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.

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 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.

Western Missouri Condemns Without Trial

By J. Bean (A Skeptic in Kansas City)

March 2010

“[For law enforcement officers] the level of proof necessary for taking action on allegations of criminal acts must be more than simply the victim alleged it and it is possible…. We need to be concerned about the distribution and publication of unsubstantiated allegations of bizarre sexual abuse.” – Kenneth Lanning, FBI

Dressed in orange jumpsuits and shackled at their wrists, ankles, and waists, six members of the Mohler family shuffle past local television news cameras and into a courtroom. Tethered together, they resemble fish on a stringer with the proud authorities displaying their catch.  On-the-spot reporters read the charges against them,“Forcible rape of a child; Deviate sexual assault; Use of a child in a sexual performance…”  Newspaper accounts are perhaps even more harsh: The men’s booking photos are posted beneath headlines such as “Incest Allegations Shatter Public image of Church-Going Clan”, [1] or “Child-Raping Missouri Family May Have Bodies in Yard”. [2 ] Posted on the internet  beneath these stories  are reader  comments reminiscent of 1692; judgments of guilt  and cries for harsh punishment along with suspicions cast upon any who question the charges dominate the boards.

The men are 76 year old Burrell Mohler Sr., his four sons, Burrell “Ed” Jr., David, Jared, and Roland, and Burrell Sr.’s 72 year old brother, Darryl Mohler. The arrests were made in November 2009, by Lafayette County, Missouri authorities based on accusations of ritualistic crimes against Ed Mohler’s (now adult) children from 1988 to 1995. The charges against the men involve numerous alleged child rapes, sodomies, and bestiality. They are also publicly accused of kidnapping, various murders, producing child pornography, breeding then slaughtering babies, performing forced abortions on minors, and holding an unwilling sex-slave for years in the family basement, although there have been no charges filed for those allegations.

“A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.” – Bertrand Russell

The case against the Mohler men first came to Lafayette County authorities in August 2009, when Ed Mohler’s 26 year old daughter (T.A.) contacted a western Missouri detective.   According to the probable cause statements: (T.A.) had “suppressed many of the memories” until recently. She “identified 8 specific memories of abuse and a 9th that was perpetrated on her brother”.  “She has many memories of abuse” but some occurred in other jurisdictions.  “She became pregnant and was made to have an abortion at age 11 ½.  She doesn’t remember any sexual abuse after that date.”[3]

Even if the word “suppressed” had not been used, the pointed use of the word “memories” in the report is indicative of repressed memory accusations. Generally when people report past events they do not do so under the context of “identifying memories”.

After those initial accusations in August, authorities made contact with, and began to question the other five siblings. On October 7th, three of the siblings (T.A.), (A.J.), and (E.M.) provided authorities with a 36 page collaborative report detailing several murders they witnessed spanning two Missouri counties. They were able to lead authorities to the approximate spot they say they helped to bury one of the murder victims. On October 29th, (T.A.) again spoke with the detective; this time alleging that she recalled her grandfather keeping a female child in his basement crawlspace. The siblings also told authorities that as they were being abused, the men told them to write down what was happening to them. These notes were placed in mason jars then buried.  The siblings say their abusers told them that if they buried these notes, their memories would also become buried. [4][5]

A fourth sibling (E.W.) told police that he had once unearthed some of those jars as a child, but reburied them at the request of his sisters.[4] Based on these statements, a search warrant was issued for the farm previously owned by Burrell Mohler Sr. to search for bodies, other evidence of murder, items from the crawlspace, and the mason jars. [6]

On November 10, 2009, as authorities swarmed the Bate City farmhouse with backhoes and shovels, detectives from Lafayette and various other counties were dispatched to arrest Burrell Sr. and his sons.

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” – Winston Churchill

As the arrests were made public, lead investigator, Sheriff Kerrick Alumbaugh, held a press conference. The stated purpose for the conference was to urge other possible victims to come forward. Specifically, investigators wished to locate the girl said to have been held captive in the basement crawlspace.

There were, however, other remarks of interest made during that press conference. One comment in particular gives further reason to suspect that all of the accusers are engaged in the recovering of repressed memories: Q: “How does the time factor complicate the case?” A: “Time factor always complicates a case. But when memories of this come out with the victims, as you talk about it, as you investigate it, more comes out.” [7]

Alumbaugh also defended the large amounts of county resources used to investigate the case, insisting the expenditures are important for protecting children: “You can read the probable cause statements as we leave and understand that this is money well spent of the tax payer’s dollars to bring these people to justice” …“They’ve had a threat to cut investigators…So, I mean, these are things that are really impacting our budgets and are very worthwhile to do because of the children.”[7]

Possibly most important, were the personal motivations Sheriff Alumbaugh expressed: “You personally attach it to yourself. You have children at home. You think about your children, you think about children that you know. Our biggest concern right now are those victims and those children that are out there that are potential victims. So, each one of us takes this very personally.”[7]

“All wrong-doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do” – Arnold Bennet

Perhaps Sheriff Alumbaugh was thinking of a 5 year old girl he met in 2006, and hoping that, through aggressively pursuing the Mohler men, he could begin to repair his part in that child’s tragedy:

In 2006, the nude, battered body of 41 year old Marsha Spicer was found in a shallow grave in Lafayette County. Lorie Dunfield, a friend of Spicer’s, reported to authorities that she believed Spicer may have been involved with a man named Richard Davis. Dunfield reported that Richard Davis had recently asked her to assist him in videotaping the torture and murder of other women during three-way sex. “He wanted me to help him kill women and get rid of the bodies.” Dunfield said.[8]  Lorie Dunfield managed to get away from Davis, but believed that her friend, Marsh Spicer, may have later hooked up with him. Sheriff Alumbaugh and his deputies were called to interview Richard Davis and his girlfriend, Dena Riley, in regard to the Spicer homicide.

Richard Davis was already being sought by his parole officer after serving 16 years for raping and sodomizing a woman at knife point. His parole officer had been unable to contact him for a drug screening. Upon arriving at Davis’ apartment, investigators noted a video camera trained on the bed, an open journal with notations about choking and sex, and marijuana on a table. During that initial interview, Davis’ girlfriend Dena Riley admitted that Davis was into violent sex.

Rather than detain Davis, Sheriff Alumbaugh told Richard Davis and Dena Riley to leave the premises while he applied for a search warrant. Alumbaugh and his deputies returned hours later. The investigators viewed the tape currently in the VCR next to Davis’ bed. It was a “snuff video” of the rape, beating, and strangulation of Marsha Spicer. It appeared that the couple may have been watching the video just prior to the Sheriff and deputies’ arrival. Regrettably, since Alumbaugh had not detained Davis and Riley, they had fled the city. It was eight days before a nationwide manhunt managed to locate the couple for arrest. During this time, Richard Davis kidnapped and raped a 5 year old girl. The child’s injuries were so severe; she had to be airlifted to a hospital.

