“Witch Hunters” Manual

Book Cover

More than 500 years ago Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger wrote and published the Malleus Maleficarum which became the most popular manual for the ferreting out and prosecution of witches during Europe’s Witchcraze. During the Witchcraze in Europe at least 100,000 and possibly more than 200,000 alleged witches were killed. The craze possessed most of Europe and brought in its wake untold misery.1

During the Witchcraze legions of Witch hunters went on their task of ferreting out and hunting witches and exposing the great conspiracy to subvert and destroy Christianity.

These Witch hunters wrote tome after tome describing the vast evidence that existed for the great Witch / Satanic conspiracy. They fully and candidly admitted that the evidence needed to be carefully vetted, that there was indeed exaggeration, confabulation and plain lunacy involved but the stories were still had a substratum of real fact that could not be wished away by naysayers who were too skeptical of the massive evidence. The Witch hunters admitted that torture could lead to exaggerated evidence and so could leading questions but in the end the stories were basically believable. And why were they believable?

1, The stories were consistent and supported each other. People in all sorts of walks of life, in different countries, at different times all reported similar stories. This being the case it is clear that they must be describing the same thing. And so the basic story must be objectively real.

2, The emotions that people felt when describing the stories of demon possession and the Black Mass could not but indicate that they genuinely believe the stories to be genuine. For the emotional state of the witnesses and people prosecuted indicate that the stories are genuine and that they are not making it up.

3, The stories told were so terrible and painful that they must be true because who would make up such painful stuff and believe it if it wasn’t true?

4, Many people have voluntarily come forward without torture etc., and voluntarily confessed to taking part in the Black Mass and other Witch rites. Why would they do so given that the penalties, were imprisonment and death if the stories weren’t true. After all who would voluntarily confess to such practices when the penalties were so extreme. So the stories must be basically true.

5. Even accepting that is a lot of nonsense involved, that people make stuff up or are deluded there are just so many of these stories that you just cannot dismiss them all. After all only a small fraction of them need to be true for the idea of the Witch conspiracy to be true. And given the vast number of stories some of them must be true. After all you can’t have smoke without fire.

6, The great majority of those professing to be Witches and to have participated in things like the Black Mass were ordinary, quite sane individuals who could not for a moment have been prey to delusions or insanity. Further some of these people had gone to the authorities and voluntarily confessed to participation. So the argument that coercion played a role must be dismissed. So given that these people were not delusional we must credit that the basis of their stories is factually accurate at a minimum.

7, The Witch hunters carefully and diligently sort through the stories, quite aware that people could be deluded and making stuff up. Further that they were aware of the effects of leading questions and the nature of confabulation and distortion. By carefully analyzing evidence and weighing it against other testimony / evidence they would come to an approximation of the truth that the Witch conspiracy was real. This of course was from looking at the evidence as a whole.2

Thus the Witch hunters accused their critics of being irrational, of ignoring the abundant irrefutable evidence of the great witch conspiracy. They argued that there was a massive conspiracy by an organization, spread throughout Europe, of Satanic covens who were working tirelessly to bring about the destruction of Christendom. The witches in each coven would fly in the middle of the night to Black Masses or Sabbats where they would receive instructions from and worship Satan. There they would participate in loathsome rites and engage in sexual activities with Demons and / or each other. They would be impregnated and give birth to demons and / or babies bred for sacrifice to Satan. Satan and his demons would leave special witches marks on them that would serve demonic purposes, like a special mole, or discolouration etc.3

This massive conspiracy was of course shown to exist by a massive body of consistent, believable, non-coerced evidence. The result is that even if you dismissed most of it has delusional and the ravings of insane people there was still a large amount of sane believable evidence in the records of the Witch hunters.   

Of course it turned out that the whole thing was a delusion; that the great Witch conspiracy was a fantasy created and then reinforced in the minds of the Witch hunters. In other words the whole thing was a crock of shit that sadly cost, probably over 100,000 people their lives in Europe.

We like to pride ourselves on being so much less gullible than our ancestors and pat ourselves on the back for it. Well a bit of humility is in order. We recently had in parts of the West a re-occurrence of the old Witchcraze antics in the form of several dozen Satanic Ritual abuse absurdities for one thing.4 However here I would just like to briefly touch on a book about a recent craze that bears unpleasant similarities to the Witchcraze. I am referring to the Alien Abduction craze and perhaps the most paranoid book it has generated The Threat.4

That the publishers should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for publishing this drek is of course totally obvious but still the book contains much that is of interest in terms of the surrender to idiot notions of secret conspiracies and “Aliens”.

The author was a Prof. of History at Temple University and his speciality was Twentieth Century American History and Culture. Sadly it was not European history and culture of the seventieth century otherwise the rather painfully obvious parallels with the Witchcraze would have been obvious. Also clear is that the author is totally out of his depth.5

Now Alien Abduction is one of those ideas which are self-refuting. For merely to describe an Alien Abduction is to refute it. The entire idea collapses on its own intrinsic absurdities. What is however fascinating is how Prof. Jacobs recapitulates the delusions of the Witch hunters and  thus gives credence to absurdities.

Thus Prof. Jacobs acknowledges that the idea is far-fetched and absurd but that the evidence is just too compelling and consistent; too many people report the same things and thus witness testimony supports the truth of Alien Abduction.

