the course of treatment for eating disorders, and for what purpose? According to the allegations, it seems, the theory at Castlewood is (or was) that eating disorders signify outer manifestations of inner repressed traumas of abuse.

“Repressed”, of course, is to say that the patient does not consciously remember the traumatic event(s). Treatments based on these assumptions always seem to rely on bringing these presumed traumas out into conscious scrutiny. This, we are told, is the only way to neutralize them… the only way to end the outer symptoms these hidden traumas are believed to cause.

Is it credible to think that the co-founders of Castlewood, Mark Schwartz and his wife Lori Galperin — both internationally recognized experts in eating disorders, and both implicated in the suits — could have been reckless enough to lead vulnerable and medicated patients to cultivate absurd delusions of satanic cult abuse, or is something else going on?

In fact, wherever the idea of “repressed memories” and multiple personalities rears its ugly, debunked head, unhinged “memories” of imagined abuse are never far behind. Throughout the 80s and 90s, internationally recognized experts in trauma and dissociation (such as Richard Kluft and Colin Ross) promoted a deranged conspiracy theory of satanic cult abuse based upon accounts that had been “recovered” by their clients. Multiple investigations debunked the narrative of these accounts entirely, and it became quite clear what was really going on: an irresponsible and unscientific therapeutic practice was being employed to encourage vulnerable mental health consumers to confabulate memories of abuse — and then, in many cases, further encouraged them to insistently believe them. These confabulations, not-so-remarkably, had an enormously high probability of validating the therapist’s assumptions, regardless of how improbable those assumptions may have been.

In parallel to the satanic ritual abuse scare (now known to sociologists as the “Satanic Panic”) the exact same theories of memory retrieval brought us the mythology of alien abduction. Believing they had developed a check-list of probable symptoms of extraterrestrial contact that had subsequently been concealed from memory, “abductologists” used the same techniques employed by multiple personality specialists to draw forth elaborate narratives involving interplanetary visitors.

Interestingly, some professionals of abductology have found, in their probing explorations of their clients’ concealed “memories”, that the extraterrestrials are here to help us — they occasionally intervene in our affairs, but only on our behalf, and with unconditional benevolence and love. This contrasts heavily with narratives revealing a nefarious plot of oddly anal-centric human vivisection and exploitation. Why the discrepancy? I have personally sought out and interviewed a number of the top names in alien abduction research with this very question. In every instance, the answer has been the same: the other guys are doing the therapy wrong. They are interpreting “screen memories” improperly, or they are interpreting fear of the unknown as malice on the part of the extraterrestrials. Both sides assert that if only the other was to “dig deeper”, they would find the truth.

Incidentally, I attended a lecture, just last month, given by one Richard Schwartz, former member of Castlewood’s clinical staff, and creator of a therapy model, used at the Castlewood treatment center, called Internal Family Systems (IFS). IFS asserts that we all have multiple personalities, called “parts”, and by understanding and reconciling these parts, we may find inner peace. Some parts are destructive (suicidal, self-undermining, irrational, etc.) and it is the therapist’s job to find those parts and understand what distresses them individually.

During a Question & Answer segment of Dr. Schwartz’s presentation, I raised my hand:

Q: I worry about the distinction between getting people to recognize naturally occurring “parts” and being blamed [as a therapist] for causing people to contextualize themselves into parts to the point where you’re blamed for [creating] destructive parts. And I know there’s an eating disorders clinic that was using IFS and has lawsuits against it now. I was wondering if they could have done things differently [in their utilization of IFS therapy], or if that’s just a professional hazard?

Dick Schwartz: You know… that one’s a tough one, because what I’ve done — early in my career what I’ve done… The lawsuit’s around false memories — that whole movement’s come back some. Early in my career I had a client who went through all these cult memories. You know, I was really into it. Did some investigating, checked things out. And then, one session, we found a part that was generating all this to keep my interest because I had seen (some interest in her[?]) I’m very, very careful to never lead people toward any kind of… never presume what’s going to come out as they do their own witnessing. Even in ways — when something scary comes out — something like that — [I] say, well, we can’t really know whether this is true or not, but it is what the part needs to show so we’re going to go with it for now and later you can evaluate it, whether it’s true or not. So, it’s not just IFS, but any therapy that goes deep with people will come upon that phenomenon… and not everybody is careful in… those… realms…

Just as with alien abduction, one can always “dig deeper” in the context of IFS so as to re-narrate the entire tale. How do licensed professionals fall for this rubbish? The lecture I attended was delivered to a full-house of professional, credulous rubes in the mental health profession.

In 2009 I attended a “Ritual Abuse/Mind-Control conference” held annually in Connecticut by an organization known as S.M.A.R.T. (Stop Mind-control And Ritual abuse Today). The conference is organized by a licensed Mental Health professional, Neil Brick, from Massachusetts. A vendor booth at the conference was selling electromagnetic-beam blocking hats, and one of the speakers casually lectured us about mind-control and “demonic harmonics”, which “involves using musical tones and quantum physics to open up portals into the spiritual realms.” Brick himself claims to have recovered memories that he was a brainwashed assassin for the satanic cult conspiracy within the Illuminati-controlled CIA. Theories of repressed trauma are used to support the notion that if this type of lunacy can be “recalled”, so too must it all be true.

The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) hosts professional conferences where the debunked diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) (now referred to in the American Psychiatric Association’s [APA] Diagnostic & Statistical Manual [DSM] as Dissociative Identity Disorder) is discussed and elaborated upon. Their last conference found a regular speaker from the annual S.M.A.R.T. conferences co-delivering a lecture on “Ritual Abuse”, a slightly euphemistic term for the conspiracy theory of satanic cult abuse.

The task force chair of the 4th edition of the DSM, Dr. Allen Frances, has recently admitted to the Wall Street Journal that MPD/DID is “complete bunk”, yet the diagnosis remains in the current 5th edition, rolled-out only last week, of the revised DSM. This refusal to acknowledge the harmful realities regarding some of their imaginary disorders surely played a role in the National Institute of Mental Health’s (NIMH) decision, announced early this month, to abandon the DSM altogether, along with a statement recognizing that “patients with mental disorders deserve better.”

Indeed they do. The APA must bear responsibility for enabling the quackery endorsed by the ISSTD, who must bear some responsibility for lending any credibility to the delusional assertions of S.M.A.R.T.

…And Richard Schwartz’s IFS must bear some responsibility for the allegations against Castlewood… and Castlewood must bear responsibility for Mark Schwartz and Lori Galperin.

New evidence suggests that Castlewood is trying to distance themselves from that responsibility as much as possible. Both Mark Schwartz and Lori Galperin were recently removed entirely from the Castlewood staff shortly after depositions were taken regarding the malpractice suits. Whether they were allowed to abruptly resign, or were outright fired is unclear at this time.

If the accusations against Schwartz and his wife prove true, let us hope they never practice again… But let us also understand, the problem is far bigger than the both of them, and it is a long way from being resolved.

More on Castlewood, by journalist Ed Cara, can be read here:http://www.dysgenics.com/author/ed/

I write this letter to you with little hope of conveying information of which you were previously unaware. Rather, I write this letter so that the general public may be made aware of what you should already be well aware of, in hopes that they may appropriately measure your credibility following your forthcoming broadcast* related to the topic of an alleged satanic cult conspiracy — an episode which promises to be full of misinformation, delusions, harmful false accusations, and lies.

Specifically, it has come to my attention that you will be airing an interview with Judy Byington, author of a book entitled Twenty-Two Faces which purports to be the true story of one Jenny Hill, an alleged victim of the bizarre and controversial psychiatric condition known as Dissociative Identity Disorder [DID] (formerly listed as Multiple Personality Disorder [MPD]).

However dubious the legitimacy of DID, this diagnosis is by far the least of the problems with Byington’s book. Twenty-Two Faces is openly rife with archaic demonologies, and paranoid conspiracy theories being presented as root causes to the disturbances in Ms. Hill’s troubled mind. That Jenny Hill — a former drug addict and prostitute with a history of mental illness — is troubled seems indisputable, but Byington’s book seeks to expose an alleged satanic government plot behind Hill’s mental malaise that is tantamount to speculation upon who, exactly, is beaming voices into the heads of schizophrenics. Such an ignorant approach to therapeutic practice is harmful to mental health consumers, and your endorsement of such can hardly be of any positive value to your viewers.

The broader harm to the public mental health in endorsing a story as laden with paranoid delusion as Twenty-Two Faces — especially insofar as it is a narrative specifically appealing to the mentally vulnerable — should be clear to a doctor of Clinical Psychology like yourself. In fact, as recently as the 1980’s (and extending into the 90s), stories of non-existent satanic cults — upon which Byington has based her unhinged claims — caused a modern witch-hunt now known to sociologists as the “Satanic Panic”. Books foundational to this panic, and thematically identical to Twenty-Two Faces — particularly Michelle Remembers by Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith, and Satan’s Underground by Lauren Stratford — were soundly and thoroughly debunked by investigative journalists. Unfortunately, these debunkings only arrived after sensational talk-shows, promoting these books uncritically, helped create a moral panic that ruined families, resulted in false convictions of satanic crimes, and exploited the most irrational fears of countless mental health consumers. Both of these books are listed in Byington’s bibliography, despite their debunkings, and despite the fact the Satan’s Underground was so thoroughly discredited as to be withdrawn from publication… following which the author changed her name and abandoned her story of Satanic Ritual Abuse to instead pose as a childhood victim of the Holocaust.

Among the supernatural claims put forward in Twenty-Two Faces we have:

• Prophecy: The protagonist’s birth is foretold by her uncle in exacting detail. Through some other-worldly messenger he is “told” that “this was a special child who would do important things on this earth.”
• Extra Sensory Perception (ESP): apparently believing that child abuse can prove beneficial to the victim (a position I hope you disagree with), author Judy Byington describes that the protagonist, Jenny Hill, was able to break through certain subliminal barriers, not in spite of, but because of, early humiliations. “In the far reaches of her brain a storehouse of demeaning events evidently opened a door for Extra Sensory Perception experiences to enter.”
• Divine guidance: desperate and in prayer, Jenny Hill hears “a soft, yet thundering voice”, which urges her to “continue to write down your life experiences, for one day a book will be written.”
• Levitation: Byington describes a cult “filled with Black Magic, levitation, seances and chanting people”. Jenny Hill is admonished at one point that “[l]evitation and evil spirits weren’t anything to mess around with and certainly not worth the price it [sic] would extract.”
• Divine intervention: In the midst of a Satanic ceremony in which she is bound to an altar, Jenny Hill is spared from sacrifice by a bare-footed “white-robed male personage, surrounded in a glorious White Light”. (Had this “personage” taken a little effort to arrive just a moment earlier, he could have spared the unlucky girl next to Hill, who is said to have been decapitated… but I’m sure His schedule is as busy as His ways mysterious.)
• Spirit Possession: Making clear that possession isn’t merely a more primitive cultural interpretation of DID, Byington describes that Hill has suffered both DID and spirit possession, the latter being cured by the prayers of LDS church officials.

Any one of these topics would be a bit much for one episode, and each of these remarkable claims demands remarkable evidence. So what evidence does Byington provide? Incredibly, Twenty-Two Faces seems to rely solely on the “memories of [Jenny Hill’s] multiple personalities and their entries in diaries written since childhood”, as Byington describes in the book’s opening disclaimer. These memories were “repressed”, only recalled later in Ms. Hill’s life in the course of re-integrating her various fractured identities. Setting aside the fact that “recovered memories” similarly serve as the “evidentiary” basis for claims of Extraterrestrial abductions and past life regression, is it appropriate — in your professional opinion as a (former) Clinical Psychologist — to accept such extraordinary claims merely on personal testimony? Do you think it’s appropriate, Dr. Phil, to air fear-mongering claims of an anti-human, ubiquitous secret society on the “evidence” of such an unlikely anecdote?

Even looking past the supernatural propositions, Byington’s book is fraught with inconsistencies, among which we find:

• Twenty-Two Faces is said to have been constructed from “memories of [Jenny Hill’s] multiple personalities and their entries in diaries written since childhood”, a claim which makes no sense when considering that Jenny Hill is supposed to have been entirely ignorant of the existence of her multiple personalities until having entered psychiatric therapy in later adulthood. How, then, did she account for various unknown individuals writing their own personal, signed entries in her own private diaries consistently throughout her life?
• Twenty-Two Faces describes that Jenny Hill was oppressed by an unlikely Jewish Nazi who worshipped Satan and was brought to the US from Germany under CIA sponsorship. Ludicrous as this alone is, Byington explains that this over-dramatized villain is careful to conceal his antics from Jenny Hill’s parents — returning her home on-time for supper, making sure her chores are finished before compelling her to return — yet we also learn later that Hill’s parents were in on the whole thing throughout.
• We are made to understand that Hill begins to experience “lost time” at the age of 4, when her abuse is said to have begun. The lost time is accounted for as episodes during which other personalities took over her consciousness so that Hill might not be troubled with the terrors of the abuse she began suffering at that age. Such episodes, starting at such an early age, would establish an expectation of occasionally lost time, or an acceptance on the part of the protagonist that she had never quite grasped what time is. Not so with Ms. Hill. Not only did she fully grasp the cultural context and broad implications of the depravities that are said to have befallen her at age 4, she is also uncannily aware of the dates and times that eluded her at an age when most children are unable to properly read a clock. Does this match with your own knowledge of childhood cognitive development, Dr. Phil?
• Hill learns, by means of “recovered memories” that she was raped by her father. She invites her parents to her psychiatric hospital, where she is an in-patient, so that she may accuse him. Apparently heartbroken and outraged, her father storms out. The inconsistency occurs some pages later when it is reported that Hill was saddened to not be invited over for the following Family Christmas.

You should be aware of serious problems with Byington’s book — the inconsistencies, improbabilities, and supernatural propositions — not least because you should be aware of the book’s contents before you endorse such material on your show, but also because I personally reached out to your producers to warn you of them. Your producers were surely also warned regarding Byington’s problematic narrative when in contact with Jenny Hill’s sister, who was also asked to appear on your show along with Mrs. Byington. Apparently, your producers — doing “entertainment” at the expense of good psychology — chose to ignore us both.

