It is a flat-out myth that people can't lie under hypnosis. They can and they will — if they think that's what the hypnotist wants them to do, or if they themselves want to do it.

When I got a more careful look at the study I had read about in Science News, I found that the questions asked were intentionally leading ones, specifically designed to evoke abduction memories. This study had as its purpose to prove that anybody can be induced to relate an abduction experience under hypnosis if he or she is asked questions designed to suggest that the hypnotist wanted him or her to relate such an experience.

Well, there was no chance at all that Dr. Klein was going to do that. This can easily be confirmed by the reader, as all the transcripts of my hypnosis sessions are verbatim. And I was very much hoping that the process would dispel the whole notion of the visitors and prove that — despite appearances — the experience had been a complicated series of misperceptions.

Still, the study illustrated a very good point and revealed a fundamental difficulty even with serious and competent efforts to use hypnosis in dealing with this sort of material.

We just don't know enough about hypnosis to call it a completely trustworthy scientific toot in a situation like this. While Don Klein certainly didn't ask provocative questions, there is always the possibility that I was unconsciously eager to comply with an outcome that I might secretly have longed for. I might wont powerful visitors to appear, to save a world that I'm pretty sure is in serious trouble. I'd spent the past three years working on books about nuclear war and environmental collapse. I knew full well that we are going to have a really rough time in the next fifty years. Maybe the idea of visitors coming along and saving our necks was more appealing to me than I might consciously have wished to admit. Maybe I hid my desperation from myself in order to live and raise a child with anything like a happy heart.

What I can say in favor of these transcripts is that they represent the response of an honest man to the efforts of a recognized expert in the field of medical hypnosis.