In a paper published 27 July [1], researchers from MIT reported successful tests in mice with a new drug that holds the promise of being a cure to all viruses. The drug, DRACO (Double-stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizer), works as a “broad-spectrum” antiviral, killing virus-hijacked cells by targeting double-stranded RNA produced in the viral replication process. DRACO proved successful against all 15 viruses tested “including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever.” [2]

We may expect results from cell trials against AIDS within the next 12 months.

DRACO is but one broad-spectrum therapeutic being developed as part of a project called PANACEA (Pharmacological Augmentation of Nonspecific Anti-pathogen Cellular Enzymes and Activities) headed by Dr. Todd Rider, senior staff scientist in MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Chemical, Biological, and Nanoscale Technologies Group.

I met with Dr. Rider in the food court of the MIT co-op bookstore early on a weekday. He had already finished tending to his mice and, after we chatted, he rose to declare that he off to do “real work”… writing grant proposals to keep his research alive.

Could you give us a broad overview of the Panacea project?

Sure. We’ve come up with a broad-spectrum antiviral that we call DRACO, Double-stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizer (I love acronyms), and it’s basically designed to detect any long double stranded RNA, so we’ve created chimeric proteins where one end will detect the chimeric RNA — the double-stranded RNA — and then the other end will trigger apoptosis, or cell suicide. So the net effect is that these DRACO molecules can go inside all the cells in your body, or at this moment, inside all the cells in a mouse, and if they don’t find anything, then they don’t do anything. But if they find a viral infection, if they find a viral double-stranded RNA, then that will activate the back ends to trigger cell suicide, and that will kill the infected cell. That terminates the infection.

So there wouldn’t be a difference between DNA Viruses and RNA Viruses?

It works with both. We’ve tested it on both. All known viruses make double-stranded RNA, and that’s true from the literature and also true from our experiments. So here (indicating illustration) the viruses we tested included a couple DNA viruses, and it worked quite nicely against those. Others in the literature are also known to make quite a bit of double-stranded RNA. Other DNA viruses, like pox viruses and herpes viruses, also make double-stranded RNA.

Has it been tested on each family of virus?

It’s been tested on these families of viruses so far (indicating paper). There are a gazillion viruses, so we’re working our way through them as quickly as we can. It’s been tested on several very different families so far.

My understanding is that viruses usually kill the cell anyway, but retroviruses usually do not. I don’t know how viruses cluster. Are there any odds at all that there would be a retrovirus that clusters too tightly in a certain organ where it [triggered cell death by DRACO] would cause a lesion?

Virtually all viruses will kill the host cell on the way out. Of the hand-full that don’t, your own immune system will try to kill those infected cells. So we’re really not killing any more cells with our appraoch than we already have been. It’s just that we’re killing them at an early enough stage before they infect and ultimately kill more cells. So if anything this limits the amount of cell death.

So that’s not really a legitimate fear.

It shouldn’t be.

How far along are you and how far away are you from human trials?

Unfortunately quite a long way. We’ve done a number of tests in mice. We need to do more testing in mice. Of course, MIT is not a pharmaceutical company. There’s only so far we can take it at MIT. We’re hoping to license it to some pharmaceutical company, and they would carry to larger-scale animal trials. Usually the FDA wants to see a lot of mouse trials, which we’ve done already; and then a lot of trials in, say, rabbits or guinea pigs, and then trials in monkeys before they approve human trials. So, if a licensee takes this, if we have funding for it, it still might take a decade or so before it really is available for humans.

So how’s the funding working now?

We have funding from NIH [National Institutes of Health].

And can you take it up to monkey here [at MIT]?

We may be able to take it into further animal models here, but mice are the easiest thing to use. We have a lot of mice. We’re also limited by funding. We only haved NIH funding at the moment, and we only have enough funding for about 1 person, and we have 4 people total, counting me, working at the moment, so we’ve split the funding four different ways…

Has anybody reached out to you?

Nope. Not so far.

When I first read about this I thought this was an amazing story, that this would be front-page news in a couple of hours. Weeks later, I was thinking this must not have been a true story. That’s when I looked it up again and saw that it was indeed on the MIT site. What’s the relative lack of interest. There haved been articles, but I feel this is definitely front-page material.

Well thank you. On the funding front, I think there’s a ton of funding for very basic research — not applied research, trying to cure something, but basic research — Let’s go study this virus, see how this virus works in a little more detail. There’s a ton of NIH funding for that. On the applied front, if you are ready for human trials — so you’re 10 years more advanced than we are now — then there are government agencies and companies that will take it and take it to that final step. But in that long gap in between there’s very very little funding out there. So we’ve been struggling for all of 11 years now just working to get funding, and at the moment we’re just barely limping along.

This is a subset of PANACEA, right? Can you describe PANACEA?

PANACEA is a family of broad-spectrum anti-pathogen treatments. We’ve tested some others, we’ve tried to get funding for others. This [DRACO] is the one that is furthest along.

What are some of the others that look promising?

We have a number of others. [DRACO] is a broad-spectrum antiviral. We have other broad-spectrum antivirals. We also have other PANACEA treatments that we’ve adapted to go after other things. Like for bacteria. And of course there are antibiotics, but for bacteria that are resistant to existing antibiotics, such as tuberculosis, malaria… so we can adapt this to pathogens other than viruses. We’ve done some initial experiments, we just can’t get funding for that so far.

Do you foresee any potential wild-cards in the human trials?

It’s always difficult to tell what will happen. I hope that there won’t be. We’re always concerned that there will be some toxicity or other unforeseen problems. We’ve been very pleased every step of the way in the cell testing. We’ve tested in a number of different human cell types representing many different organs; human lung cells, human liver cells, all kinds of different human cells, as well as a variety of animal cells. We haven’t seen any toxicity or any other strange effects in any of those cell types. In the mice we were again very concerned about toxicity, and we haven’t seen any toxicity in the mice. We inject the mice with very high doses of the stuff daily for a number of days, and they seem fine. We let them move for a while, eventually we dissected them, looked at the tissues. All the tissues were fine, there’s no organ damage or anything. It’s always possible something unexpected could come up further down the road in monkies or in humans. We certainly hope not. But I think there is enough flexibility in the concept that even if there were a problem, there are ways to redesign the constructs that we have to overcome any potential problems.

That might also speak to the production cost. Is it fairly low production cost if, say, it was to be mass-produced in the future?

These are produced in bacteria, and at the moment I really don’t know what the ultimate production cost would be. We produce on a very small scale, barely enough for our mice. Of course cells eat a lot less DRACO than mice do. So if we’re producing for cells, that’s a very small quantity, but just a few flasks of bacteria will produce enough to last us for a while. But once you scale this up to a large-scale production large-scale animal trials or human trials, hopefully the cost would go down. I don’t know exactly what the cost would be.

Do you envision the final end-plan to be people with DRACO in their medicine cabinet, or more like penicillin today?

If it’s safe I’d like to see it used as much as possible for as many different things as possible. I would guess that if it were approved for human use by the FDA, initially they would be conservative enough that they would only want to see it used in very dire cases, just in case there are interesting side-effects or something, and it’s only to people with ebola or HIV that’s become resistant to other drugs who would get this. If this proved to be safe in those cases, then I would hope that they’d approve it for wider use against more common pathogens, perhaps all the way down to the common cold. And if it really is safe, then maybe you’d just pop a DRACO pill any time you felt a cold coming on.

How long does it stay in the system? It’s obviously not a vaccine –

Right. In cells it lasts at least for a couple of weeks, possibly longer. In the mice it lasts for at least 2 days. We have a lot of data in the paper showing it will persist in mice for at least 48 hours at fairly high doses in the tissues. This is really about trying to optimize that. There are a lot of tricks we can use to try to make it last longer if necessary. And if this stuff is truly completely safe, then you can give it prophylactically. You could even concievably give someone the gene for the DRACO so that their cells would just permanently produce the DRACO, and they would naturally be resistant to almost everything.

Oh, wow. That’s an amazing idea.

Thanks.

I feel like this is something that should be fast-tracked. We have all this planning in regards to epidemics. There is all kinds of scare that we’re ripe for an epidemic.

Perhaps we will be [approached with funding offers] in the future, but so far we haven’t been. We’ve really struggled along for the past 11 years, barely getting enough funding to stay alive.

So this has been on the table, at least as an idea, for 11 years?

Right. We just got good data from the mouse trials and published that, but 11 years ago we started engineering the DRACOs. Genetic engineering was a bit more primative in those days, so it took us a while to actually produce these things. Then it took us a while to produce and test them in cells. We ultimately tested against 15 different viruses in cells. As I said, we were kind of limping along for funding for much of that time, so we could only work on it when we had funding to work on it. For some fraction of our time, we had funding to work on it. Eventually, we were able to test against the 15 different viruses in cells in 11 different cell types. And then we had funding to do some mouse trials, got data, and then we got published.

If you get a cold this winter… are you going to be tempted?

I’m not tempted by colds. I’ve had very bad stomach viruses and I’ve been tempted to give myself the stuff to see what would happen.

You don’t think you’ll do that, though?

It wouldn’t be enough anyway. We only produce enough for mice, and for a human you require a much larger dose than for a 20 gram mouse.

*********

1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022572
2. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/antiviral-0810.html

The summons was packed into the mailbox of a previous address — two residencies ago, in fact — on a Wednesday afternoon. The hearing was to be on Monday. It was only happenstance that I found out that the organizer of S.M.A.R.T. (Stop Mind-control And Ritual-abuse Today), Neil Brick, was trying to sue me at all.

As the paperwork, aside from being grossly improperly served, was also dated a couple of weeks previous to its delivery, this seemed like a rather underhanded attempt to avoid my replying to the suit. When I eventually had the opportunity to read over the summons, I could see why this may have been the tactic.

The case was weak. In fact, it was non-existent.

“Defamation” was the claim, and many quotes of mine were pulled from internet sources in an attempt to support it. Even quotes that are not mine at all were included in the summons, though Brick and his lawyer apparently felt confident enough in their origin to attribute them to me. Among these quotes are comments that are no longer online at all! As for the quotes that were written by me… I stand by them, they are founded in fact, and they certainly don’t constitute defamation.

Ironically, this all stemmed from a report I wrote about one of Brick’s conferences where I heard him deliver a speech in which he encouraged vigorous debate with skeptics against his position. It was his own failure to successfully do just that which caused him to seek legal remediation — an injunction to prevent my writing my writing about him or his organization — instead.

Here’s how it went:

Having entered the hotel slightly after the opening speaker of S.M.A.R.T.’s twelfth annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations, and Mind-Control conference began, I was told by a large woman sitting behind the registration table that I would have to wait until I could be properly registered before entering. I took a seat just outside the open door of the conference room where I could observe the full proceedings within. Brick stood at the podium. As I described him later in my subsequent “defamatory” report, he is a “small man in his 50s with a greasy dark curly comb-over, large thick glasses, and a voice that sounds exacly like Elmer Fudd (without the impediment of pronouncing his Rs as Ws).”

He was delivering the opening remarks. He was wearing a button-up shirt at least two sizes too large for his diminutive frame.  (This physical description is important when you consider his claim to have been a type of super-soldier for Black Ops military.)  Reading directly from his notes in a mechanical word-by-word monotone, without once looking up, he emotionlessly railed against skeptics who have sought to discredit ritual abuse as well as the validity of “recovered memories”.

“There is overwhelming scientific evidence that recovered memory exists as a phenomenon”, he asserted. He began to quote at length from sources that agree with this position.

A belief in the historical accuracy of recovered memories, as I had already discerned from their website, is vital to S.M.A.R.T.’s belief in a conspiracy of satanic cults and government mind-control. The theory espoused by recovered memory proponents (and well known in popular culture), is that traumatic memories of abuse may be repressed – relegated to some dark corner of the mind – where they unfailingly metastasize into some type of chronic negative emotions, compulsions, confusion, even physical ailments. Preserved in high-definition, and unerring detail, these oppressive unconscious memories must be drawn out, retrieved, relived, confronted, and reconciled within the conscious mind, before the victim can lead a happy and productive life.

Almost all of the self-proclaimed victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse have recovered their memories of victimization while undergoing some type of psychotherapy. For the most part, these memories are the only type of “evidence” they attempt to present in support of the claim that such victimization ever occurred.

The process of digging for repressed traumatic memories through hypnosis or other techniques is most often employed in treatment of the diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), now re-labeled as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Due to their almost total reliance upon recovered memory evidence, purveyors of satanic cult stories are often also defenders of the controversial multiple personality diagnosis, a condition that itself is dismissed by some psychiatrists and psychologists as a “behavioral artifact… generated by suggestion in vulnerable people.” (See below: Concerned Psychiatrists’ and Psychologists’ letter to the APA’s DSM-V Task Force.)

Critics of Recovered Memory Therapy point out that the act of digging for memories assumed to be repressed can have a subtly coercive effect on clients who – knowing what they are supposed to be “remembering” – are at least as prone to confabulating false memories as they are to recalling anything with historical accuracy. Given that such critics of recovered memory therapy often point directly to highly improbable claims of satanic cult abuse as evidence of false memories, it was no surprise that Neil Brick breezily dismissed skeptics as conspirators: “There is [...] a lot of evidence that those attacking the theory of recovered memory may have ulterior motives. For example, they may have been accused of child abuse crimes or may have been connected to mind control research in the past.”

Using “child abuse” interchangeably with “ritual abuse”, Brick attempted to further bolster a position that those who doubt the existence of an international brain-washing coven simply despise tykes: “The media turned on child abuse survivors in the early and mid 1990′s and began to in essence support those that has [sic] perpetrated crimes against children, believing unfounded stories about so called ‘miscarriages of justice.’ Due to the extreme nature of ritual abuse crimes and the psychological need for the public denial of these crimes, it became an easy sell to spin these crimes against children for the public to believe the misstatements about falsely accused perpetrators. After ritual abuse was discredited, then other child abuse crimes could be more easily discredited.”

There you have it. You’re either with Neil Brick, or you’re with the Satanists. You either believe every outrageous claim of demonic doings, or you’re part of the cover-up. At best, you’re simply in “denial”.

Suddenly, the woman at the registration table, who had also been watching Neil Brick through the open door, began to lightly sob. She grabbed a nearby tissue, dried her eyes, and blew her nose.

I stared uncomfortably down at the program in my hands. I came looking for the reasons, the so-called evidence that compels this continued belief in satanic cult crimes… of mind control… to see the self-proclaimed byproducts of the brutal puppet masters said to control the highest reaches of the world governments with an inhuman disdain for life and liberty. Instead – with scheduled lectures entitled “Dissociation and Time Management” and “The DID RA [Ritual Abuse] Family: An Attachment Perspective on a Forensic Relationship” – this conference appeared to be primarily adapted toward defending the DID diagnosis.

According to his biographical synopsis on the program, Neil Brick describes himself as a “survivor of alleged Masonic Ritual Abuse and MK-ULTRA [the CIA's covert mind-control and chemical interrogation project of 1950s - 60s]“. The disclaimer of the word “alleged” in his own biographical description is perplexing…

I mulled over this as Brick eventually concluded his labored lecture. What did it mean?

Brick came out to the registration table during the break following his presentation gripping a briefcase. He scrutinized me momentarily.

I checked out. Given the nod, my attendance was then officially approved.

I stationed myself anonymously in the second to last occupied row at the far left side of the room.

Never, it occurred to me, have I heard anybody describe oneself as an “alleged victim of a mugging”, nor would I expect one to tell me, “I was allegedly harassed by a drunkard last night”. Considering this, I wondered if perhaps Neil Brick himself is uncertain as to whether or not he was a victim of the CIA or Masonic abuse. In fact, despite a veneer of confident assurance that the satanic conspiracy is an unquestionable item of fact, the conference was rife with inconsistency and an undercurrent of doubt…

Anyway, it was the inconsistent, and wildly incredible, content of the conference that I focused on in my writing. And this was no mere point-and-laugh tactic for the amusement of those who cultivate an air of superiority with smug disbelief toward any outside notion. The conference wasn’t merely absurd, I saw it as harmful and exploitative to the attendees — many of whom seemed to imagine it as therapeutic — as well as some of the speakers… some of whom are unfortunately licensed therapists.

It is natural to laugh at absurdity. It would have been difficult to write about the sales booth within the conference room hawking electromagnetic transmission blocking hats without sounding humorous. But I was outright horrified when a 78 year-old woman, who referred to herself as Julaine, sat before the attendees — unable to stand for any extended time — to explain that she had suffered some type of negative diabetic reaction earlier that day, and that her rheumatoid arthritis was causing her no small amount of discomfort. She attributed both of these conditions to a conspiracy of evil. Rheumatoid arthritis and Satanic Ritual Abuse, Julaine posited, are “almost partners”.

Clearly, this woman needed real medical attention. To allow her to delude herself — or worse, actively feed her the delusion — that her ill health is a side-effect, and evidence of, satanic conspiracy is beyond irresponsible. Worse, these delusions have apparently encouraged the aged and infirm Julaine to sever ties with the family members who may have been most willing to help her now… You see, Julaine’s family, she believes, is a multi-generational satanic cult. “My sister thinks I’m bi-polar”, she explained. This, of course, is seen as mere denial. “She is lost”.

That Julaine is highly impressionable seemed apparent at the conference, but it was after the conference that this became quite clear.

I was perusing the website of another speaker, deJoly LaBrier, when I came across the transcripts of a lecture she had given at a much earlier S.M.A.R.T. gathering. In it, she told a familiar tale: “[My father] would draw a dot on the wall, and [my siblings and I] would stand at attention with our nose on the dot on the wall, until he told us that we could leave.”

