CIA Connections to the Mind Control Cults
Within hours, 27 other members of the Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple
were found dead at chalets in Granges, Switzerland and Morin Heights, Quebec.
Luc Jouret, the Temple's grand master, the London Times reported, "espoused
a hybrid religion that owed more to Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum
than to any bible. His followers called themselves 'knights of Christ.' The
crusading codes of the Knights Templar, the rose-and-cross symbolism of the
medieval Rosicrucian Order, Nazi occultism and new age mysticism were joined
together into a mumbo-jumbo mishmash that seemed more designed for extracting
money from disciples than saving souls."
Jouret, born in the Belgian Congo in 1947, set out in youth as a mystic with
communist leanings, but his politics apparently swung full circle. He has
since been linked to a clutch of neo-Nazis responsible for a string of bombings
in Canada. He told friends that he had once served with a unit of Belgium
paratroopers.
French-Canadian journalist Pierre Tourangeau investigated the sect for two
years. A few days after the mass murder, he reported that the sect was financed
by the proceeds of gun-running to Europe and South America. Simultaneously,
Radio Canada announced that Jouret's Templars earned hundreds of millions
of dollars laundering the profits through the infamous Bank of Credit and
Commerce International (BCCI), closed by authorities worldwide in 1991. Montreal's
La Presse observed: "each new piece of information only thickens
the mystery" - but the combination of international arms smuggling and
BCCI presented a familiar enough picture of CIA sedition. The Manhattan D.A.
who closed the American branch announced that 16 witnesses had died in the
course of investigating the bank's entanglements in covert operations of the
CIA, arms smuggling to Iraq, money laundering and child prostitution.
The average coffee table would crumple under the weighty BCCI Book of the
Dead. Journalist Danny Cassalaro and Vince Foster appear in it - grim antecedents
to the Solar Temple killings. The cult's connection to BCCI (reported in Europe
but filtered from American newspaper accounts) fed speculation among Canadian
journalists that followers of Jouret were killed to bury public disclosures
of gun-running and money laundering.
But the fraternizing of America's national security elite and the cults did
not begin in Cheiry, Switzerland. Jouret's Order of the Solar Temple was but
the latest incarnation of mind control operations organized and overseen
by the CIA and Department of Defense.
In a sense, we are in the same ethical and moral dilemma as the physicists
in the days prior to the Manhattan Project. Those of us who work in this
field see a developing potential for a nearly total control of human emotional
status. - Dr. Wayne Evans
U.S. Army Institute of Environmental Medicine, 1978
Scientists in the CIA's mind control fraternity lead double lives. Many are
highly respected, but if the truth were known they would be deafened by the
public outcry and drummed out of their respective academic haunts.
Martin T. Orne, for example, a senior CIA/Navy researcher,
is based at the University of Pennsylvania's Experimental Psychiatry
Laboratory. He is also an original member of the False Memory
Syndrome Foundation's advisory board, a tightly-drawn coterie of
psychiatrists, many with backgrounds in CIA mind control experimentation in
its myriad forms. The Foundation is dedicated to denying the existence of
cult mind control and child abuse. It's primary pursuit is the castigation
of survivors and therapists for fabricating accusations of ritual abuse.
Dismissing cult abuse as hysteria or false memory, a common defense strategy,
may relieve parents of preschool children. In a small percentage of cult abuse
cases it's possible that children may be led to believe they've been victimized.
But the CIA and its cover organizations have a vested interest in blowing
smoke at the cult underground because the worlds of CIA mind control and many
cults merge inextricably. The drum beat of "false accusations"
from the media is taken up by paid operatives like Dr. Orne and the False
Memory Syndrome Foundation to conceal the crimes of the Agency.
Orne's forays into hypno-programming were financed in the 1960s by the Human
Ecology Fund, a CIA cover at Cornell University and the underwriter
of many of the formative mind control experiments conducted in the U.S. and
abroad, including the gruesome brainwashing and remote mind control experiments
of Dr. Ewen Cameron at Montreal's Allen Memorial Institute.
Research specialties of the CIA's black psychiatrists included electroshock
lobotomies, drugging agents, incapacitants, hypnosis, sleep deprivation and
radio control of the brain, among hundreds of sub-projects.
The secondary source of funding for Dr. Orne's work in hypnotic suggestion
and dissolution of memory is eerie in the cult child abuse context. The voluminous
files of John Marks in Washington, D.C. (139 boxes obtained
under FOIA, to be exact, two-fifths of which document CIA interest in the
occult) include an Agency report itemizing a $30,000 grant to Orne from Human
Ecology, and another $30,000 from Boston's Scientific Engineering
Institute (SEI) - another CIA funding cover, founded by Edwin Land
of the Polaroid Corporation (and supervision of the U-2 spy plane escapades).
This was the year that the CIA's Office of Research and Development
(ORD) geared up a study of parapsychology and the occult. The investigation,
dubbed Project OFTEN-CHICKWIT, gave rise to the establishment of a social
"laboratory" by SEI scientists at the University of South Carolina
- a college class in black witchcraft, demonology and voodoo.
Dr. Orne, with SEI funding, marked out his own mind control corner at the
University of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s. He does not publicize his role
as CIA psychiatrist. He denies it, very plausibly. In a letter to Dr. Orne,
Marks once reminded him that he'd disavowed knowledge of his participation
in one mind-wrecking experimental sub-project. Orne later recanted, admitting
that he'd been aware of the true source of funding all along.
Among psychiatrists in the CIA's mind control fraternity, Orne ranks among
the most venerable. He once boasted to Marks that he was routinely briefed
on all significant CIA behavior modification experiments: "Why would
they come to him," Martin Cannon muses in The Controllers, which
links UFO abductions to secret military research veiled by screen memories
of "alien" abduction, "unless Orne had a high security clearance
and worked extensively with the intelligence services?"
To supplement his CIA income, the influential Dr. Orne has been the donee
of grants from the Office of Naval Research and the Air
Force Office of Scientific Research. "I should like to hear,"
Cannon says, "what innocent explanation, if any, the Air Force has to
offer to explain their interest in post-hypnotic amnesia."
According to Army records, Orne's stomping grounds, Penn U., was a bee-hive
of secret experiments in the Vietnam War period. The Pentagon and CIA - under
the auspices of ORD's Steve Aldrich, a doyen of occult and
parapsychological studies - conferred the Agency's most lucrative research
award upon the University of Pennsylvania to study the effects
of 16 newly-concocted biochemical warfare agents on humans, including choking,
blistering and vomiting agents, toxins, poison gas and incapacitating chemicals.
The tests were abruptly halted in 1972 when the prison's medical lab burned
to the ground.