Police Chief Fred Mills defended Alumbaugh’s decision, “You can spin the facts any way you want. But we had no probable cause to arrest them. What you need for an arrest warrant is a lot more than you need for a search warrant.” Alumbaugh said, “We just didn’t have enough (evidence). We weren’t ready to do hard questioning on them.”

None-the-less, Alumbaugh arrested the six Mohler men with only accusations from the alleged victims. These men had no parole violations, no drugs on their nightstands, and no past convictions for violent rapes. In fact they had no criminal histories at all. There were no bodies recently discovered in shallow graves, neither were the men holed up in shabby apartments with meth-addicted girlfriends. The Mohler men were arrested while at home with their wives or working for their longtime employers, to be charged with crimes allegedly occurring decades ago.

Newly appointed prosecutor, Kellie Ritchie filed the charges. It was while working as assistant DA in Buchanan County that Ritchie began concentrating on sexual assault cases. Four years out of law school, Ritchie was ready for greater responsibility at the same time that her boss wished to have one prosecutor handle all sexual abuse cases.[9] Ritchie readily accepted that challenge and helped to open a children’s advocacy center. Since her February, 2009 appointment to the Lafayette County office, Ritchie has continued her dedication to assisting victims of rape, raising awareness through a county Denim Day, [10] and promising the vigorous prosecution of any in possession of child pornography. [11] While these are all commendable pursuits; could this focus have clouded the prosecutor’s judgment in filing charges based on dubious repressed memory accusations?

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation” – Mahatma Gandhi

The Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI has assisted in investigations of hundreds of cases in which adults begin to report that they were victims of extreme abuses as children. Allegations involve multiple victims and multiple offenders and often include insertion of foreign objects, witnessing mutilations, as well as sexual acts and murders being filmed or photographed. In several of these cases, women claim to have had babies that were turned over for human sacrifice. Such accusations are most common in rural or suburban communities with high concentrations of religiously conservative people. According to Behavioral Science Unit Supervisory Agent Kenneth Lanning, “In none of the multidimensional child sex ring cases of which I am aware have bodies of the murder victims been found – in spite of major excavations where the abuse victims claim the bodies were located. …Not only are no bodies found, but also, more importantly, there is no physical evidence that a murder took place. Many of those not in law enforcement do not understand that, while it is possible to get rid of a body, it is even more difficult to get rid of the physical evidence that a murder took place.” – Kenneth Lanning, FBI [12]

In 1994, the US Government funded a study by The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. Researchers found more than 12,000 accusations of group cult sexual abuse, but none were able to be substantiated. The principle investigator in that study, Dr. Gail Goodman, commented, “While you would not expect to find corroborating evidence in many sexual abuse cases, you would expect it when people claim the rituals involved murders, and the reported cases come from district attorneys or police…If there is anyone out there with solid evidence… we would like to know about it.”[13][14] Large scale government funded investigations were also conducted in the states of Michigan, Utah, and Virginia with the same empty-handed results.

If Lafayette County officials were familiar with any of these reports, they should not have been surprised to find only one broken jar (no note), a bone fragment (unknown type), some broken eyeglasses, half a credit card, and a shoe sole in their excavation of the Bates City farm.[15]

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.  It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. – Mark Twain

The Sheriff’s press conference proved more fruitful than the farm excavation. The following day, a woman came forward claiming to have been held in the basement’s crawlspace for several years as a child. “She recalls becoming pregnant twice while in captivity.   Burrell Sr. and Burrell Ed Jr. put the first infant in a box and buried it in the dirt floor under the window. Days later, the floor was covered in concrete.”[16] Ground penetrating radar was used to locate a “box-like” area under the concrete and a new search warrant issued. Detectives returned to the farmhouse, broke open the concrete floor, but found only dirt.  Samples of the dirt were removed for analysis.[17] Announcements of basement sex-slave and her murdered infant made for more sensational headlines, although no charges were ever filed in regard to her. Three weeks later, Sheriff Alumbaugh said that the woman “is longer part of this investigation.”[18] This proclamation has not been widely reported.

In addition to the basement captive, a local man whose ex-wife had once been married to Ed Mohler came forward following the press conference. Mark Young and Pamela Young divorced in 1993 with Pamela gaining custody of their son. Pamela then married Ed Mohler in 1999. Mr. Young has interviewed on several television news programs, as well as with print media, claiming that Ed’s ex-wife (mother of the accusers), Jeanette Mohler (Cyr) had come to him in January 2000 alleging that Ed was abusing Mark and Pamela’s son. Mr. Young says that he then filed complaints and won custody of the boy in an emergency hearing. Public records show, however, that Mark Young did not file for custody of his son until 2002.[19]  His ex-wife had already divorced Ed Mohler nearly a year prior, in the spring of 2001.[20]

The siblings’ mother, Jeanette Mohler, told investigators that she knew about, or suspected the abuse at the time it was happening. “At the time, complaints by the mother were taken to the head of the church rather than law enforcement”. [21] Bishop Tonga, now retired, recalls Jeanette’s complaints to him. Tonga says he interviewed both Ed and the siblings and they all denied the mother’s accusations. No further action was taken by the mother or by Mr. Tonga. Only Ed, Jeanette, and their children were members of Mr. Tonga’s congregation. No complaints were taken to any member of the other men’s churches.

The statements made by Jeanette Mohler are puzzling. Just as the original accusations have expanded to include bestiality, kidnappings, and murders, they have also expanded in time, now encompassing twelve years, from 1983 to 1995. Jeanette remained married to Ed throughout this time, not filing for divorce until 1997. During their divorce, both Ed and Jeanette continued to attend the Independence Missouri Mormon Church. It’s more probable that it was during this period that the mother began leveling these complaints against her husband to her church, and to her six children.

“There are people so prone to exaggeration that they can’t tell the truth without lying”. – Josh Billings

Defendant Burrell Mohler Sr. has been the most maligned in the media due to the finding of “incest pornography” at his home. On the day of his arrest, his wife, Sandra Mohler, voluntarily allowed investigators into all common areas of the house.  (Some areas were excluded as they are private quarters for an unrelated boarder). According to the investigator’s affidavit, Mrs. Mohler explained to Jackson County Detective Cathy Covey that she and her husband had arranged for separate bedrooms “after she had discovered he was viewing magazines and videos depicting persons involved in sexual activity”.[21]  (This statement has been consistently misquoted in the press). Mrs. Mohler reported that although they had begun to sleep separately, both had full access to all areas of the residence. She indicated that her husband commonly used the computer in her room because he had never set-up internet access for the computer in his basement bedroom.

