Hypnosis, False Memories, and the New World Order
Hypnosis, False Memories, and the New World Order
Who can you believe if you can’t even trust your own memories?
While perhaps the majority of conspiracy theorists believe that the New World Order has benefitted from advanced extraterrestrial technology and mind-control sciences for centuries and are allies of the invading aliens, there are other investigators of UFO phenomena who steadfastly believe that an agency of our own government, such as MK-ULTRA, or agents of the Illuminati or New World Order have been conspiring since the late 1940s to make us believe that we are being invaded by extraterrestrials.
If various mind-control programs can create a mass panic among the American public that it is being invaded by an alien civilization with a highly advanced science, they would be more willing to give up their freedoms to a national or international government that would guarantee their protection. In this conspiracy scenario UFO abductees are not being snatched and examined by aliens, but by very human government mind-control agents who, through the use of hypnosis and drugs, place them in a receptive altered state and convince them that they have been examined, probed, left with tiny scars—and in some instances, even impregnated—by extraterrestrials. In other cases of alleged UFO abductions, witnesses may stumble unaware upon members of shadow agencies engaged in operations that they want to keep secret from the public. The witnesses are captured, hypnotized or drugged, then released with a cover story implanted in their memories that they were abducted by aliens.
In hypnosis, as the subject relaxes and concentrates on the hypnotist’s voice, the hypnotist leads the person deeper and deeper into a trancelike state of altered consciousness. When the subject has reached a deep level of hypnotic trance, the hypnotist will have access to the individual’s unconscious. Clinical psychologists believe that hypnotherapy permits them to help their clients uncover hidden or repressed memories of fears or abuse that will facilitate their cure, but in the past three decades an increasing number of amateur hypnotists have employed hypnosis to explore cases suggestive of past lives or accounts of alien abductions aboard UFOs. These lay or unprofessional hypnotists serve the New World Order very well by adding to the number of men and women who believe that they were abducted by aliens. Skeptical scientists doubt that hypnosis is a true altered state of consciousness and contend that the individuals who are classified as good subjects by both professional or lay hypnotists are really men and women who are highly suggestible and fantasy prone.
The Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales, a scientific yardstick used to measure the phenomenon of hypnosis, was developed in the late 1950s by Stanford University psychologists Andre M. Weitzenhoffer and Ernest R. Hilgard. Scoring on the Stanford scales ranges from 0 for individuals who do not appear to respond to any hypnotic suggestions, to 12 for those who are assessed as extremely responsive to hypnosis. Most people, according to extensive experimentation, place somewhere in the middle range, between 5 and 7.
Weitzenhoffer and Hilgard demonstrated that a person’s ability to be hypnotized is unrelated to his or her personality traits. Earlier suggestions that those individuals who could be hypnotized were gullible, submissive, imaginative, or socially compliant proved unsupported by the data. People who had the ability to become absorbed in such activities as reading, enjoying music, or daydreaming appeared to be the more hypnotizable subjects.
By using hypnosis, the scientists at Stanford were able to create transient hallucinations, false memories, and delusions in some subjects. By using positron emission tomography, which directly measures metabolism, the researchers were able to determine that different regions of a subject’s brains were activated when he or she was asked simply to imagine a sound or sight than when the subject was hallucinating under hypnotic suggestion.
Certain studies on memory show that people often construct their memories after the fact and that they may be susceptible to suggestions from others as to the “truth” of what actually occurred. Therefore, it is possible to create false memories in some people’s minds by suggesting that certain events happened when, in fact, such circumstances never occurred.
In March 1998 a report commissioned by the Royal College of Psychiatrists in England accused its own members of having destroyed innocent lives by implanting false memories while using irresponsible techniques of delving into patients’ childhood events. According to the report, nearly a thousand parents stated that they had been falsely accused of sexual abuse after their adult children allegedly recovered memories of the attacks during psychotherapy.
In the November 1998 issue of the journal Psychological Science, Dr. C. J. Brainerd and Dr. V. F. Reyna of the University of Arizona in Tucson published their findings that many individuals often believed more strongly in suggested false memories than in actual recollections of events. When strong themes are operative in such explorations of memory, the researchers state, things that were not really experienced can seem more real to the individual than his or her actual experiences.
The ease with which a false memory can be created was demonstrated by an experiment conducted in 2001 by University of Washington memory researchers Jacqueline E. Pickrell and Elizabeth F. Loftus. After the 120 subjects in the experiment were exposed to a fake advertisement showing Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, about a third of them later said that they had met the cartoon character when they visited Disneyland earlier in their lives, and had even shaken his hand. Such a scenario could never have occurred, because Bugs Bunny is a cartoon character owned by Warner Brothers and would not be seen walking around Disneyland with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
Pickrell, a doctoral student in psychology, stated that the study suggested how easily a false memory can be created and just how vulnerable and malleable memory is. The experiment also demonstrated how people may create many of their autobiographical references and memories. Even the nostalgic advertising employed by many commercial companies can lead individuals to remember experiences that they never really had. Dr. Loftus, a professor of psychology and adjunct professor of law at the University of Washington who has been researching memory distortion since the 1970s, suggests that false memories are often created by three common methods: yielding to social or professional demands to recall particular events; imagining events when experiencing difficulty remembering; and being encouraged to abandon critical thinking regarding the truth of memory constructions. False memories, according to Loftus and her research colleagues, are most often constructed “by combining actual memories with the content of suggestions received from others.” During such a process, individuals may experience source confusion and forget how much of the memory is valid and how much came from external sources.
And when that “external source” is a skilled New World Order manipulator of reality, the conspiracy theorists maintain, invalid memories of alien abductions might be easily implanted into deceiving the entire world into a state of apathy concerning warnings of a sinister elite who wish to make everyone into their slaves.