In my ongoing research and practice of past life explorations, I keep coming back to the subject of hypnosis, and I vacillate on whether it is a benevolent or manipulative process. My EFT teacher, the late Ted Robinson, was one of the most respected hypnosis teachers and practitioners in the country, so I have been reluctant to be critical of hypnosis in the big picture while having serious doubts about its effectiveness as a tool for accessing past lives. I am reading Michael Newton’s handbook for what he calls “Hypnotherapy of Spiritual Regression” and have been extremely distressed by his references to an “authoritarian” approach in conducting between lives sessions. And along comes the 2nd season of “Hellier” from the ghost hunting group headed by Greg and Dana Newkirk. In the show, which is available on Amazon Prime, the team takes a left turn from investigating the goblins that started their adventure, and veer in to a misadventure using a hypnotist to induce an alien abduction in a willing participant who is visibly traumatized by the procedure.
Greg Newkirk in an interview by Tim Binnall:
When we did this experiment, we were trying to get abducted by aliens. When we couldn’t get abducted by aliens the old-fashioned way, I called my friend Lonnie, who’s a hypnotist, and I said, “Hey, Do you think its possible to do the reverse of a regression hypnosis session, and plant an idea of an alien abduction in someone’s head.”
The filmmakers obviously knew this was controversial , because they included an interview with a researcher who is close to the case, Allen Greenfield, and he informs them on camera that this was “unethical”. This was discussed by Newkirk on the excellent “Binall of America” podcast* where host Tim Binnall refers to a guy in Twitter who calls them out for this ethical lapse. (That guy was me, and in a through the looking glass moment, I heard it while I was driving and listening to the podcast.) My dissatisfaction with their dismissal of this by saying the guy was a willing participant and wasn’t really hurt pales next to a much larger concern.
The facts are these: A certified professional hypnotist, Lonnie Scott**, who also bills himself as a “Trainer (This guy is training newbies?!) and occultist” is filmed hypnotizing a willing participant into believing AND EXPERIENCING an alien abduction which leaves him shaken and visibly distressed. The session was only 20 minutes but the participant believed he had 4 days of experiences. This event took place in 2012, and when he was interviewed by Newkirk years later:
…he didn’t remember anything about the experience at all …But not only did he have a lot of anxiety thinking about the experience, he believes 100% in extraterrestrials and that they might be visiting us, and he believes in hypnosis now. So it changed him, fundamentally…
My first reaction was that this was some seriously messed up MKUltra craziness. Newkirk explained that the hypnotist had reservations about the procedure but describes his thinking as:
“I think we can illustrate a point about how easily these types of things are implanted in people’s heads AND WHY PEOPLE PROBABLY SHOULDN’T DO REGRESSION so let’s give it a shot. “ (emphasis mine)
The filmed event in Hellier is included in a 10 episode 2nd season of a show available to Amazon’s Prime Video audience, potentially seen by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. Unintentionally, while starting their search for a Kentucky goblin, this 20-minute filmed session establishes that an unethical hypnotist can induce memories of an alien abduction in a willing subject, calling into question ALL of the data from hypnotic regression, the most commonly used method of memory retrieval in contact and abduction cases. Yes, there are researchers, including Rey Hernandez and Jaques Vallee, who questioned the use of hypnosis and avoid including this data. But in the vast majority of cases, including Betty and Barney Hill’s abduction which launched the modern contact era, the memories are recovered/uncovered via hypnosis. Even the excellent “Witness to Another World” documentary utilizes a hypnotic process to recover Juan Perez’s memories of his time aboard a spacecraft and retrieved Juan’s memories of his grandfather’s appearance.
What does this have to do with past life explorations? I avoid the term “past life regression” because that specifically refers to the hypnotic process of going backwards in time though this life and into a past life, but that is the public perception of this work and what clients most often ask about when contacting me. My work and over 200 sessions in the past 3 years have established that we no longer need hypnosis to access this information. William & Diane Swygard, Morris Netherton and Roger Woolger all accomplished their past lives work without hypnosis over the last 50 years. I am increasingly coming to the opinion that hypnosis is a powerful behavioral changing technology, but I question its validity as a device to retrieve memories from beneath the surface of the conscious mind. I am actively seeking an interview with an experienced, ethical hypnotist who can explain to me how this can be done effectively and without manipulation, emotional or psychic.
*http://www.binnallofamerica.com/boaa121519.html
**From his website -http://mattoonhypnosis.com, “Certified Professional Hypnotist affiliated with the International Certification Board of Clinical Hypnosis”
PS - Then this article from the Intercept found me, referencing actual MKUltra experiments with hypnosis going back to the 1950’s:
In 1956, West* reported back to the CIA that the experiments he’d begun in 1953 had at last come to fruition. In a 1956 paper titled “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” he claimed to have achieved the impossible: He knew how to replace “true memories” with “false ones” in human beings without their knowledge. Without detailing specific incidents, he put it in layman’s terms: “It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.”
**Dr. Louis Jolyon West, the head of psychiatric services at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas
https://theintercept.com/2019/11/24/cia-mkultra-louis-jolyon-west/
As the current meme says, PROVE ME WRONG.