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 founder Ralph 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 psychiatristLenore 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.”
Continued on next page…
