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A horrible mixed metaphor, but it gets the idea across. Those of you in your 20's (or younger) likely have never heard of Satanic ritual abuse, but it was all the rage back in the 1980's. Apparently there was an uber-secret, underground organization of thousands of Satanist covens indulging in breeding babies off the books, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of them in increasingly bizarre fashions. Innocent children were being led into horrible peril, being surreptitiously fed the flesh of sacrificed victims, coerced into performing the sacrifices (blindfolded and being told they're cutting a cake when actually they're hacking up a baby), and forced into all sorts of ritualized sexual abuse.
Experts gave seminars to many police departments on how to recognize the signs of Satanic ritual abuse, and made the rounds of popular talk shows (Oprah, for instance). Memoirs were published by escapees from this network, detailing the crimes (though oddly not identifying the cultists). Witnesses were found, arrests were made, trails held and the convicted were incarcerated for decades.
The only trouble is, there was no actual evidence of a Satanic network, nor for the vast majority of crimes that had been prosecuted. Witnesses had been coerced and browbeaten until they "remembered" what prosecutors wanted to hear. Years later, many of those witnesses admitted under oath that their previous testimony had all been fabricated. Most of the convictions were overturned, some with scathing comments from the appellate judges on how badly mismanaged and delusional the original prosecutions had been. The "experts" were shown to be no better than snake-oil salesmen, profiting off a fantasy - though some of them still do so to this day. One such expert claims to be an ex-(baby-sacrificing)Satanist, an ex-Mason, an ex-High Priest of four different Wiccan organizations, an ex-Catholic priest, an ex-Gnostic bishop, an ex-Mormon, an ex-vampire, an ex-D&D player and an alien abductee. He still does paid gigs talking to law enforcement organizations about recognizing dangerous occult rituals.
That's the rub - despite being throughly discredited, the secret Satanic underground myth is still with us, and seems to be gaining traction again.
Experts gave seminars to many police departments on how to recognize the signs of Satanic ritual abuse, and made the rounds of popular talk shows (Oprah, for instance). Memoirs were published by escapees from this network, detailing the crimes (though oddly not identifying the cultists). Witnesses were found, arrests were made, trails held and the convicted were incarcerated for decades.
The only trouble is, there was no actual evidence of a Satanic network, nor for the vast majority of crimes that had been prosecuted. Witnesses had been coerced and browbeaten until they "remembered" what prosecutors wanted to hear. Years later, many of those witnesses admitted under oath that their previous testimony had all been fabricated. Most of the convictions were overturned, some with scathing comments from the appellate judges on how badly mismanaged and delusional the original prosecutions had been. The "experts" were shown to be no better than snake-oil salesmen, profiting off a fantasy - though some of them still do so to this day. One such expert claims to be an ex-(baby-sacrificing)Satanist, an ex-Mason, an ex-High Priest of four different Wiccan organizations, an ex-Catholic priest, an ex-Gnostic bishop, an ex-Mormon, an ex-vampire, an ex-D&D player and an alien abductee. He still does paid gigs talking to law enforcement organizations about recognizing dangerous occult rituals.
That's the rub - despite being throughly discredited, the secret Satanic underground myth is still with us, and seems to be gaining traction again.