I clearly remembered hearing the story at the conference I had attended, for it struck me as odd… Rotten though this nose-to-the-wall experience would be for any child, I couldn’t help but feel such punishments would be quite over-shadowed by the compulsory initiation into sadistic cult rituals and child prostitution that LaBrier claimed had also taken place… So much so that being made to stand in a fixed position felt rather unworthy of mention.

But it wasn’t LaBrier who told this tale at the 2009 conference. It was Julaine.

Had it occurred to Neil Brick (who is a licensed and practicing “Mental Health Counselor” in Massachusetts), or any other attending therapist, that Julaine may not in fact have been victim to “Moriah, Illuminati… whatever you want to call it” (as she referred to “Them” in her lecture), but rather an incredibly suggestible and vulnerable old woman who has difficulty distinguishing stories she has heard from her own autobiographical memory?

Apparently not.

To allow any such questions to encroach on any one of the delusive narratives told would cast doubt on them all… and they all had their own ludicrous tales to defend with nothing more than shallow assertions of recovered memory accuracy.

For this reason, not even the most impossible of claims were met with so much as a raised eye-brow or embarrassed cough. Nobody showed a hint of doubt when a speaker going by the name of “Royal”, at all of about forty years of age, stood before us to claim that she was a personal slave to nazi doctor Josef Mengele. “My experience with Mengele”, Royal explained in a lecture (the gist of which was that Satan uses abortion as a means of traumatic mind-control), “involved much of the trauma-based mind control involving core programming (such as End-Time programming) that is connected to the global take over. He used the Psychic/Spiritual dimensions using, what I have come to call ‘demonic harmonics’, which involves using musical tones and quantum physics to open up portals into the spiritual realms. I also have core programs set up that were created using abortions as a means to develop them and more.”

Despite all this, Neil Brick imagines that my use of the words “paranoid”, and “delusional” are vicious defamations. Further, in his affidavit attached to the summons, Neil Brick states: “His actions have caused me a loss in business, as it appears our conference attendance will be much lower this year due to attendees being afraid someone like him may infiltrate the conference again.” On this, as with everything else, the suggestion that I might even owe an apology is obscene. Take the consumer advocacy view: If I’ve shown the product to be faulty, I owe nothing in compensation for a loss in sales.

Following the publication of the report, Brick went all to pieces, leaving angry comments, penning a “rebuttal”. Oddly enough though, none of his objections confronted my outrage at the absurdity of the very conspiracy theory that underlies the entire narrative framework of the conference, and of S.M.A.R.T., itself. Though claiming I misrepresented the entire affair, he failed to explain how. He failed to answer any questions regarding his own experiences as an “alleged” victim of “Masonic Ritual Abuse and MK-ULTRA”. He failed to answer any questions directly aimed at elaboration upon his belief in a massive satanic conspiracy. He failed to confront any questions regarding the content of the conference to instead assert, again and again, supported with lists of journal article citations supporting the view, that recovered memories are a real phenomenon.

This made it incomprehensible that Neil Brick would actually ask to take this court, where he might have no choice but to face those very questions.

Interesting, I thought… Even if I weren’t being summoned, I’d want to watch this court-room comedy.

Alas, it was not to be. Whether they experienced a moment-of-clarity, or the whole thing had been a mis-guided and ineffective measure meant to spook me away, neither Neil Brick nor his lawyer actually showed up to the hearing. Neither did I, for that matter (as I wasn’t actually legally summoned). But my lawyer did.

The case, not surprisingly, was dismissed, but my lawyer was heard anyway. The Judge, I am told, was nonplussed by the Plaintiff’s actions.

I’m nonplussed, too. But there was, it turns out, one item in Neil Brick’s affidavit that, if true, moves me to outrage on his behalf. He claims that: “To the best of my knowledge, everyone in my field knows about [Douglas Mesner’s] attacks against me and many have avoided contact with me due to the fear that he will attack them also, as he has done to several already.”

If by “attack” he means “directly confront them with their own incredible narratives, question their defense of such narratives when told by others, while asking clarification on where the demarcation between recovered memories and delusions can be found (unless we are to unquestioningly accept all stories of satanic conspiracy, alien abduction, and past-life regression)”, then this fear is well-founded. But if these people, this “everyone”, within Brick’s “field” agree with his notions of Satanic Ritual Abuse and Mind-Control, and if they feel that this is a position that is evidence-based and rational, then my scrutiny should not be an object of fear. It should be welcomed, and the answers to any such questions should be forthcoming. If instead, they choose to distance themselves from Neil Brick only to conceal a position that is not supported by evidence, can not be justified by facts, only so that they may hide their delusions behind the professional veneer afforded to repressed memory theory by way of poor retrospective surveys and bad data… then they are a craven lot indeed, and would be fully deserving of Neil Brick’s scorn…

If only he’d acted any differently himself…

* * * * * * * * *

Concerned Psychiatrists and Psychologists Letter to the DSM-V Committee

A Group of Concerned Psychiatrists and Psychologists

c/o Dr. Paul McHugh, MD

Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry

Johns Hopkins University

April 11, 2009

Dr. David J. Kupfer, MD

Chair of DSM-V Committee,

Dr. Thomas Detre Professor and Chair, Department of Psychiatry

Professor of Neuroscience, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic

5811 O’Hara Street

Pittsburgh, PA 15215

RE: Dissociative Identity Disorder and DSM-V

Dear Dr. Kupfer:

We are writing to you to express concern with respect to the continuation of Dissociative Identity Disorder as an approved diagnosis within the forthcoming DSM-V. We believe that the identification of Multiple Personality Disorder, and later its name change as Dissociative Identity Disorder, has been harmful to the good sense and reputation of psychiatry, not to mention the cause of grave ill-effects to large numbers of patients and their families. In the attached document we maintain that the diagnosis should be removed from DSM-V and we provide the basis for our request. If either the Task Force or Council is unable to agree on removing DID completely from the 5th Edition we suggest that at the very least it should be placed in Appendix B as an experimental criterion set requiring further investigation.

Respectfully,

Signatories

(Please see Appendix A)

Attachments

To: DSM-V Task Force &

Work Group on Anxiety, Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum,

Posttraumatic & Dissociative Disorders

Statement on:

The need to remove Dissociative Identity Disorder from DSM-V or place it in Appendix B

The evidence supporting this diagnosis as a distinct mental disorder is modest whereas much suggests it to be a behavioral artifact equivalent in nature to pseudo-epilepsy generated by suggestion in vulnerable people. Its identification as a special, separate diagnostic entity in DSM has harmed the practice of psychiatry and undermined its scientific credibility. Although it is important for us to provide evidence to support these statements, we wish to avoid excessive detail, given that such evidence has been documented widely in the published literature.

Origins

The notion of dual personalities was founded upon cases of bipolar illness (1) and was followed by the idea of extra personalities. This expansion first occurred with the hypnotically-induced introduction of a second personality and the deliberate naming of those personalities as if they were separate entities (1).

Prevalence

Taylor and Martin (2) recognized a total of 76 cases occurring between 1816 and 1944—slightly more than one every two years; they thought a similar number might be unreported. In 1954 Thigpen and Cleckley (3) reported their case, which was published as “The Three Faces of Eve” in 1957. After a film was made of this case, the numbers of reported cases increased steadily; there was a further dramatic leap after the film of “Sybil”. By 1990 thousands of cases were being diagnosed; some authors identified more cases in their personal practices than had been described in the literature over an entire century.

Twentieth Century Suggestion

As is well known, Sybil, a patient of Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, was fully aware that her therapist wanted her to create extra personalities (4). In 1973, Dr. Wilbur gave tape recordings of Sybil’s interviews to Schreiber [the journalist who reported Sybil as a case of multiple personality disorder (5)]. Schreiber made the recordings available to Ronald Rieber, a professor of psychology, who amassed evidence showing that at least some of the personalities were artifacts overtly created in treatment (6).

Etiology

Dissociative Identity Disorder is often alleged to result from repressing an experience of childhood sexual abuse. This claim has not received adequate scientific validation. For example, Piper and Merskey (7) reviewed all the studies that claimed to corroborate DID patients’ abuse recollections. These authors concluded that “no evidence supports the claim that DID patients as a group have actually experienced the traumas asserted by the disorder’s proponents” (7).

Proponents of the DID diagnosis assert that horrific, repeated childhood physical and sexual abuse is the primary cause of DID. Victims supposedly develop their multiple personalities as repositories for traumatic memories that the “host” personality is unable to tolerate consciously. The DID diagnosis thus relies on the concept of traumatic Dissociative Amnesia (DA or “repression”): the notion that the mind protects itself by banishing terrifying memories from awareness, rendering them inaccessible until the person feels psychologically safe to recall them, often years later. There is no convincing evidence that victims can become incapable of recalling genuinely traumatic experiences, as the trauma theory of DID requires (8). Indeed, an extensive survey of the historical literature, including both fictional and non-fictional written works in multiple languages, found no written example of “dissociative amnesia” prior to 1786 (9). Thus the notion of “repressing” a memory itself, like DID, appears to represent a recent culture-bound phenomenon, rather than a naturally occurring human psychological process.

In a comprehensive analysis of studies of people with documented trauma histories, not a single mention of spontaneous amnesia for the traumatic event was found—unless the forgetting was attributable to either organic amnesia or childhood amnesia (10). Finally, an examination of Freud’s original work gives reason to think that the evidence from psychoanalysis for repression is also very unsatisfactory (11, 12).

Harmful Effects

Due to the assumption that trauma is a primary etiological factor, the DID diagnosis has resulted in wrongful accusations of sexual abuse on the basis of recovered memories, not only in North America but throughout the developed world (references). DID has caused mockery of psychiatry, and, for patients, has led to misdiagnosis (13), mismanagement (14) and inadequate treatment of depression (15).

Lack of Consensus

Canadian and American psychiatrists show little consensus regarding the diagnostic status and scientific validity of DID. In surveys of board-certified psychiatrists in the United States (16) and Canada (17) fewer than one-third of Canadian psychiatrists and 35% of American psychiatrists replied that DA & DID should be included without reservations in the DSM-IV; fewer than 1 in 7 Canadian psychiatrists and only 21-23% of American psychiatrists replied that there was “strong evidence of validity” for these disorders. French- and English-speaking Canadians had similar opinions.

Conclusions

There are overwhelming reasons to question the validity of Dissociative Identity Disorder. We respectfully urge you as members of the Work Group and the Task Force to drop the category of dissociative disorders from the upcoming DSM-V: it is harmful to patients and their families, scientifically unjustified, and undermining the credibility of psychiatry.

Signatories

Please see Appendix A.

REFERENCES

1. Merskey, H. (1992a). The manufacture of personalities. The production of multiple personality disorder. Brit. J. Psychiat., 160:327-340.

2. Taylor W.F. & Martin M.F. (1944) Multiple personality. J. Abnormal & Soc. Psychol., 39:281-330.

3. Thigpen, C.H. & Cleckley, H.M. (1957). The Three Faces of Eve. New York: McGraw-Hill.

4. Spiegel, H. (1993) Mistaken Identities: Toronto. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The Fifth Estate, 9 November 1993.

5. Schreiber, F.R. (1973) Sybil. Chicago: Henry Regnery.

6. Rieber, R.W. (2006) The Bifurcation of the Self. The History and Theory of Dissociation and Its Disorders. New York: Springer Science.

7. Piper, A., Merskey, H., (2004). The persistence of folly: a critical examination of dissociative identity disorder. Part I. The excesses of an improbable concept. Can J Psychiatry 49 (9): 592-600.

8. McNally, R. J. (2003) Remembering Trauma. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.

9. Pope, H.G. Jr., Poliakoff, M.B., Parker, M.P., Boynes, M.D., & Hudson, J.I. (2007) Is dissociative amnesia a culture-bound syndrome? Findings from a survey of historical literature. Psychol. Med., 37(2):225-233.

10. Pope, H. G. Jr., Oliva, P., Hudson, J.I.: (2005) Repressed memories. The scientific status of research on repressed memories, in Modern Scientific Evidence: The Law and Science of Expert Testimony—Social and Behavioral Science, 2005-2006 Edition. Edited by Faigman D, Kaye D, Saks M, Sanders J. Eagen, MN, West Group, pp 408-447.

11. Esterson, A. (1993) Seductive Mirage. Open Court: Chicago.

12. Crews, F. (1998) Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend. New York: Viking.

13. Freeland, A., Manchanda, R., Chiu, S., et al. (1993) Four cases of supposed multiple personality disorder: evidence of unjustified diagnoses. Can. J. Psychiat., 23: 245-247.

14. McHugh, Paul R. (2008) Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash over Meaning, Memory, and Mind. Chapters 4 &5. Dana Press.

15. Fetkewicz, J., Sharma, V. & Merskey, H. (2000) A note on suicidal deterioration with recovered memory, treatment. J. Affect. Dis., 58:155-159.

16. Pope, H.G., Jr., Oliva, P.S., Hudson, J.I., Bodkin, J.A. & Gruber, A.J. (1999) Attitudes toward DSM-IV Dissociative Disorders Diagnoses among Board-Certified American Psychiatrists. Am. J. Psychiat., 2000; 157:1179-1180.

17. Lalonde, J.K., Hudson, J.I., Gigante, R.A. & Pope, H.G. Jr. (2001) Canadian and American psychiatrists’ attitudes toward Dissociative Disorders diagnoses. Can. J. Psychiat., 46(5): 407-412.

Appendix A

List of Signatories

1. Paul R. McHugh, M.D. Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University.

2. Harrison Pope, Jr., MD, MPH, Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts; Director, Biological Psychiatry Laboratory, McLean Hospital, Belmont Massachusetts

3. James Hudson, MD, ScD, Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts; Director, Biological Psychiatry Laboratory, McLean Hospital, Belmont Massachusetts

4. Elizabeth Loftus, PhD, Distinguished Professor, University of California-Irvine.

5. Richard J. McNally, Ph.D., Professor and Director of Clinical Training, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

6. Harold Merskey, FRCPsych., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario

7. Joel Paris, M.D. Professor of Psychiatry, McGill University, SMBD-Jewish General Hospital, Montreal, Quebec H3T1E4, Canada.

8. August Piper, M.D., Independent practice of psychiatry, Seattle, WA.

9. Numan Gharaibeh, MD (MB, BCh), Danbury, CT.

10. Pamela Freyd, Ph.D.

11. Eduard Vieta, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

12. Philip G. Janicak, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, Rush University, Chicago, Il.

13. Gerald M. Rosen, Ph.D., Private practice, Seattle, Clinical Professor, University of Washington.

14. Steven Jay Lynn, Ph.D., ABPP, Professor, Binghamton University (SUNY) Binghamton, NY.

15. Sally Satel, MD, resident scholar American Enterprise Institute; staff psychiatry Oasis Clinic, Washington DC; lecturer, Yale University School of Medicine.

16. James M. Wood, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Texas at El Paso.

out-sized forehead, black almond-shaped eyes

Laughlin, Nevada is the kind of place where vegetarianism is deviant. Even the lentil soup comes served with large chunks of sausage in it… Thick, greasy, lips-and-asshole chorizo sausage. Even when picked out, it befouls the rest of the soup with its putrid flavor.

I have to send it back. “This has sausage in it”, I tell the waitress.

“Yes”, the waitress says, nonplussed, “you ordered the lentil soup”.

The atmosphere has abruptly changed. My effeminate coastal dietary peculiarities have made my presence suddenly unwelcome. I feel a wave of panic fill the room. At surrounding tables, the bloated men in cowboy hats are, I imagine, wishing that they were thirty years younger, so that they might rise up to knock some sense into my goddamn skull. To the people of Laughlin, it appears, there is nothing particularly bizarre about a group of UFO seekers holding a conference in their town, but a man who doesn’t eat meat is truly a freakish thought. Christ, it’s already noon and I don’t even have a beer in my hand. To the generally upper middle-aged, beer-bellied, cigarette-sallowed gamblers of this obscure poor-man’s alternative to Reno, I am an interloper.

I feel more at ease among the ET enthusiasts. My initial impression is that they display nothing of the unwelcoming, bitter homogeneity of the Ritual Abuse crowd. Among them are Science Fiction fans and writers, Fortean chroniclers of anomalous events, students of the paranormal, and the mere curious.

The diversity is an unexpected relief. The two-hour shuttle ride from the Vegas airport to Laughlin gave grim indications that the conference would be strictly populated by elderly New Agers.

Earlier that day, I was among the first to be shuffled aboard the small bus just outside the baggage claim. Freshly acquainted geriatric galactic citizens bemoaned the horrifying quality of in-flight meals between refined excoriations against the blind ignorance of the mainstream masses who, despite overwhelming evidence, remain skeptical to the fact that Earth is being regularly visited by extraterrestrial intelligences. They were all warming up for the conference, taking full advantage of this opportunity to preach to a captive choir. Self proclaimed “intuitives”, aura readers, psychics, and UFOlogists all began climbing aboard to contribute to an increasing din of metaphysical philosophies, conspiracy theories, and Aquarian Age wisdom. Full groups spoke to each other simultaneously, without a single member listening. The driver announced that we would be leaving in five minutes, precisely on the hour, no exceptions, at which a strained looking old fellow took immediate leave. “I’ll be right back,” he assured the driver.

Ten minutes after the hour, the impatient passengers abandoned their peaceful transcendent pretensions and began to suggest with undisguised agitation that we should move on without our missing comrade. A man volunteered to look for him. He came back and reported something in confidence to the driver who then announced, “Two more minutes!” and started the engine. Our fact-finder sat back down across from me. “He’s taking a shit”, he muttered ruefully to the passenger next to him.

Soon enough our man returned, sullen and shamed, head low.

We’re away even before he’s seated.

The responsible chronicler in me wanted that I should I mingle with the other passengers, at least listen to what they were talking about, despite a fatigue-induced disinterest. Somebody was talking about media misinformation, another about how the UFO deniers are “asleep”.