Testimony before the 1977 Church Committee's probe of the CIA hinted that,
as of 1963, the scientific squalor of the CIA's mind control regimen, code-named
MKULTRA, had abandoned military and academic laboratories,
fearing exposure, and mushroomed in cities across the country. Confirmation
arrived in 1980 when Joseph Holsinger, an aide to late Congressman
Leo Ryan (who was murdered by a death squad at Jonestown) exposed the formation
of eccentric religious cults by the CIA. Holsinger made the allegation
at a colloquium of psychologists in San Francisco on "Psychosocial Implications
of the Jonestown Phenomenon." Holsinger maintained that a CIA rear-support
base had been in collusion with Jones to perform medical and mind control
experiments at People's Temple. The former Congressional aide cited an essay
he'd received in the mail, "The Penal Colony," written
by a Berkeley psychologist. The author had emphasized: Rather than terminating
MKULTRA, the CIA shifted its programs from public institutions to private
cult groups, including the People's Temple.
Jonestown had its grey eminence in Dr. Lawrence Laird Layton
of the University of California at Berkeley, formerly a chemist for the Manhattan
Project and head of the Army's chemical warfare research division in the early
1950s. (Larry Layton, his son, led the death squad that
murdered Congressman Leo Ryan, who'd arrived at Guyana to investigate the
cult.) Michael Meiers, author of Was Jonestown a
CIA Medical Experiment?, scavenged for information on the People's Temple
for six years, concluding:
"The Jonestown experiment was conceived by Dr. Layton, staffed
by Dr. Layton and financed by Dr. Layton. It was as much his project as
it was Jim Jones"
Though it was essential for him to remain in the background for security
reasons, Dr. Layton maintained contact with and even control of the experiment
through his wife and children." The African-American cult had at its
core a Caucasian inner-council, composed of Dr. Layton's family and in-laws.
The press was blind to obvious CIA connections, but survivors of the carnage
in Guyana followed the leads and maintained that Jim Jones was "an employee,
servant, agent or operative of the Central Intelligence Agency" from
1963 - the year the Agency turned to cult cut-outs to conceal MKULTRA mind
control activities - until 1978. In October 1981 the survivors of Jonestown
filed a $63 million lawsuit against Secretary of State Cyrus Vance
and Stansfield Turner, former director of the CIA, currently
a teacher at the University of Maryland and a director of the Monsanto
Corporation. The suit, filed in U.S. district court in San Francisco,
accused Turner of conspiring with Agency operatives to "enhance the economic
and political powers of James Warren Jones," and of conducting "mind
control and drug experimentation" on the Temple flock.
The suit was dismissed four months later for "failure to prosecute timely."
All requests for an appeal were denied.
Ligatures of the CIA clung to the cults. Much of the violence that has since
exploded across the front pages was incited by CIA academics at leading universities.
Small wonder, then, that Ted Goertzel, director of the Forum
for Policy Research at Rutgers, which maintains a symbiosis with
the CIA despite media exposure, should write that the most susceptible victims
of "cryptomnesia" (a synonym for false memories) believe "in
conspiracies, including the JFK assassination, AIDS conspiracies, as well
as the UFO cover-up." The problem, Goertzel says, "may have its
origins in early childhood," and is accompanied by "feelings of
anomie and anxiety that make the individual more likely to construct false
memories out of information stored in the unconscious mind."
This side of gilded rationalizations, the CIA's links to the cults are no
manifestation of "cryptomnesia."
Like Jonestown, the Symbionese Liberation Army was a mind
control creation unleashed by the Agency. The late political researcher Mae
Brussell, whose study of The Firm commenced in 1963 after the assassination
of John Kennedy, wrote in 1974 that the rabid guerrilla band "consisted
predominantly of CIA agents and police informers." This unsavory group
was, Brussell insisted, "an extension of psychological experimentation
projects, connected to Stanford Research Institute, Menlo
Park." (She went on to lament that "many of the current rash of
'senseless killings,' 'massacres,' and 'zombie-type murders' are committed
by individuals who have been in Army hospitals, mental hospitals or prison
hospitals, where their heads have been literally taken over surgically to
create terror in the community.")
Evidence that the CIA conceived and directed the SLA was obvious. The SLA
leadership was trained by Colston Westbrook, a Pennsylvania
native. Westbrook was a veteran of the CIA's murderous PHOENIX
Program in South Vietnam, where he trained terrorist cadres and death squads.
In 1969 he took a job as an administrator of Pacific Architects and
Engineers, a CIA proprietary in Southern California. Three of Westbrook's
foot soldiers, Emily and William Harris and Angela
Atwood (a former police intelligence informer), had been students
of the College of Foreign Affairs, a CIA cover at the University
of Indiana. Even the SLA symbol, a seven-headed cobra, had been adopted
by the OSS (America's wartime intelligence agency) and CIA to designate precepts
of brainwashing.
When the smoke cleared at SLA headquarters in L.A., Dr. Martin Orne was called
upon to examine Patricia Hearst in preparation for trial.
The government charged that she had participated voluntarily in the SLA's
gun-toting crime spree. Orne's was a foregone conclusion - he sided with the
government. His opinion was shared by two other psychiatrists called to appraise
Ms. Hearst's state of mind, Robert Jay Lifton and Louis
Jolyon West. Dr. Lifton was a co-founder of the aforementioned
Human Ecology Fund. The CIA contractor that showered Orne with research
grants in the 1960s. Dr. West is one of the CIA's most notorious mind control
specialists, currently director of UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute.
It was West who brought a score of mind control psychiatrists of the ultra-right
political stripe to the UCLA campus.
Drs. Orne, Lifton and West unanimously agreed that Patty Hearst had been
"persuasively coerced" to join the SLA. She had been put through
a grueling thought reform regimen. She'd been isolated and sensory deprived,
raped, humiliated, badgered, politically indoctrinated with a surrealistic
mutation of Third World Marxism. Ms. Hearst was only allowed human companionship
when she exhibited signs of submission. Orne and his colleagues assured that
attention was narrowed to their psychologizing, conveniently rendering evidence
of CIA collusion extraneous to consideration by the jury.
Another psychiatrist called to testify at the trial of "Tania"
surfaced with Dr. Orne in 1991 on the board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
(The FMSF board is almost exclusively composed of former CIA and military
doctors currently employed by major universities. None have backgrounds in
ritual abuse - their common interest is behavior modification. Dr.
Margaret Singer, a retired Berkeley Ph.D., studied repatriated prisoners-of-war
returning from the Korean War at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research
in Maryland (1952-58).