The material above covers some problems that any rational person could pick out merely from reading the book, but there are further problems with Twenty-Two Faces that are apparent to anybody who bothers to do a little research:

• The book carries an endorsement from Robert Kroon, an esteemed former foreign correspondent for Time Magazine. However, Kroon had been dead for over 5 years at the time of Twenty-Two Faces’ publication. Suspiciously, Tate Publishing, the publisher of Twenty-Two Faces, uses a similar endorsement, allegedly from Kroon, on another book published 2 years after his death.
• Judy Byington has not had a license to practice therapy in around 10 years, yet she explicitly describes continuing to conduct therapy sessions with Jenny Hill only months ago (listen to this interview at 15:45: http://kcpw.org/blog/cityviews/2012-08-07/cityviews-8812-one-woman-multiple-personalitiesbullets-and-belles/). Judy Byington also offers “therapy” over the phone or via Skype at $25 per session. Do you, Dr. Phil, endorse this type of unlicensed, not to mention grossly irrational, “therapy”?
• Jenny Hill remains mentally tormented and has a history of bearing false witness. Twenty-Two Faces describes an episode in which Jenny Hill fled from Judy Byington for a time believing that she had observed “the mark of cain” somewhere on Byington, indicated that Byington was involved, somehow, with satanic cults… yet it never seems to have occurred to Byington that any other paranoid claims of Jenny’s may have been rooted in suspicious delusion, rather than fact. In a very telling exchange (that can be read here: http://dysgenicsreport.blogspot.com/2012/10/replies-to-22-faces-claims-hard.html#more) Jenny Hill’s sister questioned Byington regarding why it is Byington unquestioningly believes many of Jenny’s unprovable claims, while knowing that Jenny has made various unfounded claims in apparent fits of panicked paranoia: “Did you believe her when she said your husband was coming on to her sexually? I have heard that allegation too many times about other men to take it seriously. […] [H]ow many times has she called you in the middle of the night to come rescue her from some drama only to find her asleep and not knowing she had called or claiming she was being held hostage and you come with police to find her watching TV[?] …” Judy Byington proved unwilling or unable to answer these questions of Jenny Hill’s sister. Was she able to answer such questions of you? Did you even ask? If not, why not? These facts were available to you before you filmed your interview with Mrs. Byington.

I hardly expect to see that you have asked any difficult, yet terribly obvious, questions of Judy Byington in your soon-to-be-aired interview, as Byington’s own website now proudly displays your endorsement:

“Dear Judy,

Thank you for taking the time to come to our show. I wish you great success with your book documenting the life of Jenny Hill and look forward to working with you in the future. God Bless!

Dr. Phil, Paramount Pictures Hollywood”

That this makes you complicit in purveying a delusional conspiracy theory is unfortunate, but hardly disputable. Judy Byington herself makes clear that she considers Dissociative Identity Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder synonymous with Satanic Ritual Abuse, and you can hardly talk to her about one without addressing the other. To be clear, when Judy Byington talks of multiplicity and dissociative trauma, she is talking about a debunked conspiracy theory of satanic mind-control plots. That you should give such hysterical claims air-time — allowing a conspiracy theory to be presented as a diagnosis — on your widely viewed show is beyond irresponsible. It makes you a menace to the public mental health.

I have no illusion that you will correct your errors, or that you might pull the episode before it airs. Rather, I am simply posting this time-stamped letter to you here — which I will also send to you directly — so that neither you, nor your producers, may possibly claim ignorance in the near future when Judy Byington meets with the critical assault that will inevitably follow when sensible people see fit to read her work. I want it to be perfectly clear, now and in the future, that all the facts were available to you at all times. It is my feeling that your credibility should greatly suffer, and it is my wish that you should soon find yourself as bankrupt financially as you are ethically.

    Acrimoniously yours,

        Douglas Mesner

        www.process.org

 *Note, original reports stated that this episode would air October 31, 2012. As of October 27, this episode is not on Dr. Phil’s broadcasting schedule. Hopefully, Phil wises up and pulls the interview entirely, however, yesterday Judy Byington left a comment online that the episode should air “soon”. This open letter has been slightly modified to reflect the sudden uncertainty of the broadcast date.

“I just don’t understand it”, Gunderson stated in an interview from “an undisclosed southwestern city” while on the run from his would-be assassins. “I thought they (the FBI) would help me. Instead… they’re trying to destroy me.”

The FBI, Gunderson asserted, was assisting in having him silenced for exposing the collusion between a satanic cult and the United States Army in a high profile triple homicide — ritual murder, by Gunderson’s account — involving a mother and her 2 daughters at Fort Bragg United States Army installation in North Carolina.

It all sounded unbelievable, but what separated him from countless other suspected delusives of the paranoid kind was that Gunderson, a private investigator, himself was a 27 year veteran of the Bureau who had headed three regional offices, serving three directors from J. Edgar Hoover to Judge William Webster. He was, in fact, an impressively credentialed G-man whose retirement party in 1979 had drawn an elite crowd of over 600. His book, How to Locate Anyone Anywhere, included endorsement blurbs from Johnny Carson and even President Gerald R. Ford, who took the opportunity to publicly congratulate Gunderson on “his fine career.”

…Yet, there he was, implicating the Bureau in anti-American — even anti-human — crimes, informing the Associated Press that he had been brutally reduced to “living from a suitcase and associating with criminals in a lifestyle that [was] a stark contrast to his decorated career […]”[3]

Naturally, suspicions were aroused (publicly expressed by associates of Ted’s on various online sites) when it was learned that Gunderson had been declared dead on July 31st, 2011, allegedly from complications related to cancer… and only just under 30 years from the time he revealed that the FBI was trying to have him silenced. Prematurely robbed of his dissenting voice at the age of 83.

…Admittedly, 30 years is long time to wait to have a man silenced. Long enough, in fact, that he should have been able to disclose everything proprietary in that time. And, conceded, 83 is a bit of an old age to claim premature death, especially when the 83 year-old in question did in fact have cancer. But in order to understand the “suspicions” surrounding Gunderson’s death, it is important to understand the whole of the Ted Gunderson story, to appreciate the shadow of fear, the miasma of paranoid discontent that he so actively engendered throughout his life. In the world of Ted Gunderson, every seemingly arbitrary idiosyncrasy, every obscure sign constructed from the random held signification aimed inexorably toward one unifying narrative.

Indisputable though his credentials were, the believability of his accusations against the FBI were routinely diluted by the innumerable bombastic conspiracist claims he would make throughout the years. In his post-FBI career as a Private Investigator, Ted commented on numerous high-profile cases, often — if not always — taking a minority or deeply implausible view, always benefiting from his professional past, never disadvantaged by the sheer number of unlikely or outright impossible conspiracies he subscribed to, never left any the poorer for any instance in which he was grievously and demonstrably entirely wrong (such as in the case of his hysterical bandwagon apocalyptic “Y2K” fear-mongering)[4].

Though his name is virtually unknown outside the hardcore conspiracy fringe, Ted Gunderson will live on in the enduring suspicions he sowed — in each case he explored as a private investigator — of deeper, more sinister plots at play behind-the-scenes. Where hysteria spread, he went to legitimize irrational fears in the FBI’s name. Many of those infected with his paranoia remain, still today, invested in his dystopian vision. Trying to cope in the wake of unfathomable crimes committed in their midst, vulnerable minds gravitated to the delusional narratives Gunderson supported which, while claiming to confront the stark horror of “reality”, offered a comfortably tidy narrative, linear and coherent, where demarcations between Good and Evil are unmistakably clear, and nothing occurs without purpose. In Gunderson’s hands, an infamous murder became the work of Satanists sanctioned by demonic government forces — the confusion created by his investigation still causing for controversy and suspicion. With his late intervention, the debunked McMartin preschool Satanic Ritual Abuse panic is revived for true believers who hold firm to an appearance of tenability founded on Gunderson’s claim that, with the aid of an archaeologist, he had unearthed secret tunnels underneath the site of the school where barbarous, sadistic rituals had been enacted. Gunderson’s investigation of fraud at a credit union in Nebraska predictably revealed a Satanic plot extending to the highest reaches of the government, creating another panic that also retains unshakable believers today.

Gunderson claimed to have personally verified that the U.S. Government knew in advance of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, yet allowed it to happen; he claimed insider knowledge of the truth behind the JFK assassination; 9/11, he was likewise certain, was an inside job… as was the 1993 World Trade Center bombing… as was the Oklahoma City Bombing; Children were being bused to the infamous extraterrestrial holding facility of Area 51 where they have been brain-washed and sold into sexual slavery; musician Sonny Bono was murdered by government hit-men for knowing too much; sitcom actor Gary Coleman, too, was murdered; actor David Carradine? Murdered by transsexual prostitutes… etc., and on and on. Every event, it seemed, was enacted at the behest of some sinister secret committee.

In theory, and at best (if one were to attempt to justify him), Gunderson practiced something of a criminological transcendental metaphysics, seeking the very source of crime itself in each individual crime he devoted his attention to, seeing them all tied to an all-pervasive network of evil. In practice, he was more of a ride-along observer to the shifting paranoid folklore panics of his times put forth by moral crusaders, modern witch-hunters, and outright con-men (and women) who benefited from attaching the prestige of a former G-man’s endorsement to whatever implausible conspiracy narrative they happened to be selling. Everywhere he appeared, in every opinion he spoke, there was attached the “former FBI” stamp of credibility, the idea that Ted Gunderson was a highly trained and specialized crime fighter with an ability to connect seemingly disparate threads of evidence unseen by the common observer.

Sensationalist journalism quoting from him almost universally described Gunderson only as a former FBI man, even long after he had become an obvious caricature, a public paranoid for hire. Ted was still simply a respected former FBI man even after decades of attaching his expertise to the furthest-flung theories of world-wide Illuminati/Masonic/Satanic/Zionist conspiracies. Throughout the moral panic of the 1980s – 1990s regarding Satanic cults thought to be subverting Christian-American lives, he would regularly appear on daytime talk shows warning of the insidious influence of Heavy Metal music and ubiquitous subliminal urgings being silently forced upon impressionable youthful minds. Even as late as 2007, long after any cursory research into his background should have revealed him to be a delirious source of (at best) unreliable information, famed CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper invoked Gunderson’s expertise in defense of alleged “psychic” Sylvia Browne in the face of criticisms presented by professional debunker and skeptical author, James Randi:

Cooper: […] James, you’ve actually called Sylvia Browne a villain.

We spoke to Ted Gunderson, who’s a retired senior special agent in charge of the FBI in Los Angeles. He’s worked with Sylvia Browne, and he says — he says he’s worked with her quite a bit. And he said this about her. He says, quote, “I’ve worked with numerous psychics in the past and very few are really on target, but Sylvia Browne is probably one of the most accurate psychics in the country.”

Now, that’s from a former senior FBI official. Are you saying he’s wrong?[5]

*********

Gunderson’s entry into the Federal Bureau of Investigations was inauspicious, his probationary appointment as a special agent in 1951 — at a per annum salary of $5,500 — the result of a seemingly whimsical letter dashed off to the Bureau at the age of 23. (“A friend of mine got a job with the FBI […],” Ted would explain, “I decided if he could do it I could too. Six weeks later, I was in training school.”[6]):

Gentlemen:

I am under the basic requirement of being twenty-five years of age but most people consider me to be twenty-six or twenty-seven.

If a person has the outward appearance of being twenty-five and can fulfill the many other requirements, why shouldn’t he be considered for a position?

If at all possible, I would like to be considered as an applicant.

Yours very truly,

Ted L. Gunderson

Gunderson’s personnel file reveals a pre-FBI academic record with no background in either Criminology or Law. A graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration[7] from the University of Nebraska, his advisor described Gunderson as “somewhat lazy” during the prerequisite Bureau background interviews, though an assistant professor assured the FBI that Ted was “by no means” lazy… He simply “did not excel”. Ted was an “average” student — “321st out of a class of 478” — working as a ham salesman for Hormel in Dearborn, Michigan, at the time in which he submitted his application letter to the Bureau.[8]

“Selling hams was alright,” Ted reminisced in a 1975 interview while acting as Special Agent in Charge for the Memphis, Tennessee Bureau office, “but I love this job.”

Indeed, the job was good to him, and he had nothing critical to say about the Bureau while in its active employ. Gunderson’s file is full of commendations for his meticulously neat appearance, as well as letters that he himself would routinely send to whomever was acting Director at the time, gushingly complimenting them for their stoic leadership and unwavering fortitude.

Gunderson steadily eased his way up the promotional chain of Bureau command before ultimately acting as Special Agent in Charge for the offices in Memphis, Dallas, and Los Angeles until his retirement in 1979.

Throughout his career, Gunderson was a vociferous defender of the not-always-popular Bureau, acting as their spokesman to media during the Watergate scandal and amid criticisms of unconstitutional counterintelligence activities that took place throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

The slick, wavy-haired, broad-shouldered, cigar-chomping Gunderson struck journalists as affable, if abrupt. According to Ted, America had been endlessly besieged by subversive enemies from within. The FBI, it seemed, was the only thing between Us and Them.

Defending the FBI’s use of Civil Liberty violating investigation techniques, such as wiretapping, mail opening, and surreptitious entries, he would claim, “When we had the counterintelligence effort called Cointelpro going in the ‘50s and ‘60s, [these methods] helped break the backs of people dropping bombs everywhere and wrecking millions of dollars worth of property. Extreme tactics were needed if we were to stop them.”

“If [the FBI] had not taken an aggressive approach in the early ‘60s when [revolutionaries] took over the college campuses […] the loss [of life and property] would have been greater than it was.”[9]

Amid the uproar following revelations of the FBI’s clandestine surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King — including placing a bug in the civil rights leader’s hotel room in hopes of catching him committing potentially stigmatizing deeds — Gunderson explained that, here too, the FBI had acted appropriately: “One of [King’s] top advisors had been identified as a communist,” he stated.[10]

Responding to criticisms leveled against the Los Angeles FBI office while under his personal command for its alleged harassment and unconcealed surveillance of a visiting Chinese scholar at UCLA, he tersely informed reporters of their duty to assume any FBI activity to be sanctioned and just. “You just have to take our word for it,” he’s quoted, “If it’s our investigation, it’s a legitimate surveillance.”[11]

Hinting at a conspiracist mindset established prior to his ignoble post-FBI private investigations career, an interview from 1978 reports that “Gunderson said that the element that has wanted to overthrow the government has always been present but that the Vietnam war gave this element a cause. He added that the element still exists today.”[12] In 1977 (and in what would become a recurring theme), he alleged plots against his life, claiming to be the target of death threats from the Black Panthers, as well as a target of hit-men working on the behalf of Soviet spies in New York.[13]

In a letter to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner published 17 January, 1979, Gunderson seems to have finally over-stepped his professional boundaries in suggesting that the then-current Attorney General Guidelines were hampering investigations, thereby presenting a threat to National Security. This provoked a phone call on behalf of director Webster in which Gunderson was educated upon Webster’s own views on adhering to, and supporting, domestic security guidelines. This in turn provoked a letter to Webster from an impassioned Gunderson, dated 7 February, insisting upon an expansion of investigative latitude: “Individual rights are of the utmost importance,” he grudgingly conceded, “but some of our citizens are going to have their individual rights blasted off the face of the earth if our intelligence community does not gird its loins ‘with the laudable purpose of prevention’ rather than collecting evidence afterwards.” Now, Gunderson was saying, is the time to bring the fight to the Enemy. “I urgently request that you lend an unbiased ear to a field commander who daily witnesses Agent frustration and overcautiousness. These men and women fear they might overstep the guidelines or find themselves powerless to protect their sources from disclosure. Hesitancy is not a historic earmark of a Special Agent of the FBI.”