Good enough. I put on my headphones and listened to music, partially falling asleep.

Anyway, my interest is in those who claim to have been in personal contact with extraterrestrial beings. That most reports of such contact are based upon recovered memories is a well-known fact. How are these recovered memories similar or different to those reporting satanic cult activity? Proponents of recovered memories of abuse, uncomfortable with the association to ET abduction, are quick to dismiss the parallel as a cheap-shot, a low-brow attempt at discrediting all recovered memories. But, without a method by which one may reliably distinguish legitimate recovered memories from fabrications or confabulations, the abductees present a unique challenge. If one can cultivate entire false memory scenarios regarding sometimes traumatic contact with alien beings, why could one not also construct such false memories about any traumatic experience? And what makes a more plausible recovered memory any less likely to be a false construction than an implausible one?

It was, I had understood, the consistency of the abduction tales that counter-balanced their implausibility with credibility. After all, how could it be that so many people, personally and geographically unrelated, would have such similar narratives of extraterrestrial encounters if these were but personal delusions?

Despite the fact that abduction stories are so prevalent in popular culture as to render this argument ludicrous, the question has proven undeniably compelling not only to fringe spiritual seekers, but to a few respected academics and journalists as well. Most notably, professor John Mack of Harvard Medical School undertook an enormous study of over 200 abductees from 6 continents in the course of over 10 years, till his death in 2004 when he was struck by a drunken driver while crossing a London street. Mack, encouraged by his long-time friend, author Thomas Kuhn, rejected what he felt to be an inhibiting materialist dualism that is “held in place by the structures, categories, and polarities of language, such as real/unreal, exists/does not exist, objective/subjective, intrapsychic/external world, and happened/did not happen.” (Mack, 1994)

Mack set out to “collect raw information, putting aside whether or not what I was learning fit any particular world view.” (Mack, 1994) Inevitably, though, Mack strained to fit his data into a world view, albeit a world view that was unconstrained by parsimony and the standard burden of scientific proof. To Dr. Mack, abduction experiences were real “in some way”, suggesting that they could be attributed to interdimensional travel rather than intragalactic. And while Mack did consider the possibility that the abduction experience was the product of an altered state, his altered state abduction wasn’t a purely internal, subjective experience, rather it was an altered state of higher consciousness that elicited communication with higher beings. (Mack, 1999)

In his book Passport To The Cosmos, Mack explains, “It is not just the experiencers’ conviction that what they have undergone is in some way real that has made me take them seriously. The richly detailed narratives they provide, the appropriate surprise, the convincing incredulity, and above all the genuine distress or other feelings they report, together with the observable emotion and intense bodily reactions they exhibit when their experiences are recalled – all these elements combined can give any witness the sense that something powerful has happened to these individuals, however impossible this may seem from the standpoint of our traditional worldview.” (Mack, 1999)

Dr. Mack’s claims of narrative consistency notwithstanding, the abduction accounts I end up hearing at the 2010 UFO Congress convention in Laughlin, Nevada – from those who claimed to have experienced them – are surprisingly inconsistent even given the near universal knowledge of how “actual” abductions are supposed to be carried out. At the very least, I had felt, everybody agreed upon who was responsible: little grey humanoids – “Greys”, they’ve been cleverly dubbed – with outsized hairless heads, large black almond-shaped eyes, and frail bodies.

Turns out there is a whole carnival of different species beaming people into different types of craft, and for different purposes – some benevolent, some… not so much. The Contactees happily share apparently well-worn, scripted descriptions of the multitudes of distorted other-world craniums and non-human eyes they’ve observed. There are mammalians, crustaceans, and ETs entirely human in appearance. The galactic community, it seems, is as diverse as human imagination.

The Greys? …Oh, yes, them.

Well, they are out there, up to their antics still, but they seem to have fallen out of fashion of late.

Given this variety of interplanetary taxonomic categories and their broad spectrum of individual motivations for the covert Earth capers they’re said to be engaged in, these are not “abductee” sessions that I am attending as an optional evening supplement to the larger conference… As hypnotherapist (and session organizer) Mary Rodwell explains, the word “abductee” carries with it certain obvious negative connotations that do not do justice to many of the “life-enhancing” extraterrestrial encounters that many of her clients have reported. Rodwell prefers the more neutral word “experiencer”. Thus, if we could refer to each other as experiencers rather than abductees, we’d all be a bit happier, yes?

There is dissent. “I don’t think that’s fair,” one harried man objects. His experience has very much been one of being taken against his will, and he seems as skeptical of reports of positive alien encounters as most people are of tales of alien contact in general. His, presumably, was one of those close-encounters of the orifice-stretching kind, and he reserves the right – by God – to refer to himself as an abductee. There is agreement from a few others in the group of about 30 who sat in a tight circle of chairs within the small windowless hotel meeting room. The “Experiencer” label, they feel, is a whitewash. They are Abductees.

Very well then. Rodwell is flexible, conveying herself with a saintly air of tolerance. She wants the evening Experiencer Sessions to “honor” all varieties of ET contact. If there are those who wish to refer to themselves as “abductees”, all well and good. So long as everybody is sensitive to the fact that “abductee” is an unacceptable blanket label to be applied to all in the room. The abductees begrudgingly agree.

Mary Rodwell holds the title of “Principal” at an organization called ACERN (Australian Close Encounters Resource Network), with the stated goal of offering “professional counselling support, hypnotherapy and information to individuals and their families who have ‘anomalous’ paranormal experiences, particularly specializing in Abduction/contact experiences.”

“If you don’t want to share and just want to listen, that’s fine”, Rodwell assures us all, much to my relief. My unease at the prospect of around-the-circle individual introductions and biographical synopses had been growing since realizing that I am, quite possibly, the only person in the room with no memories of contact with ETs.

“The other thing I’d like you to respect is everyone has their own understanding of their experiences,” Rodwell explains. “No matter how one chooses to understand it doesn’t mean you have to subscribe to that, it just means that that’s where they are with their experiences, that’s how they choose to understand it, though it may not resonate for you. It may not fit for you at all. But that’s okay, because we have the right to interpret our experiences whatever way feels right to us.”

A middle-aged Latin man seated to my immediate left is eager to tell of his experiences.

“I’m not really good at public speaking, in fact I have a phobia about speaking in groups. But I’m here tonight because I want to be around people who have had experiences. I’ve been an experiencer for approximately 25 years. It started when I was living in the Central Valley. I was a professional person. I was a parole agent. And when I started experiencing contact, I could never talk to anybody because I was a professional man and I couldn’t approach my supervisor and say, hey, I’m speaking to little grey guys. So I just pretty much kept it to myself. So my main reason for being here is just hearing other people’s stories and not feeling so awkward about what my own personal experiences have been.”

He finishes there, apparently having gotten off his chest what he wanted to express, just enjoying – it seems – being in an environment wherein he can declare himself an “experiencer” without feeling that he’ll have made himself outcast by doing so. And this is how most of the testimonials carry on throughout this first night. Experiencers within the circle talk about the various ways in which they present themselves to outsiders, some claiming to heavily advertise their relationship with extraterrestrials, others describing the daily discomfort of keeping this part of their lives constantly concealed.

One woman chimes in: “I just want to say, chances are that each one of us — in fact chances are really good — I’ve probably already lived half my life. I’m in my fifties. And I’m at a point in my life where it’s really important to me to be who I am. And I think that the extraterrestrial, interdimensional — whatever type of contact it is — that it is a significant part of my life… It has been for a long time. Um… I have had stages of being made fun of, of being talked about behind my back, being called crazy. I used to really, really care about that. And it used to really hurt my feelings… It was more important to me how other people thought of me than how I actually felt about me — you know, as far as being true to myself. So… I’m at a stage in my life where when I meet people — and let’s say they’re neighbors — there are people, like, up in the mountains. We have a place up in the country, about 35 acres around a bunch of country people. When I meet people, they come into my life, I let it be known right away. You know, this is part of my life. They have a choice whether they want to associate with me or not associate with me… there are no secrets… but on the other side of that, you know, at that point in time, they can say or think whatever they want to say or think about me. I don’t care. It’s not important to me any more. I figure people that are like me will resonate toward me, and those that aren’t will hopefully stay away. And also along with that: if I’m like a crazy person that everybody’s talking about, possibly they’ll talk to somebody who is out there who is having life experiences, who doesn’t feel like they can talk to anybody… and they’ll know they can talk to me…”

I find myself sympathizing with the experiencers. Aside from being far friendlier than the morose and self-entitled Ritual Abuse fantasists, they also aren’t directly victimizing individuals by labeling their unfortunate families as the revealed perpetrators of repressed episodes of abuse. Further, it’s annoying to think of religious literalists – believers in the Son of God’s imminent return to Earth to attend Good and Evil’s promosed apocalyptic show-down – having the audacity to laugh at these no-less-probable scenarios constructed by the experiencers. This is not to say that I feel abductees should be able to declare the absolute truth of their ET contact episodes without critical objection. Quite the contrary. Truth matters, and individual liberties are at stake. This sub-set of recovered memory advocates give license to those of the witch-hunting kind.  It’s all well and good to play philosophical games with questions like “Whose Truth?” until individual liberties and personal well-beings are threatened, at which point we must defer to the best method for knowing “truth” we’ve yet devised: scientific “materialism”… unromantic and inhibiting as it might seem.

The most perplexing comments, to my mind, this first night’s experiencer session, come from a couple of fellows who have no conscious memory of abduction, but feel that their lives have been a more-or-less regular stream of anomalous events for which alien intervention seems the most rational explanation.

Karl, a man in his late-thirties from Wyoming, tells of synchronicities, “psychic events”, and vague “anomalies” that have led him to suspect that extraterrestrials are watching him. One night, not long ago, he felt an odd compulsion to take a tent out into the woods. Before sleeping, he tells us, he asked for some sign, some acknowledgment, confirmation from these outer world beings that they are watching. He slept the whole night through without incident. But, upon returning home, he checked his email to find the confirmation that he had asked for: a girl he had gone to school with, who he hadn’t thought about in years, but who had come to mind in short proximity preceding his compelled camp-out, had sent him a Facebook friend request.

I was waiting for more. I was waiting for Karl’s story to bring us inside of a space-craft, into a vivisection lab… Something.

But that was it. A none-too-incredible synchronicity that, even if one felt certain couldn’t be “mere coincidence”, could have fit any number of supernatural narratives…  This was taken as a clear signal of extraterrestrial activity.

A short, over-weight man named Clem tells a tale equally unremarkable. One night, he was in his bathroom when the light-bulb started humming and vibrating. “I reached up to touch it”, Clem tells us, “Bwoosh!”, he spreads his hands and extends his arms, indicating an explosion.

As with Karl, Clem’s story ends before I can figure out its meaning.

After the session, I’m fortunate in that Clem approaches me and immediately begins to elaborate:

“If I was to reach up, you know, and touch something in the light I’m certain that nothing would have happened, but I didn’t want to take the chance.” He’s still marveling over the event, but I still have no idea what this has to do with ETs.

“So did you do hypnosis?” I ask.

“No! No no. No. This was — I was in the bathroom. I’m putting on a t-shirt. And you know, you got those [?] deals on the lights. I got two lights, and I just happen to touch it. And it just went — it just started to vibrate, and — you ever see Star Wars?”

“Yeah.”

“Where the Death Star exploded?”

“Right.”

“That’s what this did. And the lamp, the light itself – nothing happened to it. It burned out like a year later… but this was just… I’d never seen anything like it.”

“Something different entirely entirely, huh?” I ask, not certain what else to say.

“It was – Yeah! That was something different entirely!”

“Did you ever do a regression like she [Rodwell] does?”

It turns out, Clem has been regressed, but he seems reticent to speak of memories of direct ET contact. He continues to tell me about his bizarre electrical problems. “That comes and goes”, he explains.

“And like several years ago, I had a Lincoln…” Clem lowers his voice and leans in closer to me, as though he is about to confide to me something so frightening and abnormal that he doesn’t want to distress any innocent passers-by who might overhear. “I’m driving to work one day, and I keep losing power. And I say, what the Hell’s going on? So, I park it, and I went into work. And I go to my mechanic the next day, and I sez, so what the Hell happened? And he sez, you know, in the hundreds and hundreds of engines I’ve worked on, I’ve never seen anything like this. I was like out of a cheap b-movie… [The mechanic] pops the hood –”

Clem pauses and looks me in the eye dramatically.

“Yeah?” I urge him.

“Takes a wrench and holds it up towards the engine –” Clem raises his fist to illustrate.

“Uh huh…”

“And it goes *chunk*”, Clem opens his fist, his gaze following an imaginary wrench that slams into the engine. “…It was magnetized! And he had to reverse the poles of the engine. Change the battery. Change the alternator. Cost me several hundred dollars. And there was just no rhyme or reason for it.”

I’m at a loss. “Right…” I say, lamely.

“I’ve had experiences, and that kind of thing just drives me nuts. There’s no sense to it.”

I press Clem to tell me what exactly makes him feel certain that ETs were involved, and of what direct experiences he feels he’s had with unearthly beings.

He has had contact with ETs, but contact of the psychic kind. They come to him as voices in his head. They come into his house at night. He hears them crawling around… under the stairs, in the attic. At this point, my oscillating opinion of the hypnotherapists who perpetuate beliefs in ET encounters is decidedly negative. Clem, I feel, may need real help. He begins to describe how difficult it is to talk to some of his friends and family about these kinds of things. It is comforting to hear, at least, that he does have friends and family to talk to.

“You can’t be angry at them for finding these things hard to understand,” I tell him. “You don’t want to keep things from them, but you also want to hear them out and respect their perspective. It’s always good to hear another opinion, regardless of what they make of yours…”

Clem agrees.

We shake hands and part ways.

On my way back to my hotel room, I spot Karl. He’s telling another conference-goer who wasn’t at the session about his remarkable sychronicities. I can already see a shift in his demeanor. While he came to the session uncertain that the “anomalies” he had experienced were indicative of ET contact, he’s growing more and more convinced by the moment…

- Martha Ann Tyo v. Colin A. Ross, MD, et al…

Dr. Colin Ross, demonstrating his supernatural eye beams

According to one expert witness, it was the worst case of medical malpractice he had ever seen.  The patient, Ms. Roma E. Hart, had been grossly over-medicated into a prolonged state of deranged confusion, during which time the offending psychiatrist, Dr. Colin A. Ross, had instilled her with exotic and perverse delusions:  To wit, the rather implausible belief that her family was involved in an occult crime-ring dedicated to a supernatural evil, and that Hart herself had been forcibly impregnated by extraterrestrials, birthing a hybrid infant (presumably in the course of a routine alien abduction).  The magnitude of Ms. Hart’s mistreatment during her submission to psychiatric “care” brought her to the precipice of death on several occasions.

During her treatment Ms. Hart gave custody of her 10 year old daughter over to Child & Family Services so as to preserve the girl from clutches of her Satanic cult family. Thus Ms. Hart lost her entire family in one egregiously misguided moment; her parents unable to forgive her for the accusations of sexual Satanic Ritual Abuse, her daughter heart-broken by abandonment.

As you will read in the interview with Ms. Hart below, these are but a few of the annoyances she suffered as result of Ross’s “therapy”.This bizarre malpractice by the hand of Dr. Colin Ross was designed to treat his unfortunate patient of the condition of Multiple Personality Disorder [MPD], a condition Ms. Hart now feels she never had, and many doctors argue doesn’t exist.  It is a condition that Dr. Ross himself has largely helped define and set the diagnostic and treatment protocols of.  The theory of MPD, unsupported by science, is that an individual undergoing trauma “dissociates”, recompartmentalizing the hurtful memories into separate “personalities”, personalities that are unaware of one another.

Dr. Colin Ross’s delusions are hardly concealed.  He is a known conspiracy theorist who helped construct the Satanic cult hysteria of the eighties to mid-nineties.  He has written and lectured regarding nefarious mind-control projects within the CIA, and even – in an interesting case of possible projection – speculation regarding the “iatrogenic [clinically produced] creation of Multiple Personality Disorder” by CIA psychiatrists.  Following Dr. Ross’s own vernacular, it might be appropriate to suggest that Ross has “dissociated” his own crimes of medical mistreatment, projecting them upon a “personality” he refers to as “CIA”.

But Ross can not be dismissed as a marginal fool.  He is a well-respected and dangerous fool.  Indeed, Dr. Colin Ross is an “internationally renowned clinician, researcher, author and lecturer in the field of dissociation and trauma-related disorders”.  He is founder and President of the Colin A. Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma, which “specializes in the management of psychiatric treatment programs and is currently contracted to provide management and treatment services to Timberlawn Mental Health System, in Dallas, Texas, Forest View Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Del Amo Hospital, in Torrance, California.”  Ross is “the author of over 130 professional papers and past President of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation”, and acts as expert consultant for the Showtime television series The United States of Tara.  Dr. Ross has acted as therapist for celebrity Rosanne Barr (who now also believes she recovered memories of childhood abuse), and Cameron West, author of the New York Times bestselling First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple.