Mrs. Mohler also “had full permission to enter his sleeping area downstairs”.[22] She stated that on two occasions she had looked in hidden areas of her husband’s bedroom to find his pornography. She told Detective Covey that she had taken away the magazines she found most objectionable and locked them in her file cabinet. Mrs. Mohler voluntarily supplied the investigators with the key to that filing cabinet. The magazines she had locked away included 5 digest style magazines which showed photos of adult models, engaged in sexual activity, with narratives depicting incestuous relationships.[22] “Incest is, in fact, sexual relations between individuals of any age too closely related to marry. It need not necessarily involve an adult and a child”.[12] Those 5 magazines are the most widely reported finding to imply the guilt of all six men, although none of them involve children or even models who appear to be children. The primary stash of pornography, later found in Burrell Sr.’s sleeping quarters, consisted of at least 65 more magazines, movies, and books – none of which were incest related.[23] In fact, many of these were specifically about and for senior citizens. One dvd has the words “Grandma and Grandpa” in the title and has been falsely reported as “incest porn” when in fact it is only about sexuality between aging partners.[24]

Many observers have noted that the search inventories included many unmarked or hand labeled videos. It’s been speculated that those tapes may contain child pornography but the information has not been released to the public. In fact, some articles on the case have falsely reported that illegal pornography was seized. Possession of child porn in the state of Missouri is a felony carrying up to a 10 year sentence. None of the men have been charged with this or any other offense resulting from the searches. Despite the wide assortment of accusations, the men are charged only with the crimes in which no physical evidence would necessarily be expected.

“They were distinguished for ignorance for they had just one idea and that was wrong.” – Benjamin Disraeli

When asked where the accusing Mohler siblings reside, Sheriff Alumbaugh states that they are “from all over right now”.[7] While this is true, the primary accuser resides in the college town of Provo, Utah and two other siblings show previous addresses in Provo. Provo, Utah is home to the Brigham Young University, run by the LDS Church. For a city of only 42 square miles, it has seen more than its share of repressed memory scandals. “Following a single article in the Provo weekly paper [about the FMS Foundation], in three days, over 150 families in this single geographical area called to report their experience.” Institute for Psychological Therapies, 1992

The student Counseling Center at BYU offers therapy to students for abuse issues. The Center’s website asserts, “Some individuals have little or no memory of being sexually abused and its impact upon them until adulthood.” [25] The Center also recommends books by repressed-memory therapists, Lynn Finney, Beverly Engel, and Noemi Mattis, as suggested reading. “The authors of these books all rely on the one another’s work as supporting evidence for their work; they all endorse and recommend one another’s books to their readers. If one of them comes up with a concocted statistic — such as ‘more than half of all women are victims of childhood sexual trauma’ — the numbers are traded like baseball cards, reprinted in every book and eventually enshrined as fact. Thus the cycle of misinformation, faulty statistics and invalidated assertions maintains itself….” -Carol Tavris

Lynn Finney is known for her promotion of self-hypnosis to recover memories of abuse, and for her belief that fully one-third of all women have been victims. In fact, Finney’s one-third statistic leads BYU Counseling Center’s website page for students seeking therapy.[25] One of Finney’s former patients, Martha Beck, authored the 2005 book Leaving the Saints. Beck is a Provo native, a therapist, and past professor of Sociology at BYU. It was while teaching at BYU, that Beck recovered memories of ritual abuse. In her book, Beck brags of her cruel confrontation with her 90 year old ailing father, “I grin, but my father is not amused. He looks longingly toward the hotel room door, apparently realizing I’m not about to let him leave.” [26] All seven of Beck’s siblings have expressed outrage and condemned these allegations.

Beverly Engel espouses, “If you still have a hard time believing a survivor…look at your own history for signs that you yourself may have been abused and are in denial” Engel gives a list of symptoms to assist the reader in determining if they have been abused and are in denial. Those symptoms include:  feeling ugly; a tendency to apologize; feeling helpless; or problems in relationships.[27]

Also recommended by the BYU Counseling Center is the 1993 publication Confronting Abuse.[25][28] Compiled by three Brigham Young University professors, Confronting Abuse is a collection of essays on ritual and sexual abuse. In it, repressed-memory practitioner, Neomi Mattis, describes the abuse she’s helped her patients to uncover: “In addition to all combinations of sexual intercourse genital, anal, and oral between child and adult or child and child (forced), victims are penetrated genitally or rectally with all kinds of objects, and are forced to submit to sexual activity with animals”. “They are forced to participate in all of the crimes, including sacrifice of animals; the torture and sometimes murder of babies, including in some cases the infants of young girls required to bear children specifically for sacrifice; the torture and sometimes murder of adults; and the systematic disposal of bodies.” Mattis explains why evidence of these crimes is never found, despite in-depth investigations: “Cultists include professionals, such as morticians and butchers, who are skilled at disposing of evidence.” She goes on to explain why many of the reports are verifiably false, “The victims are programmed to dissociate, so that they do not recognize or remember parts of their own experience or personality. They are trained to deny accusations, tell conflicting stories and retract their own reports”.  As for the seemingly normal, often charitable, outward lives of the accused in these child-rapes, breedings, murders, and torture, Mattis offers this, “[The Perpetrators are also]dissociative and thus unaware of their other cult-involved selves.” [29] (*See footnote) By this logic, any one of us could be not only victims, but also perpetrators of these crimes and never know it.

Just eight miles outside of Provo, the infamous “Greenbaum” [30] lecturer, Corydon Hammond operates a therapy office. In 2004, Hammond, along with Bennett Braun and Roberta Sachs of Chicago, settled a malpractice lawsuit against them by retracting repressed-memory patient Elizabeth Gale.  Hammond paid $175,000 of that $7.5M settlement.

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” – Albert Einstein

It seems to be the perfect storm: A divorce with bitter custodial parent; the repressed-memory pied pipers of Provo; a lead investigator with an agenda; a newly appointed prosecutor who has specialized in sexual abuse cases; and regular sensationalist misinformation distributed in the media. Having made the allegations so public and over-extending county monies on the investigation, the likelihood that the charges will be dropped due to the lack of hard evidence is greatly lessened.

