Okay, I've had a bit of free time now, and have got some links on confabulation and implanting of false memories during hypnotism.
This link is very comprehensive. Well worth reading the whole section on the 5 problems referred to on the first page linked.
This is a summary of the Brandon Report, a report by the Royal College Of Psychiatrists on recovered memories. The memories in question are of childhood sexual abuse, but the findings have general significance outside of the specific remit of the report. I'll quote the relevant bits:
The Brandon report is an authoritative review of the current knowledge of the reliability of recovered memories of child sexual abuse and their source. It confirms that there are no good or safe ways of practising recovered memory therapy since all methods are prone to inducing false memories of abuse. This is the case regardless of the training or status of the welfare professional.
[...]
"Evidence does not support the view that memory enhancement techniques actually enhance memory. There is evidence to support the view that these are powerful and dangerous methods of persuasion.
"...there is sufficient evidence of distortion and/or elaboration of memories to assert that entirely new and false memories can be created, not only experimentally but also in clinical practice.
"The evidence suggests that this is true of:....drug abreaction, hypnosis, age regression, dream interpretation, imagistic work, 'feelings work', art therapy, survivors' groups."
[...]
"Despite widespread clinical support and popular belief that memories can be 'blocked out' by the mind, no empirical evidence exists to support either repression or dissociation.
"There is no evidence to support the wholesale forgetting of repeated experiences of abuse, nor of single episodes of brutality or sadistic assault, apart from the normal experience of infantile amnesia.
"No evidence exists for the repression and recovery of verified, severely traumatic events, and their role in symptom formation has yet to be proved.
"Given the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse, even if only a small proportion are repressed and only some of them are subsequently recovered, there should be a significant number of corroborated cases. In fact there are none."
[...]
"There is no reliable means of distinguishing a true memory from an illusory one other than by external confirmation.
"There is no means of determining the factual truth or falsity of a recovered memory other than through external evidence."
What are the likely preconditions of creating false memory?
"Therapist and/or patient expectations, reinforced by guided reading, particular techniques and survivors' group participation may distort any existing memory or implant a wholly new one."
It's worth noting here that the implanting of a false memory can be entirely accidental and without the knowledge of the hypnotist. It's also worth noting that the suggestions can be entirely subtle. I can't remember on what programme I saw it but a few years ago I saw a programme which had a segment on the implantation of false memories with specific reference to UFO abduction cases. It showed a woman who was interviewed beforehand and stated that she didn't believe in alien visitation to this planet, or that there was anything other than a mundane explanation for UFOs. A hypnotist then put her under and took her through an entirely mundane night time car journey. He didn't appear to ask any leading questions, a typical snippet of conversation being as follows, from after she had said that she'd stopped and got out of her car, having not yet reported anything unusual:
Hypnotist: What can you see now?
Subject: I can see a light.
Hypnotist: Is it above you or below you?
Subject: It's above me.
He didn't put any emphasis on any word or anything like that, but it's clear that his question is what caused her to say that the light was above her. If you didn't know you were watching a demonstration of implanting false memories, though, you could easily believe that the information was coming from her.
They showed the whole session, uncut, and the portion I've listed here was the portion with the most leading questions. Within 2 minutes this woman who had previously professed to not even believing in aliens having visited the Earth had recounted a typical abduction scenario, complete with Greys, metal tables, and probes. She later testified to it being a real memory.
My point here is that even if the whole session seems entirely innocuous, that false memories can still be implanted without the knowledge of either the subject or the hypnotist. The example I gave had the hypnotist deliberately creating the memory, but if you look at the questions, it's easy to see how a hypnotist could create such a memory even without being aware of doing so.
Anyway, I digress in order to expand on a small point from my last link. Back to the linkdump.
This article has quotes from both American and British medical and psychiatric associations on the subject:
American Medical Association (1985): Policy statement on hypnotically enhanced memory. JAMA 253:1918-1923.
Journal of American Medicine (JAMA) Vol. 253 No. 13, April 5, 1985
The Council finds that recollections obtained during hypnosis can involve confabulations and pseudo-memories and not only fail to be more accurate, but actually appear to be less reliable than non-hypnotic recall. The use of hypnosis with witnesses and victims may have serious consequences for the legal process when testimony is based on material that is elicited from a witness who has been hypnotized for the purposes of refreshing recollection.
American Psychiatric Association 1993,
“It is not known how to distinguish, with complete accuracy, memories based on true events from those derived from other sources.”
American Psychological Association 1995,
“At this point it is impossible, without other corroborative evidence, to distinguish a true memory from a false one."
Royal College of Psychiatrists in England published the following statements about hypnosis in their association's journal Psychiatric Bulletin on October 1, 1997,
“There is a good deal of evidence that patients will produce the material the therapist seeks, but it is often a product of fantasy”.
Also from that same report,
“Hypnosis increases the confidence with which the memory is held, while reducing its reliability.”
Professor Elizabeth Loftus of the Psychology Department at the University of Washington stated as her final comments in a paper entitled, “The formation of false memories”:
Nearly two decades of research on memory distortion leaves no doubt that memory can be altered via suggestion. People can be led to remember their past in different ways, and they even can be led to remember entire events that never actually happened to them. When these sorts of distortions occur, people are sometimes confident in their distorted or false memories, and often go on to describe the pseudo memories in substantial detail.
It's also well worth reading the next few paragraphs in which both Betty Hill (she of one of the most famous abduction case of all) and Whitley Streiber (he of another of the most famous abduction cases of all) say that you absolutely should not use hypnosis to try to recover memories because the memories are unreliable. It's also worth noting that the site I'm linking to is a site about abductions made by someone who believes in them.
If all that's not enough, then it's also worth noting that testimony gained under hypnosis is considered inadmissible in many states in the US and, while not actually disallowed in the UK, the Home Office guidelines strongly advise against the use of hypnosis in interrogation because the testimony is almost certainly going to be ruled inadmissible by the judge.
Really, Rramjet, you've been researching UFOs for a long time, I believe. I can't believe you've never looked in to the reliability of hypnosis in the recovery of memories. Even the most basic of research would have shown an overwhelming consensus amongst scientists, medical bodies and the law that memories "recovered" under hypnosis are inherently unreliable and are likely to be false.
So, in short, I return to my original point - testimony gained under hypnosis is entirely worthless.
The possible influences of Cahill's "strong faith in God" and her "deep interest in the great religious works" plus the fact she "had studied them, particularly the Bible, in great detail" in building her experience are never taken in to account by the "investigators".
I've seen some sites which cite it as a reason to believe that she wouldn't be mistaken about something like that. Personally, I wonder whether the fact that she had been an ardent Christian but had recently lost her faith isn't a major factor. It looks to me like she may have simply found something else in which to have faith.
We'll never know, because the report is 15 years late and the organization has either disappeared or been abducted by aliens.