Like all conspiracy theorists, Ross seems to feel he has an understanding of the true cause of all Evil.  Likewise, MPD feeds Ross’s paranoid fiction as, not only a by-product of a sinister CIA plot, but as a medical condition that serves to explain and negate all others.  Roma Hart gives an example of this over-valuation of the MPD diagnosis by Ross in a personal email to the author:

[...]I was regularly in seclusion [whilst an in-patient of Colin Ross], a lovely concrete walled and floored hole where I was locked in for days at a time.  Sometimes [I would be] thrown in, and I’d have the huge bruises to show for it.  [The seclusion room] was often used for “behaviour modification”, I suppose.  You see, when I had seizures from the drugs [Ross had over-medicated],  Ross told the nurses that I was just switching personalities to one called “Blue” that had seizures, so they should throw me in seclusion whenever that happened. One evening when [the seizures were] really bad, Ross had the nurses take me down to the ward below and strip me before they dropped me onto the floor.  That [particular] seclusion room had a bad fluorescent light that flickered really badly.  I laid there until the next day when they put me in a wheelchair to take me back up to my other seclusion room.  Those nurses, as I told you before, followed Ross around like panting puppies and did anything he said. I remember when I had my blood pressure taken my nurse asked me if I knew why my blood pressure was so unstable. I was going to answer “the drugs?”, but before I could say anything she said, “it’s because each of your personalities has its own blood pressure.” And, of course, [there was] the time that I was nearly killed from an overdose on the ward and I barely made it to the nurse’s station, gasping for breath, (respiratory arrest) [trying to] get their attention. The nurses became angry at me and demanded that I go back to my room. I fell to the floor and crawled back to my room still struggling with every ounce of my strength for every breath.  This was extrememly frightening and I was so close to dying. I made it to my bed and the nurse took my blood pressure. She wrote it on my bed sheet as a matter of fact: 190/180. The following day after I regained consciousness another nurse came in and took my blood pressure: 60/50.  Well, she remarked, you MPD patients are fascinating. You see, Doug, Ross had told the staff that night that I had “pulled myself in” and that it was an “MPD coma”, not a real coma.

On the face of it, Roma Hart’s accusations appear absurd.  For this reason, the hyperlinks embedded in this article, showing corroborative sworn testimony and affidavits, are important.  Thus, Ms. Hart’s claim that Dr. Ross actually encouraged her toward suicide seems quite plausible when taken together with the sworn affidavit of Winnipeg resident George Bergen, who testifies that Ross’s therapy drove his sister-in-law and at least four others to suicide, and the statement of Martha Ann Tyo (who also sued Ross for malpractice) indicating an eerily blase attitude, on Ross’s part, toward the possibility of his client’s suicide (see quote from Tyo v. Ross above).  The fact that Martha Ann Tyo, a patient in Texas (Hart was treated in Manitoba), tells also of being implanted with a conviction of Satanic Ritual Abuse and alien abduction does much to affirm that these beliefs were a product of Ross’s mind rather than those of Tyo or Hart. So, though the documents cataloging Dr. Ross’s criminal incompetence are linked throughout, I shall – in the spirit of Ross’s own book, Bluebird, which seeks full-disclosure of CIA malpractice – list an index of some of the more important ones here:

1. Affidavit of Roma E. Hart regarding Ross’s malpractice
   
2. Sworn affidavit of George Bergen regarding suicide deaths in Dr. Ross’s care
3. Martha Ann Tyo v. Ross, et al.
4. Testimony of Thomas Brown regarding Ross’s implantation of false memories in his wife.
5. Sworn affidavit of Robert Alexander Cowan attesting that Ross was fired from a Winnipeg Hospital.
6. Dr. Harold Merskey’s assessment of Dr. Colin Ross’s malpractice upon Roma Hart
7. Petition of the British False Memory Society seeking indictment of Dr. Colin Ross for violations of the Nuremburg Code
8. Dr. Alexander Bodkin’s assessment of Dr. Colin Ross’s malpractice upon Roma Hart
9. Selected quotes of Dr. Colin A. Ross, suggesting a mind disturbed
10. A list of Statutory Declarations attributing ruined lives to Dr. Ross’s clinical techniques

Interview with Ms. Roma E. Hart
by Douglas Mesner (Process.org)

How did you come to be in the care of the genius Dr. Ross?

Before I started seeing him, I was working constantly.  I was a single mom, I had two jobs, I was going to University full-time, and I had hurt my foot really, really badly.  So I got unemployment insurance, which only lasted a few weeks.  One of my friends said, Hey, you know what?  you can get it extended if you apply for stress.  I thought, cool, why don’t I do that?  Extra money, get my unemployment extended. So I was at University, went the the University Student Psych Centre, figured I could get them to fill out the form for unemployment insurance.  I saw one of the master’s students there, who was a student of Colin Ross’s.  She said, what do you do when you get under stress? I said, Well, I just switch to autopilot and just keep on going – I’m a single mom, after all. And she goes, Autopilot??  Do you have a name for this “autopilot”? Her eyes went so big, and she said, My professor Colin Ross is an expert in Multiple Personality Disorder [MPD] and I would just love to work with him.  I’ll bring you to him and he will fill out the form for you. So she put me in the car, drove me down to see Colin Ross, and it was just about 15 minutes before he shook my hand and welcomed me to MPD therapy.  Then I handed him the unemployment insurance form and said, fill this out for me please. And that was it.  I was doomed since.  That was it.

And how in that 15 minutes did he determine that you had MPD?

He had talked to that student councilor at the University of Manitoba – his student.  She had told him that I said that I switch to autopilot when I’m under stress.  He determined that she was absolutely correct, that [autopilot] was another personality.

Aha…

But you and I know that ["running on autopilot" is] just something people have been saying for years.  It just means you just keep on going because you have to.  You just do without even thinking about it.  I had no idea that anybody would ever interpret that as another personality.  But I thought to myself, Well, what the heck – he’s going to fill out the form – what possible harm could come? I had no idea my life would be ruined after that.

To kind of work backward so people have an idea right from the get-go what we’re dealing with:  What are the permanent side-effects you deal with now from having been a victim – or patient – of Dr. Ross?

One of the the biggest problems I have is a permanent record in my medical file that lists me as ‘Multiple Personality Disorder’.  That comes to my face any time I go for any test, any time I have to go to the hospital for X-rays… you name it.  It’s right there.  I’m never taken seriously for anything at all.  It’s on a permanent record for Child & Family Services because Colin Ross decided that my child was interfering with my therapy, so she was put into foster care.  She was put into foster care and hidden from me and from my whole family from the time she was 10 years old to the time she was 18 years old.  She has completely lost her family.  I lost the most darling child.  I was a single mother.  She and I were so close.  It was like we breathed at the same time.  I lost my whole family.  My parents were teachers.  Because when you’re diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, Colin Ross believes that 100% of the time, you have been sexually molested by your parents.  He told that to Child & Family Services.  My parents had to take early retirement from their teaching jobs.  My family hates me.  My parents were almost thrown in jail… And then, of course, there’s always [the fact that] I had to drop out of University.  My career was ended.  I lost my home.  I lost my friends.  I lost every cent I had… Then, of course, there’s the drug experiments that he did.  He did massive and illegal drug experiments on me in the hospital.  And I nearly died several times.  I was in comas, I was in wheelchairs.  I got down to like 55 pounds at 5 foot 5.  I was so, so sick.

Which Drugs?

The main one was Halcion, although he combined a whole bunch on top of each other just very recklessly. No regard for human safety whatsoever.  But Halcion: He had me up to 52 milligrams per day¹
Four hundred times the maximum dosage. He explains that – he justifies that – in one of the court transcripts I sent you – it’s really quite appalling – he justifies that amount by saying that I was a drug-user.  He has told the hospital – Saint Boniface Hospital, where he treated me – that I was a heroin addict.  And of course, that is why he had to use so many massive amounts of drugs.  Now, I most certainly wasn’t [a drug-user].  Just a few weeks before I saw him, I got up at six o’clock in the morning and I spent all morning, until 12:30 at the University, because I was a full-time student.  Then I worked all afternoon until 6 o’clock at a daycare.  Then I went home and took care of my child.  On the weekends, I worked as a maid at Holiday Inn.  I had two jobs, was a full-time University student, and I had a child to take care of.  I had no time to be a heroin addict!  I was a Pentecostal Christian fundamentalist.  I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t allow it in my home.  My brother and his wife were living with me.  They weren’t allowed to drink or smoke in the home.  And yet, Colin Ross says, I gave her all these drugs because she’s a heroin addict. What a crock!  But there it is, on my medical record.  And he keeps on saying that.

So you didn’t feel particularly mentally disturbed when you first went to see Colin Ross, but felt a definite worsening of your condition after therapy began?

The only thing that bothered me was my foot.  I just needed an extension of my unemployment insurance because my foot still hurt real badly, but the unemployment insurance had run out.  I thought, well this is really easy.  I’ll get it extended based on stress.  So when I saw Colin Ross, the only actual problem I had was a very sore foot that had been injured.  There was nothing wrong with me mentally.  I was definitely stressed, but that’s because I was still working a part-time job.  I was still going to University full-time, and I was still a single mother, and I had almost no money to live on.  So, that was why I was stressed.

So clearly you were an out-patient.  How often did you see [Dr. Colin Ross], and what was the “therapy” at that point?

I saw him twice a week for an hour to two hours.  It was hypnotherapy.  He made some tapes for me to listen to all day.  He had me do ‘dream-imaging’, where at the end of each session he’d ask me to think about whether certain things had happened to me.  My homework was to go home and dream about these things.  I’d come back the next session and say, I dreamed about those things, and this was what I was dreaming. And he would always say, Those dreams you had are actually flash-backs of real events in your life. So it proceeded very quickly into insanity.  So about two months after I started seeing him, I was committed into the hospital’s Psych Ward.

So then you were an in-patient at that point.

I was committed, I was forcefully given injections of drugs, yes.

And for how long were you an in-patient?

I was an in-patient for two weeks, and then I went back in-and-out, in-and-out for several years.

What was your drugs regimen at that point?

I was given antidepressants, I was given tranquilizers of various kinds.  At the end it was almost exclusively Halcion.  The last year I saw him, he switched me off of Halcion onto 320 milligrams of Valium per day²

And all the while he was telling you to recall your dreams as memories?

He would give me something to think about.  I had homework to do.  He would plant the thought in my head that this is what I was supposed to try to see if I could remember.  Of course I would dream about it, because what else are you going to do when you’re deep in therapy?  When somebody tells you to think about this, you’ll go home and you’ll dream about it, you come back and you say, I had this terrible nightmare about what you said.

Ah, well, that’s a flash-back.  It really did happen.

And I would say to him, I don’t remember that happening. The first time I saw him – the first visit, I told him – he asked, were you ever abused as a child? I was raised in the sixties by military parents, because my father was an aerial cartographer.  They were very strict.  I said, what do you mean by abuse?  I mean, they were strict, but they never abused me. I made it very clear to him that my parents never, at any time, ever sexually abused me, or anybody.  But he said it was normal to deny it.

So eventually you were made to come to agree that you had been sexually abused?

I was told by Colin Ross that I fit the description of somebody who was sexually abused… Even though I swore it never happened.  He said, you fit the description.  All people with MPD have been sexually abused [according to Colin Ross].

I know about Colin Ross.  He has written [several conspiracy theory books].  How specific was his story for you?  Did he develop a specific narrative for you that fit his conspiracy theory [and explained your supposed MPD]?

Oh, absolutely.  As I said, my father was in the military.  This was when I was a tiny little girl, he was in the Air Force.  And for Colin Ross, for anybody who’s ever been in the military, he just makes the immediate leap into CIA, for crying out loud.  He asked me if the words – what was it? – ‘beta’… ‘gamma’… and, um… ‘omega’, I think it was [meant anything to me].  Those three.  He said that children were put in to CIA experiments where they used goggles on [the children's] eyes and hypnotized [them].  [The CIA programmed personalities] were either one of those: beta, omega, alpha, one of those.  One [of these designations programmed the child so that they] would commit suicide, one would be given the job to dispense disinformation, the other was [...] an assassin.  I just thought ‘gamma’ sounds too stupid, ‘alpha’ sounds like alphabet soup, for crying out loud, I think I chose Omega, or something like that.  I chose the one that sounded the least stupid to me, because I was just trying to cooperate with him.  There was just no way you could argue with him.  He’d always just twist things around.  You couldn’t possibly argue with him.  He’d always just say that you fit the description, absolutely fit the description.  It has to be this.

So in his mind, you had to be Omega, or Gamma, etc.  You couldn’t be None of The Above?

No.  Not at all.  No.  He was very much involved in [the idea of] CIA mind-control nonsense.  And then he would give you jobs to do, homework to do at home.  You were supposed to close your eyes and you were supposed to visualize different parts of the city so that you could leave your body and travel around the city.  Then you’d come back for your next appointment and he’d say, So did you go anywhere?  Did you see anything for these out-of-body experiments he was putting you into?  I would say, I don’t think I did.  I don’t know. I tried the best I could.  You’d just try to please him so much because he just had this charisma, and you’d want to please this guy.  He was very affectionate with all of his patients.  He would give hugs, he’d rub your back and rub your legs.  In those days he was just so charismatic.  He was such a good-looking young psychiatrist.  All the nurses would just pander to him like puppies… So here we were: young women as MPD patients trying to please this handsome, young, charismatic guy who was giving [us] all of his affection.

So did he ever give any indication of where he was getting his ideas of government mind-control projects that were bringing patients in to him?

He never told me where he was getting that from.

But he seemed to have a pretty specific idea of what [he felt] was going on?

He told me that he was the only MPD expert in Canada.  That he knew more than anybody else.  That they didn’t understand him.

And eventually he denied having ever given you drugs at all?

Yes, he did!  One of the last times I saw him, I asked, Why did you give me all those drugs?  And he looked at me, and he said with a straight face, I never gave you any drugs.  I lived about a mile away from the hospital where I walked all the way home thinking, I must be so crazy, so completely delusional.  Why would I think this if he never did [it]? I got to the drug store, and I went up to the pharmacist and I said, I know this is going to sound weird, but could you tell me if I’ve ever been given any drugs? He looked at me, because he recognized me, of course, and he said, I’ll print off some pages for you. He printed off reams and reams of pages for me.  Oh my goodness.

Why did he deny it?

I think he’d have to because it was – when I talked to a police officer a year later [he told me] – what [Colin Ross] did was criminal.  The amount of drugs Ross gave me was criminal.  [The officer] said if they could bring him into court they would charge him with administering noxious substances and endangering my life.  I never could get him into court though.

And you have long-term effects from the addiction?

I did have – I talked to Peter Breggin about that – I suffered with Halcion withdrawal, really seriously bad Halcion withdrawal for 10 years.  My family doctor, the neurologist, they’d all say, That’s impossible.  You can’t be suffering from withdrawal for that long.  It only lasts two weeks.  And then Peter Breggin gave me a copy of his Prolonged Benzodiazepine Withdrawal Syndrome paper that he sent to the AMA.  It’s not as bad now as it was before.  This has been like 20 years.  Most of it is gone.  There is some side-effects: Loss of memory, loss of concentration, and if I get really tired I’ll start having seizures again.  And I do have fibromyalgia as a result of an accident: falling on the ice when I went to pick up my daily prescriptions.  The Pharmacist wouldn’t let me have more than 320 milligrams of Valium per day.  He wouldn’t do that.  I had to go all the way to the pharmacy, walk over there to pick up one day’s prescription at a time.  It was very icy.  Up here in Winnipeg, it’s very icy.  I started having a seizure, and I fell on the ice, and I injured myself very badly.  I had to have several operations and I have fibromyalgia – constant pain for that.  One of the problems I have is I have a morbid fear of drugs now.  Just a horrible, morbid fear of drugs, so while the pain clinics and my family doctor want to give all sorts of pain medication, I won’t take it.  I’m just too afraid.  So I’m just going to be living in terrible constant pain for the rest of my life.

I was looking at the affidavit you submitted to The Queen’s Bench – as it’s called in Canada – and it mentioned a…  sexual assault… in the hospital…

Yes.  Isn’t that disgusting?  I think I already mentioned that he did illegal medical experiments on me.  He likes to do experiments, this guy.  He likes to do research.  Well, he knew.  He knew darn well that he was admitting into the hospital a dangerous sexual offender.  He knew who that man was because he came to me and told me, after I had been sexually assaulted… It was Christmas, and, um, I’d gone to a funeral.  I came back from the funeral, and I was terribly upset because my child’s father had died.  I couldn’t go to sleep, so I just sorted magazines just to calm myself down.  Everyone on the ward was a woman.  That ward was totally women, except for that evening, while I was at the funeral, Colin Ross admitted this sexual predator – offender – onto the ward.  He didn’t tell the nurses.  Didn’t tell the Hospital.  Didn’t tell me, that’s for sure.  I came in from the funeral   and I was sexually assaulted on the ward.  The next morning, Colin Ross says, Oh, I’m so sorry. Yes, I have 5 video tapes of this guy, and all the information about his sexual offenses. He said, But I never thought he’d do that in the hospital.  I didn’t think he would.  [note: Following the interview Ms. Hart would amend this statement to say that Ross, in fact, did not apologize - rather, he told her that he believed her when she reported she had been assaulted]

…Well, I just – I’m claiming.  This is just my claim [speculation].  I’m claiming that this was an experiment. Let’s just put this sexual offender on a ward of totally female [inhabitants], not tell them anything, and see what happens.  Well, I’ll tell you what happens: He sexually assaulted me!

And I went to the press after that, when Colin Ross left my room.  I phoned the police and I phoned the newspaper, and then they contacted the hospital.  Later – it was a couple days later – there was a front page news article about it.  President of the hospital confirmed that Yes, the man was prone to sexual assault, yes he was a dangerous offender.  Yes, that was all true. And Colin Ross came in [my room].  He was furious.  He was absolutely livid.  He was just beat red.  He came into my room and he yelled at me and said, Get the Hell out of here! But, you see, I was on such high levels of Halcion that if he had thrown me out that day, I would have died.  So, he had to take me off just enough so that I could get down to 320 milligrams of Valium instead.  And then I was kicked out of the hospital.  On my own… Just to see if I’d live or die…

With no referral to go elsewhere?

Oh, no.  Not at all.

And as I recall, it took you a while to find a psychiatric assessment after that.