Clearly unmoved, Webster replied 26 February stating, “I believe at this time we are able to work within [the Attorney General guidelines] and, therefore, no modifications are necessary.”

Just a week and a half later, 06 March 1979, Gunderson announced his retirement.[14]

*********

By Ted’s own account, it wasn’t until his first major case as a private investigator following his retirement in 1979 that he learned “what was going on”.

“I had no idea about the Illuminati [before then]”, he would explain…. “I [didn’t] know anything about Satanism. I read about it in the Bible, of course, but that’s about it…” [15]

The break-through investigation that he refers to was the highly publicized, still controversial Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald case. It was the same ground-breaking investigation that he would later claim had first put him on the FBI’s hit-list.

The MacDonald case was already 10 years old by the time Gunderson became an investigator for the defense in 1980. And today, over 40 years after the crime, there is still bitter and divisive controversy over whether or not Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald himself is guilty of slaying his pregnant wife and 2 daughters in their bedrooms at their home on Fort Bragg, or if — as MacDonald claims — the savage slaughterings were committed by a Manson Family-like cult of narcotic crazed hippies. The facts of the case are generally available, having inspired a best-selling book and television movie, so the details will not be belabored here… Whatever the evidence may indicate of the actual sequence of events in the MacDonald household that fatal night in 1970, Gunderson certainly did little to clear the confusion with his own bizarre “investigation”, instigated at the behest of friends of the convicted MacDonald.

He would claim that he was adamant that he would not have worked for MacDonald if he had found credible evidence of MacDonald’s guilt. But at an hourly rate of $100, Gunderson reportedly decided within 24 hours of accepting the job that MacDonald had been “railroaded”.[16]

His “investigation”, such as it was, focused on a drug-addicted mentally disturbed daughter of a lieutenant colonel, Helena Stoeckley — located in nearby Fayetteville at the time of the murders — who had previously been pointed to as a possible suspect. Interviewed twice about the murders by the army’s Criminal Investigation Division, Stoeckley’s testimony had been deemed worthless prior to Gunderson’s involvement.

Stoeckley had since married and relocated to South Carolina. According to Vanity Fair magazine[17], Gunderson, “[a]cting on this intelligence […] secured MacDonald’s approval to dispatch a Canadian psychic, the notion being that her paranormal powers would put Stoeckley on an airliner. Stoeckley proved resistant, however, even after the psychic told her that she’d ‘fallen in love’ with MacDonald and that the psychic could ‘foresee a beautiful life’ for her—if she aided in clearing his name.”

Upon securing Stoeckley for questioning, according to another former FBI agent assisting Gunderson, there was an “element of duress” in the following interrogations wherein Gunderson resorted to “unethical means and tactics in a very important case”. In fact, his “interview” tactic oscillated between applied duress and promised rewards of lucrative book and movie deals for Stoeckley’s story.

“Assured that she’d be resettled in California with a new house, job, and identity—even a part in the forthcoming movie—Stoeckley signed a statement not only implicating herself in the murders but naming five other killers (later referred to as “Black Cult” members) as well.”[18] Predictably, under Gunderson’s influence, Stoeckley would go into hiding for fear of her life following the confession.[19]

Stoeckley’s story didn’t match with events as MacDonald described them, nor was it corroborated with the available evidence, despite Gunderson’s feeling that it must have been. According to CBS News: “When [Stoeckley] told her story, Gunderson says he believed her. ‘Because she said that she tried to ride the rocking horse in the small bedroom … and she tried to get on it and she couldn’t because the spring was broken.’”:

“Asked why that would be significant, Gunderson says, ‘Because the only people that knew that spring was broken on the rocking horse was the family, the MacDonald family.’

But 1970 crime scene photos, recently obtained by [CBS television documentary and news program] 48 Hours from the Department of Justice, seem to show that none of the springs on the toy horse were broken.”[20]

Worse, Stoeckley’s confession named five male co-perpetrators, all of whom denied involvement, none of whom could be connected to the scene of the crime, and one of whom had an unshakable alibi: he had been in jail on the night in question.[21]

Stoeckley herself would alternate between embellishing upon, and outright recanting, the confession, but this hardly seemed to matter to Gunderson. For the rest of his life he would point to the MacDonald case and the disregarded confession of Helena Stoeckley as evidence of the United States Army’s involvement in a world-wide Satanic cult crimes cover-up. Though Gunderson claimed it wasn’t until the MacDonald case that he was awoken to the presence of Satanic conspiracy, it seems he immediately grasped the magnitude of the situation. The Satanic threat was imperiling the lives, freedom, and very humanity of good citizens worldwide.

Convinced that the FBI had undermined his investigation into the MacDonald murders and was actively working to destroy his reputation, Gunderson wrote a letter to President Reagan in 1985 pleading executive intervention. The President’s counsel forwarded his letter to the Deputy Attorney General advising “no continuing interest in the matter.”[22] In July 1987, Gunderson sent a rather disjointed letter to Arizona Senator John McCain warning of subversive Satanic cult activities with enclosures of documentary proof: a booklet entitled Satanic Cults — Missing Children, and a New York Post article from earlier that same month about former CIA agent-turned-whistleblower, Philip Agee. The Satanists, Gunderson disclosed, were executing “kidnappings […], human and animal sacrifices, illicit drug and other criminal activity […].” The connection to Agee –who was “obviously a turncoat K.G.B agent who should [have been] in prison”, by Gunderson’s reckoning — was clear: “[…] the Soviets are involved to a degree in the Satanic Cult movement in this country.” McCain forwarded Gunderson’s materials to the Department of Justice for investigation. The DOJ’s letter of reply to Senator McCain assured him that, furnished with any evidence of “violations falling within [the DOJ’s] jurisdiction”, they would surely investigate all available leads. However, “the information Mr. Gunderson has provided […] regarding ‘Satanic Cults’ has been in generalities and nothing relating to specific incidents other than the Jeffrey MacDonald case.”[23]

Gunderson contributed heavily to a general moral panic regarding allegations of Satanic Ritual Abuse and he inspired localized uproars with allegations specific to certain communities. Such was the case when, in 1989, he boldly alleged on the Geraldo show that Mason County, Washington was the site of a mass burial ground for the bodies of victims of Satanic ritual murder. “They can’t possibly go out there and dig them all out”, Gunderson declared with grave certainty, “because there are too many of them.”

Predictably, these statements were met with particular shock in Mason County itself where a local paper reported that distressed county residents had been calling the sheriff’s department and stopping deputies in the streets “[…] asking if Gunderson knew what he was talking about”. As Gunderson hadn’t bothered to inform local law enforcement of his specific findings, they were keen to learn if in fact he did have any idea of what he was talking about. Asked by journalists, the FBI also stated that he hadn’t reported the allegations of Satanic crimes to them.[24] Contrary to Gunderson’s continuous assertions that Law Enforcement was ignoring the Satanic threat, the Mason County Sheriff’s department did everything they could to either validate or disconfirm his claims. Eager to interview him regarding the specifics of these alleged crimes, the Sheriff’s department asked the Seattle FBI office for help in locating the now unreachable Gunderson.

…But Gunderson was having none of it. “If I turn this over to the wrong law enforcement officials, I could blow the whole thing,” he told one reporter. “This element has infiltrated every level of society […] It’s big, and involves heavy-duty, intelligent people . . . doctors, lawyers, prosecutors, police, airline pilots . . . every walk of life has been infiltrated.”[25]

And there is little doubt that Gunderson must have been convinced that the Mason County Sheriff’s department were “the wrong law enforcement officials” with whom to confide such sensitive details. Only two months prior to his mass-grave revelation, he had been confronted by a Mason County Sheriff, Bob Holter, who advised that because Gunderson had been “associating with known drug-dealers in the Mason County area, and because of the fact that Gunderson has been quite public about his former SAC [Special Agent in Charge] status within the Bureau, he (Holter) felt that the Bureau should be made aware of the situation.”[26] Holter’s subsequent report to the FBI noted that Gunderson “appear[ed] somewhat dishevelled in expensive clothing.”

Perhaps insinuating that his appearance was merely a masterful disguise in service to a deep cover operation, he confided to Holter that he was “involved in some type of clandestine project.”

The fear, according to Gunderson, was that if he revealed his sources they would surely be “silenced” shortly thereafter. As with most intelligence that he cited in his post-FBI career, he learned of the Mason County mass grave through what he described as“various reliable sources”, confidential and unverifiable contacts who feared for their very lives.

Of course, Gunderson too was in mortal danger for his trifling into Satanic affairs. MacDonald murder confessor Helena Stoeckley had been found dead in her apartment in January of 1983 from pneumonia and cirrhosis of the liver — a not-so-mysterious death according to the coroner’s report — though Gunderson would be “convinced that she was silenced using one of the many covert, untraceable assassination techniques known to government intel agencies.”[27] One day, he would claim to find a death threat in the form of “13 red roses, 13 chrysanthemums and a three-line typed note on the lawn in front of his apartment.” In a perplexing display of subtlety — considering this “threat” presumably came from a global force of evil actively engaged in concealed mass murders — the note simply read, “Poacher in the grass. Once a cub the lion sees. Shades of death and life.”[28]

Gunderson’s subsequent withdraw into a transient lifestyle in hiding may, in reality, have been motivated by more pragmatic concerns than a paranoia of Satan-worshipping FBI agents on assignment to have him silenced. At the time of his fugitive wanderings, the FBI was in fact investigating him regarding his role in an investment firm, Dekla International Inc., which “defrauded clients by taking advance fees or ‘front money’ to provide loans that never materialized.” Acting as president of the firm, Gunderson worked with two business partners, each of whom had criminal records.[29]

*********

I first called Ted Gunderson in 2004 to ask him about his role in researching a book about a cult claimed to have been responsible for motivating the famous Son of Sam murders of 1976 – 77.[30] I knew very little about Ted at that point and was still naively cowed by his credentials. The book in question was, at best, unconvincing as the author, on little to no evidence, attempted to fit what appeared sloppy and obviously rather unceremonious .44 calibre shootings — motivated by homicidal delusions and personal fetish — into a larger, well-schemed and highly secretive conspiracy. By the final page of this poorly-plotted crime fiction rubbish, I had an extreme deficit of respect for the “journalist” responsible, but I wondered how a former FBI man ended up in the book’s acknowledgments.

Ted recalled finding a vital piece of evidence that suggested cult involvement in the Son of Sam serial homicides. He and the author of the aforementioned tripe had traveled to a victim’s former dwelling, finding a bible had been opened to particular passage. What that passage was exactly, I cannot recall, but it contained a typical sanguinary quote, the likes of which are not too terribly uncommon in the “Good” Book.

Clearly, this was a message.

“But, Ted…” I protested, “this is the Holy Bible you’re talking about!”

“But that’s what they like to do, these Satanists,” Ted explained, “They like to leave little clues, hidden messages.”

It turned out that I had done something Ted’s “journalist” never attempted as far as I could tell; I had actually located and spoken to members of the defunct and maligned hippy-era cult that was said to have inspired these inelaborate alleged ritual killings. I asked Ted if he was aware that a number of the former inner-circle luminaries of this group were now running a rather successful, large no-kill animal shelter in keeping with the prior cult’s own impassioned anti-vivisection stance.

“Well,” Ted opined without missing a beat, “They manage an animal shelter so that they may have animals to use in their sacrifices.”

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“That’s what they do, these Satanists,” Ted again explained.

Gunderson’s “knowledge” was clearly not to be constrained by evidence.

*********

It was following one of his lectures regarding the MacDonald case, according to Gunderson, that somebody from the audience approached him with a book that he would come to credit with opening his eyes to the hidden truth about the “Illuminati”. The book, Pawns In The Game by William Guy Carr (1958), became foundational to Gunderson’s world-view, and he would often cite it as a primary source of documentary evidence for the insidious omnipresent conspiracy at play throughout history, now just at the precipice of realizing its infernal end.

Soon echoing Carr’s own conspiracist world history, he would explain in his lectures how, in 1776, one Adam Weishaupt was commissioned by the House of Rothschild[31] to assemble the Illuminati, whose function was to corrupt society by way of “liberalism”, cultural engineering, economic control, and drug trafficking (among other unholy schemes). The demonology of the Illuminati is fundamental to modern conspiracy lore and exists in a variety of similar narrative forms, Carr’s interpretation being among some of the furthest right-wing and anti-semitic of the lot.

In fact, there was an 18th century society known as the Bavarian Illuminati founded by one Weishaupt, a Jesuit, but the Rothschilds in no way — by any credible history — played any part in it. Nonetheless, the idea of a Jewish connection to the Illuminati is central to the counterfactual Pawns which forwards the notion that the blueprints for the Illuminati’s over 230 year-old plan-in-progress are explicated in the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a 24-point plan for world domination which includes recipes for planned disorder, absolute control of the press and, ultimately, total domination… all by the scheming, and for the benefit, of anti-Christ Jews… or “Illuminati”.[32]

Protocols, as many know, is a vicious historical forgery, false evidence for a Jewish world conspiracy, the etiology of which can, in fact, be traced absolutely to anti-semitic and fictitious tales of non-Jewish origin. Historian Norman Cohn argues that Protocols, a compulsory text of study in schools of the Third Reich, was nothing short of Hitler’s “warrant for genocide”, his justification for attempted elimination of the “Jewish threat”.[33]

According to Pawns, the “Synagogue of Satan” is steadily working ever nearer to a global Luciferian totalitarian nightmare, propelled forward by the propagation of Atheistic materialism into the mass (“Goyim”) consciousness.

Disturbing as the Pawns author’s interchangeable usage of words like “Illuminati” and “Luciferian” with various words for “Jew” (“international bankers”, “political Zionists”) is, certain passages of the book heavily suggest unbalance beyond the xenophobic variety, into the territory of paranoid schizophrenia. Indicating tin-foil hat notions of a mind oppressed by the jumbled chaos of its own thoughts, author William Guy Carr describes his fear that the Devil himself may be broadcasting pure Evil into the “mysterious receiving set” of each human brain:

“Undoubtedly many people will ask ‘But how could the Devil inoculate the minds of men with Atheistic and other evil ideas ?’ That question can be answered in this way, If HUMAN Beings can establish radio, and television stations, from which one individual can influence millions of others by broadcasting his opinions on any given subject over the invisible air-waves then why shouldn’t it be possible for CELESTIAL Beings to broadcast their messages to us? No brain specialist has dared to deny that in the brain of each individual there is some kind of mysterious receiving set. Every hour of every day Human Beings are saying ‘I was inspired to do this’, or ‘I was tempted to do that’. Thoughts, be they good or evil, must originate somewhere, from some ‘cause’, and be transmitted to the human brain. The body is only the instrument which puts the dominating thought for ‘Good’ or for ‘Evil’ into effect.”[34]

Aside from using the discredited Protocols, Carr’s book — Gunderson’s conspiracist bible — contains very little in the way of any attempt to cite documentation that would support his so-called research, yet Gunderson would claim that its unconvincing premise is “very well documented”.