An entire generation has come up since the hysteria of the 1980’s and early 1990’s. We saw then how easily the hysteria spreads from one sibling to the next, to investigators, prosecutors, child services, the media, and to the public. Each points to the other as evidence that their beliefs are reasonable. At that time, it was daytime talk shows like Sally Jesse Raphael or Phil Donahue that disseminated these shocking tales to gullible audiences. Today, the internet has taken the place of those talk shows and it seems that audiences are just as gullible.

*Footnote:
A 1995 study found that in cases of alleged abuse with no claims of repression or amnesia by the accusers, only 22% of accused passed polygraphs.  In cases where accusers claimed a period of amnesia, 91% of accused passed polygraphs. [29]

References:

1. Bradley, D. (2009, November 23) Incest Allegations Shatter Public image of Church-Going Clan.  Kansas City Star.
2. Marttinez, E. (2009, November  12)  Child-Raping Missouri Family May Have Bodies in Yard. CBS NEWS
3. Schroer, Det. C. (2009 November 3).  Mohler Probable Cause, Lafayette Co., MO
4. Schroer, Det. C. (2009 November 9).  Mohler Probable Cause, Lafayette Co., MO
5. Reported by Sgt. Collin Stosberg , Missouri Highway Patrol
6. Bates City farm Search Warrant Authorization 11/9/09; Judge Frerking
7. Alumbaugh, K. Sheriff (2009, November 11). Press Conference. http://www.kmbc.com/video/21586514/index.html
8. Krajicek, D. (2005) Serial Killers: Partners in Crime: Ricky and Dena.  http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/partners/richard_dean_davis/1_index.html
9. Cooper, R. (2009, November 29) Former Local Attorney Involved in Huge Case. St. Joseph News Press.
10. Parmon, J. (2009, April 29) Rally Shows Support for Victims of Rape.  The Lexington News
11. Ritchie, K.W. (2010, January 25) First Year Report.
12. Lanning, K. (1992) Investigators Guide to Allegations of Ritual Child Abuse.  Behavioral Science Unit & National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.
13. Goleman, D.  (1994, October 31) Proof Lacking for Ritual Abuse. New York Times
14. Goodman, G., et al (1994) Characteristics & Sources of Allegations of Ritual Child Abuse.  Clearing House on Child Abuse & Neglect Information
15. Burns, Det. Ray (2009, November 10) Return and Inventory.   Lafayette Co., MO
16. Schroer, C. (2009, November 12) Affidavit.  Lafayette Co., MO
17. Burns, Det. Ray (2009, November 13) Return and Inventory.  Lafayette Co., MO
18. Kelleher, M.  (2009, December 12) Jared Mohler Returns to Court.  Fox 4 News
19. Pamela Young-Robinson-Mohler v Mark Young MO Case #7CV193002524 (1993-2006)
20. Burrell Edward Mohler v Pamela Robinson-Mohler  MO Case #01FC204320 (2001)
21. Lederle, Officer M.  (2009, November 10)  Affidavit.  Boone Co., MO
22. Wilson, Sgt. A.  (2009, November 10) Affidavit/ Inventory.  Jackson Co., MO
23. Cole, Det. P. & Kelley, Det. A. (2009, November 20)Return and Inventory.  Jackson Co., MO
24. http://www.over40videos.com/video/Detailed/132.shtml (WARNING – Explicit material)
25. BYU  Career and Counseling Center:  http://ccc.byu.edu/childhood-abuse
26. Beck, M. (2005) Leaving the Saints. Crown Publishing.
27. Engel, B.  (1989). The Right to Innocence. Ivy Books.
28. Horton, A.L., Harrison, B.K., & Johnson, B.L. (1993) Confronting Abuse. Desert Book Co.
29. Abrams, S. & Abrams, J.  (1995) False Memory Syndrome vs. Total Repression.  Journal of Psychiatry and Law
30. Hammond, C. (1992, June 25). “Greenbaum Speech “originally known as “Hypnosis and MPD: Ritual Abuse” Presented at the Fourth Annual Eastern Regional Conference on Abuse and Multiple Personality.  Washington DC.

Cartoon courtesy of Martha Churchill

Not Exonerated Quite Yet: An update on Missouri Mohler case
by J. Bean (A skeptic in KC)

The arrests in the fall of 2009 of Burrell Mohler Sr., his brother, and his four sons stunned Western Missouri residents.   On Friday, February 17, 2012, the community was again taken off-guard as Burrell Sr.’s impossibly high bond was reduced, then waved, releasing him from jail to  await a trial, still many months away.

On November 11, 2009 Lafayette County Sheriff Kerrick Alumbaugh, along with prosecutor Kellie Ritchie-Campbell, held a press conference, announcing the arrests of the Mohler men on charges that they had repeatedly sexually assaulted several young relatives during the 1980’s.   In the weeks following that press conference, information and speculations from authorities continued to be shared with the media.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the media frenzy came to a halt.  Questions as to why no charges were filed on any of the allegations which should have produced physical evidence went unanswered, as were questions as to why it’s taken over 20 years for the victims to come forward.   Now, the community is left with another mystery:  What has happened in the cases which would cause a judge to release the accused without posting bond?

Since his arrest, the legal wranglings in the case of Burrell Mohler Sr. have all centered around discovery – specifically the production of diaries and medical/therapy records.  The state’s primary justification for not producing these in the past two years has been that the alleged victims were stunned and terrified due to “unexpected” media attention.  The defense has pointed out that the only media attention the case received was immediately following the state’s calling of a press conference.   As soon as defense counsel was retained, the media blitz stopped.

In December 2011, a special appointed discovery judge issued a 30 day final deadline for the lists of physician names to be provided for subpoena.   Still nothing happened.   Burrell’s attorney filed a motion for sanctions, to be heard on Feb 17th.

In the weeks following the filing of that motion, there was a sudden flurry of activity, the accusers finally providing names of physicians and other materials.  On Wednesday, Feb 15th, the alleged victims made a statement to the Associated Press, which read in part:  “After four years of cooperating with the prosecution, we believe that a just and speedy trial can be reached without further compromising our privacy and safety”.   Due to this announcement, several media outlets noted the motion to be heard on Friday.

Friday at 10am there was a packed courtroom, as usual, on the side of the defense.  For the first time in over two years, there were also a few seats occupied on the side of the state – not supporters of the state, but members of the press.

Oral arguments began with Attorney Kim Benjamin reviewing the two years of attempts in obtaining necessary discovery.   She told of the original complaint having been brought to and investigated by neighboring Jackson County, with no charges filed.  The complaint was then taken to Lafayette County and the men immediately arrested and charged based on the victim statements alone. Only then did that county begin its investigation.

