Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [87]
The movement grows in complexity to its level of criticality, whereupon it collapses. Hundreds of thousands of women (perhaps even a million) were killed and in some villages significant portions of the population were depleted until the psychosocioeconomic pressures were relieved and the witch craze collapsed. As for the repressed memory movement, the movement hit its peak in the mid-1990s and was largely dormant by the end of the century, triggered by a number of factors, including a successful settlement by Laura Pasley against her therapist, which has led to dozens of lawsuits filed against therapists; Gary Ramona’s successful lawsuit and $500,000 award against his daughter’s two therapists, opening the door to other third-party lawsuits; the plethora of “retractors”—in the past several years over three hundred women have retracted their original accusation; and perhaps most important in the reversal of the feedback loop, major media coverage now given to false memory syndrome rather than to a repressed memory syndrome.32
Alien abduction stories also nicely follow this sequence. Driven socially by cold war anxieties and the burgeoning science fiction industry, alien abduction claims took off in 1975 after millions watched NBC’s portrayal of Betty Hill’s abduction dreams as reality in The UFO Incident. The stereotypical alien with a bulbous bald head and large almond-shaped eyes, reported by so many abductees since 1975, was actually created by NBC artists. The rate of information exchange accelerated as more and more abductions were reported in the news. As there seemed to be corroboration on the appearance of the aliens, as well as the sexual content of the experiences (usually women being sexually molested in their beds by the aliens), the feedback loop was established. The sequence received a boost from academia when Harvard psychiatrist John Mack published his best-selling book Abduction, making the usual rounds of talk shows and, not surprisingly, causing an increase in abduction claims.33
Figure 9.2. The growth and collapse of the witch craze sequence from 1560 to 1620
Figure 9.3. A witch craze feedback loop model. The driving force in the witch craze: the rate of information exchange between suspected witches and their accusers (top) and between villages (bottom).
Figure 9.4. A false memory sex abuse witch craze. The documented number of accusations of sexual abuse against parents, officially registered by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, from almost nothing in 1992 to almost twelve thousand cases in 1994.
Another classic example of mass hysteria is the strange case of the “phantom anesthetist” of Mattoon, Illinois, during the month of September 1944. On September 1, a woman claimed that a stranger entered her bedroom and anesthesized her legs with a spray gas. The Mattoon Daily Journal-Gazette ran the headline “Anesthetic Prowler on Loose.” Soon cases were reported all over Mattoon, the state police were brought in, husbands stood guard with loaded guns, and dozens of reports of eyewitness sightings were made. After ten days, however, no one was caught, no chemical clues were discovered, the police spoke of wild “imaginations,” and the newspapers began to report the story as a case of “mass hysteria.” With this the movement reached criticality, the feedback loop reversed, and the last attack was reported on September 12. As described in corollary 6, the sequence had self-organized, reached complex criticality, switched from a positive to a negative feedback loop, and collapsed, all in the span of two