The Sting of False Memory
During 1952–53, hypnosis dominated the most celebrated of all hypnotic- regression cases, when a Colorado housewife named Virginia Tighe remembered details of her past life in 19th-century Ireland, as a woman named Bridey Murphy. Whether the amateur hypnotist, Morey Bernstein, successfully regressed Tighe is unknown. Reporters began to dig following the 1956 publication of Bernstein’s best-selling book, The Search for Bridey Murphy; some concluded that Tighe innocently recalled details from the life of an Irishwoman (named Bridey) who lived nearby when Tighe was a girl. Other investigators suggested that the whole thing was a fraud cooked up by Tighe, Bernstein, or both.
Meanwhile, professional hypnotherapists—credentialed and untrained alike— practiced hypnotic regression with a fervor that, by the mid-1990s, forced the recognition of a dangerous phenomenon: false memory syndrome. Inept hypnotherapists could steer subjects—usually women who claimed to be past victims of incest and other sexual abuse—to memories of events that never happened. “Repressed memory” sex-abuse civil-court claims in the U.S. rose from a single case in 1983 to 104 in 1994. U.S. criminal-court cases rose from none or one per year during 1983–89 to a high of twenty-three in 1993. That some defendants (including those tried not for sexual abuse but for medical malpractice and even murder) had been wrongly convicted left fallout that led many among jurists and the public to believe that all hypnotic memory regression is worthless, dangerous nonsense.
Many, if not most, alien abduction accounts arise from memory stimulation encouraged via hypnosis. Advocates of hypnosis say that the process uncovers repressed memory, and brings otherwise unrecoverable detail to abduction narratives. As we have seen, abductee stories can be vivid and convincing. What are we to make of accounts, though, that are the result of false memory?
Whether during ordinary recollection or while under hypnosis, many abductees relate tales that are at once believable and unexplainable. Abductee veracity can be difficult to question. On the other hand, hypnosis can implant false memories if the hypnotist purposely or inadvertently gives the subject a prompt—a suggestion of an event that the subject unconsciously embraces as true memory.
By way of example: a 2001 University of Washington memory-and-suggestion experiment—undertaken to demonstrate the dangers inherent in relying on memory regression in criminal prosecutions—successfully suggested (via misinformation and leading questions) to about 40 of 120 subjects that they had met a costumed Bugs Bunny at Disneyland and shaken his hand. The experiment was headed by Elizabeth Loftus and Jacquie Pickrell (who were well aware that Bugs Bunny is the property of Warner Bros., and not the Disney organization).
In a similar experiment headed by Loftus, subjects “believed” that they had been lost in a shopping mall as children. As with the Bugs Bunny experiment, a third of Loftus’s subjects recalled something that had not happened, in this case, the trauma of being lost.
Sometimes, false-memory syndrome is an unconscious repression of a frightful, life-altering memory—a kind of psychological self-defense against the horrors of, say, sexual abuse. The syndrome’s proponents assume that defensive repression is common, but it is not. False memories can be encouraged by hypnosis and brought to the surface later with trigger words. In other instances, false memory can be created when a subject is eager to please the hypnotist, or satisfy the aims of investigators. If the subject is part of a group claiming a shared negative experience, false memory can be encouraged by a readiness to “explain” one’s unusual or “bad” behavior. In other words, it happened to all of those other people, and then it happened to me, too.