Attorney Benjamin showed color glossy photos of the original press conference, with the DA herself standing next to a chart which clearly identified the alleged victims as the children of Ed Mohler. Ms. Benjamin told of the allegations, made but not charged, of satanic rituals, severed heads floating down rivers, child prostitution as preschoolers, and live births at the ages of ten or eleven.  She said the state had denied this was a case of repressed memory, then read a quote from one of the first communications ever given to authorities, in which one of the accusers asserts she was the first of the siblings “to have adult memories of our childhood abuse”, only a few years ago. She explained how easily the defense was able to connect the accusers with a group of pet psychics and massage therapists who claim to be able to bring hidden memories out of your body cells.

The prosecutor admitted that it is a case of repressed and recently recovered memories, saying she’d never told attorneys differently.  She said she did not have control over the press conference, and spoke of the re-victimization of rape victims by having to hand over personal records.   She stressed that many records have been provided in the past couple of weeks.   The discovery judge, Hon. Michael Maloney, confirmed that he had recently received several thousand pages of materials.   In proceedings later in the day, he took the bench, and expressed some dismay that it is the defense, rather than the prosecution, seeking these and other records, as the state should have sought them in order to prove its case noting, “The results of the alleged abuse would certainly have required critical care”.

Burrell Sr.’s attorney reiterated that the appropriate time for the state’s investigation should have been prior to the arrests, rather than arrest first, and now attempting to gather the required evidence two and a half years later.  She argued that it’s not a matter of “what have you done for me lately”, but a matter of her client rotting in jail, while counsel has still not received a single page of this discovery.

Judge Harmon denied the motion for sanctions or dismissal.  Then, without it having even been asked, ordered Burrell Sr. released on his own recognizance.  The state asked there be a condition that he cannot be around children under the age of 17, which the court rejected.

Burrell’s hearing aid wasn’t working, so he had no reaction.  As the family broke into tears of joy and relief, Ms. Benjamin penned him a note saying, “You’re going home.”

Father of the accusers, Ed Mohler, awaits in jail in another county.  No similar motions have yet been filed by his public defender.

Burrell’s brother, defendant Darrel Mohler passed away in October, and thus will never hear of his accusers’ announcement that they are now ready to provide him a just and speedy trial.

]]> https://process.org/discept/2012/02/28/reminiscent-of-1692-a-modern-missouri-witch-hunt/feed/ 9 https://process.org/discept/2011/02/26/among-the-brain-washed-and-abused/ https://process.org/discept/2011/02/26/among-the-brain-washed-and-abused/#comments Sun, 27 Feb 2011 06:17:11 +0000 https://process.org/discept/?p=809 This post is a follow up to an earlier post detailing some of my encounters and conversations with people who believe they have been abducted by aliens. Some who have followed previous writings of mine may find some informational redundancies but, while continuing my narrative, I also like each article to be able to stand alone…

 

 

 

If by “attack” he means “directly confront them with their own incredible narratives, question their defense of such narratives when told by others, while asking clarification on where the demarcation between recovered memories and delusions can be found (unless we are to unquestioningly accept all stories of satanic conspiracy, alien abduction, and past-life regression)”, then this fear is well-founded.  But if these people, this “everyone”, within Brick’s “field” agree with his notions of Satanic Ritual Abuse and Mind-Control, and if they feel that this is a position that is evidence-based and rational, then my scrutiny should not be an object of fear.  It should be welcomed, and the answers to any such questions should be forthcoming.  If instead, they choose to distance themselves from Neil Brick only to conceal a position that is not supported by evidence, can not be justified by facts, only so that they may hide their delusions behind the professional veneer afforded to repressed memory theory by way of poor retrospective surveys and bad data… then they are a craven lot indeed, and would be fully deserving of Neil Brick’s scorn…

If only he’d acted any differently himself…Ironically, this all stemmed from

Having entered the hotel slightly after the opening speaker of S.M.A.R.T.’s twelfth annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations, and Mind-Control conference began, I was told by a large woman sitting behind the registration table that I would have to wait until I could be properly registered before entering. I took a seat just outside the open door of the conference room where I could observe the full proceedings within. Brick stood at the podium. As I described him later in my subsequent “defamatory” report, he is a “small man in his 50s with a greasy dark curly comb-over, large thick glasses, and a voice that sounds exacly like Elmer Fudd (without the impediment of pronouncing his Rs as Ws).”

He was delivering the opening remarks. He was wearing a button-up shirt at least two sizes too large for his diminutive frame.  (This physical description is important when you consider his claim to have been a type of super-soldier for Black Ops military.)  Reading directly from his notes in a mechanical word-by-word monotone, without once looking up, he emotionlessly railed against skeptics who have sought to discredit ritual abuse as well as the validity of “recovered memories”.

“There is overwhelming scientific evidence that recovered memory exists as a phenomenon”, he asserted. He began to quote at length from sources that agree with this position.

A belief in the historical accuracy of recovered memories, as I had already discerned from their website, is vital to S.M.A.R.T.’s belief in a conspiracy of satanic cults and government mind-control. The theory espoused by recovered memory proponents (and well known in popular culture), is that traumatic memories of abuse may be repressed – relegated to some dark corner of the mind – where they unfailingly metastasize into some type of chronic negative emotions, compulsions, confusion, even physical ailments. Preserved in high-definition, and unerring detail, these oppressive unconscious memories must be drawn out, retrieved, relived, confronted, and reconciled within the conscious mind, before the victim can lead a happy and productive life.

Almost all of the self-proclaimed victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse have recovered their memories of victimization while undergoing some type of psychotherapy. For the most part, these memories are the only type of “evidence” they attempt to present in support of the claim that such victimization ever occurred.

The process of digging for repressed traumatic memories through hypnosis or other techniques is most often employed in treatment of the diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), now re-labeled as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Due to their almost total reliance upon recovered memory evidence, purveyors of satanic cult stories are often also defenders of the controversial multiple personality diagnosis, a condition that itself is dismissed by some psychiatrists and psychologists as a “behavioral artifact… generated by suggestion in vulnerable people.” (See below: Concerned Psychiatrists’ and Psychologists’ letter to the APA’s DSM-V Task Force.)

Critics of Recovered Memory Therapy point out that the act of digging for memories assumed to be repressed can have a subtly coercive effect on clients who – knowing what they are supposed to be “remembering” – are at least as prone to confabulating false memories as they are to recalling anything with historical accuracy. Given that such critics of recovered memory therapy often point directly to highly improbable claims of satanic cult abuse as evidence of false memories, it was no surprise that Neil Brick breezily dismissed skeptics as conspirators: “There is […] a lot of evidence that those attacking the theory of recovered memory may have ulterior motives. For example, they may have been accused of child abuse crimes or may have been connected to mind control research in the past.”