At best, Gunderson’s advocating for the veracity of Carr’s unhinged supernatural horror fantasy establishes him as having been a worthless judge upon the validity of historical documentary research, but does it establish an underlying anti-Semitism in his own conspiricist conception of the world? Is it possible that Ted, unlike Carr, saw the Illuminati as a distinct entity — they being the true originators and executors of the plot outlined in Protocols — separated from any notion of Jewish plots? After all, like many conspiracy theorists, Gunderson was quick to draw parallels to the events of his day and those of 1930s Germany, implying that he was at least somewhat at odds with Hitler’s National Socialist antics.

Rhetorical invocations of Nazi evil aside, Gunderson could be found at a 2006 historical revisionist/Holocaust denier conference for the American Free Press/Barnes Review. A post-conference report describes the wine & cheese social where their “old friend” Ted was in attendance, as well as a “Mr. Theo Junker […] former member of the Wiking division of the S.S. who,” the author of the report gushes, “courageously opened a Museum in Wisconsin dedicated to the memory of Adolf Hitler. It was indeed one of the highlights of the conference meeting this courageous patriot who continues to fight the good fight well into his 80’s. God bless you, Herr Junker!”[35]

Ted was deeply respected by the survivalist extreme right — a “true patriot” and one-time presidential candidate for the Independent American Party of Nevada (a Constitution Party[36] affilate) — appearing in their newsletters and on their radio shows with inflated reports regarding important world events, claiming a unique knowledge of each. Government plots against the good people of the nation abound. Enslavement ever imminent… The U.S. Government intentionally poisoning the air with toxic chemical contrails emitted from airliners; the Obama government has “prepared 1,000 camps for its own citizens”, and, “has stored 30,000 guillotines to murder its critics, and has stashed 500,000 caskets in Georgia and Montana for the remains.”

Guillotines, you say?

“Beheading”, Ted explained, “is the most efficient means of harvesting body parts.”[37]

He would continue his conspiracist evangelizing after the MacDonald case (and for the rest of his life) explaining as late as mid-2011 in an interview that the Satanists are “active — extremely active. They sacrifice like 50 to 60 thousand people a year in this country[38], the cult does. They have secret auctions for the children. The list goes on and on…” Explaining this harrowing state of affairs with proper gravity, Ted then rather tactlessly directed his attention to the interviewer, “This is all on my CD that’s available for 35 dollars… want me to give you the address where they can send the 35 dollars…?”[39]

Note: This is the first of a 2-part piece. The second will primarily explore Gunderson’s role in constructing the McMartin preschool Satanic abuse mythology.

A note on footnotes: catalog numbers followed by section number reference FBI files obtained via Freedom Of Information.

The Apparition by Gustave Moreau

Sound thinking and critical reservations were abruptly cast aside in New Delhi during the early morning hours of September 21st, 1995. Statue idols, it seemed, had taken to drinking milk being fed to them by spoon. By what bizarre urging the first pilgrim to report this phenomenon was compelled to test whether a milk offering would pass the lips of a statue is unclear, but the idea rapidly took hold, devolving into a frenzy. The World Hindu Council hastily declared it a “miracle”, and by noon hopeful herds across North India stampeded to the temples leaving trampled bodies wounded underfoot. Police reinforcements were deployed by necessity to restrain outbreaks among the fevered milk-bearing mobs. Faithful conviction ruled the day.

Some believers may well have been unamused — especially those within the ranks of the afflicted and dying — that the gods had chosen such a valueless display with which to affirm their continued beneficent authority, but it was the science-minded unbelievers who were predictably the least impressed… Nor did it take long to figure out what was really going on. Representatives from India’s Ministry of Science and Technology arrived on-scene to demonstrate that what was being witnessed was simple “capillary action”: The surface tension of the milk created an upward pull upon contact with the surface of the statue before the liquid ran downward in a transparent film, while some was absorbed into the porous stones. To illustrate this, the scientists colored their milk with a dye that remained apparent as it coated the statue. When hysteria regarding milk imbibing statues struck again in 2006, the president of the Indian Rationalist Association, Sanal Edamaruku, was quoted in the press, “Forget deities. I fed a cup of coffee to a statue of Jawaharlal Nehru (India’s first prime minister) right before television cameras,” he said, “Even bricks are drinking milk.”[1]

The 1995 “Milk Miracle” hysteria spread throughout the world within the span of several days and has seen recurrences in the years since, despite the oft-repeated claim that the phenomenon was mysteriously confined within a 24-hour span. Faithful supernaturalists have proved predictably unwilling to abdicate their miracle to non-magical explanations. Nor has the lasting insistence that the Milk Miracle remains a mystery unsolved been confined to willfully credulous Hindus. A widely used college-level World Religions textbook states in its 2011 edition, referencing the 1995 incident: “Scientists suggested explanations such as mass hysteria or capillary action in the stone, but the phenomenon lasted only one day.”[2]

To refer to the statement above as merely misrepresentative may be overly kind. “Scientists suggested explanations” indicates befuddled skeptics groping for generalized answers with which to force the inexplicable into a materialist framework. In fact, scientists did more than “suggest” capillary action, they demonstrated it. And it was never an either/or question between mass hysteria or capillary action — capillary action accounted for the illusion of milk drinking statues, while mass hysteria best described the temple-swarming religious fervor that the misattribution of “miracle” provoked. Both capillary action and mass hysteria were perfectly evident. To state that it could have been either/or further suggests confusion among scientists unable to accept a miracle taking place before their eyes, while also unable to come to a consensus amongst each other as to what might account for what was being witnessed.

More flagrantly misleading still are the countless accounts of the Milk Miracle which claim that scientists dismissed the entire event as a “mass hallucination”. The site milkmiracle.com, maintained by an outspoken Milk Miracle true believer, Philip Mikas, states:

There are many sceptics and scientists who have tried to explain what happened on September 21, 1995 in terms of science. Some have repeatedly said that this so-called “Milk Miracle” was caused by something as simple as capillary action. Some have tried to attribute it to a case of “global scale mass hallucination or hysteria”. To them, I would like to say this – there are many things that we just cannot explain with our present levels of science and technology. Perhaps, we will need to look into our souls and discover the secret spiritual powers that we all have before we can fully explain such phenomena.

Oddly, among a great many of the sites that treat the Milk Miracle as an unexplained or paranormal phenomenon, the phrase “global scale mass hallucination or hysteria” is offered as a summary of the skeptical position, always in quotes, never with attribution.

And so it degenerates… the actual explanation rejected, marginalized, obscured, and ultimately re-written to the point that numerous bloggers now treat the question of the Milk Miracle as one of mass hallucination versus paranormal activity, weighing the merits of — or elaborating the flaws in — an explanation that never was.

Presenting the scientific attempt at a rational explanation as a snobbish dismissal of mass eyewitness testimony certainly has its advantages to those who wish to maintain that something otherworldly was plainly observed, and arguments against the mass hallucination theory can be found anywhere believers in the improbable attempt to make their case. Thus, throughout the vast blogosphere, lengthy essays can be found heaping derision upon this scientific folly in favor of claims ranging from Sasquatch’s existence, to the reality of extraterrestrial visitations, to Satanic cults conspiring to enslave the Globe… to any number of implausible and bizarre ideas believed by a resolute minority. Almost universally lacking in these tirades against the close-minded “scientific establishment” is any direct citation of an actual argument in favor of the mass hallucination theory, nor is mass hallucination explicitly defined, its meaning presumed intuitively clear.

On the face of it, the idea of any specific event being attributed to “mass hallucination” sounds ridiculous. It suggests a large number of people suddenly, simultaneously, and spontaneously experiencing an intense, shared, detailed, false or grossly distorted shared perception of an event or events contrary to the reality surrounding them. At its most crudely literal, this would have us interpreting the Milk Miracle as an event wherein masses of individuals merely perceived milk disappearing from their spoons, while in actuality it did not; Sasquatch as a sudden unprovoked mental phantom shared amongst unwitting forest explorers; UFOs as but internal synchronized specters projected upon the empty skies.

But is this what “mass hallucination” actually means? And has there ever actually been an anomalous event for which mass hallucination was offered as a scientific explanation? Or — as with the Milk Miracle — is the idea of Mass Hallucination merely a straw man argument meant to paint the skeptical position as both improbable and patronizing?

*****

A search for “mass hallucination” in the American Psychological Association’s PsycINFO — “an expansive abstracting and indexing database with more than 3 million records devoted to peer-reviewed literature in the behavioral sciences and mental health […] covering psychology back to its underpinnings in the 17th Century” — yields a total of zero articles. Of course, this does not bode well as an indication of the concept’s interest among serious researchers.

However, the concept of “collective hallucinations” — first expounded by French polymath Gustave Le Bon in his 1895 classic book on Crowd Psychology, La psychologie des foules (translated into english as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind) — has a minimal  presence in psychology books related to Mob Mentality and psychological anomalies.

In The Crowd, Le Bon described inflated suggestibility as a general characteristic of human herds. “[…] a crowd [is] perpetually hovering on the borderland of unconsciousness, readily yielding to all suggestions, having all the violence of feeling peculiar to beings who cannot appeal to the influence of reason, deprived of all critical faculty, cannot be otherwise than excessively credulous.”[3] This excessive credulity, according to Le Bon, primes the crowd to accept, as fact ,“[t]he first perversion of the truth effected by one of the individuals of the gathering”, which then becomes “the starting point of the contagious suggestion.”[4] Collective hallucinations then, by Le Bon’s definition, are the outcome of perceptual interpretations colored by suggestions delivered to a crowd in its throes of thoughtless zeal.

The concept is further expanded upon in a book titled Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking by Leonard Zusne and Warren H. Jones[5]. There, the authors confront the question of — if an event is presumably hallucinated — how do “2 or 200 people manage to coordinate and synchronize their subjective lives?”

“In collective hallucinations, expectation plays the coordinating role. Although the subjective matter of individual hallucinations has virtually no limits, that of collective hallucinations is limited to certain categories. These categories are determined, first, by the kinds of ideas that a group of people may get excited about as a group, for emotional arousal is a prerequisite of collective hallucinations.”

Collective hallucinations, according to Zusne and Jones, are not spontaneous occurrences, and in accompaniment to “emotional arousal”, there is the prerequisite of “spreading imagery”…

“[…] all participants in the hallucination must be informed beforehand, at least concerning the broad outlines of the phenomenon that will constitute the collective hallucination. This may take the form of a publicly announced prophecy, for example, or someone suddenly looking up and saying, ‘Lo, in the sky!’ or words to that effect.”

And while the imagery preceding the event may only contain the “broad outlines of the phenomenon”, it is important to note that, due to the reconstructive nature of memory, the hallucinations themselves need only be broadly similar…

“Once the general type of hallucination is identified, it is easy to harmonize individual differences in accounts. This may take place during the hallucination or in subsequent discussions.”

*****

As examples of collective hallucinations, Zusne and Jones offer several occasions at various locations in Italy where locals reported “moving and bleeding images of saints”.

Also, in 1981, in Yugoslavia, in a village called Medjugorje, a small group of children reported meeting and speaking with the mythical “Virgin” Mary, whereupon some estimated 11 million pilgrims travelled to the childrens’ village. These pilgrims stared into the sky, toward the sun, looking for Mary’s divine form at an appointed time and place. Interestingly, despite their priming, none of them seemed to manage an actual vision of Mary herself. However, they did report anomalous visions, “such as […] crosses in the sky, double suns”, and some reported “being able to stare at the setting sun without eye damage.”[6]

Similar to the Medjugorje incident, the famous Fatima apparition of 1917 was a mob reaction to reports made by 3 Portuguese children who claimed to have been visited by the ghost of Mary. Here again, reports were less-than-impressive as far as presumably synchronous specific subjective events are concerned. The children, it is claimed, saw the Virgin, while some of the crowd reported seeing the sun “dancing” in the sky, radiant colors, or the sun approaching the Earth… Others still saw nothing at all.

Of course, the sun did not make any aberrant movements that day, as witnessing astronomical observatories could attest. The same sun, visible to much of the world, appeared to be following its daily routine everywhere but where expectations for a miracle found faithful pilgrims looking to the sky in anticipation of something extraordinary.

In both Medjugorje and Fatima, observers were staring into the sunlit sky. Joe Nickell (author and Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry [CSI]) explains, “several eyewitnesses of the October 13, 1917, gathering at Fatima specifically stated they were looking ‘fixedly at the sun’ or ‘tried to look straight at it’ or otherwise made clear they were gazing directly at the actual sun […]. If this is so, the ‘dancing sun’ and other solar phenomena may have been due to optical effects resulting from temporary retinal distortion caused by staring at such an intense light or to the effect of darting the eyes to and fro to avoid fixed gazing (thus combining image, afterimage, and movement).”[7]

If UV-beaten eyes are responsible for reports of Fatima’s dancing sun, Zusne and Jones are unclear as to whether their definition of mass hallucination is meant to describe such illusions for which an organic cause is apparent. In either case, however, the prerequisite conditions of emotional arousal, spreading imagery, as well as the subsequent harmonizing of the narrative from various disparate reports, were clearly extremely influential factors in Medjugorje and Fatima.

*****

 In 2001, Christian apologist Gary Habermas published a paper titled Explaining Away Jesus’ Resurrection: the Recent Revival of Hallucination Theories[8]. Though Habermas explains that he surveyed “over 1,000 critical publications on the resurrection”, he offers no hard numbers with which to qualify his claim of any recent “revival of hallucination theories”. In vague terms, he reports, “more scholars apparently support various naturalistic hypotheses [to account for the biblical claim of Christ’s resurrection] than has been the case in many decades. […] Of those who now prefer hallucination explanations, however, only a few scholars have pursued this approach in detail, while several other scholars simply mention the possibility of, or preference for, the hallucination thesis.”

A preference for “the hallucination thesis” opposed to what, one wonders? Opposed to other “naturalistic hypotheses” (such as the quite obvious explanation that the New Testament is a poor fictional work from the start) mass hallucination weighs in rather weakly; opposed to accepting the resurrection myth at its face value, however, mass hallucination can clearly be assigned a much higher probabilistic value by mere virtue of being a naturalistic hypothesis. Missing this point completely, Habermas asks, “[…] why must a naturalistic, subjective explanation be assumed?”

Though the question is presented rhetorically, there is sound rationale for assuming naturalistic explanations. To begin, while there is ample cross-cultural research demonstrating the human tendency to embrace superstition and to exert self-deceiving confirmation biases, there is no such research at all that satisfactorily demonstrates any supernatural phenomena. For that matter, supernatural forces are, by definition, not observable — they cannot be recorded, transcribed, traced, or measured by scientific procedure. As we can never isolate a mechanistic cause of a supernatural event, we are left with simply no other option than exhaust all naturalistic options first.

Further, history provides hard lessons in the unreliability of even large consensus accounts. The archaic minds of Christian philosophers, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, took seriously claims of demonic assaults upon humanity by mere virtue of the claims’ ubiquity, Aquinas even insisting that reports of demonic voices could not have been imaginary as they were reported to be heard to all within earshot.[9] From this logic, prosecutions and brutal purgings of “witches” were deemed sound and fair due to their multiple corroborating witness accounts.

