The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [79]
When Berkeley’s Richard Ofshe was called in by the prosecution, he performed a control experiment. It was a breath of fresh air. Merely suggesting to Ingram that he had forced his son and daughter to commit incest and asking him to use the ‘memory recovery’ technique he had learned, promptly elicited just such a ‘memory’. It required no pressure, no intimidation - just the suggestion and the technique were enough. But the alleged participants, who had ‘remembered’ so much else, denied it ever happened. Confronted with this evidence, Ingram vehemently denied he was making anything up or was influenced by others. His memory of this incident was as clear and ‘real’ as all his other recollections.
One of the daughters described the terrible scars on her body from torture and forced abortions. But when she finally received a medical examination, there were no corresponding scars to be seen. The prosecution never tried Ingram on charges of satanic abuse. Ingram hired a lawyer who had never tried a criminal case. On his pastor’s advice, he did not even read Ofshe’s report: it would only confuse him, he was told. He pleaded guilty to six counts of rape, and ultimately was sent to prison. In jail, while awaiting sentencing, away from his daughters, his police colleagues and his pastor, he reconsidered. He asked to withdraw his guilty plea. His memories had been coerced. He had not distinguished real memories from a kind of fantasy. His plea was rejected. He is serving a twenty-year sentence. If it was the sixteenth century instead of the twentieth, perhaps the whole family would have been burned at the stake, along with a good fraction of the leading citizens of Olympia, Washington.
The existence of a highly sceptical FBI report on the general subject of satanic abuse (Kenneth V. Lanning, ‘Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of “Ritual” Child Abuse’, January 1992) is widely ignored by enthusiasts. Likewise, a 1994 study by the British Department of Health into claims of satanic abuse there concluded that, of 84 alleged instances, not one stood up to scrutiny. What then is all the furore about? The study explains,
The Evangelical Christian campaign against new religious movements has been a powerful influence encouraging the identification of satanic abuse. Equally, if not more, important in spreading the idea of satanic abuse in Britain are the ‘specialists’, American and British. They may have few or even no qualifications as professionals, but attribute their expertise to ‘experience of cases’.
Those convinced that devil cults represent a serious danger to our society tend to be impatient with sceptics. Consider this analysis by Corydon Hammond, PhD, past President of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis:
I will suggest to you that these people [sceptics] are either, one, naive and of limited clinical experience; two, have a kind of naivete that people have of the Holocaust, or they’re just such intellectualizers and sceptics that they’ll doubt everything; or, three, they’re cult people themselves. And I can assure that there are people who are in that position... There are people who are physicians, who are mental health professionals, who are in the cults, who are raising trans-generational cults ... I think the research is real clear: We got three studies, one found 25 percent, one found 20 percent of out-patient multiples [multiple personality disorders] appear to be cult-abuse victims, and another on a specialized in-patient unit found 50 percent.
In some of his statements, he seems to believe that satanic Nazi mind control experiments have been performed by the CIA on tens of thousands of unsuspecting American citizens. The overarching motive, Hammond believes, is to ‘create a satanic order that will rule the world’.
In all three classes of ‘recovered memories’, there are specialists - alien abduction specialists, satanic cult specialists, and specialists in recalling repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. As is common in