Apparently, there is a pervasive police gullibility problem on this matter. Here are some excerpts from FBI expert Lanning’s analysis of ‘Satanic, Occult and Ritualistic Crime’, based on bitter experience, and published in the October 1989 issue of the professional journal, The Police Chief:
Almost any discussion of satanism and witchcraft is interpreted in the light of the religious beliefs of those in the audience. Faith, not logic and reason, governs the religious beliefs of most people. As a result, some normally sceptical law enforcement officers accept the information disseminated at these conferences without critically evaluating it or questioning the sources . . . For some people satanism is any religious belief system other than their own.
Lanning then offers a long list of belief systems he has personally heard described as satanism at such conferences. It includes Roman Catholicism, the Orthodox Churches, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, rock and roll music, channelling, astrology and New Age beliefs in general. Is there not a hint here about how witch hunts and pogroms get started? He continues:
Within the personal religious belief system of a law enforcement officer, Christianity may be good and satanism evil. Under the Constitution, however, both are neutral. This is an important, but difficult, concept for many law enforcement officers to accept. They are paid to uphold the penal code, not the Ten Commandments . . . The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it.
Many of those alleging satanic abuse describe grotesque orgiastic rituals in which infants are murdered and eaten. Such claims have been made about reviled groups by their detractors throughout European history, including the Cataline conspirators in Rome, the Passover ‘blood libel’ against the Jews, and the Knights Templar as they were being dismantled in fourteenth-century France. Ironically, reports of cannibalistic infanticide and incestuous orgies were among the particulars used by Roman authorities to persecute the early Christians. After all, Jesus himself is quoted as saying (John vi, 53) ‘Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you’. Although the next line makes it clear Jesus is talking about eating his own flesh and drinking his own blood, unsympathetic critics might have misunderstood the Greek ‘Son of man’ to mean ‘child’ or ‘infant’. Tertullian and other early Church fathers defended themselves against these grotesque accusations as best they could.
Today, the lack of corresponding numbers of lost infants and young children in police files is explained by the claim that all over the world babies are being bred for this purpose, surely reminiscent of abductee claims that alien/human breeding experiments are rampant. Also similar to the alien abduction paradigm, satanic cult abuse is said to pass down from generation to generation in certain families. To the best of my knowledge, as in the alien abductien paradigm, no physical evidence has ever been offered in a court of law to support such claims. Their emotional power, though, is evident. The mere possibility that such things are going on rouses us mammals to action. When we give credence to satanic ritual, we also raise the social status of those who warn us of the supposed danger.
Consider these five cases: (1) Myra Obasi, a Louisiana school-teacher, was – she and her sisters believed after consultation with a hoodoo practitioner – possessed by demons. Her nephew’s nightmares were part of the evidence. So they left for Dallas, abandoned their five children, and the sisters then gouged out Ms Obasi’s eyes. At the trial, she defended her sisters. They were trying to help her, she said. But hoodoo is not devil-worship; it is a cross between Catholicism and African-Haitian nativist religion. (2) Parents beat their child to death because she would not embrace their brand of Christianity. (3) A child molester justifies his acts by reading the Bible to his victims. (4) A 14-year-old boy has his eyeball plucked out of his head in an exorcism ceremony. His assailant is not a satanist, but a Protestant fundamentalist minister engaged in religious pursuits. (5) A woman thinks her 12-year-old son is possessed by the devil. After an incestuous relationship with him, she decapitates him. But there is no satanic ritual content to the ‘possession’.
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 began paying attention. This was only the tip of the iceberg, some said.
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.