Habermas goes on to contest Zusne and Jones’s description of collective hallucination as it might be applied to the myth of Christ’s resurrection, though he concedes that Zusne and Jones themselves wrote of collective hallucinations “without any application to Jesus’ resurrection”. Further, none of the only three authors from this “revival” of hallucination theories Habermas explores — as examples of those who share a “hallucination theory preference” — invoke Zusne and Jones’s collective hallucination definition to support their positions. Nor are these authors unclear as to what they themselves mean when referring to the resurrection as a hallucination.[10] Of the three authors Habermas disputes, only German theologian Gerd Luedemann advances an explanation directly born of an established collective hallucination theory. Invoking Le Bon, Luedemann describes the appearance of the resurrected Christ to “more than 500 brethren” as “mass ecstasy” stimulated by the “preaching and the recollections” by Peter and the twelve disciples who saw Jesus die on the cross. This proselytizing devotion, according to Luedemann, “led to religious intoxication and an enthusiasm which was experienced as the presence of Jesus[…]”

Summarizing this without offering a direct counterpoint, Habermas goes on to protest against hypotheses published by two more theologians, Jack A. Kent and Michael Goulder. Kent, in his book The Psychological Origins of the Resurrection Myth, proposes that Jesus’s cult individually “experienced grief-related hallucinations or illusions following the traumatic death of their leader”.[11] Kent details the Gospel accounts of “the Easter morning events” and notes that they are “inconsistent, contradictory, and inconclusive”, though he argues that “Mary Magdalene and the disciples did see what they believed were ‘appearances’ of Jesus but those ‘appearances’ were grief-related hallucinations or illusions.”

Likewise, Goulder, in his essay The Baseless Fabric of a Vision[12], describes Peter’s vision of the resurrected Christ as a personal vision — a conversion vision — which he likens to violent conversions reported throughout history wherein the convert typically describes visions accompanying an intense feeling of revelation. As an example, Goulder cites Manson Family murderer Susan Atkins’ prison conversion, which she described in visual terms, with Christ personally appearing to her offering consolation and forgiveness.

The appearances of Christ to the apostles or the 500 brethren, however, are seen as a collective delusion by Goulder, which he likens to today’s Bigfoot phenomenon. With both Bigfoot and Jesus expectation and popular enthusiasm precipitated sightings. “If you sighted Bigfoot, you were the centre of attention; people spoke about you; the press sought you out. If you sighted Jesus, you confirmed the Church’s hopes, and your own.”

Despite these descriptions of purely personal hallucinations acting to precipitate group delusions of resurrection, Habermas — after breezily under-summarizing each author’s actual position — disingenuously states: “One of the central issues in this entire discussion concerns whether a group of people can witness the same hallucination.” In fact, this appears only to be the central point that Habermas was predetermined to argue, while his survey of “over 1,000 critical publications” seems to have yielded little to indicate that this was ever at issue.

*****

From the few academic descriptions available, authored by Le Bon and Zusne and Jones, we see that collective hallucinations are not intended to describe spontaneous herd occurrences of perfectly matched phantasmagoria. Nor is it irrelevant to emphasize the difference in terminology: collective hallucination, as opposed to the often-invoked mass hallucination which, while subtle, further reinforces the suspicion that those arguing against mass hallucination theory (in favor of their cherished chosen implausibility) are in fact inveighing against an imaginary opposition.

While “collective hallucinations” find a negligible presence in psychological literature, “mass hallucination theory” is disproportionately invoked as the primary — if not only — explanation offered to counter extraordinary claims for which there are (presumably) multiple corroborating witnesses. So long as this position is maintained, arguments for paranormal events are presented as less incredible than the alleged scientific alternative: that a mass of people all at once spontaneously shared a detailed mental vision, much like a group of people watching a film, and collectively mistook this shared vision for an external physical reality.

When “mass hallucination” is said to be the scientific counterpoint to any claim, it is worth asking, By which scientists? Where? What other explanations have been proposed? and, of course, “Mass hallucination” meaning what, exactly? Upon inspection, we find that the idea of mass hallucination as the fall-back end-all “scientific” position toward the inexplicable is, in itself, nothing more than a desperately crafted mass delusion… a bullshit argument — attributed to rational arguments against bullshit — that is meant to make said rational arguments look like bullshit.

Eight years after accusing her father of having sexually abused her, Meredith Maran concluded that the allegation was untrue — a socially constructed false memory.

As a committed feminist and journalist with a keen sense of justice, Maran’s zeal led her to therapeutic sessions for incest survivors, reform sessions for perpetrators, and ultimately to the conclusion that she herself had repressed memories of abuse. Her new book, My Lie, is a poignant and fascinating account of the events and processes that led her from accusation to retraction.

In the midst of international media attention, and only one day after the 2010 U.S. mid-term elections, Maran honored Process.org with this interview to discuss her new book, and what her experience, her “lie”, may tell us about                                                       false beliefs in general…

You describe that, as a girl, your father was your best friend. To give a necessarily broad overview of your story, how did you come to be falsely convinced that he had molested you?

Well, that’s a long, complicated story that took 200 pages to explain. It’s a combination of the personal and the political. The personal being a combination of the dynamic in our particular family. As you mention, I was always close with my father, not so much with my mother. That was true when I was young. But then, when I got to be a teenager, my father began to get very possessive, and we began to have huge fights because he didn’t want me to date. I ultimately left home really young, mostly because of that.

So that was the personal part of it. It was kind of heart-breaking for me to have lost a parent that I was so close to, who became this angry guy that I was fighting with all of the time.

The cultural part of it is that the culture was in a period of rapid shift from incest-never-happens to incest-happens-all-the-time. And I was part of that shift because I was a journalist for about five years — one of the first journalists to write about this subject, before [incest] was known to be as prevalent as, in fact, it is, and was. So I sort of immersed myself in the world of incest treatment, incest identification, and so on. [This was] in the early eighties… and I ultimately became convinced that it had happened to me as well.

So you were steeped in a culture of molestation revelation and exposure. You weren’t guided by any one particular individual.

No [I wasn’t guided by an individual].

Do you feel there was any pressure on you at that time to identify yourself as a victim?

Well, yes. Pressure I applied to myself, in a way that people — or I — wanted to be part of a movement that seemed to me to be the latest phase in a movement to end the oppression of women, which I had been active in trying to do for a long time. It became sort of a meme — a widely believed idea that incest was in fact the embodiment of male domination and violence. So, fighting incest, personally and politically, became a way of fighting women’s oppression.

[The book] The Courage To Heal states: “If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were.” I can only imagine the confusion this could cause in anybody who is sold on the idea of the commonplace prevalence of repressed memories… Did you find yourself interpreting and second-guessing presumed symptoms –?

Yes, once I started down that path, which happened a long time before The Courage To Heal was published, because of my unusual circumstance of being a journalist who was steeped in that world of actual incest treatment. I was spending a lot of time with people who were some of the first to treat survivors — genuine survivors — of incest. When I was doing that, a lot of the people I was working with in those programs — when I was a journalist — would ask me what my interest was in particular in this field, and why I was one of the few journalists who was coming around into these treatment programs when nobody else seemed to be interested. The implication was that I had some personal reasons to be interested, and I did start to wonder why I was the only journalist who was reporting on incest. Also, in the course of doing the journalism [I found myself] sitting in incest survivor therapy sessions with children who had recently disclosed that they’d been molested by their fathers, and also in perpetrator groups with men who had been convicted of incest and were in treatment — [they were] in therapy as a condition in being out-of-prison. Unlike most people who had kind of a stereotype in their minds of what an incest perpetrator looks like, I knew it wasn’t just a sleazy [looking] guy in a trench coat, because I had seen the guys in these groups who looked just like my dad.

Right. And I’m sure at that time you would have had difficulty entertaining the notion of accusations that were false for fear of undermining this movement — that realization that this was actually happening.

Right. I have to say, of course, I deeply regret what I did — accusing my father falsely — I also have to say that I think there was a huge amount of positive change that came out of this movement to address the truth of the prevalence of incest. Before this movement, there were many fewer, if any, programs in place to help kids protect themselves from being sexually abused, and also for adults to help children who reported being sexually abused. So the slogan, believe the children, was a very meaningful one to anyone who considered herself an advocate of child welfare. I was certainly one of those people.

In your book you describe that at the time of your holding the conviction that your father had molested you, you were in a relationship with another self-identified incest survivor whose recovered memories grew increasingly more bizarre and implausible. How did you square the conspiracy-laden, supernatural recovered memory narratives that began to surface in that time with your belief in recovered memory accuracy?

When you say “supernatural”, you mean the toddlers reporting — ?

Right. Well, even in Michelle Remembers, she [protagonist and co-author, Michelle Smith] faces Satan himself.

Well, to me it was as if someone had just said the world was flat — or the world was round, I guess you would say. Until this time in which I started doing research about Childhood Sexual Abuse, I had believed that it was a wild, rare occurrence. So, when one lie was revealed to me, [and I learned] that it occurred far more often, and it was often reported, and the kids were not believed — the kids reporting it [were] not being believed by the adults being told… that cultural lie, that [molestation] was rare, and that kids lied about it regularly, sort of opened me up to thinking that everything that I had believed about it was a lie. It sort of made the incredible credible. It’s sort of a reverse logic in a way. Once I realized that I had bought a lie on the other side of the equation — the lie that [molestation] rarely happens — then it became very possible to believe anything that argued the other point… If you follow my logic… not that it’s logical, but it seemed logical at the time.

You describe very well in your book coming to the gradual realization that you were wrong, so I won’t make you go through all that here (I’ll just encourage those interested to read it) — but I was interested [in the fact that] you never directly confronted your father, nor did you press charges. While some may wonder if you’d have retracted earlier had you taken either of those steps, I wonder if doing those things might have made retraction that much harder. That is to say: I wonder if some people might have reached a point in this from which they feel there is no return…

I almost felt that way. It took me many years to get to my retraction, as you know from reading the book. So, I can definitely imagine why one would have doubts, and then sort of cast those doubts aside because of the consequence of realizing that she was wrong. I think my retraction would have come sooner if I hadn’t had to — if I hadn’t realized what it would mean to say that I had made this up, that I had believed something that wasn’t true… But I’m not really clear what you want to know from me here?

I’ve entered into debate with some people who I feel have perhaps developed too elaborate a narrative, estranged themselves too far from their families, that I don’t think they are going to ever retract. No matter what [evidence] they are faced with, it will be too painful to face the proposition that they are wrong.

Well, there is definitely that.  But, I think, more so than a conscious thought of, if I retract this accusation then I’m going to have to do X, Y, and Z to apologize, I think that it’s as I describe in the book, when I interviewed the neuroscientist. He described the physiological proclivity of the human brain to be certain, to be sure, to feel that what you’re saying, or thinking, or feeling, is true. I think it is as much a function of that as it is not wanting to face the consequence of a lie. In the book I describe how for years I was tortured. It took me about 5 years to get from this first thought, did my father actually do this to me, to the point where I actually said it out-loud. It also took me at least a couple of years before starting to doubt my accusations, before I acknowledged that I no longer believed it was true. I think part of that was that I didn’t want the consequences, but also I think it came about because it felt better to be sure of a terrible lie than it felt to be uncertain about what was true. That sensation of mixed relief and horror both times — first when I accused my father and felt both horrified and relieved, and also when I retracted my accusation — I felt the same way. On the one-hand I felt the relief of this new certainty, on the other hand I realized that I had caused so much pain for nothing.

Do you feel it would have been possible to publish this book 15 years ago, or do you feel it’s only possible now that some of the dust [from the Memory Wars] has settled?

That’s an ironic question because it was almost not possible for me to publish this book. I’ve published — I don’t know — about 9 books before this one, and not to say that it’s always easy to get a book contract, but I’ve never had as hard a time getting a book contract as I had this time for this book. Most publishers rejected publishing it. Their two main reasons were, one: it’s over. It’s a piece of History, and no one cares anymore. Two: I was such an unreliable witness that who would want to read a book by someone who calls her own self a liar? So, on both counts, they said, it wasn’t worth publishing. Of course, since it’s been published, I’ve also heard those accusations from people, both of them. But I’ve also heard an equal number of people saying that it’s happening to them now — they’re being accused, or they are coming out of accusing someone. Also, I may be a marginal character, but I have very large company as a marginal character as someone who has since realized that the accusation was false.

Not only is it still happening now, but I feel that this whole episode can tell us more about belief in general. In the introduction to your book, you talk about deeply held political myths, such as [Saddam] Hussein’s connection to the 9-11 attacks, President Obama’s Muslim faith — how do you feel your story better helps us understand these convictions?

That really is the biggest goal of my book. And today — being post-election day — with a major shift in the political landscape, and much of it based on falsehoods. Certainly, the Tea Party came to prominence by propagating things that factually are inaccurate. You can certainly debate what might be the best health care plan for the United States, but you can’t debate what Obama’s proposal actually said. It did not say that there would be Death Panels killing grandmothers. You can debate whether you like Obama’s policies or not, but you can’t debate whether he was born in the United States, or whether he is a practicing Muslim. These falsehoods were presented as facts and bandied about so much that they no longer needed to be repeated. Those lies and others were used just yesterday to essentially win a bloodless coup. We’ll see if it remains bloodless. So, I agree with you. I would not have written the book if it were just the story of one woman who made a terrible mistake. There would be many more books on the shelves than there are if everybody who made a terrible mistake wrote a book about it. I wrote the book because of exactly what you’re saying, which is that we need to have a much better understanding of how our emotions translate to what we come to believe as facts. I think that in the same way that if I had been able to articulate what I really had to say to my parents, and to my father in particular, and to myself — and that message might have boiled down to, I need to take a break for a while because I’m too enmeshed with you, or your opinion matters too much to me, or I need an apology from you have having caused me to run away from home when I was too young to take care of myself — something like that would have been a very messy, but much more honest way to say what I ended up saying by using the word “incest”. I think that similarly, if a lot of people in this country would just say, I really hate having a black president, instead of saying that he’s channelling the war-mongering of his Kenyan father, or that he was born elsewhere, or that he’s a secret Muslim — I think we’d all be a lot better off.

Or, [claiming that] gay marriage will cause insurance rates to be unpredictable, or go up, rather than [admitting] that [gay marriage] is contrary to one’s religious convictions.

Or that gay soldiers will cause a morale deficit. All these things —

In our brief e-mail introduction you indicated that you hope to help bridge the divide in this still-bitter memory war. How do you hope to do this?