After he [Colin Ross] left Winnipeg, I tried, and no one would take me on as a patient because – apparently… I did go into the hospital to have a cardiac test done.  When I was in the room with the cardiologist, he took my medical files on his desk – like a foot high – turned them around to face me so that I caould see them.  Then he left the room for about 10 minutes.  So I thought, Well, okay – just out of curiosity. I looked at the top paper, just at the top of the pile, and it was a letter from Colin Ross warning everyone not to treat me.  I have copies of all my medical records, but I don’t have that paper.  When I had all my medical records copied from the hospital, I paid about $700 dollars for all the papers, all the transcripts.  They wouldn’t copy that one.  I know it exists, because a cardiologist turned around so I could see it.   So, no, I couldn’t get anybody to help me.  And then after [Colin Ross] left, down to Dallas, and I filed a lawsuit against him, no one would see me at all.  So I went to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, talked to Pope, the guy in charge there.  He said he couldn’t force anybody to see me.  So I went to my family doctor who contacted the Minister of Health, Chomiak.  Now Chomiak arranged for me to go to London Ontario, because there was a psychiatrist out there who had formally debated Colin Ross – Known all about him.  And he had agreed to do a psychiatric assessment for me.  So I did have to get politicians involved, and there were arguments, during question period, on the floor to get me this kind of psychiatric assessment.  That’s how difficult it was to have done.

And it was Harold Merskey who did see you after that, right?

Dr. Harold Merskey.  That’s right.

You decided to file suit against Colin Ross after he left for Texas?

That’s right.

So what compelled him to leave for Texas?  I was looking at some of his [court] transcripts and I had fallen under the impression that it was a malpractice suit that had compelled him to leave for Texas when he did.

I sent you a copy of a Winnipeg Free Press article.  In that Winnipeg Free Press article – this was 1991.  It says that there was quite a lot of hostility against Colin Ross.  The doctors in this city hated Colin Ross.  There’s this one time when I came out of one of my comas in the Victoria hospital.  Colin Ross worked at the St. Boniface hospital.  He wasn’t allowed to work at the Victoria hospital.  I was up in the ward and Colin Ross stopped by to visit me.  The doctor who was taking care of me came in and that was the first time in my life I ever heard two doctors yelling at each other out in the hall.  He just wanted Colin Ross to leave, and drop off the face of the Earth.  He was so angry.  There’s a lot of doctors who just can’t stand him up here.  They’re embarassed to say they even know who he is.

And that’s what compelled him to leave for Texas?

Yes.  Because he couldn’t get any funding.  Now, the Grey Nuns owned the St. Boniface Hospital.  Sister Jean Ell is a Psychologist, and she’d done a psychological assessment of Dr. Colin Ross – there were an awful lot of complaints – and she told the board at St. Boniface Hospital that it was her opinion that he should be let go, but that they told her – the board at the Hospital – that he was bringing in a lot of research money.  So, in spite of everything – they agreed he was crazy – he was bringing in so much money.  It was only after the research grants dried up and he couldn’t get any more money, that’s when they told him to get out.  And that’s when he left.

And he still seems a bit crazy… to say the least.  In a personal correspondence with James Randi, Randi tells me about Colin Ross’s eye beams, and how they were set to experiment this to either prove or disprove [Colin Ross's assertion that he can project energy from his eyes].  Colin Ross backed out [of the experiment], said he’d get back to Randi, but never did.  So maybe he has sense enough to back out of such an experiment, but to have made the claim [that he could produce eye beams] at all – you really have to wonder -

He has such a big ego though.  He doesn’t say that he’s wrong.  He just says that he needs to adjust his test for whatever the problem is.  He doesn’t admit he’s wrong.

Dr. Colin Ross, heating a burrito with his eye beams - by Alethea Jones

Right… Right.  And he would never retract his MPD diagnosis of you.

Never!  Never!  He won’t retract it.  The Hospital – St. Boniface Hospital… The president, Dr. [Michel] Tetreault, wrote me a letter last year explaining that the hospital no longer endorses that, that diagnosis.  So nobody would be diagnosed with that [MPD] today.  But because Colin Ross won’t retract that diagnosis, they won’t take it off [my records].

I Don’t understand why it would have to be Colin Ross who would do so.

Because it has to be the doctor that was treating you at the time that you were diagnosed.

That seems like a bit of an insane policy itself…

Well, Dr. Harold Merskey, who certainly believes that I’ve never had MPD, ever – he certainly explains that in his psychiatric assessment [of me] – what he wrote [in my psychiatric assessment] is that my [request] to have Multiple Personality Disorder removed should be granted.  And that was the best he could do, because that’s just the way hospitals work.  It has to be the doctor who treated you, the doctor who diagnosed you, that’s the one who has to take the diagnosis off.

There was a point also where you went into Emergency in the same hospital you were receiving psychiatric care in, and they remanded you back to psychiatric.  How did that happen?

This is when I was just a few days away from dying.  I was so terribly sick.  My blood pressure was down to 50 over 40, and there’s a walk-in clinic just across the parking lot from the psychiatric center that is at the St. Boniface Hospital.  Dr. Colin Ross wouldn’t allow me to see any doctors – the residents, the students that would come to the ward.  He wouldn’t let anybody see me, and he told the nurses to ignore me.  But I had passes.  I was allowed to leave.  So I almost crawled.  Part of the way, I did.  I crawled to the walk-in clinic and I saw a doctor there who told me, You need to go to emergency right away. I told him, I’m already in the hospital.  So he contacted the nurses on the floor, he sent me back, and half-way across the parking lot, a doctor stopped his car, put me in his car, and drove me up to the ward.  Colin Ross still refused to let the nurses treat me.  So I called the walk-in clinic doctor and I said, You know, you called over here, and the nurses won’t help me.  So he had to call Dr. Colin Ross himself.  Otherwise I would have died.

Did Colin Ross encourage you to take action against your parents under the assumption that they sexually abused you?

Yes.  When I was at my most insane, under the most drugs, he encouraged me to get a rifle and go up and shoot them. He also encouraged me to kill myself constantly, saying it would be quite understandable.  He would phone me late at night – and he did that to other patients too, because there was an MPD support group, and we’d all talk to each other and visit each other – he’d send us home with lethal amounts of drugs, phone us up at night, and encourage us to kill ourselves.  One of the reasons I figure he did that was because he had this interest in the ‘white-light’ Near Death Experience.  So after we’d come out of comas, or what-not, from drug over-doses, the first thing he’d ask us was, Well, did you see the light? That’s all he was interested in.  Some of the other women died though.  But he really didn’t care about that.  He just said it was fate.

Some of the patients did die?

Yes.  12 of them.

12 of them?!

12 of them died in Dallas, too.

I did not know that.

Yes. Laura Pasley used to work for the police department, she also sued him down there… no, she sued one of his colleagues.  But she was in the police department, and she said, yes, it was the same number that died down there too.

Well, beside encouraging you to shoot [your parents], did [Colin Ross] encourage you to take legal action?

Absolutely.  Oh. yes.  He also wanted me to sue one of my old family doctors from when I was a child who was the Governor General of Manitoba at the time… George Johnson³ , the Governor General who was a friend of my parents, because Colin Ross told me that he had other patients who claimed that the Governor General had sexually assaulted them when they were children.  And [Colin Ross] said, You really ought to sue.  I’ll help you.  And I said, I will if somebody else will.  Nobody else would, so George Johnson fortunately got away with not having to be dragged through the court system, the poor guy.

Did [Colin Ross] just have a grudge against George Johnson?

Yes.  Governor General.  I guess [George Johnson] just wasn’t helpful with the research grants.

Well… I guess you have that latitude [to falsely accuse your enemies] when you’re the Witch-Hunter General.

Sure.  You don’t want to make Colin Ross mad at you.

I think that’s inevitable for me pretty soon.

(Laughs) Okay.

So – your malpractice proceedings: You didn’t end up even getting a settlement, did you?

No.  Because I am on welfare disability, the only money I could raise for lawyers was just through begging people that I was given contact numbers for.  [I would be told] This lawyer hates [Colin Ross], this doctor hates him.  And this other man – his daughter died under Colin Ross’s care, and he helped me with some money too.  So I did manage to drag it through the system for 11 years with 4 different lawyers.  But, because my second to last lawyer did such an atrociously bad job – and he admitted to his negligence to the Law Society – it was dismissed due to delay.  And then Colin Ross’s lawyer managed to have the costs awarded against me.  So I owed Colin Ross something like 100 to 200 thousand dollars – something astronomical.  So I had to appeal that.  So I had to raise another 5 thousand dollars to appeal that, and then the Law Society threw in another 20 to 30 thousand dollars to pay the lawyer to help me appeal that, so I would have the costs removed.  And that was Judge Sinclair’s order that I sent down to you.  It says that, reason for dismissal due to delay, fault of my counsel.  And the costs were taken off.  I didn’t have to pay the costs.

I didn’t get too good of a chance to look over the [courtroom] transcripts [of a different suit brought against Dr. Colin Ross] you sent me today, but [from what I see, during the trial] somebody from an outside jurisdiction was saying that these charges brought against Colin Ross would certainly have his medical license removed.  I wasn’t sure what case that was.  There were several pages missing.

That was Elizabeth Carlson.  She sued.  It was a 12 week trial in Minnesota.  She was the first to sue in any type of case like this.  And that was Christopher Barden.  Christopher Barden has his doctorate in Psychology, and he has a Law degree from Harvard.  He was the one who said that.  He read all of my hospital records.  The doctor who was an expert witness, Bodkin,sent the affidavit that said that it was grossly inappropriate the amount of drugs that Colin Ross had given me.  It’s just amazing.  It’s just amazing that he wasn’t charged.  It was very odd the way the police said it.  They said they wouldn’t charge him criminally until after the civil suit.  I don’t understand that at all.  I would just think that if someone would do a crime like that, they would just charge them.  But they said they wouldn’t do it until after the civil suit.

I saw somewhere – I believe it was online, and not one of the documents that you sent me – that you were at a proceeding saying that your case [against Colin Ross] had carried on 8 years as you were trying to extend the Statute of Limitations in your case due to your [previous] lawyer’s incompetence.

I went 4 months over the Statute of Limitations.

Is there still hope for you getting any satisfaction out of this.

None.  No.  All I can do is spend the rest of my natural life hounding him as much as I can, so I can expose him for the fraud that he is, and hopefully save the lives of as many people as I can.

I was going to ask you about that.  How do you feel about those documents [relating to your malpractice proceedings against Dr. Colin Ross] being posted publicly?

I’d put them on a billboard.  I don’t care.  I don’t want him to think that I’m ashamed of what happened, because I wasn’t responsible.  I was under an immense amount of hypnosis and drugs.  He is responsible.  I have no shame.  It seems so silly to say.  I am not going to be blackmailed into being quiet, or anything.  This is what he did, and he should be held accountable.  And he is just such a lying dog, I can’t stand it.  So, I make sure everybody knows what happened.  My lawsuit was never completed, unfortunately, but my hospital records still exist, and they’ve been used in other lawsuits for other people to have successful outcomes.

I’ve talked to a few other recovered memory detractors who seemed to feel a sense of loss from leaving their support group [of MPD patients or Ritual Abuse survivors].  It sounds like you dealt mostly with Colin Ross, or did you have anything like a support group that talked about experiences with Satanic Ritual Abuse, or whatever conspiracy theory was being held onto?

He set us all up in an MPD support group called the MPDers, and he tried to get us registered as a charity so we could go and raise money for him.

That’s inventive!

We were supposed to approach businesses, and he told us which ones – nice big ones – and we were supposed to approach businesses to raise money for his research.  And he was going to have us registered as a charity.  So that’s what his MPD patients were doing for him.

And what exactly did he say his research was?

Multiple Personality Disorder and [that research into alleged] mind control experiments with the CIA – and Satanic Ritual Abuse, for crying out loud!  He explained this to me the first month I started seeing him.  There was a sign above the planetarium, and I saw it on my way to see him.  It was the silliest thing.  It was going toward Christmas and they were talking about the star of [Bethlehem], and that made [Colin Ross] start commenting about aliens.  The star [of Bethlehem, according to Colin Ross] wasn’t really the star of Jesus – it was an alien ship that they were really seeing.  So then he explained that lots of people had been abducted by aliens, and that women had been abducted by aliens and impregnated by aliens, and they have these alien babies.  Now, I think I already said to you that at that time when I started seeing him I was a Pentecostal Christian Fundamentalist.  I belonged to Church, was a Sunday School teacher.  All I could think was, How horrible!  How could God let that happen?  And what about the baby?  Would it have a soul? So, in my mind, I was horrified.  Completely horrified.  I wouldn’t even talk about it.  I couldn’t even talk about it.  I just didn’t want to talk with anyone.  But then, a few years later – I think it was 1990, somewhere around then – he came up from a conference in Chicago.  He’d seen [infamous MPD therapist] Bennett Braun and the International Association of Dissociation and MPD, and that.  He came in the hospital to see me and he said, Oh, I have great news for you! He was so excited, so happy and bubbly.  I looked at him and thought, Good.  Great news.  What is it? And he said, You know that baby that you had?  The half alien baby?  It didn’t die! Thinking that it had died was [according to Colin Ross] the only way that I could resolve it in my mind, so that I wouldn’t have to worry about the soul.  So he thought for me, telling me that it didn’t die was going to be some good news.  I looked at him absolutely horrified.  I said, What are you talking about? At the conference he’d just been to, it had explained why all of the Satanic Ritual Abuse cases that they’d always talk about, where women give birth to these babies and they kill the babies – but nobody can ever find the bodies of these babies – [the conference Colin Ross attended explained that] the reason they can’t find the bodies of these babies is because the bodies of these babies are beamed up into spaceships, and they’re raised in the spaceships until they’re 18 years old.  Then they’re beamed back down to earth and given jobs with the CIA.  This is all to form a New World, and all that.  So it’s really the aliens who are impregnating the women, while they’re CIA mind-controlled, and then they give birth at Satanic rituals.  It’s a big circular thing.  It’s the craziest circular thing I ever heard in my life.  But I was horrified.  I burst into tears.  I couldn’t believe he just told me that my alien baby was alive.  But he was so confused.  He didn’t know why I wasn’t happy.

I’m horrified now! I went to a conference of self-proclaimed – or therapeutically proclaimed – victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse and Mind-Control, and I wrote a report about that, I don’t know whether you read it or not – oh, no, you did.  You quoted from it [on James Randi's website].  That’s right.  When I argued with [the attendees and organizer of the conference] that recovered memories bring about tales of alien abduction, despite the crazy shit these people were [otherwise] saying, they were mortified by that comparison.  But Dr. Colin Ross goes the limit.  He believes it all.

In the transcripts from the Minnesota trial – there’s only a couple pages that I sent you today – Dr. Humenansky, she gives sworn testimony that Colin Ross told her that there’s a connection between the CIA and Satanists and Satanic Ritual Abuse.

Well, he kind of denies it, doesn’t he?  There’s pages missing after they bring up the issue, but it sounded like he was going to backtrack on that in the court of law.

He’ll deny everything to his dying breath if he thinks there’s a court reporter around.

But he has put out books and done conferences where he’s pretty open about [his delusions].  It’s amazing to me that he’s still taken seriously.  I’m sure you realize that he’s written the foundational papers, really.  Him and Richard Kluft, and a few others, really defined Multiple Personality Disorder, and its treatment.  And, In fact, it was Richard Kluft and Colin Ross who were the two doctors consulted as experts for the formation of the storyline for [the Showtime series] The United States of Tara.  The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation had them on a panel to discuss The United States of Tara just last year [at their annual conference].  So the whole movement [of therapists who hold to the myth of multiple personalities] still rallies around this fool.

Absolutely.  And they think he’s so special.  In his book Bluebird, he gets all these CIA documents and he puts them in the back.  He thinks he’s so special that he can get those documents.  You know, anybody could get those documents [through the Freedom of Information Act].  Anybody could.  There’s nothing special about him.  He’s just a shameless self-promoter, really.

It’s easily pointed out that just because there are secrets in the case of International Security, or whatever, it doesn’t give Colin Ross a carte blanch to decide what those secrets are or exactly how they work.

This is what Dr. Richard Ofshe from Berkley told me back in 1994: If – and it’s not true of course, but if – everything Colin said [regarding his conspiracy theories] was true, it would still not excuse anything that he did to me.  What he did to me was the worst case of medical malpractice that he had seen.  Really, he can’t excuse what he did by saying, Well look over here, look what they did in the CIA.  Well, what they did in the CIA is the same thing [Colin Ross] does.  All the experiments, all the drugs, all the hypnosis, mind-control.  All the things that he says look at what the CIA did [about], they’re the very same things he did!

I do find it funny that he actually wrote an article about the iatrogenic creation of Multiple Personality Disorder within the CIA, and I also see articles by people like Corydon Hammond, who was trained in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, talking about how not to lead people to believe things that are not true.  They seem to be doing just the opposite, or exactly what they describe or proscribe to other people doing.

The tapes he had me listen to – he made me hypnosis tapes – I’m walking around the University listening to these hypnosis tapes, and I’m taking these drugs, and of course I couldn’t complete my courses, I had to drop out.  And it just made me completely crazy, all this mind-control, all day long, all night long, this constant mind-control.  The constant visits to his office.  It was just ridiculous. That is mind-control.

…And the drugs, and the hypnotherapy.

