Episode 141: The Philadelphia Experiment — Did the US Navy Make a Warship Invisible?

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Episode 141: The Satanic Panic — When America Saw the Devil Everywhere

In 1983, a mother in Manhattan Beach, California, reported to police that her son had been sexually abused at the McMartin Preschool by a teacher named Raymond Buckey. The report triggered an investigation that would grow into one of the most extraordinary episodes in American legal history. By the time the McMartin trial concluded in 1990 — after more than six years, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history — no one had been convicted. The charges, which had expanded to include hundreds of counts against seven defendants, including satanic rituals, animal sacrifice, and abuse in secret tunnels beneath the school, rested almost entirely on the testimony of children whose accounts had been shaped by leading interview techniques that told them what had happened rather than asking what they remembered. The children said what the interviewers wanted them to say. No physical evidence of tunnels, abuse, or ritual activity was ever found. And yet by the end of the 1980s, hundreds of similar cases had erupted across the United States and, to a lesser extent, in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. The Satanic Panic had consumed the decade.

In this episode of The Conspiracy Theory Analyst, we examine the Satanic Panic — what triggered it, why it spread so rapidly, what the psychological and social conditions were that made hundreds of thousands of people believe that networks of Satanists were systematically abusing children in day care centres across the Western world, and what the collapse of those prosecutions tells us about the relationship between fear, suggestion, and what we call evidence.

The Satanic Panic did not emerge from nowhere. It had several preconditions. The mass entry of women into the workforce in the 1970s had created a rapid expansion of day care, which generated anxiety in a culture that had not yet culturally processed the change. Michelle Remembers, a 1980 book by a psychiatrist and his patient claiming to document childhood memories of Satanic abuse recovered through therapy, established a template that was replicated nationally. The recovered memory movement — the belief, widespread in therapeutic communities of the 1980s, that traumatic memories could be repressed and recovered intact through hypnosis or therapy — provided the mechanism by which adults came to "remember" abuse that had not occurred, and by which children came to describe abuse they had not experienced.

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