I think that publishing the book is doing that. Not agreeing to promote either point of view. I believe both are true. I am a feminist in that I believe in the equality of women. To me, that’s what feminism means. So the “feminist” side of this debate is the one that is supposed to believe children and women at all costs, no matter how incredible their stories might be. The myth is that only feminists care whether women and children have been sexually abused. So, I have taken some heat because I have written the truth of what happened to me, and what I did. Not just what happened to me, but what I caused to happen, which is that my feminist beliefs led me in a really bad direction. That’s not to say I’m no longer a feminist. I’m very much a feminist, I think feminism is a very simple precept. I also think that any extremist movement — whether on the right or left, or for groups for equality, or for overthrow of the government, or anything else — I think that every movement, just like every human being, is capable of great extremes. Often, movements go to great extremes before they sort of settle into a middle ground. I hold the feminist belief that women should be equal, and that they should not be abused in any way, and I also hold the “opposing belief” which is that false memories should be rooted out, and not treated as real memories. False accusations, whether they are lodged at Obama, or lodged at my father, are a form of injustice. I happen to believe that it is possible to repress memories and recover them years or decades later, but that’s just my personal opinion, it has nothing to do with a political affiliation. That is not a view that is held by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, but they know that, and we work together toward the end of putting an end to false accusations. Some [people] on the other side accuse me of selling out feminism because I’m helping to harbor accused molesters, like the co-founder of the FMSF[*]. So, obviously I don’t want to do anything to help any man who abused his child to go unpunished. That’s not my goal. Nor do I want women to see themselves as victims who are in search of an explanation for their victimhood. So, you can say that I’m a bridge, or you could say I’m big trouble for both sides. I like to see myself as a bridge.

In the writing of the book, for example, I was going back-and-forth between the warring sides. I spoke at length with both Pam and Peter Freyd, who are the founders of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and I also spoke at length with their daughter with whom they are estranged [**]. So I would listen to Jennifer Freyd tell me her version of what had happened in her family, and I would listen to Pam and Peter — Pam, in most cases — tell me what she believed. And they were opposite. It was challenging, but it was the point of the book to sit with the reality that each presented to me, and make peace with that myself.

[*Editors note: The False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was co-founded by Pamela and Peter Freyd, whose daughter, Jennifer Freyd, claims to have recovered memories of childhood abuse. While this explains the Freyds’ interest in False Memory Syndrome, some suggest that the entire idea of a False Memory Syndrome was only introduced as a mere cover-up for actual crimes.]

[** Correction: either due to a conversational mis-step on the part of the interviewee, or my own misinterpretation of the audio I was transcribing, “spoke at length with” needs to be corrected to convey that Mrs. Maran’s dialog with Jennifer Freyd was not spoken, but conducted by email.  As Maran elaborated to me in a recent email: “she and I emailed about research matters, and I read everything I could find about her family history but, as stated in my book, she refused to discuss her family history.”]

I can think of few things more noble than taking a full accounting of the facts, without discarding those which don’t mesh with what you think you already know, and allowing yourself to adjust your beliefs and behavior accordingly.

Of all the reasons that I campaigned for Obama, I think the fact that he seemed more willing to do that than most politicians was my greatest attraction to him. I’m not an Obama maniac at this point. I have my criticisms of him. I think that a lot of people voted for him for the same reason, and I think there is, despite this latest election, I do think there’s a longing in each of us, individually, and in the culture, to relax into the complicated truth instead of latching onto these extreme views; inflexible views of pretty much everything. And it’s very challenging. I get into fights — arguments — with people who I love very much. I get very clenched and rigid over how that person is mistreating me, or misrepresenting the facts. It’s been a very interesting learning process for me in a very deep personal way, as well as socially — looking at that kind of rigidity and adherence to belief at all costs, including the cost of the truth, is so prevalent today.

out-sized forehead, black almond-shaped eyes

Laughlin, Nevada is the kind of place where vegetarianism is deviant. Even the lentil soup comes served with large chunks of sausage in it… Thick, greasy, lips-and-asshole chorizo sausage. Even when picked out, it befouls the rest of the soup with its putrid flavor.

I have to send it back. “This has sausage in it”, I tell the waitress.

“Yes”, the waitress says, nonplussed, “you ordered the lentil soup”.

The atmosphere has abruptly changed. My effeminate coastal dietary peculiarities have made my presence suddenly unwelcome. I feel a wave of panic fill the room. At surrounding tables, the bloated men in cowboy hats are, I imagine, wishing that they were thirty years younger, so that they might rise up to knock some sense into my goddamn skull. To the people of Laughlin, it appears, there is nothing particularly bizarre about a group of UFO seekers holding a conference in their town, but a man who doesn’t eat meat is truly a freakish thought. Christ, it’s already noon and I don’t even have a beer in my hand. To the generally upper middle-aged, beer-bellied, cigarette-sallowed gamblers of this obscure poor-man’s alternative to Reno, I am an interloper.

I feel more at ease among the ET enthusiasts. My initial impression is that they display nothing of the unwelcoming, bitter homogeneity of the Ritual Abuse crowd. Among them are Science Fiction fans and writers, Fortean chroniclers of anomalous events, students of the paranormal, and the mere curious.

The diversity is an unexpected relief. The two-hour shuttle ride from the Vegas airport to Laughlin gave grim indications that the conference would be strictly populated by elderly New Agers.

Earlier that day, I was among the first to be shuffled aboard the small bus just outside the baggage claim. Freshly acquainted geriatric galactic citizens bemoaned the horrifying quality of in-flight meals between refined excoriations against the blind ignorance of the mainstream masses who, despite overwhelming evidence, remain skeptical to the fact that Earth is being regularly visited by extraterrestrial intelligences. They were all warming up for the conference, taking full advantage of this opportunity to preach to a captive choir. Self proclaimed “intuitives”, aura readers, psychics, and UFOlogists all began climbing aboard to contribute to an increasing din of metaphysical philosophies, conspiracy theories, and Aquarian Age wisdom. Full groups spoke to each other simultaneously, without a single member listening. The driver announced that we would be leaving in five minutes, precisely on the hour, no exceptions, at which a strained looking old fellow took immediate leave. “I’ll be right back,” he assured the driver.

Ten minutes after the hour, the impatient passengers abandoned their peaceful transcendent pretensions and began to suggest with undisguised agitation that we should move on without our missing comrade. A man volunteered to look for him. He came back and reported something in confidence to the driver who then announced, “Two more minutes!” and started the engine. Our fact-finder sat back down across from me. “He’s taking a shit”, he muttered ruefully to the passenger next to him.

Soon enough our man returned, sullen and shamed, head low.

We’re away even before he’s seated.

The responsible chronicler in me wanted that I should I mingle with the other passengers, at least listen to what they were talking about, despite a fatigue-induced disinterest. Somebody was talking about media misinformation, another about how the UFO deniers are “asleep”.

Good enough. I put on my headphones and listened to music, partially falling asleep.

Anyway, my interest is in those who claim to have been in personal contact with extraterrestrial beings. That most reports of such contact are based upon recovered memories is a well-known fact. How are these recovered memories similar or different to those reporting satanic cult activity? Proponents of recovered memories of abuse, uncomfortable with the association to ET abduction, are quick to dismiss the parallel as a cheap-shot, a low-brow attempt at discrediting all recovered memories. But, without a method by which one may reliably distinguish legitimate recovered memories from fabrications or confabulations, the abductees present a unique challenge. If one can cultivate entire false memory scenarios regarding sometimes traumatic contact with alien beings, why could one not also construct such false memories about any traumatic experience? And what makes a more plausible recovered memory any less likely to be a false construction than an implausible one?

It was, I had understood, the consistency of the abduction tales that counter-balanced their implausibility with credibility. After all, how could it be that so many people, personally and geographically unrelated, would have such similar narratives of extraterrestrial encounters if these were but personal delusions?

Despite the fact that abduction stories are so prevalent in popular culture as to render this argument ludicrous, the question has proven undeniably compelling not only to fringe spiritual seekers, but to a few respected academics and journalists as well. Most notably, professor John Mack of Harvard Medical School undertook an enormous study of over 200 abductees from 6 continents in the course of over 10 years, till his death in 2004 when he was struck by a drunken driver while crossing a London street. Mack, encouraged by his long-time friend, author Thomas Kuhn, rejected what he felt to be an inhibiting materialist dualism that is “held in place by the structures, categories, and polarities of language, such as real/unreal, exists/does not exist, objective/subjective, intrapsychic/external world, and happened/did not happen.” (Mack, 1994)

Mack set out to “collect raw information, putting aside whether or not what I was learning fit any particular world view.” (Mack, 1994) Inevitably, though, Mack strained to fit his data into a world view, albeit a world view that was unconstrained by parsimony and the standard burden of scientific proof. To Dr. Mack, abduction experiences were real “in some way”, suggesting that they could be attributed to interdimensional travel rather than intragalactic. And while Mack did consider the possibility that the abduction experience was the product of an altered state, his altered state abduction wasn’t a purely internal, subjective experience, rather it was an altered state of higher consciousness that elicited communication with higher beings. (Mack, 1999)

In his book Passport To The Cosmos, Mack explains, “It is not just the experiencers’ conviction that what they have undergone is in some way real that has made me take them seriously. The richly detailed narratives they provide, the appropriate surprise, the convincing incredulity, and above all the genuine distress or other feelings they report, together with the observable emotion and intense bodily reactions they exhibit when their experiences are recalled – all these elements combined can give any witness the sense that something powerful has happened to these individuals, however impossible this may seem from the standpoint of our traditional worldview.” (Mack, 1999)

Dr. Mack’s claims of narrative consistency notwithstanding, the abduction accounts I end up hearing at the 2010 UFO Congress convention in Laughlin, Nevada – from those who claimed to have experienced them – are surprisingly inconsistent even given the near universal knowledge of how “actual” abductions are supposed to be carried out. At the very least, I had felt, everybody agreed upon who was responsible: little grey humanoids – “Greys”, they’ve been cleverly dubbed – with outsized hairless heads, large black almond-shaped eyes, and frail bodies.

Turns out there is a whole carnival of different species beaming people into different types of craft, and for different purposes – some benevolent, some… not so much. The Contactees happily share apparently well-worn, scripted descriptions of the multitudes of distorted other-world craniums and non-human eyes they’ve observed. There are mammalians, crustaceans, and ETs entirely human in appearance. The galactic community, it seems, is as diverse as human imagination.

The Greys? …Oh, yes, them.

Well, they are out there, up to their antics still, but they seem to have fallen out of fashion of late.

Given this variety of interplanetary taxonomic categories and their broad spectrum of individual motivations for the covert Earth capers they’re said to be engaged in, these are not “abductee” sessions that I am attending as an optional evening supplement to the larger conference… As hypnotherapist (and session organizer) Mary Rodwell explains, the word “abductee” carries with it certain obvious negative connotations that do not do justice to many of the “life-enhancing” extraterrestrial encounters that many of her clients have reported. Rodwell prefers the more neutral word “experiencer”. Thus, if we could refer to each other as experiencers rather than abductees, we’d all be a bit happier, yes?

There is dissent. “I don’t think that’s fair,” one harried man objects. His experience has very much been one of being taken against his will, and he seems as skeptical of reports of positive alien encounters as most people are of tales of alien contact in general. His, presumably, was one of those close-encounters of the orifice-stretching kind, and he reserves the right – by God – to refer to himself as an abductee. There is agreement from a few others in the group of about 30 who sat in a tight circle of chairs within the small windowless hotel meeting room. The “Experiencer” label, they feel, is a whitewash. They are Abductees.

Very well then. Rodwell is flexible, conveying herself with a saintly air of tolerance. She wants the evening Experiencer Sessions to “honor” all varieties of ET contact. If there are those who wish to refer to themselves as “abductees”, all well and good. So long as everybody is sensitive to the fact that “abductee” is an unacceptable blanket label to be applied to all in the room. The abductees begrudgingly agree.

Mary Rodwell holds the title of “Principal” at an organization called ACERN (Australian Close Encounters Resource Network), with the stated goal of offering “professional counselling support, hypnotherapy and information to individuals and their families who have ‘anomalous’ paranormal experiences, particularly specializing in Abduction/contact experiences.”

“If you don’t want to share and just want to listen, that’s fine”, Rodwell assures us all, much to my relief. My unease at the prospect of around-the-circle individual introductions and biographical synopses had been growing since realizing that I am, quite possibly, the only person in the room with no memories of contact with ETs.

“The other thing I’d like you to respect is everyone has their own understanding of their experiences,” Rodwell explains. “No matter how one chooses to understand it doesn’t mean you have to subscribe to that, it just means that that’s where they are with their experiences, that’s how they choose to understand it, though it may not resonate for you. It may not fit for you at all. But that’s okay, because we have the right to interpret our experiences whatever way feels right to us.”

A middle-aged Latin man seated to my immediate left is eager to tell of his experiences.

“I’m not really good at public speaking, in fact I have a phobia about speaking in groups. But I’m here tonight because I want to be around people who have had experiences. I’ve been an experiencer for approximately 25 years. It started when I was living in the Central Valley. I was a professional person. I was a parole agent. And when I started experiencing contact, I could never talk to anybody because I was a professional man and I couldn’t approach my supervisor and say, hey, I’m speaking to little grey guys. So I just pretty much kept it to myself. So my main reason for being here is just hearing other people’s stories and not feeling so awkward about what my own personal experiences have been.”

He finishes there, apparently having gotten off his chest what he wanted to express, just enjoying – it seems – being in an environment wherein he can declare himself an “experiencer” without feeling that he’ll have made himself outcast by doing so. And this is how most of the testimonials carry on throughout this first night. Experiencers within the circle talk about the various ways in which they present themselves to outsiders, some claiming to heavily advertise their relationship with extraterrestrials, others describing the daily discomfort of keeping this part of their lives constantly concealed.

One woman chimes in: “I just want to say, chances are that each one of us — in fact chances are really good — I’ve probably already lived half my life. I’m in my fifties. And I’m at a point in my life where it’s really important to me to be who I am. And I think that the extraterrestrial, interdimensional — whatever type of contact it is — that it is a significant part of my life… It has been for a long time. Um… I have had stages of being made fun of, of being talked about behind my back, being called crazy. I used to really, really care about that. And it used to really hurt my feelings… It was more important to me how other people thought of me than how I actually felt about me — you know, as far as being true to myself. So… I’m at a stage in my life where when I meet people — and let’s say they’re neighbors — there are people, like, up in the mountains. We have a place up in the country, about 35 acres around a bunch of country people. When I meet people, they come into my life, I let it be known right away. You know, this is part of my life. They have a choice whether they want to associate with me or not associate with me… there are no secrets… but on the other side of that, you know, at that point in time, they can say or think whatever they want to say or think about me. I don’t care. It’s not important to me any more. I figure people that are like me will resonate toward me, and those that aren’t will hopefully stay away. And also along with that: if I’m like a crazy person that everybody’s talking about, possibly they’ll talk to somebody who is out there who is having life experiences, who doesn’t feel like they can talk to anybody… and they’ll know they can talk to me…”

I find myself sympathizing with the experiencers. Aside from being far friendlier than the morose and self-entitled Ritual Abuse fantasists, they also aren’t directly victimizing individuals by labeling their unfortunate families as the revealed perpetrators of repressed episodes of abuse. Further, it’s annoying to think of religious literalists – believers in the Son of God’s imminent return to Earth to attend Good and Evil’s promosed apocalyptic show-down – having the audacity to laugh at these no-less-probable scenarios constructed by the experiencers. This is not to say that I feel abductees should be able to declare the absolute truth of their ET contact episodes without critical objection. Quite the contrary. Truth matters, and individual liberties are at stake. This sub-set of recovered memory advocates give license to those of the witch-hunting kind.  It’s all well and good to play philosophical games with questions like “Whose Truth?” until individual liberties and personal well-beings are threatened, at which point we must defer to the best method for knowing “truth” we’ve yet devised: scientific “materialism”… unromantic and inhibiting as it might seem.

