The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Content Warning: This chapter addresses the topics of rape and childhood sexual abuse.

Sagan discusses John Mack, a Harvard university psychiatrist he has “known for many years” (153). Mack was originally skeptical of alien abductees, but now accepts their accounts at face value. Therapists who accept such accounts uncritically are denying the more rational possibility that the "recovered" memories they are recounting are more likely vestiges of more prosaic repressed incidents, particularly of rape and childhood sexual abuse. Recent trends in therapeutic treatment are focused on accepting the claims of patients; not believing them—whether they claim alien abduction or sexual abuse—is considered harmful to patients and to their relationships with their therapists. While he can appreciate the humaneness of this approach, Sagan suggests that it creates a lot of false data and reinforces false beliefs in patients, including several instances of false accusations of childhood sexual abuse.

As a case study in the willingness to believe in therapeutically recovered memories, Sagan turns to accusations of sexual abuse involving satanic ritual cults. According to a 1994 study at the University of California, 12,000 claims of sexual abuse at the hands of satanic cultists were evaluated—an episode of cultural history we now know as the Satanic Panic—and none were found to have merit, leading scholars to conclude that the most common cause of cult-related memories is a “mutual deception between the patient and the therapist” (161). Sagan uses the case of Paul Ingram “a man who may have had his life ruined because he was too gullible, too suggestible, too unpracticed in skepticism” (161), to depict the consequences of such recovered memories. In 1988, Ingram was Chairman of the Republican Party in Olympia, Washington; he was a well-regarded and very religious person in the community until his daughter, after a “highly emotional session” (162) at a religious retreat, accused him of sexually assaulting, torturing, and impregnating her and making her sexually available to sheriff’s deputies. Ingram had no memory of these events, but when police investigators, church officials, and a consulting psychologist explained that offenders can repress memories of their actions, Ingram admitted guilt, and later concocted several other false memories using the “memory recovery” techniques he was taught. Though none of the allegations were ever substantiated, Ingram pled guilty to six counts of rape and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Sagan notes that Ingram’s case, alien abductions, and therapeutically recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse share one thing in common: a specialist therapist, whose livelihood depends on eliciting certain memories or emotions, and who is thus unlikely to apply rigorous skepticism to the results of their work. This creates a closed system of knowledge which rewards believers, confirms tenuous beliefs, and abhors skeptical thinking.