Singer turned up in 1982 on the book jacket of Raven - the
CIA's code-name for Jim Jones - by San Francisco Examiner reporters
Tim Reiterman and John Jacobs, a thoroughly-researched account of the People's
Temple that completely side-steps CIA involvement. Co-author John Jacobs
was supposedly one of the country's leading authorities on CIA mind control,
a subject he studied at length for a series published by the Washington
Post. Reiterman had been the Examiner reporter on the Patricia Hearst
beat. Yet both writers managed to avoid obvious intelligence connections.
Dr. Singer commended the book as "the definitive psychohistory of Jim
Jones." Raven, she opined, conveyed "the essence of psychological
and social processes that Jim Jones, the ultimate manipulator, set in motion."
The true "manipulators," of course, were operatives of the CIA,
and the public disinformation gambit lauded by Dr. Singer was, according to
Meiers, in tune with "a concerted attempt to suppress information, stifle
investigations, censor writers and manipulate public information."
The CIA and Pentagon have quietly organized and influenced a long line of
mind control cults, among them:
The Riverside Lodge of the Ordo Templis Orientis:
Also known as The Solar Lodge of the OTO, which followed
the teachings of cult messiah Aleister Crowley, whose fixed
gaze on the astral equinox resulted in instructions from his deities to form
a religious order. Crowley, high priest of the OTO and a British intelligence
agent, gave Winifred T. Smith a charter to open an OTO lodge
in Pasadena. The high priest of the lodge was Jack Parsons,
a rocket expert and founder of the California Institute of Technology. Parsons,
who took the oath of the anti-Christ in 1949, contributed to the design of
the Pentagon under subsequent CIA director John J. McCloy. He was killed in
a still unexplained laboratory explosion. There is a crater on the moon named
after him.
The OTO's Solar Lodge in San Bernardino was presided over by Georgina
"Jean" Brayton, the daughter of a ranking Air Force officer
in the 1960s. The cult subscribed to a grim, apocalyptic view of the world,
and like Charles Manson believed that race wars would precipitate the Big
Cataclysm. In the Faustian Los Angeles underworld, the lodge was known for
its indulgence in sadomasochism, drug dealing, blood drinking, child molestation
and murder.
Candace Reos, a former member of the lodge, was deposed
by Riverside police in 1969. Reos said that Brayton controlled the thinking
of all cult members. One poor soul, she said, was ordered to curb his sexual
urges by cutting his wrists every time he was aroused. Mrs. Reos told police,
according to the report, that when she became pregnant, Georgina was angry
and told her that she would have to condition herself to hate her child. Reos
told police that children of the cult's 43 adult members were secluded from
their parents and received "training" that took on "very severe
tones."
"There was a lot of spanking involved," she said, "a lot of
heavy criticism. There was a lot of enclosed in dark rooms." The teachers,
she added. "left welts."
If so ordered, adult cultists would beat their children.
According to a Riverside County Sheriff's report, a six year-old child burned
the group's school house to the ground. The boy was punished by solitary confinement
in a locked shipping crate left in the desert, where the average temperature
was 110 degrees, for two months. The boy was chained to a metal plate.
When police freed him, they were nauseated by the suffocating stench of excrement.
The child was smothered in flies swarming from a tin-can toilet.
The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Movement:
In 1985 the Portland Oregonian published a 36-part, book-length series
linking the cult to opium trafficking, prostitution, money laundering, arson,
slave labor, mass poisonings, illegal wiretaps and the stockpiling of guns
and biochemical warfare weapons. The year-long Oregonian investigation revealed
cult ties to CIA-trained mercenaries in El Salvador and the Far East. Domestically,
Rajneesh's secret police force worked with Agency operatives.
The Finders:
On February 7, 1987 Customs agents raided a child-porn ring in Tallahasee,
Florida. Eight suspects and six children were taken into custody. The children,
according to a Customs Department memo, behaved "like animals in a public
park," and "were not aware of the function and purpose of telephones,
televisions and toilets."
The children told police that they were forced to live outdoors and were
given food only as a reward. A check on the backgrounds of the adults turned
up a police report, "specific in describing 'bloody rituals' and sex
orgies involving children, and an as-yet unsolved murder."
Customs agents searched a cult safe house and discovered a computer room
and documents recording "high-tech" bank transfers, explosives,
and a set of instructions advising cult members on moving children through
jurisdictions around the country. One photographic album found in the house
featured the execution and disembowelment of goats, and snapshots, according
to a Customs report, of "adults and children dressed in white sheets
participating in a bloody ritual."
An American passport was found. The investigating agents contacted the State
Department and were advised to "terminate further investigation."
They investigated anyway, reporting that "the CIA made contact and admitted
to owning the Finders ... as a front for a domestic training organization,
but that it had 'gone bad.'" The late wife of Marion David Pettie, the
cult's leader, had worked for the Agency, and his son had been an employee
of Air America, the heroin-riddled CIA proprietary. Yet Pettie denied to a
reporter for U.S. News & World Report any connection to the Firm. Police
in Washington refused to comment. Officials of the CIA dismissed as "hogwash"
allegations of any connection to the Finders cult.
MOVE:
On May 13, 1985 MOVE's Philadelphia headquarters was firebombed by local police.
Not only did the fire consume the cult's home - it devastated the entire neighborhood,
leaving 11 dead and 250 homeless. The group was cofounded by Vince
Leapheart, aka John Africa, a Korean veteran. His
intellectual mentor and source of funding was Donald Glassey,
a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work. Glassey
was an admitted police "informant," but conducted himself like a
paid provocateur. He purchased weapons for the cult with cash drawn from city
coffers. John Africa, the cult's titular head, claimed to be a messiah, and
like Jim Jones to have Godly "healing" powers and "total control"
over his followers.
O.T.A.: The Order of the Temple of Astarte in Pasadena, California
is a "hermetic" occult organization that practices "Magick
in the Western Tradition." The cult is led by Fraters Khenemel,
a police officer, and Aleyin, a veteran Green Beret. The
cult's everyday language is unusual for a mystical order - one group schedule
is laden with words like "operation," "sixteen-thirty hours,"
and "travel orders." Demonology is among the OTA's primary occult
interests.
The police connection recalls the statement of Louis Tackwood,
the former LAPD provocateur whose revelations of secret police subterfuge
set off a political tempest in Los Angeles in 1973. "You don't know,"
he told journalist Donald Freed, "but there's a devil worship cult
in Pasadena. Actually in Altadena." Tackwood alleged that the cultists
were "on the LAPD payroll."
The CIA and Pentagon cooperate in the creation of cults. To be sure,
the Association of National Security Alumni, a public interest veterans group
opposed to covert operations, considers it a "primary issue of concern"
that the Department of Defense has a "perceived role in satanic cult
activities, which qualify in and of themselves as very damaging exercises
in mind control and behavioral modification."