Using “child abuse” interchangeably with “ritual abuse”, Brick attempted to further bolster a position that those who doubt the existence of an international brain-washing coven simply despise tykes: “The media turned on child abuse survivors in the early and mid 1990′s and began to in essence support those that has [sic] perpetrated crimes against children, believing unfounded stories about so called ‘miscarriages of justice.’ Due to the extreme nature of ritual abuse crimes and the psychological need for the public denial of these crimes, it became an easy sell to spin these crimes against children for the public to believe the misstatements about falsely accused perpetrators. After ritual abuse was discredited, then other child abuse crimes could be more easily discredited.”

There you have it. You’re either with Neil Brick, or you’re with the Satanists. You either believe every outrageous claim of demonic doings, or you’re part of the cover-up. At best, you’re simply in “denial”.

Suddenly, the woman at the registration table, who had also been watching Neil Brick through the open door, began to lightly sob. She grabbed a nearby tissue, dried her eyes, and blew her nose.

I stared uncomfortably down at the program in my hands. I came looking for the reasons, the so-called evidence that compels this continued belief in satanic cult crimes… of mind control… to see the self-proclaimed byproducts of the brutal puppet masters said to control the highest reaches of the world governments with an inhuman disdain for life and liberty. Instead – with scheduled lectures entitled “Dissociation and Time Management” and “The DID RA [Ritual Abuse] Family: An Attachment Perspective on a Forensic Relationship” – this conference appeared to be primarily adapted toward defending the DID diagnosis.

According to his biographical synopsis on the program, Neil Brick describes himself as a “survivor of alleged Masonic Ritual Abuse and MK-ULTRA [the CIA’s covert mind-control and chemical interrogation project of 1950s – 60s]“. The disclaimer of the word “alleged” in his own biographical description is perplexing…

I mulled over this as Brick eventually concluded his labored lecture. What did it mean?

Brick came out to the registration table during the break following his presentation gripping a briefcase. He scrutinized me momentarily.

I checked out. Given the nod, my attendance was then officially approved.

I stationed myself anonymously in the second to last occupied row at the far left side of the room.

Never, it occurred to me, have I heard anybody describe oneself as an “alleged victim of a mugging”, nor would I expect one to tell me, “I was allegedly harassed by a drunkard last night”. Considering this, I wondered if perhaps Neil Brick himself is uncertain as to whether or not he was a victim of the CIA or Masonic abuse. In fact, despite a veneer of confident assurance that the satanic conspiracy is an unquestionable item of fact, the conference was rife with inconsistency and an undercurrent of doubt…

Anyway, it was the inconsistent, and wildly incredible, content of the conference that I focused on in my writing. And this was no mere point-and-laugh tactic for the amusement of those who cultivate an air of superiority with smug disbelief toward any outside notion. The conference wasn’t merely absurd, I saw it as harmful and exploitative to the attendees — many of whom seemed to imagine it as therapeutic — as well as some of the speakers… some of whom are unfortunately licensed therapists.

It is natural to laugh at absurdity. It would have been difficult to write about the sales booth within the conference room hawking electromagnetic transmission blocking hats without sounding humorous. But I was outright horrified when a 78 year-old woman, who referred to herself as Julaine, sat before the attendees — unable to stand for any extended time — to explain that she had suffered some type of negative diabetic reaction earlier that day, and that her rheumatoid arthritis was causing her no small amount of discomfort. She attributed both of these conditions to a conspiracy of evil. Rheumatoid arthritis and Satanic Ritual Abuse, Julaine posited, are “almost partners”.

Clearly, this woman needed real medical attention. To allow her to delude herself — or worse, actively feed her the delusion — that her ill health is a side-effect, and evidence of, satanic conspiracy is beyond irresponsible. Worse, these delusions have apparently encouraged the aged and infirm Julaine to sever ties with the family members who may have been most willing to help her now… You see, Julaine’s family, she believes, is a multi-generational satanic cult. “My sister thinks I’m bi-polar”, she explained. This, of course, is seen as mere denial. “She is lost”.

That Julaine is highly impressionable seemed apparent at the conference, but it was after the conference that this became quite clear.

I was perusing the website of another speaker, deJoly LaBrier, when I came across the transcripts of a lecture she had given at a much earlier S.M.A.R.T. gathering. In it, she told a familiar tale: “[My father] would draw a dot on the wall, and [my siblings and I] would stand at attention with our nose on the dot on the wall, until he told us that we could leave.”

I clearly remembered hearing the story at the conference I had attended, for it struck me as odd… Rotten though this nose-to-the-wall experience would be for any child, I couldn’t help but feel such punishments would be quite over-shadowed by the compulsory initiation into sadistic cult rituals and child prostitution that LaBrier claimed had also taken place… So much so that being made to stand in a fixed position felt rather unworthy of mention.

But it wasn’t LaBrier who told this tale at the 2009 conference. It was Julaine.

Had it occurred to Neil Brick (who is a licensed and practicing “Mental Health Counselor” in Massachusetts), or any other attending therapist, that Julaine may not in fact have been victim to “Moriah, Illuminati… whatever you want to call it” (as she referred to “Them” in her lecture), but rather an incredibly suggestible and vulnerable old woman who has difficulty distinguishing stories she has heard from her own autobiographical memory?

Apparently not.

To allow any such questions to encroach on any one of the delusive narratives told would cast doubt on them all… and they all had their own ludicrous tales to defend with nothing more than shallow assertions of recovered memory accuracy.

For this reason, not even the most impossible of claims were met with so much as a raised eye-brow or embarrassed cough. Nobody showed a hint of doubt when a speaker going by the name of “Royal”, at all of about forty years of age, stood before us to claim that she was a personal slave to nazi doctor Josef Mengele. “My experience with Mengele”, Royal explained in a lecture (the gist of which was that Satan uses abortion as a means of traumatic mind-control), “involved much of the trauma-based mind control involving core programming (such as End-Time programming) that is connected to the global take over. He used the Psychic/Spiritual dimensions using, what I have come to call ‘demonic harmonics’, which involves using musical tones and quantum physics to open up portals into the spiritual realms. I also have core programs set up that were created using abortions as a means to develop them and more.”

Following the publication of the report, Brick went all to pieces, leaving angry comments, penning a “rebuttal”. Oddly enough though, none of his objections confronted my outrage at the absurdity of the very conspiracy theory that underlies the entire narrative framework of the conference, and of S.M.A.R.T., itself. Though claiming I misrepresented the entire affair, he failed to explain how. He failed to answer any questions regarding his own experiences as an “alleged” victim of “Masonic Ritual Abuse and MK-ULTRA”. He failed to answer any questions directly aimed at elaboration upon his belief in a massive satanic conspiracy. He failed to confront any questions regarding the content of the conference to instead assert, again and again, supported with lists of journal article citations supporting the view, that recovered memories are a real phenomenon.