I don’t know how he got away with the amount of the drugs he used.  He claimed it was okay, because I had questioned him about that.  I said, Are you sure this is safe?  I wasn’t completely stupid, I wanted to be sure it was safe.  He said, Oh, yes, yes, it’s perfectly safe.  Now, I’ve learned since then that he’s said the same thing to other patients: Oh, yeah, sure, it’s all safe, I checked it out.  Very same words to them.  But then I find out later, no, it was never checked out, no one ever approved it, no one ever did this before.  It was never safe.  He was just lying.  So any consent he ever got from anybody for any drugs he gave them was never informed consent.  So he’s violated the Nuremburg Code.  He’s violated the Nuremburg Code automatically by not getting informed consent, by doing illegal medical experiments on people with no informed consent.

So I’m still having trouble understanding what was it he believed was the therapeutic part of this?  You had your drugs, and you had your ‘homework’ to remember things, but what then?  What, after remembering it?  Where was the effort to try and bring you back into unity with your ‘core self’, or your ‘real personality’, or whatever is they call it in the vernacular [of Multiple Personality Disorder]?

There was no desire to help anybody.  There was only a desire to see how far you could get away with doing whatever you wanted to do.  It was treating us like white rats.  Some of the patients died.  With me, I got so completely insane, because of him.  So he had tried to have me locked up in a permanent psychiatric ward outside the city limits.  And that’s where you go when you’re like criminally insane.  He had tried to do that, but they wouldn’t take me.

How did you come to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation [FMSF]?

I was listening to the radio, and I heard that there were a couple of support group members on the radio, and they were talking about False Memory Syndrome.  It just sounded so much like what I had.  This was about a year after Colin Ross left, so… 1992.  Two years after he had left.  FMS wasn’t even formed as an idea of a syndrome until 1992, there were no support groups until 1993.  So it was ’93 when I heard the radio program.  By the time that I’d found lawyers and doctors who could explain it to me, it was four months after the statute of limitations had expired.  So it took that long for me to understand that this was what was wrong, that this was what happened to me.

It sounds like you had a falling-out with Colin Ross before you had a chance to revise your thinking about what had actually happened to you.  What was the process there?  How did you come back to reality?  What were you thinking?

I had lost my child to Child & Family Service issues – put in foster care and hidden away from me.  Hidden away from her whole family, because Colin Ross had told them our whole family was involved in satanic ritual cults, killing children.  And my parents were supposedly high priests of this murderous satanic cult.  So CFS was hiding her from the whole family.  I was desperately trying to get her back.  I was doing everything I possibly could.  I went back to University, I tried to ween myself back off of drugs.  I told Colin Ross that other doctors had told me that I was addicted to the drug he was giving me, Halcion.  He said, No.  It’s impossible.  Can’t be addicted to Halcion. I tried to get off Halcion, tried to get off Valium, best I could, all by myself without any help.  And I had a court case coming up, and I didn’t want to be under care.  I just wanted to go to court looking as fit as I possibly could.  So I told Colin Ross that I couldn’t continue with the MPD therapy because I was fighting a custody battle, and the MPD therapy was making me too sick to fight my custody battle.  And he agreed with me!  That’s basically how it came to an end:  He agreed the therapy was making me too sick to fight for my child.  He was fed up with me as a patient anyway.  I was causing him nothing but trouble.((Note: After Ross’s infuriated reply to Roma Hart’s making public her sexual assault in St. Boniface Hospital while in his care, Hart was discharged from the hospital, but continued to see Ross on an out-patient basis. It was later that Ms. Hart sought to end her MPD therapy, and Ross, leaving Manitoba, failed to refer her elsewhere for psychiatric evaluation. This should clear up confusion that might be caused by what might otherwise sound like more than one permanent break made from Ross by Roma Hart.))

So you didn’t come to a sudden realization that all this about Satanism and alien abduction was crap?  You kind of always had that feeling in the background to begin with?

Well, I had read a magazine article where a woman said she thought she was MPD but really wasn’t, it wasn’t true.  I thought, Hmm, I wonder.  I read it and threw it away.  It wasn’t something I was using as evidence.  You know, I don’t still have it.  I read it and threw it away.  So there was that little thought in my mind.  But I was still worried my parents were going to kill me.  I was still quite certain that they belonged to a satanic cult, and they were going to murder me.  So I wasn’t out of the grip of this nonsense still.  I was still very fearful.  When I was sitting in my living room, in the apartment I had downtown, if lights flashed from the traffic, and they would flash on the windows, my heart would jump because I would think it was an alien spaceship or something.  I was still completely, totally crazy.  But there was still that one ‘maybe’.  So I would go back and forth thinking, Am I?  Am I not?  Am I crazy?  Am I delusional? I was very confused.  So desperately confused.

But you eventually grew more skeptical of those claims.  Was it a slow process, or a realization?

In 1993 when I heard that radio program with the FMS support group – I contacted them, and they gave me a bunch of stuff to read.  I put it on top of my microwave.  I probably had a foot-high pile of stuff on my microwave.  I never read it.  I just put it in a pile, and I would never read it, because I was not quite sure that they weren’t a part of the satanic cult or not.  I didn’t know what was true and what was not true.  I was open-minded, but I was scared.  I was very scared.  Scared of my own shadow.

Now you work with [the FMSF], don’t you?

I do.  I do.  One of the few retractors that they have there.  Think they’ve got, maybe, a few hundred retractors.  So I’m open to anybody who’s been falsely accused, or wants to retract, or is interested at all.  I’m open to talk to anybody who wants to talk about it.

1. “The recommended dose for most adults is 0.25 milligrams (mg). In some patients, a lower dose may be prescribed and the maximum daily dose should not exceed 0.5 mg.” – From the Physician’s Desk Reference [PDR] online (http://www.pdrhealth.com/drugs/rx/rx-mono.aspx?contentFileName=Hal1192.html&contentName=Halcion&contentId=265
2. “The usual dose, depending upon severity of symptoms, is 2 milligrams to 10 milligrams 2 to 4 times daily.” -http://www.drugs.com/pdr/valium.html .
3. Correction: Dr. George Johnson wasLieutenant Governor of Manitoba, not Governor General

“Scientific research has clearly demonstrated that when one per cent of the population of a city or town practices Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation Programme, the crime rate significantly decreases. Similarly, when groups of individuals practicing Maharishi’s TM-Sidhi programme with Yogic Flying equal at least the square root of one per cent of a population, there is a significant reduction of crime and accidents, as well as an increase in stock prices, decreased pollution, decreased unemployment, and decreased hostilities between nations.”

This crime-reducing by-product of TM™ is a phenomena known as “The Maharishi Effect”. During the Summer of 1993, 4,000 faithful, trained in the peaceful art of Transcendental Meditation™, gathered in crime-ridden Washington, D.C. with a mission: to scientifically prove the Maharishi Effect. And, if you ask those minds from the prestigious Maharishi University who were responsible for the study, the experiment was a great success… A success, that is, despite the fact that “during the weeks of the experiment Washington D.C.’s weekly murder count ‘hit the highest level ever recorded.’”

So where was the success? I childishly ask in my negativity-induced ignorance.

Ah… you see, though homicides peaked in this TM™-increased field of peace, crime was in fact reduced 18 percent from what it would have been had the meditators not been present!

No doubt about it. Maharishi University’s own physicist, Dr. John Hagelin worked out all of the variables. The Maharishi Effect is proven… But I have my doubts. When I published an article questioning the validity of TM™ science, a commentator and TM™ practitioner tried to set me straight:

“[...]You get the facts all wrong because you see it through a negative belief system. Lighten up. I’ve been doing TM for years. It’s given me more happiness & energy for success in my work, gotten rid of stress that I see dragging others down & making them sick. Friends whom I’ve gotten to do TM, I’ve watched meditation change their life. It’s ridiculous to try to reason or explain the facts to people enmeshed in an unhealthy, negative mindset. This article’s not even about the research. It’s not about TM. It’s about a world view threatened by the possibility that TM really has the effects claimed for it. It’s about a rigid belief system that needs to convince itself & others that the all-positive, life-changing effects of TM are not possible, because that would mean your beliefs & your defense mechanism would collapse. TM is a totally cool, edifying experience – a fact you cannot change.”

Worse than my failure to appreciate the science of the Maharishi Effect, is the fact that I’ve dismissed out-of-hand, as absurd, TM™’s Yogic Flying – the claim that TM™ meditators may achieve levitation. “Stage One is generally associated with what would best be described as ‘hopping like a frog.’ Stage Two is flying through the air for a short time. Stage Three is complete mastery of the sky.” The very idea proved altogether too much for the defense mechanisms I’d constructed in preservation of my negative world view, and when I learned that TM™, through the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, was attempting to insert itself into public schools, I went on the offensive, publishing the following article on Examiner.com… an article that the General Counsel for Maharishi University would deem “defamatory”:

Transcendental Meditation in schools, the David Lynch program

Expel from your mind the stereotyped image of the robed, bearded yogi. Forget the worn image of the unkempt, hash-headed, lotus-seated hippy listening to sitar music in an incense-filled room behind a beaded curtain. This is not the Transcendental Meditation [TM] we are talking about. This is Science!

“Hundreds of scientific studies have been conducted on the benefits of the Transcendental Meditation program at more than 200 independent universities and research institutions worldwide in the past 35 years,” explains the TM-promoting David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace website. Among the positive side-effects of the TM program, we find: increased focus, decreased hostility, reduced anxiety, even a reduction in cardiovascular disease among practitioners.

Surely, with this in mind, no reasonable person would argue against teaching the TM method in public schools.

And this is exactly what the David Lynch Foundation – founded by the cult film director of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive – proposes: implementation of a TM teaching program “in public and private schools and in after-school programs across the U.S. and around the world, with thousands of students enjoying its benefits.”

This past April, the foundation held a large benefit concert in New York – including performances by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Ben Harper, and Moby – which, according to USA Today, raised an estimated $3 million toward funding the TM-in-schools program.

But, despite the attributed benefits and celebrity endorsements, some worry that the teaching of a TM-based program in public schools constitutes another breach across the ever-eroding church-state dividing line. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State reports, “Slowly but steadily, TM seems to be gaining a foothold in public schools across the country. The trend has alarmed some advocates of church-state separation, who point out that the practice is based in Hinduism and that the federal courts removed it from New Jersey public schools on church-state grounds in 1979.”

In regards to funding being offered by the David Lynch Foundation in support of the TM program, “Americans United is urging school officials to turn down the money, reminding educators that TM in the schools can spark litigation. In 1976, Americans United and other groups joined with Roman Catholic and Protestant parents to bring a lawsuit against the use of TM in five New Jersey public schools.” […] “A federal court struck down the TM classes in October of 1977, a decision that was affirmed by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in February of 1979…Ruling in Malnak v. Yogi, the federal appeals court declared that TM is grounded in Hinduism. Students, the court pointed out, were assigned the name of a Hindu god to chant, and even went through a type of religious initiation ceremony called a puja.”

Indeed, though the David Lynch Foundation seems keen to express that TM is just a technique, with real estate holdings, schools, and clinics—even a town, Vedic City, in Iowa—“worth more than $3 billion in the late 1990s,” TM is clearly something more. Some go so far as describe TM as “a cult that ultimately seeks to strip individuals of their ability to think and choose freely.”

Therapist John Knapp, specializing in providing help to ex-cult members and people entangled in “cultic relationships” left TM after 23 years of involvement. “I married somebody who was not involved with the group, and part of my group experience was that I was asked to lie about a number of items. And living every day with someone and having to lie to them was extremely difficult… It caused what you could call a cognitive dissonance. It really caused a bifurcation in my mind. It was really difficult to live with. And I’d also gotten very far away from my family, which is not uncommon for people who are in these kinds of [cultic] relationships. As my mother was getting older I wanted to re-establish my ties with her and the family. These kinds of things led me to begin questioning my relationship [with TM].”

Upon deciding that he would leave TM, Knapp reports that he suffered a good deal of harassing behavior from the group. “It was difficult for me, because I had believed so strongly in this group [TM]. My spiritual and emotional life was really bound up completely with this group, so when they turned on me it was very confusing and very difficult for me…”

Worse, Knapp reports negative effects derived from the meditation technique itself, from addictive behavior to increased feelings of dissociation. He claims that many clients of his that come from TM have experienced the same.

TM was founded by a man known as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1956 in India, and the revered guru himself had once been accused of using “fear and intimidation” in order to work to prevent a disciple from leaving the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. The disillusioned student, Robert Kropinski, and six other people sued Maharishi’s University for $9 million on the grounds of “fraud, neglect, and intentionally inflicting emotional damage”. Kropinski stated that none of the promised TM benefits ever surfaced during his time as a student, and he was awarded $138,000 by a Washington D.C. jury. Maharishi did not appear in court, as he was never available to receive summons.

Admittedly, all of this sounds most unpleasant, but what of the scientific data supporting theindividual benefits of TM?

There are problems with TM’s data. While the David Lynch Foundation endlessly promotes the “unique” benefits of TM, there is a conspicuous shortage of comparative analytical studies that measure TM against other relaxation techniques. Surprisingly, studies measuring the effects of a simple mid-day nap report many of the same “unique” benefits touted by TM.

In fact, a study published in the journal Science in 1976 found in studying “five experienced practitioners of Transcendental Meditation”, that they “spent appreciable parts of meditation sessions” merely napping.

And, according to a June 2007 report, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that evaluated the quality of the meditation research along an array of standard scientific criteria such as the proper use of randomization and control group techniques, “Overall, the methodological quality of both intervention and observational analytic studies on meditation practices is poor.”

According to Dr. Barry Markovsky, professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina, “Poor evidence, even in large quantities, falls short of establishing scientifically the benefits of TM.”

Worst of all, TM makes a series of staggering claims that can be charitably described as “unlikely”. Old advertisements for TM claim that practitioners of TM will develop “supernormal powers” including “supernormal sight and hearing”, invisibility, and levitation! The organization even circulated photos with pictures of lotus-seated students apparently hovering above the ground, but first-hand observations of the “levitations” left many unconvinced. The levitators never managed to levitate for very long; they never really “hovered”. In fact, they sprung up rather abruptly and dropped immediately to the ground again. Really, it was quite apparent that these transcendent hopefuls were merely hopping about from a seated position.

Nor has TM provided any legitimized demonstrations of any of its supernormal powers.

When asked about “advanced techniques” such as “yogic flight” during a press conference promoting his benefit concert, David Lynch replied with some rambling vagaries about a “field of unity”, “bliss”, and the “collective consciousness”.

The David Lynch Foundation has a stated of goal of teaching TM to one million children, which is reminiscent of another supernatural claim of TM: the Maharishi Effect, which states that a certain critical mass of TM meditators can affect change upon the material world.

While John Hagelin of the David Lynch Foundation claims that the Maharishi Effect is a scientifically proven phenomenon, there is no reliable evidence to support this. (Hagelin, it should be noted, is partially to blame for the simple-minded buffoonery of the best-selling book The Secret, which promotes a simpler version of the Maharishi Effect: The idea that one can obtain what one wants through mere wishful thinking.) Hagelin claims that in 1993 crime was reduced inWashington, DC during a two month period due to the collective effort of 4000 TM practitioners.

As Skeptico reports: “There were many problems with this experiment. One was that the murder rate rose during the period in question. Another was that Hagelin’s report stated violent crime had been reduced by 18% (in the film [What The Bleep Do We Know] he says 25%), but reduced compared with what? How did he know what the crime rate would have been without the TM? It was discovered later that all the members of the “independent scientific review board” that scrutinized the project were followers of the Maharishi. The study was pseudoscience: no double blinding, the reviewers were not independent, and the experiment has never been independently replicated. Hagelin deservedly won an Ig Nobel Prize in 1994 for this outstanding piece of work.”

James Randi, famed stage magician, author, founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation, and debunker of supernatural claims, explains that TM has “always maintained this… [the idea] that if a certain critical number of people take up TM, they will protect everybody, and the world will be perfectly safe from then on.”

Randi came to be aware of TM through his friend and fellow magician, Doug Henning. “I knew [Henning] very well as a kid, and later as a mature magician. We were always in touch…” Randi describes a deeply cultic relationship between Henning and Transcendental Meditation that would destroy Henning’s career and eventually take his life. Henning’s career as a television magician was compromised as he strove to hire only TM initiates to work on the set. According to Randi, this was not only problematic for the fact that it was difficult to find people within TM who were talented in television production, but “every so often they went in to meditation and work just stopped…” Eventually, TV executives grew weary of Henning’s professional antics.

Henning became even more deeply involved with TM following his diagnosis of liver cancer, eventually removing himself from contact with non-TM practitioners. “He gave up all medical care… the Maharishi had told him that he could recover from his liver cancer simply from meditating… he meditated himself to death.” Henning died in February of 2000.

“I’m so angry at the TM movement,” says Randi, “for having taken an innocent person.”

John Knapp feels that the drive to bring TM into more schools is destined to failure as any critical scrutiny of the organization will prove its undoing. According to him, “It’s just too damn strange…”

Relaxation – whether by crude napping, or practiced meditation – holds certain benefits that are not the monopoly of the TM brand. It is this author’s hope that schools will continue to seek techniques to aid the reduction of stress and conflict – while increasing health and focus – withoutreducing their curriculum to supernatural philosophies that cross the church-state line.

*********

Not long after posting the article above, I received an email from an Examiner editor informing me that she had received an email from William Goldstein of Maharishi University.

“I received [an] email [from William Goldstein] regarding your recent article regarding transcendental meditation and the David Lynch Foundation. As you should be aware, the Examiner.com Terms of Use and the click-through Examiners Independent Contractor Agreement and License (which you entered into with Examiner.com) prohibit the posting of content that is defamatory or factually inaccurate, as has been alleged here. Accordingly, we have temporarily removed the article from our site pending further investigation and/or modification of the article by you.”