It is beginning to dawn on the psychiatric community at large that the CIA's
mind control clique is a menace reminiscent of Nazi medical experimentation.
In 1993, Dr. Corydon Hammond, a professor at the University
of Utah's School of Medicine, conducted a seminar on federally-funded mind
control experiments. Topics covered by Hammond included brainwashing, post-hypnotic
programming and the induction of multiple personalities by the CIA.
Hammond contended that the cult underground has roots in Nazi Germany,
and that the CIA's cult mind control techniques were based upon those of Nazi
scientists recruited by the CIA for Cold Warfare. (Researcher Lenny Lapon
estimates in Mass Murderers in White Coats that 5,000 Nazis resettled
in the U.S. after WW II.) Hammond was forced to drop this line
of inquiry by professional ridicule, especially from the CIA's False Memory
Syndrome Foundation, and a barrage of death threats. At a recent
regional conference on ritual child abuse, he regretted that he could no longer
speak on the theme of government mind control.
The psychological community is waking to the threat in its ranks, to judge
by APA surveys and personal communications with ranking members of the mental
health field, but the world at large remains in the dark. The "mass hysteria"
and "false memory" bromides disseminated by the establishment press
obscure federal and academic connections to the mind control cults, which
are defended largely by organized pedophiles, cultists and hired guns of psychiatry.
An ambitious disinformation gambit has led the world at large to side with
cultists operating under federal protection. As at Jonestown and Chiery, Switzerland,
the denouement of cult activity often ends in the destruction of all witnesses.
This cycle of abuse and murder can only be ended by full public awareness
of the federal mind control initiative.
The CIA, The False Memory Syndrome Foundation,
and the Politics of Ritual Abuse
The conference session bears a passing resemblance to a 12-Step meeting.
Assembled in a Portland religious retreat, members of the False Memory Syndrome
Foundation (FMSF), all accused of child abuse, are encouraged to unload their
anguish. Only women take the stage (they leave reporters with a sympathetic
impression - men stigmatized by child abuse do not). Pamela Freyd,
a Foundation founder, assures these victims of pernicious therapies they are
not alone. The Foundation's office in Philadelphia, she says, takes 60 calls
on a typical day from distraught adults hounded by their own confused children,
rogue therapists and sensation-seeking pack journalists.
The number of dues-paying members (each contributes $100 a year) varies according
to the source. The group reported in January 1993 that 1,200 families had
made contact in its first year of operation. The same month, the San Jose
Mercury News declared flatly that "nearly 3,000 families" from
across the country had been recruited. The FMSF now claims 5,000 families.
Time magazine raised the figure to "7,000 individuals and families who
have sought assistance."
The Foundation's distinctive handling of statistics is incessant. In April
of this year the FMSF claimed 12,000 families have been strained by false
child abuse allegations. A month later, the figure dropped to"9,500 U.S.
families." Yet the Foundation prides itself on accuracy. One FMSF newsletter
advises members to insist the media "report accurate information. The
rumors and misinformation surrounding the false accusations based on recovery
of repressed memories are shocking." The same author regrets that "65%
of accusations of abuse are now unsubstantiated, a whopping jump from 35%
in 1976." This figure, once gleefully disseminated by such pedophile
defense groups as NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association)
and VOCAL (Victims of Child Abuse Laws) was debunked years
ago. It was fabricated by Douglas Besherov of the American
Enterprise Institute, a hard right-wing propaganda factory fueled
by the Olin Foundation, a CIA funding cover. (Christian conservatives
are often accused of propagating ritual abuse "hysteria," yet in
the 1992 presidential election the para-conservative wing of the Republican
Party slipped into its platform a strategy to put an end to investigations
of child abuse.)
The FMSF selectively ignores child abuse data that disagrees with their own.
Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery, reported
in the Harvard Mental Health Letter that false abuse allegations by children
"are rare, in the range of 2-8% of reported cases. False retractions
of true complaints are far more common, especially when the victim is
not sufficiently protected after disclosure and therefore succumbs to intimidation
by the perpetrator or other family members who feel that they must preserve
secrecy."
Other statistics shunned by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation include
a survey presented at a 1992 psychiatric conference that found that a full
88% of all therapists in a large sampling consider ritual child abuse to
be a very real social problem with devastating emotional effects. Another:
In 1990 the State University of New York at Buffalo polled a national sampling
of clinical psychologists on ritual abuse. About 800 psychologists - a third
of the poll - were aware of treating at least one case. Only 5% of all child
abuse cases ever enter the courtroom - half of these end with the child in
the custody of the abusive parent..
The recovered memory debate was discussed at a 1993 conference on multiple
personality disorder. Richard Lowenstein, a psychiatrist
from the University of Maryland Medical School, argued that the Foundation
is "media-directed, dedicated to putting out disinformation."
Other conference participants contemplated funding sources and "possible
CIA connections."
The Devil Denuded The CIA, in fact, has several designates on the FMSF advisory board.
They have in common backgrounds in mind control experimentation. Their
very presence on the board, and their peculiar backgrounds, reveal some heavily
obscured facts about ritual child abuse.
Martin T. Orne, a senior CIA researcher, is an original board member of the
Foundation, and a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania's Experimental
Psychiatry Lab in Philadelphia. In 1962 his forays into hypno-programming
(the elicitation of "anti-social" behavior, dissolving memory and
other mind-subduing techniques) were financed by a CIA front at Cornell University.
He was also funded by Boston's Scientific Engineering Institute, another front,
and a clearinghouse for the Agency's investigation of the occult.
The CIA and Pentagon have formed a partnership in the creation of cults.
To be sure, the Association of National Security Alumni, a public interest
veterans group opposed to clandestine ops, considers it a "primary issue
of concern" that the Department of Defense has a "perceived role
in satanic cult activities, which qualify in and of themselves as very damaging
exercises in mind control."
The smoothing over of the national security state's cult connections is handled
by academic "experts."
A forerunner of the Foundation is based in Buffalo, New York, the Committee
for Scientific Examination of Religion, best known for the publication
of Satanism in America: How the Devil Got More Than His Due, widely
considered to be a legitimate study. The authors turn up their noses to ritual
abuse, dismissing the hundreds of reports around the country as mass "hysteria."
Cult researcher Carl Raschke reported in a March, 1991 article
that he coincidentally met Hudson Frew, a Satanism in America
co-author, at a Berkeley bookstore. "Frew was wearing a five-pointed
star, or pentagram, the symbol of witchcraft and earth magic," Raschke
says. Shawn Carlson, a contributor to the book, is identified
by the media as a "physicist." Yet he runs the Gaia Press in El
Cerrito, California, a New Age publishing house with an emphasis on witchcraft
and occultic lore. Carlson is also a "scientific and technical consultant"
to the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal"
(a promoter of the "false memory" theory of ritual abuse and UFO
abductions), publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer.
