The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [78]
The second and third cases come from FBI files. The last two come from a 1994 study by Dr Gail Goodman, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues, done for the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. They examined over 12,000 claims of sexual abuse involving satanic ritual cults, and could not find a single one that held up to scrutiny. Therapists reported satanic abuse based only on, for instance, ‘patient’s disclosure via hypnotherapy’ or children’s ‘fear of satanic symbols’. In some cases diagnosis was made on the basis of behaviour common to many children. ‘In only a few cases was physical evidence mentioned - usually, “scars”.’ But in most cases the ‘scars’ were very faint or non-existent. ‘Even when there were scars, it was not determined whether the victims themselves had caused them.’ This also is very similar to alien abduction cases, as described below. George K. Ganaway, Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University, proposes that ‘the most common likely cause of cult-related memories may very well turn out to be a mutual deception between the patient and the therapist’.
One of the most troublesome cases of ‘recovered memory’ of satanic ritual abuse has been chronicled by Lawrence Wright in a remarkable book, Remembering Satan (1994). It concerns Paul Ingram, a man who may have had his life ruined because he was too gullible, too suggestible, too unpractised in scepticism. Ingram was, in 1988, Chairman of the Republican Party in Olympia, Washington, the chief civil deputy in the local sheriff’s department, well regarded, highly religious, and responsible for warning children in social assemblies of the dangers of drugs. Then came the nightmare moment when one of his daughters - after a highly emotional session at a fundamentalist religious retreat - levelled the first of many charges, each more ghastly than the previous, that Ingram had sexually abused her, impregnated her, tortured her, made her available to other sheriffs deputies, introduced her to satanic rites, dismembered and ate babies... This had gone on since her childhood, she said, almost to the day she began to ‘remember’ it all.
Ingram could not see why his daughter should lie about this, although he himself had no recollection of it. But police investigators, a consulting psychotherapist, and his minister at the Church of Living Water all explained that sex offenders often repressed memories of their crimes. Strangely detached but at the same time eager to cooperate, Ingram tried to recall. After a psychologist employed a closed-eye hypnotic technique to induce trance, Ingram began to visualize something similar to what the police were describing. What came to mind were not like real memories, but something like snatches of images in a fog. Every time he produced one - the more so the more odious the content - he was encouraged and reinforced. His pastor assured him that God would permit only genuine memories to surface in his reveries.
‘Boy, it’s almost like I’m making it up,’ Ingram said, ‘but I’m not.’ He suggested that a demon might be responsible. Under the same sort of influences, with the Church grapevine circulating the latest horrors that Ingram was confessing, and the police pressuring them, his other children and his wife also began ‘remembering’. Prominent citizens were accused of participating in the orgiastic rites. Law enforcement officers elsewhere in America