She helpfully made my situation clear:

“Please be aware that because you are an independent contractor and your articles are selected, written, posted or controlled solely by you, you alone would be liable should either of the organizations listed below decide to bring a lawsuit for defamation or otherwise. Accordingly, we strongly encourage you to consider modifying the article[...]“

William Goldstein’s accusatory email followed:

Dear Examiner Editor in Chief

I write this letter as General Counsel for Maharishi University of Management and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace concerning the article in your online publication: http://www.examiner.com/x-20682-Boston-Underground-Examiner_y2009m10d5-Transcendental-Meditation-in-schools-the-David-Lynch-program

I will not comment on the inappropriate statements on the scientific research conducted on the TM program contained in Mr. Mesner’s article. Dr. Orme Johnson’s comments you have received reply more expertly than I could on that subject and I incorporate them [Orme Johnson posted his remarks in the public comments field following the article on Examiner.com]. But there are other false, defamatory and/or misleading statements which need to be identified as such and retracted. The failure to do so continues to damage the reputation of my client organizations which teach and promote these programs, and the individuals involved in those activities.

One court case, over thirty years ago, found a curriculum in the Science of Creative Intelligence which included the TM program to have religious overtones violative of the First Amendment. That “Malnak” case has been mischaracterized and its scope overstated by Mr. Mesner. No court at any time has ever ruled that teaching the TM program alone is impermissible, nor that the student is “assigned the name of a Hindu God to chant”.

What is even more relevant is the fact that, largely in light of the extensive research that has been done over the last thirty years on the Transcendental Meditation programs benefits in removing stress, several thousand at risk students in public schools across the United States have decided voluntarily to learn the TM program. Through sponsorships from the David Lynch Foundation, they have learned the technique in voluntary Quiet Time programs without any legal interference. The Supreme Court’s 1985 decision in Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 US 38 and its progeny have now made it clear that secular or non-secular meditation is permissible under the First Amendment in such circumstances.

Mr. Mesner then goes on to paste the horrific label of a “cult” on the TM program. Al Gore, Jerry Seinfeld and Paul McCartney would find it remarkable to be told they are members of a cult, but that does not mitigate the serious damages that such thoughtless labeling can have on the organizations which teach these programs to the public. And while Jerry may laugh at such a characterization, Al Gore may not have as well developed a sense of humor.

John Knapp, who claims to be a licensed counselor, is quoted by Mr. Mesner as saying he was lied to and harassed by the TM organization. But this is not factually supported. However, what is a fact is that Mr. Knapp has developed a niche in the field of counseling for victims of cults which he actively promotes on his websites. He has created a straw man, and now he is selling expensive medicine to him. Mr. Knapp’s professional ethical conflict of interest seems much more worthy of note than his unsupported claims of lies and harassment.

Further, Messrs.. Knapp and Mesner attempt to attribute the symptoms of mental illness to the practice of the TM program without scientific basis. This may be of great support to his cult counseling practice, but is not supported by the several hundred studies. No one claims that every person who practices the TM technique will be promptly freed of any mental distress. People who practice the TM program may indeed coincidentally suffer from such problems. What the research shows conclusively, however, is that they get noticeably and materially better through this practice — they do not get worse. If Mr. Knapp really and honestly feels otherwise, why has he not undertaken a controlled scientific study which has been published in a peer reviewed journal? In fact, all such studies of the TM program have shown that it only produces beneficial effects. Mr. Knapp’s self serving, conflict ridden unscientific anecdotes are not the evidence recognized as credible by science or his profession and claiming such is unethical and irresponsible. It is also damaging to those who teach and practice those programs and he should be held accountable for such damage. In any event, it should not be published and promoted by this publication or you are participating in this damaging process.

Mr. Mesner’s misrepresentations continue by his claim that Kropinski received a $138,000 jury verdict for claimed injuries from the TM program. What he omits to mention is that it was reversed on appeal. Kropinski v. WPEC, 853 F.2d 948 ( 1988) .

These falsehoods, defamations and omissions compel me to ask you to remove this article from your newspaper to put an end to the continuing damage its publication causes to my client.

Thank you very much for your anticipated co-operation.

William Goldstein
General Counsel,
Maharishi University of Management and
David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace

Telephone 641 472 1183
Fax 641 472 1141
email: bgoldstein@mum.edu

William Goldstein
General Counsel
Maharishi University of Management
Telephone 641 472 1183
Fax 641 472 1141
email: bgoldstein@mum.edu

*******************

And so, my article was pulled, and I was being given the opportunity to amend and correct all defamations. I re-read my work carefully….

No, no defamations there. As Examiner claimed no legal responsibility regarding the article, I decided to take the liberty of re-posting it in full, exactly as it was but with this preface:

This previously posted article has been updated with appended material following a letter received from the General Counsel for Maharishi University of Management and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace, William Goldstein, under the subject heading “Retraction of Defamatory Article”. Upon reviewing Goldstein’s criticisms, the author has decided that there are no grounds for labeling this article “defamatory”. An open reply to Goldstein’s letter follows the article below:

As promised, the updated post of the article was appended with my reply to the claim of “defamation” as follows:

On October 13 editors at Examiner received an email from William Goldstein, General Counsel for Maharishi University of Management and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace. The email’s subject heading was “Retraction of Defamatory Article”, and it ended with strong words claiming that the “falsehoods, defamations and omissions [in the article above] compel me [Goldstein] to ask you to remove this article from your newspaper to put an end to the continuing damage its publication causes to my client.”

And what were these “falsehoods, defamations and omissions”? Goldstein opens: “I will not comment on the inappropriate statements on the scientific research conducted on the TM program contained in Mr. Mesner’s article. Dr. Orme Johnson’s comments you have received reply more expertly than I could on that subject and I incorporate them.”

I had read Dr. Orme Johnson’s criticisms and found them less than compelling, some of them nonsensical. For instance, this comment – “To Knapp’s statement that TM is “too strange” for America, one has to ask, strange for whom, the narrow minded and ethnocentric? I think our nation has gotten past a lot of that.” – left me to merely wonder what in the world ethnocentricism might have to do with any of this if TM is not to be viewed as an Eastern practice rooted in Eastern beliefs and traditions?

Dr. Orme Johnson made comments suggesting that James Randi was incorrect regarding Henning’s situation: “Maharishi’s advice was always to seek medical attention when one gets sick, not “just meditate” as Randi alleges. Studies of medical care utilization that I conducted on Blue Cross statistics found that 2,000 TM subjects over a five-year period had on average 50% less hospitalization and doctors visits than the norm or matched controls, with reductions in all categories of disease.”

This comment would be laughable if the ramifications were less grave. When the criticism is that TM discouraged a sick man from seeking medical attention, the statistic of 50% less hospitalization amongst TM practitioners hardly makes that claim seem less credible. But, just the same, if Randi’s comments are “falsehoods, defamations, or omissions”, that is problem that must be taken up with James Randi. He is accurately quoted in the article above.

Likewise, the claim that TM is a “cult” is attributed, and Goldstein must take any disagreement with that label up with those who use it to describe his… “client”. In my favorite part of his email, Goldstein writes: Mr. Mesner then goes on to paste the horrific label of a “cult” on the TM program. Al Gore, Jerry Seinfeld and Paul McCartney would find it remarkable to be told they are members of a cult, but that does not mitigate the serious damages that such thoughtless labeling can have on the organizations which teach these programs to the public. And while Jerry may laugh at such a characterization, Al Gore may not have as well developed a sense of humor.

This shameless name-dropping is pointless, as it can be worked both ways. “Jerry may laugh”, and Al Gore may be a humorless bore. Or Jerry may in fact cringe in disgust if presented with the idea that TM practitioners may learn to levitate, or that the Maharishi Effect is a proven phenomena. Al Gore may laugh at such nonsense. We really don’t know, do we? Were Jerry Seinfeld, Al Gore, or Paul McCartney asked to give an opinion of my article? Is it just too remarkable to imagine that such celebrities might be involved in a “cult” or cult-based practices? Do Tom Cruise and John Travolta find it remarkable that many accuse Scientology of being a cult? For that matter, isn’t Scientology’s Dianetics “auditing” practice nothing more than a therapeutic technique? As such, perhaps it too should be welcomed into school rooms.

Goldstein goes on to question the credibility of John Knapp: “Mr. Knapp has developed a niche in the field of counseling for victims of cults which he actively promotes on his websites. He has created a straw man, and now he is selling expensive medicine to him. ”

While I’m not exactly sure what is meant by this, it seems to imply that counseling ex-TM practitioners has proven lucrative for Knapp which would also imply a consistent client base of TM disaffected. But, again, if Goldstein takes issue with what is said by Knapp, he must take it up with him. Knapp is accurately quoted in the article above.

The one helpful item mentioned in Goldstein’s email was the fact that the Kropinski finding was over-turned on appeal – though this would better have been mentioned in the comments, not in a full letter claiming “defamation”.

Most other comments regarding this article, by Dr. Orme Johnson and others, take exception to the criticisms regarding the Maharishi Effect. I have no intention of being ambiguous about this: the Maharishi Effect is not a proven phenomena. I seriously doubt it can even be considered a valid hypothesis. It’s failed hippy mysticism, and it has no place whatever in public schools.

I said it.

Go ahead and sue me.

Speaking only for myself,

Douglas Mesner

www.process.org

*********

Anticipating summons, though believing the claim of “defamation” to be entirely unfounded, I contacted organisations and institutions I felt might be of assistance should TM™ in fact attempt to sue me.

So it was that sometime in early December, somebody with copies of the Goldstein-Examiner emails posted them on Wikileaks so as to demonstrate TM™’s descent into Scientology-like litigiousness. The public posting of Goldstein’s letter further agitated the TM™ apologists. The comments on the Wiki page questioned the purpose of posting such an item. One Commenter asked, Is Wikileaks serving a noble purpose here?:

“WikiLeaks needs to carefully discern documents such as this to determine if the material actually poses a threat to “A just and corrupt free world.” If the document is benign and the legal notice by the TM people was justified because the Examiner article actually is defamatory, then WikiLeaks is just letting themselves be used for destructive purposes by self-serving people with ill intentions.

After reading the letter, and being aware beforehand of the positive nature of TM, it appears to me that WikiLeaks, in this case, is itself acting in opposition to a fair and corrupt-free world. Just because someone claims to have a “secret document” revealing unfounded threats doesn’t mean that promoting that person’s accusations is noble and progressive.

But I think you’re actually doing TM a favor by publishing the letter and showing people the rational, fact-based response of the TM organization to Mesner’s attacks, whose article in the Examiner (for anyone who actually does research or knows the facts) was replete with false accusations and defamations.

I urge WikiLeaks to consider this: If TM is actually a good thing, and the organization is actually justified in their request that Mesner adjust his article, then are you really serving a just cause to allow yourself to be instrument of further defamation?

By reading through your files on TM, one gets the impression that your organization is not neutral, fair-minded or inclined to value scientific research and objectivity, but is predisposed to accept negativity and rancorous attacks against TM just for the sake of providing more so-called “leaked material,” regardless or whether or not the “leaker’s” context and explanations are justified.

Wiley, USA”

Odd though it was that the publication of Goldstein’s letter should provoke a defensive reaction from those who claim to feel his criticisms of my article were justified, it was a different comment entirely that infuriated me and demanded my correction:

[...] I think this is a complete non-issue. There was a basis for the claim (erroneous defamatory information being posted in the article). That was then corrected and the article was reposted with the correction and no further complaint. Totally legit (as would also be the case if it happened to wikileaks or anyone else – removing false statements)

This statement was posted anonymously. Of course, I had not “corrected” the article before I had reposted it. The claim that I had done so, supposedly conceding to having posted erroneous and defamatory information made me feel… defamed as a researcher and freelance writer.

I replied under the subject heading of “Maharishi Spin”:

Amid what appears to be an attempt by TM to re-spin this story, I want to make it abundantly clear that I did not, in any way revise the article on Examiner.com – except to add a brief introduction mentioning Goldstein’s letter, and an addendum replying to that letter – before reposting the article on that site. The claim that the article was “corrected” before being re-posted is a flat lie, and I would challenge anybody saying otherwise not to do so anonymously, and cite what exact corrections are imagined to have been made. In reality, what seems to have happened is, Goldstein attempted to intimidate both me and the editors at Examiner.com with the threat of legal action on the base-less claim of defamation in hopes that we would fold and remove the article. That did not work, the article remains as is, and Goldstein’s failure to sue me since is perhaps a tacit confession that there is, in fact, no case for defamation to be made.–Douglas Mesner 20:41, 15 December 2009 (GMT)

And that’s where we stand… for now….

David Lynch by Alethea Jones

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1904334,00.html?iid=digg_share

This is all very interesting to me because I ride an electric bike and it’s made in China.

Giant Lite with Extracycle extension

I originally built this bike as a camera car. I was shooting the Marathon de Medoc in Bordeaux and wanted to shoot the host of my show in amongst the marathon runners. This is strictly forbidden for motor vehicles but my production manager talked the race organizers into allowing a bicycle on the course. So I built this Giant electric with an Xtracycle back end. The bike carried a rider, myself and all of our camera and sound gear for the whole marathon, just under 400 pounds or 200kg. I was sold. When i returned home with the bike it pretty much replaced my car and keep in mind that I live in Los Angeles. My Giant with two batteries has a range of about 60miles and a top (assisted) speed of about 28mph. It can easily carry two people and a weeks worth of groceries. The bike all in cost me around 2,500 USD. Of course the bike uses a bit of generated energy but according to what I’ve read (sorry no footnotes) it works out to over 800 mpg. If you are really industrious you could invest another $600 in a rooftop solar kit and your bike would be completely off the grid.

I find it kind of astounding that the electric bike or electric scooters haven’t become popular in North America. I think it’s partially due to the fact that electric vehicles are not considered to be a practical form of transportation here. An affordable electric car is definitely a ways off (unless you have 90k burning a hole in your pocket to buy a Tesla Roadster…drool). But here’s the thing, electric bike technology is totally capable of providing us with low cost zero emission transport right now. Especially for those of us who live in warmer climates. The only thing that’s really holding back the manufactures of e-bikes are the laws governing the bikes themselves. Most countries require that the top speed of any assisted bicycle be around 17-19mph. I think that’s ridiculous considering the fact that anyone in reasonably good shape can pedal a normal road bike a lot faster than that. Now, I’m not suggesting that legislation should allow unlicensed e-bikes an unlimited top speed, but something closer to 30 mph would be more reasonable and way more practical. That’s about as fast as your average rider would want to go on a bike anyway and is a totally reasonable speed for urban transport. Fortunately there are ways around these limitations and that’s what this article is about. Hacking the electric bike!

Disclaimer:

O.K. This is the part where I need to cover my ass. During the course of this article I may be giving you advice that would allow you to make or build your e-bike in such a way that it may go faster than your local laws allow. If you do this and have some kind of horrifying accident where you are dismembered, maimed or in anyway injured. Don’t come crying to me. Also if you are not completely comfortable on a normal bicycle, I would not recommend going this route first. Buy a nice slow stock e bike and ride it until you’re really ready to speed things up a bit.

The important thing to understand is that any bike can be made electric and it’s not a difficult process if you are using a ready made kit. I would argue that an e-bike that you construct for yourself will not only be a far superior ride in terms of stability and speed, but way cooler. Off the rack e-bikes are dork-mobiles for the most part, and those that aren’t are far too expensive for the level of performance they deliver.

O.K. Step one HACKING THE GIANT LITE

The Giant Lite was by far the best e bike built in it’s time. It still stands up pretty well next to what’s out there right now. Granted the motor at 350 watts is a bit underpowered but on the whole it’s one of the lightest and most efficient off the rack bikes that has ever been made. You can still find new ones on line and they usually about USD $1000. Which is a STEAL compared to other off the rack e-bikes bike out their today.

If you’re going to try a mod like mine try to find a step through model. The step through makes more sense if your going to extend the back end and make it a two seater. Throwing your leg over the back of a bike that’s 7 feet long isn’t so easy. Also I think the step through model is easier to find.

If you are truly in need of step by step advice on how to covert a Giant Lite to a faster viable urban transporter then send me an email and I’ll send you detailed instructions. I’m not going to post them here. I’ve had great success with this bike but I think there are better and cheaper alternatives that have developed since I built it. There are some links to said alternatives at the end of this article.

Batteries:

The Giant uses NiMh batteries and like all rechargeables, they have a finite life-span. The good news is they are easy and inexpensive to refurbish. The even better news is that when you refurbish your batteries you can buy new ones that have a higher storage capacity and will give you more range. The process of upgrading your batteries is called re-celling them. You can buy the kits on-line. The original battery packs for the Giant are around $400. The re-cell kits are half that price.

For any other kit avoid old school led acid batteries. They are cheap, but can’t be recycled and have a very poor power to weight ratio. There is a good on-line distributor for battery tech:

http://www.batteryspace.com/?SSAID=297581

I’m currently investigating LifePO4 batteries as the power source for my next bike. Lithium seems to be the way to go now.

Currently I think the best and also the easiest option is to go with a high output hub motor combined with some advanced battery technology. Just make sure you match the battery voltage to the motor your are powering. Most e-bike systems are either 24 or 36 volt technology. Hub motors can be configured to drive either the front or rear wheel and can be fitted to pretty much any standard bike.

http://www.falconev.com/E-Bikes.html

http://www.wildernessenergy.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=1

For an in-depth DIY concept and overview

http://www.electricycle.com/ebike2.htm

Dear Mr. or Miss 6,000 Year Old Earth Believer,

I’m not here to attack your religious belief system — you believe what you believe, for whatever basis, and that’s that. I’m not even here to point out that there’s supposed to be a separation between church and state in this country.

I am here, however, to say that it is one thing to stand firmly on one’s belief system, but it is a wholly other kettle of fish to deny something and still insist on using the fruits of that thing which you are denying. It would be like my having a fundamental belief that bridge trolls are responsible for creating donuts but then still driving over to Krispy Kreme to shovel their freshly made donuts into my gaping maw.