The FMS Foundation is no less eccentric. Within two years of its founding,
it was clear that the Foundation leadership was far from disinterested on
the workings of childhood memory, and concealed a secret sexual and political
agenda.
FMSF founderRalph Underwager, director of the Institute
of Psychological Therapies in Minnesota, was forced to resign in
1993. Underwager (a former Lutheran pastor) and his wife Hollida Wakefield
publish a journal, Issues in Child Abuse Allegations, written
by and for child abuse "skeptics." His departure from the False
Memory Syndrome Foundation was hastened by a remark in an interview, appearing
in an Amsterdam journal for pedophiles, that it was "God's Will"
adults engage in sex with children. (His wife Hollida remained on the Foundation's
board after he left.) As it happens, holy dispensation for pedophiles is the
exact credo of the Children of God cult. It was fitting,
then, when Underwager filed an affidavit on behalf of cult members tried in
France in 1992, insisting that the accused were positively "not guilty
of abuse upon children." In the interview, he prevailed upon pedophiles
everywhere to shed stigmatization as "wicked and reprehensible"
users of children.
In keeping with the Foundation's creative use of statistics, Dr. Underwager
told a group of British reporters in 1994 that "scientific evidence"
proved 60% of all women molested as children believed the experience was "good
for them."
Dr. Underwager invariably sides with the defense. His grandiloquent
orations have graced courtrooms around the world, often by satellite. Defense
lawyers for Woody Allen turned to him, he boasts, when Mia Farrow accused
her estranged husband of molesting their seven year-old daughter. Underwager
is a virtual icon to the Irish Catholic lobby in Dublin, which raised its
hoary hackles against a child abuse prevention program in the Irish Republic.
He was, until his advocacy of pedophila tarnished an otherwise glittering
reputation, widely quoted in the press, dismissing ritual child abuse as a
hysterical aberration.
He is the world's foremost authority on false memory, but in the courtroom
he is repeatedly exposed as a charlatan. In 1988, a trial court decision
in New York State held that Dr. Underwager was "not qualified to render
any opinion as to whether or not (the victim) was sexually molested."
In 1990 his testimony on memory was ruled improper "in the absence of
any evidence that the results of Underwager's work had been accepted in the
scientific community." And In Minnesota a judge ruled that Underwager's
theories on "learned memory" were the same as "having an expert
tell the jury that (the victim) was not telling the truth."
Peter and Pamela Freyd, executive directors of the Foundation,
joined forces with Underwager in 1991, and their story is equally wretched.
Jennifer Freyd, their daughter, a professor of psychology
at the University of Oregon, openly leveled accusations of abuse against her
parents at an August 1993 mental health conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
"My family of origin was troubled in many observable ways, "
she said. "I refer to the things that were never 'forgotten' and 'recovered,'
but to things that we all knew about." She gave her father's alcoholism
as an example. "During my childhood, my father sometimes discussed
his own experiences of being sexually abused as an 11 year-old boy, and
called himself a 'kept boy.'"
Peter Freyd graduated to male prostitution as an adolescent.
At the age of 13, Jennifer Freyd composed a poem about her father's nocturnal
visits:
I am caught in a web,
A web of deep, deep terror.
she wrote. The diaries of her youth chronicle the "reactions and feelings
(guilt, shame and terror) of a troubled girl and young woman. My parents oscillated
between denying these symptoms and feelings ... to using knowledge of these
same symptoms and feelings to discredit me."
"My father," she says, "told various people that I was brain
damaged." The accusation was unlikely. At the time, Jennifer Freyd was
a graduate student on a National Science Foundation fellowship. She has taught
at Cornell and received numerous research awards. The "brain damage"
apologia did not wash. Her mother suggested that Jennifer's memories were
"confabulations," and faulted therapeutic intervention. Pamela Freyd
turned to her own psychiatrist, Dr. Harold Lief, currently
an advisory board member of the Foundation, to diagnose Jennifer.
"He explained to me that he did not believe I was abused," Jennifer
recalls. Dr. Lief's diagnosis was based on his belief that Peter Freyd's fantasies
were strictly "homoerotic." Of course, his daughter furrows a brow
at the assumption that homoerotic fantasies or a heterosexual marriage exclude
the possibility of child molestation. Lief's skewed logic is a trademark of
the Foundation.
He is a close colleague of the CIA's Martin Orne. Dr. Lief, a former major
in the Army medical corps, joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty in
1968, the peak of federally-funded behavioral modification experiments at
Holmesburg Prison. Dr. Orne consulted with him on several studies in hypnotic
programming. His academic writing reveals a peculiar range of professional
interests, including "Orgasm in the Postoperative Transsexual" for
Archives of Sexual Behavior, and an exploration of the possibility of life
after death for a journal on mental diseases edited by Foundation fellow Paul
McHugh. Lief is a director of the Center for Sexuality and
Religion, past president of the Sex Information and Education
Council.
And an original board member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Two
others, Jon Baron from Penn U. and Ray Hyman
(an executive editor of the aforementioned Skeptical Inquirer), a professor
of psychology at the University of Oregon, resigned from the board after Jennifer
Freyd went public with her account of childhood abuse, and the facetious attempts
of her parents and their therapist to discredit her. They were replaced by
David Dinges, co-director - with the ubiquitous Martin Orne
- of the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry at the University
of Pennsylvania.
"At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered 'false,'"
Jennifer says, "and my alcoholic father's memory is considered rational
and sane." She does not, after all, remember impossible abuses: "I
remember incest in my father's house.... My first memories came when I was
at home a few hours after my second session with my therapist, a licensed
clinical psychologist working within an established group in a large and respected
medical clinic.
"During that second visit to my therapist's office, I expressed great
anxiety about the upcoming holiday visit from my parents. My therapist asked
about half way into the session, whether I had ever been sexually abused.
I was immediately thrown into a strange state. No one had ever asked me such
a question. I responded, 'no, but...' I went home and within a few hours I
was shaking uncontrollably, overwhelmed with intense and terrible flashbacks."
Jennifer asks herself why her parents are believed. "In the end, is it
precisely because I was abused that I am to be discredited despite my personal
and professional success?"