 

* * * * * * * * *

Concerned Psychiatrists and Psychologists Letter to the DSM-V Committee

A Group of Concerned Psychiatrists and Psychologists

c/o Dr. Paul McHugh, MD

Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry

Johns Hopkins University

April 11, 2009

Dr. David J. Kupfer, MD

Chair of DSM-V Committee,

Dr. Thomas Detre Professor and Chair, Department of Psychiatry

Professor of Neuroscience, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic

5811 O’Hara Street

Pittsburgh, PA 15215

RE: Dissociative Identity Disorder and DSM-V

Dear Dr. Kupfer:

We are writing to you to express concern with respect to the continuation of Dissociative Identity Disorder as an approved diagnosis within the forthcoming DSM-V. We believe that the identification of Multiple Personality Disorder, and later its name change as Dissociative Identity Disorder, has been harmful to the good sense and reputation of psychiatry, not to mention the cause of grave ill-effects to large numbers of patients and their families. In the attached document we maintain that the diagnosis should be removed from DSM-V and we provide the basis for our request. If either the Task Force or Council is unable to agree on removing DID completely from the 5th Edition we suggest that at the very least it should be placed in Appendix B as an experimental criterion set requiring further investigation.

Respectfully,

Signatories

(Please see Appendix A)

Attachments

To: DSM-V Task Force &

Work Group on Anxiety, Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum,

Posttraumatic & Dissociative Disorders

Statement on:

The need to remove Dissociative Identity Disorder from DSM-V or place it in Appendix B

The evidence supporting this diagnosis as a distinct mental disorder is modest whereas much suggests it to be a behavioral artifact equivalent in nature to pseudo-epilepsy generated by suggestion in vulnerable people. Its identification as a special, separate diagnostic entity in DSM has harmed the practice of psychiatry and undermined its scientific credibility. Although it is important for us to provide evidence to support these statements, we wish to avoid excessive detail, given that such evidence has been documented widely in the published literature.

Origins

The notion of dual personalities was founded upon cases of bipolar illness (1) and was followed by the idea of extra personalities. This expansion first occurred with the hypnotically-induced introduction of a second personality and the deliberate naming of those personalities as if they were separate entities (1).

Prevalence

Taylor and Martin (2) recognized a total of 76 cases occurring between 1816 and 1944—slightly more than one every two years; they thought a similar number might be unreported. In 1954 Thigpen and Cleckley (3) reported their case, which was published as “The Three Faces of Eve” in 1957. After a film was made of this case, the numbers of reported cases increased steadily; there was a further dramatic leap after the film of “Sybil”. By 1990 thousands of cases were being diagnosed; some authors identified more cases in their personal practices than had been described in the literature over an entire century.

Twentieth Century Suggestion

As is well known, Sybil, a patient of Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, was fully aware that her therapist wanted her to create extra personalities (4). In 1973, Dr. Wilbur gave tape recordings of Sybil’s interviews to Schreiber [the journalist who reported Sybil as a case of multiple personality disorder (5)]. Schreiber made the recordings available to Ronald Rieber, a professor of psychology, who amassed evidence showing that at least some of the personalities were artifacts overtly created in treatment (6).

Etiology

Dissociative Identity Disorder is often alleged to result from repressing an experience of childhood sexual abuse. This claim has not received adequate scientific validation. For example, Piper and Merskey (7) reviewed all the studies that claimed to corroborate DID patients’ abuse recollections. These authors concluded that “no evidence supports the claim that DID patients as a group have actually experienced the traumas asserted by the disorder’s proponents” (7).

Proponents of the DID diagnosis assert that horrific, repeated childhood physical and sexual abuse is the primary cause of DID. Victims supposedly develop their multiple personalities as repositories for traumatic memories that the “host” personality is unable to tolerate consciously. The DID diagnosis thus relies on the concept of traumatic Dissociative Amnesia (DA or “repression”): the notion that the mind protects itself by banishing terrifying memories from awareness, rendering them inaccessible until the person feels psychologically safe to recall them, often years later. There is no convincing evidence that victims can become incapable of recalling genuinely traumatic experiences, as the trauma theory of DID requires (8). Indeed, an extensive survey of the historical literature, including both fictional and non-fictional written works in multiple languages, found no written example of “dissociative amnesia” prior to 1786 (9). Thus the notion of “repressing” a memory itself, like DID, appears to represent a recent culture-bound phenomenon, rather than a naturally occurring human psychological process.

In a comprehensive analysis of studies of people with documented trauma histories, not a single mention of spontaneous amnesia for the traumatic event was found—unless the forgetting was attributable to either organic amnesia or childhood amnesia (10). Finally, an examination of Freud’s original work gives reason to think that the evidence from psychoanalysis for repression is also very unsatisfactory (11, 12).

Harmful Effects

Due to the assumption that trauma is a primary etiological factor, the DID diagnosis has resulted in wrongful accusations of sexual abuse on the basis of recovered memories, not only in North America but throughout the developed world (references). DID has caused mockery of psychiatry, and, for patients, has led to misdiagnosis (13), mismanagement (14) and inadequate treatment of depression (15).

Lack of Consensus

Canadian and American psychiatrists show little consensus regarding the diagnostic status and scientific validity of DID. In surveys of board-certified psychiatrists in the United States (16) and Canada (17) fewer than one-third of Canadian psychiatrists and 35% of American psychiatrists replied that DA & DID should be included without reservations in the DSM-IV; fewer than 1 in 7 Canadian psychiatrists and only 21-23% of American psychiatrists replied that there was “strong evidence of validity” for these disorders. French- and English-speaking Canadians had similar opinions.

Conclusions

There are overwhelming reasons to question the validity of Dissociative Identity Disorder. We respectfully urge you as members of the Work Group and the Task Force to drop the category of dissociative disorders from the upcoming DSM-V: it is harmful to patients and their families, scientifically unjustified, and undermining the credibility of psychiatry.

Signatories

Please see Appendix A.

REFERENCES

1. Merskey, H. (1992a). The manufacture of personalities. The production of multiple personality disorder. Brit. J. Psychiat., 160:327-340.

2. Taylor W.F. & Martin M.F. (1944) Multiple personality. J. Abnormal & Soc. Psychol., 39:281-330.

3. Thigpen, C.H. & Cleckley, H.M. (1957). The Three Faces of Eve. New York: McGraw-Hill.

4. Spiegel, H. (1993) Mistaken Identities: Toronto. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The Fifth Estate, 9 November 1993.