One of the more frequent tools used in judging the age of organic objects found on our planet is called “radiocarbon dating” which allows the dating of objects back about 60,000 years; the process relies upon judging the amount of a radioactive isotope of the element carbon which remains in the object and which changes over time due to radioactive decay. By your choosing to say that this form of measurement is invalid, you must also say that our understanding of radioactive decay is incorrect. If so, with regards to these other technologies which rely upon the same understanding:

• If part of your power grid is supplied by nuclear generating plants: please stop using our electricity
• The radiology facilities at the hospital: please stay broken-boned and unknowingly tumored
• The bridges and buildings whose metallurgy is verified and made stronger: please stay off, and out, of them
• Nuclear weapons: ¿pretend that all of those tests and attacks never happened?

If you also think that the universe is not billions and billions of years old, then let’s look at that. Our understanding of that age relies upon a number of things too esoteric to provide for clear cutting examples here; there is one verifying, simple, concept though: the way ‘light’ behaves. With that in mind, if you’d like to claim that we have no idea what we’re doing concerning the behaviour of light – that the distances, and therefore the time and age, which we’re looking at is mistaken calculation, then let’s look at what else you should be giving up:

• Airplanes, which rely upon GPS for navigation: please stop boarding them
• The GPS navigation systems in your cars: please go back to printed maps and driving aimlessly lost, too proud to ask for directions
• The hikes through forests and mountains relying upon hand held GPS units: please get lost with your compasses and maps
• Land line telephones, cell phones, the internet, …, basically all modern forms of telecommunication (which are relying both on satellite communication and fiber optics): please stop using them
• Modern stores, UPS/FedEx/DHL/the post office, and any other place using laser barcode readers: please limit your shopping to farmers markets and your shipments to 19th century implements

In conclusion, this isn’t my viewpoint, this is simply the facts being laid out in a manner which demonstrates the fragile house of cards in which you live. I can see how you might not like that, but at the end of the day, and this is the beauty of science, no amount of legislation will change what is a provable fact regardless of what county, state, or country you live in.

Sincerely,
Loki der Quaeler

The following book review, originally published in Skeptic Magazine volume 14, no. 2, gives my rather unflattering overview of the assertions made in The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary. The book distresses me in that I see in it an early Creationist assault on the Cognitive Sciences, and the formation of the false scientific arguments that may be brought to the stem cell debate in years to come. After the review was published, I found myself wondering what the authors of the book must have thought of my review – if they had read it at all. I wondered if they would be able to rebut my dissection of their work. It was my feeling that the questions I had posed would have to be confronted if anybody was to take their “evidence” seriously at all. With that in mind, I contacted co-author Denyse O’Leary by email and asked that she review my review and, if she would be so kind, explain to me where I might have gone wrong. She agreed to do so once the review was posted online. Her reply follows my review below…

The Ghost In The Machine

The Spiritual Brain by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary reviewed by Doug Mesner

Even before we reach the Table of Contents, the book has run afoul of reason, casting serious doubts upon the intellectual honesty of its authors. The first sentence on the inside flap of the dust-jacket synopsis asks “Do religious experiences come from God, or are they merely the random firing of neurons in the brain?” Of course, confined strictly between the two options, one may even feel compelled to choose the former – but clearly the cards have been stacked. That neurons must fire in patterns seems intuitive. But to present this as necessarily the product of God’s divine will demands quite a bit of justification. The question is also eerily similar to the equally misrepresentative question often posed by Intelligent Design advocates, “Was life designed, or is it the product of mere random chance?” Available biographical information about the authors reveals this similarity as no coincidence…

The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul was co-authored by neuroscientist Mario Beauregard – whose Templeton Foundation-funded research provides what very little original content the book has to offer – and journalist Denyse O’Leary, author of an Intelligent Design pseudoscience book titled By Design or By Chance? The Growing Controversy on the Origins of Life in the Universe. Indeed, The Spiritual Brain proves to be little more than a remanufacturing of Creationist arguments applied to the Cognitive Sciences.

One might reasonably expect that a book that claims to give evidence for the existence of the “soul” would at least give the reader the benefit of defining “soul” at the very outset. Why – it has been asked – if there is some angelic vapor that drives a living being, provides character, morality, and consciousness, would God have equipped us with burdensome, fragile, and expensive (in biological terms) organs such as brains? Where does the brain end and the soul begin? If the brain provides robotic function, and the soul provides “consciousness”, what are we to make of cases of extreme character change due to neurological disorder or brain injury?

The book begins with no such definition, nor with any overview of its evidence, nor a clear interpretation of the authors’ findings. It begins instead with a vitriolic attack on what the authors refer to as “materialist science”; being quite simply a euphemism for that damnable brand of elitist science that insists upon testable, empirical data.

According to the authors, an unwillingness to accept causes outside the physical world has crippled progress in the field of neuroscience. The reader is belabored with full-paragraph quotations from the leading minds in the Cognitive Sciences meant to demonstrate the magnitude of this bias. Current theories are misrepresented, ridiculously simplified and mocked. But, while the authors effectively prove that great minds have shown a near unanimous unwillingness to accept supernatural theories, they entirely fail to demonstrate how this has hindered progress. Quite the contrary. After pressing through bloated pages of rambling anti-materialist drivel, the reader will likely become solidly convinced that the practice of “nonmaterialist science” as advocated by the authors could itself only serve to end scientific progress. According to the authors, this magical science “is not compelled to reject, deny, explain away, or treat as problems all evidence that defies materialism.” It is quite plain that, instead of seeking explanations for the unexpected or unknown, the nonmaterialist scientist would be perfectly at liberty to “explain” anomalous data as the mysterious workings of God.

Those readers who are convinced by the arguments exposing the follies of evidence-based science may find the presentation of evidence for the soul now entirely needless. However, the “evidence” is sparse enough that converts may immediately practice their newfound powers of credulity.

The primary data put forward as evidence for the soul regards mystical experiences and the profound life-changing effects such experiences have. The authors seem to feel that mystical experiences are indicative of entirely real spiritual contact with God Almighty Himself, and scoff at the idea that these perceptions are derived merely from an altered state of mind. “[T]he fact that mystical experiences and states may have identifiable neural correlates [...] has typically been interpreted by journalists as suggesting that the experiences are somehow a delusion. In itself, that is a confused idea, equivalent to assuming that if hitting a home run has identifiable neural correlates, the home run is a delusion.”

Author Mario Beauregard ran a study on Carmelite nuns, who “live a life of silent prayer”. These nuns report that they enter a “mystical state” that they find difficult to describe. “[T]hey felt the presence of God, his unconditional and infinite love [...]”

But this is precisely what any scientist might expect of a Christian sect of meditators attempting communion with God. Meditators of another religion would surely interpret their experience in their own spiritual frame-work. The authors mention Buddhist meditators, but fail to give an account of their interpretation of the Religious Experience: “The scope of the present book does not permit a wide-ranging assessment of all types of contemplative states, so we will consider only the study of the Franciscan nuns.”

In fact, cognitive scientists don’t shy away from the study of mystical experiences, nor would most deny that these experiences do have the ability to change lives. But the fact that these experiences occur provides no evidence for the existence of the soul or an outer “spiritual reality”. Because the Franciscan nuns interpret this as a communion with God doesn’t mean that we should accept this uncritically.

There is a rare neurological disorder (Capgras’ syndrome) in which the afflicted are capable of recognizing the faces of loved ones, but feel that these people have been replaced with an imposter. Would Beauregard have us believe that this is because exact human replica imposters delight in annoying perceptive victims of particular types of brain lesions, or would he see these unique conditions of the brain as having manufactured this perception? The former would be just as scientifically valid as his assertion that spiritual experiences are provoked by a spiritual world.

Curiously absent from this book is any mention of mystical experiences achieved by means of psychedelic drug usage. A recent study (performed at Johns Hopkins University under neuroscientist Roland Griffiths) involving the inducement of mystical experiences by means of psilocybin (the psychoactive component in “magic” mushrooms) produced a report titled Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. The report concludes, “When administered under supportive conditions, psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences.” If mystical experiences induced by heathen drugs are somehow to be distinguished from mystical experiences induced “naturally” by prayer or contemplation, Beauregard has failed to demonstrate this.

The authors, to their credit, actually do admit that there is no proof of a spirit world to be gleaned from the mystical experience: “Do our findings prove that mystics contact a power outside themselves? No, because there is no way to prove or disprove that from one side only.”

Research of the mystical experience as experienced by the Carmelite nuns was the only original data provided in this book, and it admittedly proves nothing.

For reasons unclear, the book references the well-known placebo effect as some type of evidence for the soul. The ultimate message in this bizarre placebo digression seems to be, “faith matters”, as belief itself has yielded tangible benefits. Equally perplexing is the handling of the question of Free Will, wherein the authors seem to mistake consciousness and self-control for Free Will. The most cursory perusal of available literature on the topic could have served to correct them.

In citing Near Death (NDE) and Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE) as evidence for the soul, the authors again fail to make mention of certain data that seem to contradict their conclusions. One relevant experiment involved subjects whose brains were electrically stimulated in the right temporal region, thus causing them to experience full blown Out-of-Body perception. If Out-of-Body experiences can be electrically induced, where does this leave the idea that such experiences are caused by supernatural spiritual forces?

Near Death Experiences are handled no better. Here again the authors are remiss in their research. Omitted is any mention of NDEs induced by the drug ketamine, or by rapid acceleration, in subjects who are not in fact dead, or in serious risk of dying. Instead, the unscientific supporting “evidence” is anecdotal.

Rarely, a “science” book that attempts to justify supernaturalism holds a certain entertainment value in its far-flung contortions of logic as it attempts to explain away contradictory evidence. As The Spiritual Brain merely ignored data that troubled its thesis, we’re generally denied any such entertainment here. Searching for some redeeming quality, we might be amused at the book’s tone as it oscillates from indignant confidence to near-resignation, confessing that the soul’s existence can not be proven. It’s the similar to the perverse entertainment one might find in witnessing a lunatic street-preacher who, while engaged in solo argument… finds that he is losing.

Denyse O’Leary replies:

Doug Mesner writes asking me to respond to a review of The Spiritual Brain which he published in Skeptic Magazine, and he has now helpfully made the review available on line.

Read Ms. O’Leary’s full reply here:

http://mindfulhack.blogspot.com/2009/04/skeptics-review-of-spiritual-brain.html

Not to waste anybody’s valuable time with a reply to a rebuttal that was meant to end a long unhelpful dialogue, but I feel I must justify my reference to the stem cell debate that so puzzled poor Ms. O’Leary (a reference that I must point out was not made in the review at all, but rather in the introduction to the review on this site).

As stem cells clearly lack a nervous system, the idea of their personhood or “dignity” (as some theologians are fond of calling it) seems reliant upon the idea of a “soul” having been assigned to the life-to-be in advance of their development from the embryonic.  That this would elude Ms. O’Leary of all people seems hardly credible to me.  This possible anti-stem cell research consequence of a belief in the immortal soul is worth mentioning to show why this issue is worth arguing at all.  There is more at stake here than Ms. O’Leary’s faith.  If there weren’t, I should hardly feel good about attacking that which gives some well-meaning people solace.

Also incredible to me is the idea that she doesn’t find my skeptical materialism worth arguing, as it is “dead in the water”.  A perusal of her blog will show you that she has written attack after attack against skeptical materialism – in fact, such arguments are the very themes of her numerous blogs.  To imagine that theological supernaturalism has long since replaced materialism in the realm of scientific inquiry (whatever that would really mean) is delusional at best.  I feel that I have done my best to expose the flaws of The Spiritual Brain, and the author’s refusal to address my charges lead me to believe that she simply can’t. I suspect her decision to bow out of the debate is nothing more than a concession of defeat…

This may read as nonsense given the seemingly endless stream of news items in which guy from faith A attempts to kill person from faith B and recent quasi-scrutiny of the belief system birthed by that science fiction author; if so, suspend your disbelief for a moment. Tolerance of religious belief has causally allowed a regular discouragement of scientific inquiry, but what is more damaging than that is that it has allowed illogical ‘explanations’ of real world phenomena to gain social validity. I suggest that by allowing one large portion of people’s lives, of their tenets, to slide by completely unquestioned despite obvious flaws and contradictions, an underlying message of complacency towards the ‘okay-ness’ of irrational and unsupported policy claims is being allowed to permeate portions of society in which it has no place being.

As i was walking around Rome several weeks ago, it was impossible to dodge the overarching influence of Christianity which still shadows life there: from roving small packs of American priests in their 20s on study, to the density of churches, to, of course, the Vatican itself. While i don’t expect the wide spread conversion of churches to Starbucks, it is saddening to note that nearing the end of 2008, with centuries of inquiry and discovery under our collective human belt, with rapid information dissemination at our fingertips, with an increasingly egalitarian view onto our peers, that we can still find such large subscriptions to religious faith.

As is evidenced by published poll data, and anecdotally noted by the turn out at public celebrations of religious events, the vast majority of the human race¹ turn towards religious doctrine for their moral guidance and cosmological explanation. While surveying in the US did appear to give evidence to a shade of a down tick in religious adherence from 1990 through 2000², there was an apparent bounce-back (though not to 1990 rates) reported by 2008.³ Outside the US, the data is not very available (or, at least, very locatable) on a more global scale; though with the world becoming more economically and politically instable⁴ over the past decade, one can imagine an increasing trend in faith during this time.⁵

Confusing this situation even more: during this same recent era, the ability to communicate information across geographically separated communities has become ever easier. This is perplexing since, as communication of information has become increasingly easy, and more widespread, one would think that it must take more effort to actively discount and screen out ideas contrary to one’s personal religious beliefs. Unfortunately, this sort of willful ignorance cannot be easily grouped under the established correlation between poor education and religious belief.⁶ Since the majority of the population succumbs to some flavor of superstitious belief system, what we often see as a reluctance to pose rational questions on the belief systems of others could likely be the fear that their own fragile framework could not withstand a similar scrutiny.

Key to both illusionary magic tricks and religious indoctrination: the participation of two parties is required — someone willing to be fooled, and someone willing to fool. While it is more difficult to see the motivations behind those willing to be duped, it’s not hard at all to see the roots of interest in an established belief system’s discouragement, or forbidding, of rational inquiry into an area which it has already claimed to be able to define through divine insight. No one wants to look like an ass, especially an organization which believes they are able to steer one’s eternal existence; so whether it’s an earth-centric view of the universe, a six day formation of all the universe, or whatever, once the guardians of the belief system have stated X as fact, it is in their interest to discourage examination of X.⁷
The Judeo-Christian belief system carries an extra weapon for this discouragement: in their mythology, the cause of their banishment from an idyllic eden life is the very process of questioning — the search for knowledge, symbolically embodied in that whole serpent-apple routine; to Christians, it is the original, the first, sin.⁸

Once we, as societies, kowtow — giving power to religious ideals by accepting them to be a coherent piece of the fabric of an individual — then it greatly hinders the ability for remotely rational dialogue to enter the equation when a belief system jumps from somewhat loony⁹ to dangerously-and-completely-absent-from-reality loony¹⁰. If we cannot consistently and regularly apply rational scrutiny to matters impacting daily human existence, then there is muted value in those times that we can do it at all.
It is of cold comfort that, for example, sanity finally regained control of the Kansas School Board when the real problem is the large step backwards taken due a fundamental Christian worldview being given such validity within society that a subculture believed it to be something it wasn’t, something it couldn’t be.

Truly, not everything can be presently answered by scientific inquiry and research — and it is completely plausible that it will never entirely be able to be answered — but it is certain that when people are allowed to defer to ritual and willful blindness then inquiry and research is stunted at best, and, at worst, it is prevented outright. Especially in these times in which there is a rash of bad events arising partially from our inability to model a large system¹¹ and partially from our inability to engineer new production solutions¹², it is important that we turn our minds outward with vigilance to ask coherent and decomposing questions, not turn our minds inward to take refuge in constructed fantasy.

As a postscript: it should be noted that, while i am mentioning Christianity in this article, there is no reason this complaint does not apply to all faith based systems (including those ‘alternative’ types — the ‘magick’ spectrum, the wiccan variants, …): they all have, as their basis, a kernel framework of unverifiable supposition over which further ideas, also unverifiable, are added or inferred to form a body of ‘laws’ and a cosmology.¹³

1. pie charted for your visual consumption
2. for two frequently referenced sources, there are the ARDA studies and the 2001 ARIS study
3. the Boston Globe had a decent summary
4. including the re-inventing of societies previously dominated by atheism-enforcing governments
5. … given the indications that humans, in a perceived crisis do turn to religion. Anecdotal evidence abounds through Google – here is one of the more recent picks of the litter
6. … those nations which do have less resources with which to educate their population actually do have a more ‘religious’ population (with the United States being the anomalous, and embarrassing, data point in that set) — PewResearchCenter Global Attitudes Project study in 2002.
7. especially when the synthesized ‘fact’ is not based on fact at all
8. think briefly what it means to have a system in which this is the core principle describing the cause for a adherent’s lot in life. ‘you could have had an amazingly paradisiacal life, had only your ancestors not been inquisitive’
9. like “there exists exactly one omnipotent being who watches over everything in the universe”
10. like “there are young children in Nigeria who are actually witches, and whose evil magic is responsible for poor fishing harvests (and not the oil industries dumping regulation-free into the waterways)”
11. in this case an economic system
12. for example a new economically and environmentally sound energy generation source
13. as opposed to something like the field of study loosely termed ‘Physics’, which has a kernel framework of verifiable conjecture from and over which further ideas (including some thought to be unverifiable as portended in certain facets of ‘string theory’) are derived