Pamela Freyd published an open letter defending her husband in Ralph Underwager's
Issues in Child Abuse Accusations in 1991. It was reprinted in Confabulations,
a book published a year later. Laced with lubricious sentiment, the book bemoans
the "destruction of families" brought on by false child abuse accusations,
and maligns "cult-like" support groups and feminists, or "lesbian
cults." Executive director Freyd often refers to the feminist groups
that have taken up the cause of child abuse survivors as "lesbians,"
after the bizarre Dr. Underwager, who claims, "these women may be jealous
that males are able to love each other, be comrades, friends, be close, intimate."
Pamela Freyd's account of the family history, Jennifer insists, is patently
false. In an electronic message from her father, he openly acknowledged that
in his version of the story "fictional elements were deliberately inserted."
"'Fictional' is rather an astounding choice of words," Jennifer
observed at the Ann Arbor conference. The article written by her parents contends
that Jennifer was denied tenure at another university due to a lack of published
research. "In fact," Jennifer counters, "I moved to the University
of Oregon in 1987, just four years after receiving my Ph.D. to accept a tenured
position as associate professor in the psychology department, one of the world's
best psychology departments.... My mother sent the Jane Doe article to my
colleagues during my promotion year - that is, the year my case for promotion
to full professor was being considered. I was absolutely mortified to learn
of this violation of my privacy and this violation of truth."
Manipulative tactics are another Foundation imprimatur. Lana Alexander,
editor of a newsletter for survivors of child sexual abuse, observes that
"many people view the false memory syndrome theory as a calculated defense
strategy developed by perpetrators and the lawyers and expert witnesses who
defend them."
A legitimizing barrage of stories in the press has shaped public opinion
and warmed the clime for defense attorneys. The concept of false memory serves
the same purpose as Holocaust denial. It shapes opinion. Unconscionable crimes
are obstructed, the accused is endowed with the status of martyr, the victim
reviled.
The emphasis on image is obvious in "How Do We Know We are Not Representing
Pedophiles," an article written for the February 29, 1992 FMS Foundation
Newsletter by Pamela Freyd. In it, she derides the suggestion that many members
of the group could be molesters because "we are a good-looking bunch
of people, greying hair, well dressed, healthy, smiling; just about every
person who has attended is someone you would surely find interesting and want
to count as a friend."
Friendly Fire
People forget things. Horrible things. Here
at the Foundation someone had a repressed memory, or what would be called
a false memory, that she had been sexually abused. -- Pamela Freyd,
FMS Foundation Founder
The debate's bloodiest stage is the courtroom. The hired guns of Martin
Orne's circle of psychiatrists are constantly called upon to blow smoke at
the jury's gallery to conceal CIA mind control operations. This branch
of the psychiatric community is steeped in the programming of serial killers,
political assassins and experiments on involuntary subjects. Agency psychiatrists
on the witness stand direct the press away from the CIA, and the prosecution
to a predetermined end. Martin Orne's high-toned psychologizing in the Hillside
Strangler case, for example, is a strategy adopted by the FMS foundation
to stifle the cries of mind control survivors.
Orne's influence contributed to the outcome of a high-profile abuse case,
the $8 million lawsuit filed by Gary Ramona of Napa, California
against child therapist Marche Isabella and psychiatrist
Richard Rose. Ramona charged that his daughter Holly's therapists
elicited from her flashbacks of sexual molestation that never occurred, decimating
his marriage and career as a vice president at Robert Mondavi wineries. His
wife and employer, note, immediately believed Holly's accusations. In May
of 1994 Ramona received a $500,000 jury award. He hailed the decision as a
"tremendous victory."
Nevertheless, Holly Ramona still maintains that she was
sexually abused by her father, though no criminal charges have been filed.
Holly first confronted her father with the allegations on March 15, 1990,
with her mother and Isabella present. She filed a civil action against him
in Los Angeles County, but before it went to trial her father's suit got underway
in Napa.
The suit turned on the use of sodium amytal to resurrect buried memories.
Holly Ramona exhibited telltale symptoms of abuse - fear of gynecological
examinations, a phobia of pointy teeth, like her father's - and asked to be
treated with sodium amytal. Dr. Rose wrote in his notes that under the influence
of the drug, Holly "remembered specific details of sexual molestation."
But Orne, who has pioneered in the use of sodium amytal in hypnosis research,
cautioned in a court brief that the drug is "not useful in ascertaining
'truth.' The patient becomes receptive to suggestions due to the context and
to the comments of the interviewers."
Yet the jury foreman stated for the record that Isabella and Rose did not
implant false memories of abuse, as Holly's father had complained, but were
negligent in reinforcing the memories as Holly described them under the influence
of the barbiturate. The court considered it irrelevant whether Holly actually
suffered abuse, narrowing the legal focus instead to the chemical evocation
of Holly's recollections and her therapist's leading questions.
Left hanging was the question of Ramona's guilt or innocence, not exactly
an irrelevant issue. Orne offered no opinion. The "tremendous victory"
in Napa, given these facts, begins to look like a manipulation of the court
system, especially the use of "expert" testimony.
The therapists did not, contrary to most press reports, bear the full brunt
of blame. The jury found that Ramona himself bore 5% of the blame for what
happened to him, Holly's therapists 55%, and 45% was borne by the girl's mother
and the Robert Mondavi winery.
But the 55% solution is diluted by Holly's memories. Contrary to the impression
left by the press, her past has not been explained away. "I wouldn't
be here if there was a question in my mind," she testified in Napa.
False memory had no clinical history or symptomology (repressed memory has
both), but the concept had held up in court.
All that remained was to provide a scientific explanation. The Foundation
had spread the word that a "syndrome" was winding through society
and "destroying families." But what is the origin of false (not
inaccurate or clouded or fragmented) memories? What are the symptoms? It remained
to supply a cognitive model for false memories of ritual molestation.
One of the most prolific and quotable popularizers of false memory is Elizabeth
Loftus, a professor of psychology and law at the University of Washington
in Seattle, and an advisory board member of the Foundation. Her dual academic
interests have fueled suspicions that the organization is more committed to
defending perpetrators than ferreting out the facts. Loftus testified in over
150 criminal cases prior to joining the Foundation, always on behalf of defendants.
In 1991 she published a professional autobiography, Witness for the Defense,
a study of eight criminal trials in which she appeared as an expert witness.
In her book, Loftus - billed as "the expert who puts memory on trial"
- conceded that her critics deem her research "unproven in real-life
situations," and her courtroom dissertations "premature and highly
prejudicial."
One book reviewer for the New York Times grumbled: "Her testimony would
be less controversial if she could distinguish between the innocent and the
guilty and reserve her help for the former."
Elizabeth Loftus has two criteria for taking the stand. The first is when
eyewitness identification is the sole or primary evidence against the defendant.
