Cooler Heads
Dr. Ronald Leo Sprinkle (born 1930), Professor Emeritus of Counseling Services at the University of Wyoming, has brought a measured approach to hypnotism-based investigation of alien abduction accounts. A member of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, Sprinkle has seen UFOs on multiple occasions, and hosted the Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation in the 1980s and ’90s. Sprinkle’s professional background has encouraged him to avoid a temptation to explain away abductee accounts, but rather to, in Sprinkle’s words, “emphasize the willingness to explore the personal meaning of these human experiences of spiritual emergence.”
In 1968, at the invitation of the Condon Committee (see chapter nine), Sprinkle hypnotized Herbert Schirmer, a Nebraska police sergeant, in order to release the officer’s memories of his 1967 capture by extraterrestrials and temporary confinement within an alien spacecraft. Because the Condon Committee’s unstated objective was to discredit UFO witnesses and debunk the whole idea of flying discs and similar aerial phenomena, the invitation to Sprinkle amounted to a stunt designed to allow the committee to dismiss Schirmer’s claim, saying that committee staff had “no confidence that the trooper’s reported UFO experience was physically real.” For his part, Sprinkle felt confident that the trooper “believed in the reality of the events he described.” Given that Schirmer had suffered ridicule and physical intimidation back home, and had felt helpless when his wife left him, the belief he expressed during his sessions was more real than even Dr. Sprinkle could have imagined.
Sprinkle founded the Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation in 1980, to investigate what he calls the “high strange” experiences of UFO witnesses and abductees. To date, he has guided more than five hundred subjects through hypnotic regression.