The most perplexing comments, to my mind, this first night’s experiencer session, come from a couple of fellows who have no conscious memory of abduction, but feel that their lives have been a more-or-less regular stream of anomalous events for which alien intervention seems the most rational explanation.

Karl, a man in his late-thirties from Wyoming, tells of synchronicities, “psychic events”, and vague “anomalies” that have led him to suspect that extraterrestrials are watching him. One night, not long ago, he felt an odd compulsion to take a tent out into the woods. Before sleeping, he tells us, he asked for some sign, some acknowledgment, confirmation from these outer world beings that they are watching. He slept the whole night through without incident. But, upon returning home, he checked his email to find the confirmation that he had asked for: a girl he had gone to school with, who he hadn’t thought about in years, but who had come to mind in short proximity preceding his compelled camp-out, had sent him a Facebook friend request.

I was waiting for more. I was waiting for Karl’s story to bring us inside of a space-craft, into a vivisection lab… Something.

But that was it. A none-too-incredible synchronicity that, even if one felt certain couldn’t be “mere coincidence”, could have fit any number of supernatural narratives…  This was taken as a clear signal of extraterrestrial activity.

A short, over-weight man named Clem tells a tale equally unremarkable. One night, he was in his bathroom when the light-bulb started humming and vibrating. “I reached up to touch it”, Clem tells us, “Bwoosh!”, he spreads his hands and extends his arms, indicating an explosion.

As with Karl, Clem’s story ends before I can figure out its meaning.

After the session, I’m fortunate in that Clem approaches me and immediately begins to elaborate:

“If I was to reach up, you know, and touch something in the light I’m certain that nothing would have happened, but I didn’t want to take the chance.” He’s still marveling over the event, but I still have no idea what this has to do with ETs.

“So did you do hypnosis?” I ask.

“No! No no. No. This was — I was in the bathroom. I’m putting on a t-shirt. And you know, you got those [?] deals on the lights. I got two lights, and I just happen to touch it. And it just went — it just started to vibrate, and — you ever see Star Wars?”

“Yeah.”

“Where the Death Star exploded?”

“Right.”

“That’s what this did. And the lamp, the light itself – nothing happened to it. It burned out like a year later… but this was just… I’d never seen anything like it.”

“Something different entirely entirely, huh?” I ask, not certain what else to say.

“It was – Yeah! That was something different entirely!”

“Did you ever do a regression like she [Rodwell] does?”

It turns out, Clem has been regressed, but he seems reticent to speak of memories of direct ET contact. He continues to tell me about his bizarre electrical problems. “That comes and goes”, he explains.

“And like several years ago, I had a Lincoln…” Clem lowers his voice and leans in closer to me, as though he is about to confide to me something so frightening and abnormal that he doesn’t want to distress any innocent passers-by who might overhear. “I’m driving to work one day, and I keep losing power. And I say, what the Hell’s going on? So, I park it, and I went into work. And I go to my mechanic the next day, and I sez, so what the Hell happened? And he sez, you know, in the hundreds and hundreds of engines I’ve worked on, I’ve never seen anything like this. I was like out of a cheap b-movie… [The mechanic] pops the hood –”

Clem pauses and looks me in the eye dramatically.

“Yeah?” I urge him.

“Takes a wrench and holds it up towards the engine –” Clem raises his fist to illustrate.

“Uh huh…”

“And it goes *chunk*”, Clem opens his fist, his gaze following an imaginary wrench that slams into the engine. “…It was magnetized! And he had to reverse the poles of the engine. Change the battery. Change the alternator. Cost me several hundred dollars. And there was just no rhyme or reason for it.”

I’m at a loss. “Right…” I say, lamely.

“I’ve had experiences, and that kind of thing just drives me nuts. There’s no sense to it.”

I press Clem to tell me what exactly makes him feel certain that ETs were involved, and of what direct experiences he feels he’s had with unearthly beings.

He has had contact with ETs, but contact of the psychic kind. They come to him as voices in his head. They come into his house at night. He hears them crawling around… under the stairs, in the attic. At this point, my oscillating opinion of the hypnotherapists who perpetuate beliefs in ET encounters is decidedly negative. Clem, I feel, may need real help. He begins to describe how difficult it is to talk to some of his friends and family about these kinds of things. It is comforting to hear, at least, that he does have friends and family to talk to.

“You can’t be angry at them for finding these things hard to understand,” I tell him. “You don’t want to keep things from them, but you also want to hear them out and respect their perspective. It’s always good to hear another opinion, regardless of what they make of yours…”

Clem agrees.

We shake hands and part ways.

On my way back to my hotel room, I spot Karl. He’s telling another conference-goer who wasn’t at the session about his remarkable sychronicities. I can already see a shift in his demeanor. While he came to the session uncertain that the “anomalies” he had experienced were indicative of ET contact, he’s growing more and more convinced by the moment…

“Scientific research has clearly demonstrated that when one per cent of the population of a city or town practices Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation Programme, the crime rate significantly decreases. Similarly, when groups of individuals practicing Maharishi’s TM-Sidhi programme with Yogic Flying equal at least the square root of one per cent of a population, there is a significant reduction of crime and accidents, as well as an increase in stock prices, decreased pollution, decreased unemployment, and decreased hostilities between nations.”

This crime-reducing by-product of TM is a phenomena known as “The Maharishi Effect”. During the Summer of 1993, 4,000 faithful, trained in the peaceful art of Transcendental Meditation, gathered in crime-ridden Washington, D.C. with a mission: to scientifically prove the Maharishi Effect. And, if you ask those minds from the prestigious Maharishi University who were responsible for the study, the experiment was a great success… A success, that is, despite the fact that “during the weeks of the experiment Washington D.C.’s weekly murder count ‘hit the highest level ever recorded.'”

So where was the success? I childishly ask in my negativity-induced ignorance.

Ah… you see, though homicides peaked in this TM-increased field of peace, crime was in fact reduced 18 percent from what it would have been had the meditators not been present!

No doubt about it. Maharishi University’s own physicist, Dr. John Hagelin worked out all of the variables. The Maharishi Effect is proven… But I have my doubts. When I published an article questioning the validity of TM science, a commentator and TM practitioner tried to set me straight:

“[…]You get the facts all wrong because you see it through a negative belief system. Lighten up. I’ve been doing TM for years. It’s given me more happiness & energy for success in my work, gotten rid of stress that I see dragging others down & making them sick. Friends whom I’ve gotten to do TM, I’ve watched meditation change their life. It’s ridiculous to try to reason or explain the facts to people enmeshed in an unhealthy, negative mindset. This article’s not even about the research. It’s not about TM. It’s about a world view threatened by the possibility that TM really has the effects claimed for it. It’s about a rigid belief system that needs to convince itself & others that the all-positive, life-changing effects of TM are not possible, because that would mean your beliefs & your defense mechanism would collapse. TM is a totally cool, edifying experience – a fact you cannot change.”

Worse than my failure to appreciate the science of the Maharishi Effect, is the fact that I’ve dismissed out-of-hand, as absurd, TM’s Yogic Flying – the claim that TM meditators may achieve levitation. “Stage One is generally associated with what would best be described as ‘hopping like a frog.’ Stage Two is flying through the air for a short time. Stage Three is complete mastery of the sky.” The very idea proved altogether too much for the defense mechanisms I’d constructed in preservation of my negative world view, and when I learned that TM, through the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, was attempting to insert itself into public schools, I went on the offensive, publishing the following article on Examiner.com… an article that the General Counsel for Maharishi University would deem “defamatory”:

Transcendental Meditation in schools, the David Lynch program

Expel from your mind the stereotyped image of the robed, bearded yogi. Forget the worn image of the unkempt, hash-headed, lotus-seated hippy listening to sitar music in an incense-filled room behind a beaded curtain. This is not the Transcendental Meditation [TM] we are talking about. This is Science!

“Hundreds of scientific studies have been conducted on the benefits of the Transcendental Meditation program at more than 200 independent universities and research institutions worldwide in the past 35 years,” explains the TM-promoting David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace website. Among the positive side-effects of the TM program, we find: increased focus, decreased hostility, reduced anxiety, even a reduction in cardiovascular disease among practitioners.

Surely, with this in mind, no reasonable person would argue against teaching the TM method in public schools.

And this is exactly what the David Lynch Foundation – founded by the cult film director of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive – proposes: implementation of a TM teaching program “in public and private schools and in after-school programs across the U.S. and around the world, with thousands of students enjoying its benefits.”

This past April, the foundation held a large benefit concert in New York – including performances by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Ben Harper, and Moby – which, according to USA Today, raised an estimated $3 million toward funding the TM-in-schools program.

But, despite the attributed benefits and celebrity endorsements, some worry that the teaching of a TM-based program in public schools constitutes another breach across the ever-eroding church-state dividing line. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State reports, “Slowly but steadily, TM seems to be gaining a foothold in public schools across the country. The trend has alarmed some advocates of church-state separation, who point out that the practice is based in Hinduism and that the federal courts removed it from New Jersey public schools on church-state grounds in 1979.”

In regards to funding being offered by the David Lynch Foundation in support of the TM program, “Americans United is urging school officials to turn down the money, reminding educators that TM in the schools can spark litigation. In 1976, Americans United and other groups joined with Roman Catholic and Protestant parents to bring a lawsuit against the use of TM in five New Jersey public schools.” […] “A federal court struck down the TM classes in October of 1977, a decision that was affirmed by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in February of 1979…Ruling in Malnak v. Yogi, the federal appeals court declared that TM is grounded in Hinduism. Students, the court pointed out, were assigned the name of a Hindu god to chant, and even went through a type of religious initiation ceremony called a puja.”

Indeed, though the David Lynch Foundation seems keen to express that TM is just a technique, with real estate holdings, schools, and clinics—even a town, Vedic City, in Iowa—“worth more than $3 billion in the late 1990s,” TM is clearly something more. Some go so far as describe TM as “a cult that ultimately seeks to strip individuals of their ability to think and choose freely.”

Therapist John Knapp, specializing in providing help to ex-cult members and people entangled in “cultic relationships” left TM after 23 years of involvement. “I married somebody who was not involved with the group, and part of my group experience was that I was asked to lie about a number of items. And living every day with someone and having to lie to them was extremely difficult… It caused what you could call a cognitive dissonance. It really caused a bifurcation in my mind. It was really difficult to live with. And I’d also gotten very far away from my family, which is not uncommon for people who are in these kinds of [cultic] relationships. As my mother was getting older I wanted to re-establish my ties with her and the family. These kinds of things led me to begin questioning my relationship [with TM].”

Upon deciding that he would leave TM, Knapp reports that he suffered a good deal of harassing behavior from the group. “It was difficult for me, because I had believed so strongly in this group [TM]. My spiritual and emotional life was really bound up completely with this group, so when they turned on me it was very confusing and very difficult for me…”

Worse, Knapp reports negative effects derived from the meditation technique itself, from addictive behavior to increased feelings of dissociation. He claims that many clients of his that come from TM have experienced the same.

TM was founded by a man known as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1956 in India, and the revered guru himself had once been accused of using “fear and intimidation” in order to work to prevent a disciple from leaving the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. The disillusioned student, Robert Kropinski, and six other people sued Maharishi’s University for $9 million on the grounds of “fraud, neglect, and intentionally inflicting emotional damage”. Kropinski stated that none of the promised TM benefits ever surfaced during his time as a student, and he was awarded $138,000 by a Washington D.C. jury. Maharishi did not appear in court, as he was never available to receive summons.

Admittedly, all of this sounds most unpleasant, but what of the scientific data supporting theindividual benefits of TM?

There are problems with TM’s data. While the David Lynch Foundation endlessly promotes the “unique” benefits of TM, there is a conspicuous shortage of comparative analytical studies that measure TM against other relaxation techniques. Surprisingly, studies measuring the effects of a simple mid-day nap report many of the same “unique” benefits touted by TM.

In fact, a study published in the journal Science in 1976 found in studying “five experienced practitioners of Transcendental Meditation”, that they “spent appreciable parts of meditation sessions” merely napping.

And, according to a June 2007 report, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that evaluated the quality of the meditation research along an array of standard scientific criteria such as the proper use of randomization and control group techniques, “Overall, the methodological quality of both intervention and observational analytic studies on meditation practices is poor.”

According to Dr. Barry Markovsky, professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina, “Poor evidence, even in large quantities, falls short of establishing scientifically the benefits of TM.”

Worst of all, TM makes a series of staggering claims that can be charitably described as “unlikely”. Old advertisements for TM claim that practitioners of TM will develop “supernormal powers” including “supernormal sight and hearing”, invisibility, and levitation! The organization even circulated photos with pictures of lotus-seated students apparently hovering above the ground, but first-hand observations of the “levitations” left many unconvinced. The levitators never managed to levitate for very long; they never really “hovered”. In fact, they sprung up rather abruptly and dropped immediately to the ground again. Really, it was quite apparent that these transcendent hopefuls were merely hopping about from a seated position.

Nor has TM provided any legitimized demonstrations of any of its supernormal powers.

When asked about “advanced techniques” such as “yogic flight” during a press conference promoting his benefit concert, David Lynch replied with some rambling vagaries about a “field of unity”, “bliss”, and the “collective consciousness”.

The David Lynch Foundation has a stated of goal of teaching TM to one million children, which is reminiscent of another supernatural claim of TM: the Maharishi Effect, which states that a certain critical mass of TM meditators can affect change upon the material world.

While John Hagelin of the David Lynch Foundation claims that the Maharishi Effect is a scientifically proven phenomenon, there is no reliable evidence to support this. (Hagelin, it should be noted, is partially to blame for the simple-minded buffoonery of the best-selling book The Secret, which promotes a simpler version of the Maharishi Effect: The idea that one can obtain what one wants through mere wishful thinking.) Hagelin claims that in 1993 crime was reduced inWashington, DC during a two month period due to the collective effort of 4000 TM practitioners.

As Skeptico reports: “There were many problems with this experiment. One was that the murder rate rose during the period in question. Another was that Hagelin’s report stated violent crime had been reduced by 18% (in the film [What The Bleep Do We Know] he says 25%), but reduced compared with what? How did he know what the crime rate would have been without the TM? It was discovered later that all the members of the “independent scientific review board” that scrutinized the project were followers of the Maharishi. The study was pseudoscience: no double blinding, the reviewers were not independent, and the experiment has never been independently replicated. Hagelin deservedly won an Ig Nobel Prize in 1994 for this outstanding piece of work.”