Secondly, the accused must act innocent - she regrets testifying on behalf
of Ted Bundy because the serial killer once smiled at the prosecutor, which
she regards as an expression of guilt - and defense attorneys must believe
it.
Loftus stood at the Harvard Medical School podium in May, 1994 to inform
a conference on false memory of her research, "in which false memories
about childhood events were created in 24 men and women ages 18 to 63."
Dr. Loftus reported that the parents of volunteers "cooperated to produce
a list of events that had supposedly taken place in the volunteer's early
life." Three of the events actually took place. But one, a shopping trip,
never happened. Some of the volunteers had memories, implanted by suggestion,
of wandering lost on the fictitious shopping expedition.
Karen Olio, the author of scores of articles on sexual abuse,
complains that Loftus's memory studies "examine only the possibility
of implanting a single memory with which most people could easily identify
(being lost in a mall, awakened by a noise in the night). The possibility
of 'implanting' terrifying and shameful memories that differ markedly from
an individual's experience, such as memories of childhood abuse in individuals
who do not have a trauma history," remains to be proven."
Psychiatrist John Briere of the University of Southern California
has found that nearly two-thirds of all ritual abuse survivors report episodic
or complete amnesia at some point after it occurred. The younger the child,
the more violent the abuse, the more likely that memory lapses occurred.
These findings have been duplicated at the University of California at San
Francisco by psychiatrist Lenore Terr, who concluded that
children subjected to repeated abuse were more likely to repress memories
of it than victims of a single traumatic event.
Clinical psychologist Catherine Gould has treated scores
of ritually abused children at her office in Encino, California. At the September
1993 National Conference on Crimes Against Children in Washington, D.C., Gould
objected that the studies of Elizabeth Loftus ignore past research on trauma
and its influence on memory.
"My concern about Elizabeth Loftus," Gould said, "is that
she has stated in print, and correctly so, that her data tells us nothing
about the nature of memory of traumatic events. And yet she has failed to
protest the misapplication of her findings by groups who are involved in discrediting
the accounts survivors are giving of their traumatic history. I believe that
Dr. Loftus, like other psychologists, has an ethical responsibility to do
everything possible to ensure that her research findings are interpreted and
applied accurately, and are not manipulated to serve the political agenda
of groups like the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. I question whether she
has met this ethical responsibility."
Some psychologists accuse Loftus of faking her research data.
Her study did not live up to its promise. But now that she had "proven"
that a false memory could be implanted, friends of the Foundation at the Harvard
conference announced they'd identified the neurological and cognitive causes
of disorder. Daniel Schacter, a Harvard psychologist and
conference organizer, claimed that the "confabulator" selects a
fragment of a real memory, "but confuses its true context, and draws
on other bits of experience to construct a story that makes sense of it."
Dr. Morris Moscovitch, a neuro-psychologist at the University
of Toronto, claimed that "brain damage" could also evoke false memories.
He noted that mental patients with frontal lobe defects frequently confuse
imaginary stories with actual memories.
A superficially plausible revelation was provided by Cornell
psychologist Stephen Ceci, who reported on five studies of
574 preschool children. After 10 weeks of repeated questioning, 58% of them
concocted a false account for at least one fictitious event.
But like the studies of Elizabeth Loftus, Ceci did not attempt to explain
the supposed amnesiac effect of severe trauma on children and adults alike
(veterans of WW II and Vietnam have been known to "forget" atrocities
of war). Besides, the average preschooler is bound to invent at least one
fantasy in 10 long weeks of repetitive questioning. Toddlers aren't known
for their consummate adherence to objective reality. An invisible playmate
and the Cat in the Hat are not "false memories."
The research results presented at the Harvard conference were not exactly
staggering. All that had been proven was that children forget, become confused
and make things up.
Seattle therapist James Cronin, one of the Foundation's
harshest critics, believes that the false memory concept is promoted by "fact
and artifice" to a public conditioned to the fragmentation of knowledge,
intellectual charades, elitism and the sterile abstractions that often pass
for university education and expertise. The so-called experts now jumping
on the side of false memory and therapist 'bias' are opportunists."
Yet the New York Times hailed the Harvard conference as
"epic." The conference had given a gracious "scientific nod
to the frailty of memory." Victims of aggravated child abuse had nothing
to celebrate, but the Times reporter was ecstatic. At long last, scientists
everywhere had arrived at "a consensus on the mental mechanisms that
can foster false memories." A consensus? Actually, the "consensus"
of psychologists, at least the 88% mentioned earlier - only a vast majority
- believe it to be a very real scourge.
The Times story is typical of the scorn the press has shown ritual abuse
victims and their therapists.
60 Minutes, for example, publicly exonerated Kelly
Michaels, a day-care worker in New Jersey, of charges that she sexually
molested dozens of youngsters in 1984. Michaels was sentenced to 47 years
in prison for sodomizing the children in her care with kitchen implements,
among related charges. Her conviction was overturned in March 1993 when the
state appeals court ruled that Michaels had not had a fair trial.
But in its rush to present Michaels as a blushing innocent, the Sixty Minutes
research department somehow overlooked a May 1991 New York Times story on
the abuse trial, and the testimony of four Essex County corrections officers
who witnessed Miss Michaels and her father kissing and "fondling"
one another during jail visitations. Jerry Vitiello, a jailer, said that
"he saw Ms. Michaels use his tongue when kissing his daughter, rub her
buttocks and put his hand on her breasts." Similar incestuous liaisons
were detailed in the courtroom by three women working in the jail. The bizarre
sexual antics of Kelly Michaels - damningly chronicled in Nap Time
by Lisa Manshel in 1990 - was nixed from the one-sided Sixty Minutes account,
which made her out to be grist for the meat grinder of wrong-headed child
abuse laws.
The Forgettable "Remembering Satan"
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation made its collective debut in "Remembering
Satan," a two-part story by Lawrence Wright in the New
Yorker for April and May 1993. The story (republished in 1994 in
book form) concerns a ritual abuse trial in Olympia, Washington that culminated
with a 20-year prison sentence for Thurston County Sheriff Paul Ingram,
chairman of the local Republican Party. Ingram has since filed motions to
withdraw his guilty plea, a move rejected by an appellate court in 1992. Also
charged, but not convicted, were Jim Rabie, a lobbyist with
the Washington State Law Enforcement Association and a former
police detective assigned to child abuse cases, and Ray Risch,
an employee of the State Patrol's body-and-fender shop. Wright's conclusion,
however, is based on the opinions of False Memory Syndrome Foundation psychiatrists:
that accusations made by Ingram's two daughters, and his own confession to
police, were fantasies misinterpreted by Ingram himself and his daughters
as actual memories.