5. Schreiber, F.R. (1973) Sybil. Chicago: Henry Regnery.

6. Rieber, R.W. (2006) The Bifurcation of the Self. The History and Theory of Dissociation and Its Disorders. New York: Springer Science.

7. Piper, A., Merskey, H., (2004). The persistence of folly: a critical examination of dissociative identity disorder. Part I. The excesses of an improbable concept. Can J Psychiatry 49 (9): 592-600.

8. McNally, R. J. (2003) Remembering Trauma. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.

9. Pope, H.G. Jr., Poliakoff, M.B., Parker, M.P., Boynes, M.D., & Hudson, J.I. (2007) Is dissociative amnesia a culture-bound syndrome? Findings from a survey of historical literature. Psychol. Med., 37(2):225-233.

10. Pope, H. G. Jr., Oliva, P., Hudson, J.I.: (2005) Repressed memories. The scientific status of research on repressed memories, in Modern Scientific Evidence: The Law and Science of Expert Testimony—Social and Behavioral Science, 2005-2006 Edition. Edited by Faigman D, Kaye D, Saks M, Sanders J. Eagen, MN, West Group, pp 408-447.

11. Esterson, A. (1993) Seductive Mirage. Open Court: Chicago.

12. Crews, F. (1998) Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend. New York: Viking.

13. Freeland, A., Manchanda, R., Chiu, S., et al. (1993) Four cases of supposed multiple personality disorder: evidence of unjustified diagnoses. Can. J. Psychiat., 23: 245-247.

14. McHugh, Paul R. (2008) Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash over Meaning, Memory, and Mind. Chapters 4 &5. Dana Press.

15. Fetkewicz, J., Sharma, V. & Merskey, H. (2000) A note on suicidal deterioration with recovered memory, treatment. J. Affect. Dis., 58:155-159.

16. Pope, H.G., Jr., Oliva, P.S., Hudson, J.I., Bodkin, J.A. & Gruber, A.J. (1999) Attitudes toward DSM-IV Dissociative Disorders Diagnoses among Board-Certified American Psychiatrists. Am. J. Psychiat., 2000; 157:1179-1180.

17. Lalonde, J.K., Hudson, J.I., Gigante, R.A. & Pope, H.G. Jr. (2001) Canadian and American psychiatrists’ attitudes toward Dissociative Disorders diagnoses. Can. J. Psychiat., 46(5): 407-412.

Appendix A

List of Signatories

1. Paul R. McHugh, M.D. Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.

2. Harrison Pope, Jr., MD, MPH, Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts; Director, Biological Psychiatry Laboratory, McLean Hospital, Belmont Massachusetts

3. James Hudson, MD, ScD, Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts; Director, Biological Psychiatry Laboratory, McLean Hospital, Belmont Massachusetts

4. Elizabeth Loftus, PhD, Distinguished Professor, University of California-Irvine.

5. Richard J. McNally, Ph.D., Professor and Director of Clinical Training, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

6. Harold Merskey, FRCPsych., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario

7. Joel Paris, M.D. Professor of Psychiatry, McGill University, SMBD-Jewish General Hospital, Montreal, Quebec H3T1E4, Canada.

8. August Piper, M.D., Independent practice of psychiatry, Seattle, WA.

9. Numan Gharaibeh, MD (MB, BCh), Danbury, CT.

10. Pamela Freyd, Ph.D.

11. Eduard Vieta, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

12. Philip G. Janicak, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, Rush University, Chicago, Il.

13. Gerald M. Rosen, Ph.D., Private practice, Seattle, Clinical Professor, University of Washington.

14. Steven Jay Lynn, Ph.D., ABPP, Professor, Binghamton University (SUNY) Binghamton, NY.

15. Sally Satel, MD, resident scholar American Enterprise Institute; staff psychiatry Oasis Clinic, Washington DC; lecturer, Yale University School of Medicine.

16. James M. Wood, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Texas at El Paso.

]]> https://process.org/discept/2010/11/07/in-defense-of-neil-brick-psychotherapist/feed/ 0 https://process.org/discept/2010/10/18/among-the-abducted/ https://process.org/discept/2010/10/18/among-the-abducted/#comments Tue, 19 Oct 2010 02:33:19 +0000 https://process.org/discept/?p=730 This is the first report of my experiences with individuals who feel that they have had personal contact with extraterrestrials.  More are forthcoming.  Where appropriate, names have been changed…

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…

]]> https://process.org/discept/2010/10/18/among-the-abducted/feed/ 1 https://process.org/discept/2010/02/08/dr-colin-a-ross-psychiatry-the-supernatural-and-malpractice-most-foul/ https://process.org/discept/2010/02/08/dr-colin-a-ross-psychiatry-the-supernatural-and-malpractice-most-foul/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:44:34 +0000 https://process.org/discept/?p=675

“Q.  Okay.  Just to make sure I have covered the bases and the record is clear, there is no known, reliable method for distinguishing between true and false memories by talking to a patient?

According to one expert witness, it was the worst case of medical malpractice he had ever seen.  The patient, Ms. Roma E. Hart, had been grossly over-medicated into a prolonged state of deranged confusion, during which time the offending psychiatrist, Dr. Colin A. Ross, had instilled her with exotic and perverse delusions:  To wit, the rather implausible belief that her family was involved in an occult crime-ring dedicated to a supernatural evil, and that Hart herself had been forcibly impregnated by extraterrestrials, birthing a hybrid infant (presumably in the course of a routine alien abduction).  The magnitude of Ms. Hart’s mistreatment during her submission to psychiatric “care” brought her to the precipice of death on several occasions.

During her treatment Ms. Hart gave custody of her 10 year old daughter over to Child & Family Services so as to preserve the girl from clutches of her Satanic cult family. Thus Ms. Hart lost her entire family in one egregiously misguided moment; her parents unable to forgive her for the accusations of sexual Satanic Ritual Abuse, her daughter heart-broken by abandonment.

1. “The recommended dose for most adults is 0.25 milligrams (mg). In some patients, a lower dose may be prescribed and the maximum daily dose should not exceed 0.5 mg.” – From the Physician’s Desk Reference [PDR] online (http://www.pdrhealth.com/drugs/rx/rx-mono.aspx?contentFileName=Hal1192.html&contentName=Halcion&contentId=265
2. “The usual dose, depending upon severity of symptoms, is 2 milligrams to 10 milligrams 2 to 4 times daily.” –http://www.drugs.com/pdr/valium.html .
3. Correction: Dr. George Johnson wasLieutenant Governor of Manitoba, not Governor General

“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