James Randi, famed stage magician, author, founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation, and debunker of supernatural claims, explains that TM has “always maintained this… [the idea] that if a certain critical number of people take up TM, they will protect everybody, and the world will be perfectly safe from then on.”

Randi came to be aware of TM through his friend and fellow magician, Doug Henning. “I knew [Henning] very well as a kid, and later as a mature magician. We were always in touch…” Randi describes a deeply cultic relationship between Henning and Transcendental Meditation that would destroy Henning’s career and eventually take his life. Henning’s career as a television magician was compromised as he strove to hire only TM initiates to work on the set. According to Randi, this was not only problematic for the fact that it was difficult to find people within TM who were talented in television production, but “every so often they went in to meditation and work just stopped…” Eventually, TV executives grew weary of Henning’s professional antics.

Henning became even more deeply involved with TM following his diagnosis of liver cancer, eventually removing himself from contact with non-TM practitioners. “He gave up all medical care… the Maharishi had told him that he could recover from his liver cancer simply from meditating… he meditated himself to death.” Henning died in February of 2000.

“I’m so angry at the TM movement,” says Randi, “for having taken an innocent person.”

John Knapp feels that the drive to bring TM into more schools is destined to failure as any critical scrutiny of the organization will prove its undoing. According to him, “It’s just too damn strange…”

Relaxation – whether by crude napping, or practiced meditation – holds certain benefits that are not the monopoly of the TM brand. It is this author’s hope that schools will continue to seek techniques to aid the reduction of stress and conflict – while increasing health and focus – withoutreducing their curriculum to supernatural philosophies that cross the church-state line.

*********

Not long after posting the article above, I received an email from an Examiner editor informing me that she had received an email from William Goldstein of Maharishi University.

“I received [an] email [from William Goldstein] regarding your recent article regarding transcendental meditation and the David Lynch Foundation. As you should be aware, the Examiner.com Terms of Use and the click-through Examiners Independent Contractor Agreement and License (which you entered into with Examiner.com) prohibit the posting of content that is defamatory or factually inaccurate, as has been alleged here. Accordingly, we have temporarily removed the article from our site pending further investigation and/or modification of the article by you.”

She helpfully made my situation clear:

“Please be aware that because you are an independent contractor and your articles are selected, written, posted or controlled solely by you, you alone would be liable should either of the organizations listed below decide to bring a lawsuit for defamation or otherwise. Accordingly, we strongly encourage you to consider modifying the article[…]”

William Goldstein’s accusatory email followed:

Dear Examiner Editor in Chief

I write this letter as General Counsel for Maharishi University of Management and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace concerning the article in your online publication: http://www.examiner.com/x-20682-Boston-Underground-Examiner_y2009m10d5-Transcendental-Meditation-in-schools-the-David-Lynch-program

I will not comment on the inappropriate statements on the scientific research conducted on the TM program contained in Mr. Mesner’s article. Dr. Orme Johnson’s comments you have received reply more expertly than I could on that subject and I incorporate them [Orme Johnson posted his remarks in the public comments field following the article on Examiner.com]. But there are other false, defamatory and/or misleading statements which need to be identified as such and retracted. The failure to do so continues to damage the reputation of my client organizations which teach and promote these programs, and the individuals involved in those activities.

One court case, over thirty years ago, found a curriculum in the Science of Creative Intelligence which included the TM program to have religious overtones violative of the First Amendment. That “Malnak” case has been mischaracterized and its scope overstated by Mr. Mesner. No court at any time has ever ruled that teaching the TM program alone is impermissible, nor that the student is “assigned the name of a Hindu God to chant”.

What is even more relevant is the fact that, largely in light of the extensive research that has been done over the last thirty years on the Transcendental Meditation programs benefits in removing stress, several thousand at risk students in public schools across the United States have decided voluntarily to learn the TM program. Through sponsorships from the David Lynch Foundation, they have learned the technique in voluntary Quiet Time programs without any legal interference. The Supreme Court’s 1985 decision in Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 US 38 and its progeny have now made it clear that secular or non-secular meditation is permissible under the First Amendment in such circumstances.

Mr. Mesner then goes on to paste the horrific label of a “cult” on the TM program. Al Gore, Jerry Seinfeld and Paul McCartney would find it remarkable to be told they are members of a cult, but that does not mitigate the serious damages that such thoughtless labeling can have on the organizations which teach these programs to the public. And while Jerry may laugh at such a characterization, Al Gore may not have as well developed a sense of humor.

John Knapp, who claims to be a licensed counselor, is quoted by Mr. Mesner as saying he was lied to and harassed by the TM organization. But this is not factually supported. However, what is a fact is that Mr. Knapp has developed a niche in the field of counseling for victims of cults which he actively promotes on his websites. He has created a straw man, and now he is selling expensive medicine to him. Mr. Knapp’s professional ethical conflict of interest seems much more worthy of note than his unsupported claims of lies and harassment.

Further, Messrs.. Knapp and Mesner attempt to attribute the symptoms of mental illness to the practice of the TM program without scientific basis. This may be of great support to his cult counseling practice, but is not supported by the several hundred studies. No one claims that every person who practices the TM technique will be promptly freed of any mental distress. People who practice the TM program may indeed coincidentally suffer from such problems. What the research shows conclusively, however, is that they get noticeably and materially better through this practice — they do not get worse. If Mr. Knapp really and honestly feels otherwise, why has he not undertaken a controlled scientific study which has been published in a peer reviewed journal? In fact, all such studies of the TM program have shown that it only produces beneficial effects. Mr. Knapp’s self serving, conflict ridden unscientific anecdotes are not the evidence recognized as credible by science or his profession and claiming such is unethical and irresponsible. It is also damaging to those who teach and practice those programs and he should be held accountable for such damage. In any event, it should not be published and promoted by this publication or you are participating in this damaging process.

Mr. Mesner’s misrepresentations continue by his claim that Kropinski received a $138,000 jury verdict for claimed injuries from the TM program. What he omits to mention is that it was reversed on appeal. Kropinski v. WPEC, 853 F.2d 948 ( 1988) .

These falsehoods, defamations and omissions compel me to ask you to remove this article from your newspaper to put an end to the continuing damage its publication causes to my client.

Thank you very much for your anticipated co-operation.

William Goldstein
General Counsel,
Maharishi University of Management and
David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace

Telephone 641 472 1183
Fax 641 472 1141
email: bgoldstein@mum.edu

William Goldstein
General Counsel
Maharishi University of Management
Telephone 641 472 1183
Fax 641 472 1141
email: bgoldstein@mum.edu

*******************

And so, my article was pulled, and I was being given the opportunity to amend and correct all defamations. I re-read my work carefully….

No, no defamations there. As Examiner claimed no legal responsibility regarding the article, I decided to take the liberty of re-posting it in full, exactly as it was but with this preface:

This previously posted article has been updated with appended material following a letter received from the General Counsel for Maharishi University of Management and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace, William Goldstein, under the subject heading “Retraction of Defamatory Article”. Upon reviewing Goldstein’s criticisms, the author has decided that there are no grounds for labeling this article “defamatory”. An open reply to Goldstein’s letter follows the article below:

As promised, the updated post of the article was appended with my reply to the claim of “defamation” as follows:

On October 13 editors at Examiner received an email from William Goldstein, General Counsel for Maharishi University of Management and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace. The email’s subject heading was “Retraction of Defamatory Article”, and it ended with strong words claiming that the “falsehoods, defamations and omissions [in the article above] compel me [Goldstein] to ask you to remove this article from your newspaper to put an end to the continuing damage its publication causes to my client.”

And what were these “falsehoods, defamations and omissions”? Goldstein opens: “I will not comment on the inappropriate statements on the scientific research conducted on the TM program contained in Mr. Mesner’s article. Dr. Orme Johnson’s comments you have received reply more expertly than I could on that subject and I incorporate them.”

I had read Dr. Orme Johnson’s criticisms and found them less than compelling, some of them nonsensical. For instance, this comment – “To Knapp’s statement that TM is “too strange” for America, one has to ask, strange for whom, the narrow minded and ethnocentric? I think our nation has gotten past a lot of that.” – left me to merely wonder what in the world ethnocentricism might have to do with any of this if TM is not to be viewed as an Eastern practice rooted in Eastern beliefs and traditions?

Dr. Orme Johnson made comments suggesting that James Randi was incorrect regarding Henning’s situation: “Maharishi’s advice was always to seek medical attention when one gets sick, not “just meditate” as Randi alleges. Studies of medical care utilization that I conducted on Blue Cross statistics found that 2,000 TM subjects over a five-year period had on average 50% less hospitalization and doctors visits than the norm or matched controls, with reductions in all categories of disease.”

This comment would be laughable if the ramifications were less grave. When the criticism is that TM discouraged a sick man from seeking medical attention, the statistic of 50% less hospitalization amongst TM practitioners hardly makes that claim seem less credible. But, just the same, if Randi’s comments are “falsehoods, defamations, or omissions”, that is problem that must be taken up with James Randi. He is accurately quoted in the article above.

Likewise, the claim that TM is a “cult” is attributed, and Goldstein must take any disagreement with that label up with those who use it to describe his… “client”. In my favorite part of his email, Goldstein writes: Mr. Mesner then goes on to paste the horrific label of a “cult” on the TM program. Al Gore, Jerry Seinfeld and Paul McCartney would find it remarkable to be told they are members of a cult, but that does not mitigate the serious damages that such thoughtless labeling can have on the organizations which teach these programs to the public. And while Jerry may laugh at such a characterization, Al Gore may not have as well developed a sense of humor.

This shameless name-dropping is pointless, as it can be worked both ways. “Jerry may laugh”, and Al Gore may be a humorless bore. Or Jerry may in fact cringe in disgust if presented with the idea that TM practitioners may learn to levitate, or that the Maharishi Effect is a proven phenomena. Al Gore may laugh at such nonsense. We really don’t know, do we? Were Jerry Seinfeld, Al Gore, or Paul McCartney asked to give an opinion of my article? Is it just too remarkable to imagine that such celebrities might be involved in a “cult” or cult-based practices? Do Tom Cruise and John Travolta find it remarkable that many accuse Scientology of being a cult? For that matter, isn’t Scientology’s Dianetics “auditing” practice nothing more than a therapeutic technique? As such, perhaps it too should be welcomed into school rooms.

Goldstein goes on to question the credibility of John Knapp: “Mr. Knapp has developed a niche in the field of counseling for victims of cults which he actively promotes on his websites. He has created a straw man, and now he is selling expensive medicine to him. ”

While I’m not exactly sure what is meant by this, it seems to imply that counseling ex-TM practitioners has proven lucrative for Knapp which would also imply a consistent client base of TM disaffected. But, again, if Goldstein takes issue with what is said by Knapp, he must take it up with him. Knapp is accurately quoted in the article above.

The one helpful item mentioned in Goldstein’s email was the fact that the Kropinski finding was over-turned on appeal – though this would better have been mentioned in the comments, not in a full letter claiming “defamation”.

Most other comments regarding this article, by Dr. Orme Johnson and others, take exception to the criticisms regarding the Maharishi Effect. I have no intention of being ambiguous about this: the Maharishi Effect is not a proven phenomena. I seriously doubt it can even be considered a valid hypothesis. It’s failed hippy mysticism, and it has no place whatever in public schools.

I said it.

Go ahead and sue me.

Speaking only for myself,

Douglas Mesner

www.process.org

*********

Anticipating summons, though believing the claim of “defamation” to be entirely unfounded, I contacted organisations and institutions I felt might be of assistance should TM in fact attempt to sue me.

So it was that sometime in early December, somebody with copies of the Goldstein-Examiner emails posted them on Wikileaks so as to demonstrate TM’s descent into Scientology-like litigiousness. The public posting of Goldstein’s letter further agitated the TM apologists. The comments on the Wiki page questioned the purpose of posting such an item. One Commenter asked, Is Wikileaks serving a noble purpose here?:

“WikiLeaks needs to carefully discern documents such as this to determine if the material actually poses a threat to “A just and corrupt free world.” If the document is benign and the legal notice by the TM people was justified because the Examiner article actually is defamatory, then WikiLeaks is just letting themselves be used for destructive purposes by self-serving people with ill intentions.

After reading the letter, and being aware beforehand of the positive nature of TM, it appears to me that WikiLeaks, in this case, is itself acting in opposition to a fair and corrupt-free world. Just because someone claims to have a “secret document” revealing unfounded threats doesn’t mean that promoting that person’s accusations is noble and progressive.

But I think you’re actually doing TM a favor by publishing the letter and showing people the rational, fact-based response of the TM organization to Mesner’s attacks, whose article in the Examiner (for anyone who actually does research or knows the facts) was replete with false accusations and defamations.

I urge WikiLeaks to consider this: If TM is actually a good thing, and the organization is actually justified in their request that Mesner adjust his article, then are you really serving a just cause to allow yourself to be instrument of further defamation?

By reading through your files on TM, one gets the impression that your organization is not neutral, fair-minded or inclined to value scientific research and objectivity, but is predisposed to accept negativity and rancorous attacks against TM just for the sake of providing more so-called “leaked material,” regardless or whether or not the “leaker’s” context and explanations are justified.

Wiley, USA”

Odd though it was that the publication of Goldstein’s letter should provoke a defensive reaction from those who claim to feel his criticisms of my article were justified, it was a different comment entirely that infuriated me and demanded my correction:

[…] I think this is a complete non-issue. There was a basis for the claim (erroneous defamatory information being posted in the article). That was then corrected and the article was reposted with the correction and no further complaint. Totally legit (as would also be the case if it happened to wikileaks or anyone else – removing false statements)

This statement was posted anonymously. Of course, I had not “corrected” the article before I had reposted it. The claim that I had done so, supposedly conceding to having posted erroneous and defamatory information made me feel… defamed as a researcher and freelance writer.

I replied under the subject heading of “Maharishi Spin”:

Amid what appears to be an attempt by TM to re-spin this story, I want to make it abundantly clear that I did not, in any way revise the article on Examiner.com – except to add a brief introduction mentioning Goldstein’s letter, and an addendum replying to that letter – before reposting the article on that site. The claim that the article was “corrected” before being re-posted is a flat lie, and I would challenge anybody saying otherwise not to do so anonymously, and cite what exact corrections are imagined to have been made. In reality, what seems to have happened is, Goldstein attempted to intimidate both me and the editors at Examiner.com with the threat of legal action on the base-less claim of defamation in hopes that we would fold and remove the article. That did not work, the article remains as is, and Goldstein’s failure to sue me since is perhaps a tacit confession that there is, in fact, no case for defamation to be made.—Douglas Mesner 20:41, 15 December 2009 (GMT)

And that’s where we stand… for now….

David Lynch by Alethea Jones