Wright fumigates any question of abuse with false memory theory. Among the
authorities consulted by Wright was Foundation board member Paul McHugh,
director of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns
Hopkins. Like Margaret Singer, he is a veteran of the Walter
Reed Army Institute of Research (1961-64) and moves in political
circles. For three years (1986-89), McHugh was chairman of the bio-psychology
study section of the National Institutes of Health, and a
former member of the Maryland Governor's Advisory Commission.
McHugh is an unshakable skeptic of repressed memories. He told Wright that
"most severe traumas are not blocked out by children but are remembered
all too well." Most, in fact, are. But McHugh's own professional opinion
leaves open the possibility that some severe traumas are repressed.
He cites as an example the children of chowchilla, California, who were kidnapped
in a school bus and buried alive. McHugh claims they remembered the horror
"all too well." Not exactly. In fact, the FBI's subsequent use of
investigative hypnosis was largely the result of the Chowchilla children's
failure of memory. After their release, none of the children had a clear recollection
of the kidnappers, could not identify them - and neither did the bus driver,
Ed Ray, who managed to recite the license-plate number of the abductor's van
under hypnosis.
Wright's defense of Ingram turns on the opinion of Richard Ofshe,
a Berkeley psychologist, reputed mind control expert and friend of the False
Memory Syndrome Foundation. Ofshe has written, Wright explains, "extensively
about how the thought-control techniques developed in Communist china, the
Soviet Union and North Korea had come to be employed and refined by various
religious cults in the United States." Pointing to mind control in Communist
countries is a favorite tactic of the American mind control fraternity to
divert attention from the highly sophisticated techniques employed in "Democratic"
countries (often in the form of experimentation on unknowing subjects). This
historical revision is a fine example of "mirror imaging,"
the CIA technique of vilifying others, and ignoring the Agency's own role
in the formation and control of mind control cults. Ofshe has not been
directly linked to the CIA, but his work parrots the writings of UCLA's Louis
Jolyon West and other psychiatrists with Agency credentials.
Wright somehow failed to mention that Ofshe is sharply at odds with much
of the American Psychological Association. He has filed a
suit, with Margaret Singer, for $30 million against the APA for engaging in
a "conspiracy" to "destroy" their reputations and prevent
them from testifying in the courtroom. Both Ms. Singer and Richard Ofshe derive
a significant part of their income as consultants and expert witnesses on
behalf of accused child abusers. Their complaint, filed under federal racketeering
laws - tripling any financial damages - claims that members of the APA set
out with "repeated lies" to "discredit them and impair their
careers."
The Association flatly denied the charges. Two courts quickly dismissed the
case. The APA released a statement to the press stating that the organization
had merely advised members against testifying in court on the subject of brainwashing
with "persuasive coercion" (a concept, after all, pushed during
the Korean war by the CIA to justify barbaric mind control experimentation
on American citizens), and had in no way conspired to impair the careers of
Ofshe, Singer or anyone else.
Many in Ofshe's own profession believe him to be a world-class opportunist.
He is a constant in newspaper interviews and on the talk show circuit, where
he claims there is "no evidence" to support ritual abuse allegations.
His categorical denial ignore's Ingram's own confession and a number of jury
decisions across the country. And then there are, to cite one documented example
of evidence from the glut that Ofshe ignores, the tunnels beneath
the McMartin preschool, the most widely-publicized case. And a
raid on the Children of God compound in Argentina in 1993 turned
up videos of ritual abuse and child pornography. Evidence does exist - Ofshe
simply refuses to acknowledge the fact. A cult specialist with Ofshe's credentials
would surely explore the abundance of evidence if he was a legitimate psychologist.
Instead, he chirps a categorical "no evidence," perfectly aware
that most mental health professionals will see through him. A credulous public
will not.
On the December 3, 1993 Rolanda talk show, a woman was interviewed who'd
had flashback memories of abuse before consulting with a therapist. Dr. Ofshe
appeared on the program, his silver beard groomed, looking every inch the
authority. Rolanda asked Ofshe if "a terrible childhood memory, as bad
as child abuse, (can) actually be repressed."
"There is absolutely no reason to think that that is true," Ofshe
told her. "And it's not just what I say - this is the sum and substance
of everything science knows about how memory works." This, of course,
is a transparent lie. Ofshe dismissed repressed memories of abuse as the reigning
"psychological quackery of the 20th century."
Dr. Daniel Lutzker, a psychologist at the Milton
Erickson Institute, was sitting in the audience - turning crimson
with rage at Ofshe's misrepresentations of the psychology of trauma. He stood
up and argued that sex abuse can indeed begat buried recollections. "Repressed
memories," Lutzker countered, "are not only important, they are
the cornerstone of most psychotherapies. the fact is that the more awful the
experience, the more likely it is to be repressed!"
Ofshe responded that there was "no evidence" so support such "nonsense."
Grimacing with disbelief, Lutzker said that Ofshe wouldn't make such outrageous
comments if he bothered to pick up "any basic textbook on psychotherapy."
"Your making it up!" Ofshe spat. Lutzker stared at him in disbelief.
But the crowning contradiction to Ofshe's "expert" opinions appeared
in a September 1994 L.A. Weekly article on alien abductions (another phenomenon
said by the Foundation to breed "false memories").
"There are a lot of not particularly well-certified people out there,"
Dr. Ofshe told Gardetta, "using very powerful techniques on people. Visualizing
this kind of stuff under hypnosis - abduction, Satan cults, sexual abuse -
is the closest thing that anyone can experience short of the experience itself.
That's why it's so traumatic to the individuals undergoing hypno-therapy,
and why the hypno-therapist today can be seen as a new form of sexual predator."
But one morning, shortly thereafter, Gardetta awoke to find a triangular
rash on the palm of his left hand.
"It didn't surprise me," Gardetta wrote. "Things around the
house - which sits on a hilltop in a semi-rural area - had been getting weird.
A jet-wash noise buzzed some afternoons around the house, its origin impossible
to discern. Lights were turning themselves on, and the alarm system's motion
sensor was tripping itself every morning between 5 and 6. One early evening,
small footsteps crossed the roof. I ran outside to find the electrical wires
leading to a nearby telephone pole swaying in the windless dusk."
The mysterious federal mind control fraternity had struck again, leaving
behind more memories to be denounced by the "skeptics" of the FMS
Foundation - the CIA's answer to the Flat Earth Society.
Alex Constantine
Web published at: http://morethanconquerors.simplenet.com/MCF/alexfmsf.htmWe
All information posted on this web site is
the opinion of the author and is provided for educational purposes only.
It is not to be construed as medical advice. Only a licensed medical doctor
can legally offer medical advice in the United States. Consult the healer
of your choice for medical care and advice.