Prof. Jacobs states that at first he was very skeptical of the Alien Abduction story but that the sheer number of cases and the consistency of the stories compelled belief.

As mentioned above like the Witch hunters Prof. Jacobs claimed that care must be taken to evaluate the evidence, that fantasy and confabulation do take place but that underneath it all was a hard substratum of fact. Thus we get Jacobs saying:

I conducted my first hypnotic regression in August 1986. By 1992 I had conducted more than three hundred hypnotic regressions and had discovered that analyzing abductee accounts was not easy. Asking the right questions and separating reality from fantasy was difficult and even treacherous; false memories and confabulation could lead researchers and abductees into a never-never land of wishful thinking and fantasy.6

Thus Prof. Jacobs argues that he is a careful researcher and that he took care to avoid confabulation and fantasy. Further that he is aware the hypnotic regression can lead to fantasy but if one takes care that will be avoided.

Of course what is interesting is that the “proof” that Jacob’s seeks to support his fantasy is not physical evidence that supports the Alien Abduction evidence but merely other witness testimony. In fact Prof. Jacobs, just like the Witch hunters dismisses the need for other evidence on the grounds that the Aliens are so powerful they destroy it and further that the myriad number of witness statements obtained support the Alien Abduction theory.

That Prof. Jacobs’s claims of early skepticism are overdrawn is perhaps strongly indicated by the following statement in the book:

As if these issues were not complex enough, until recently I did not have even provisional answers to the most important questions: What is the purpose of the breeding program? What constitutes alien authority and society? Why are they operating in secrecy? What is the magnitude of the abduction program? What is the purpose of hybridization? For the first twenty years of my research, I thought that we would never have the answers to the fundamental questions of alien motivation and intentions. All that has changed now. In the past ten years, I have gathered information that I feel certain answers these questions satisfactorily.7

I merely note that this means that Prof. Jacobs had been a full on believer in the reality of Alien Abductions since at least 1979. (The Book The Threat was published in 1999.) His alleged phase has a skeptic seems to have been very brief.

Has mentioned above Prof. Jacobs claims prudence and awareness of such things has sleep paralysis, and false memory but rejects them on the ground that the phenomena do no correspond to what happens in Alien Abductions.

Thus we get the following totally gob smacking story from Prof. Jacobs:

1. In contrast to victims of false memory syndrome, abductees do not recount only childhood experiences. They do, of course, recall abduction events during childhood, because the abduction phenomenon begins in childhood, but they also recall abduction events as adults. In fact, many abduction accounts, unlike false memory accounts, are of very recent events. Of the last 450 abductions that I have investigated, nearly 30 percent happened within the previous thirty days and over 50 percent had occurred within the past year. I have also investigated abduction events that were reported to me only a few hours, or even a few minutes, after they took place.

In 1991, for example, Jason Howard, a schoolteacher, was on his way to my house for an abductee support group meeting. He put on his shoes, which he keeps  by the front door. It is the last thing he always does before he leaves his house. Suddenly it was four hours later and Jason was on his bed in his bedroom upstairs. He called me immediately, explaining that he vaguely remembered putting on his shoes and then lying on the couch. When I conducted a hypnotic session on this event, Jason remembered putting on one shoe and then feeling an irresistible urge to lie on the couch. He recalled that small beings appeared in his living room and floated him directly up through the ceiling into a waiting UFO. A series of procedures followed, including sperm sampling and mental envisioning sequences. The aliens returned him to his house, but instead of putting him on the couch, where he was at the beginning of the abduction, they put him on his bed in his upstairs bedroom. When he came to consciousness, he realized that something had happened, and he called me. The immediate reporting of this event does not fit the description of false memory syndrome.8

It is pretty clear what happened. Jason fell asleep and had a dream. That Prof. Jacobs finds this sort of thing credible beggars belief..

Later Prof. Jacobs gives 4 further reasons:

2. In contrast to victims of false memory syndrome, abductees have indirect corroboration of events. For example, I was on the phone with Kay Summers, whose abduction experiences began while we were talking. She described a roaring noise sometimes associated with the beginning of abduction, and I could hear this noise over the phone. Hypnosis later revealed that soon after she hung up the phone, she was abducted. False memories do not take shape. simultaneously with the occurrence of actual events during which a researcher is an indirect corroborator.

3. In contrast to victims of false memory syndrome, abductees often remember events without the aid of a therapist. They can remember events that happened to them at specific times in their lives. They have always known that the event happened, and they do not need a therapist to reinforce their memories.

4. In contrast to victims of false memory syndrome, abductees are physically missing during the event. The abductee is not where he is supposed to be; people who search for him cannot find him. The abductee is usually aware that there is a gap of two or three hours that neither he nor anyone else can account for. Such physical corroboration does not exist in false memory.

5. In contrast to victims of false memory syndrome, abductees can provide independent confirmation of the abduction. Approximately 20 percent of abductions include two or more people who see each other during the abduction event. They sometimes independently report this to the investigator.9

The example given in number two is stunning. Of course it never occurred to Prof. Jacobs to send someone to Kay’s place to see if she had in fact been abducted. Of course Prof. Jacob’s could have remembered that corroboration after words when Kay claimed to have been abducted. Oh and just why did Prof. Jacobs not stay on the line! And has corroboration to an extraordinary event a loud noise is pretty pathetic especially since it seems to have been a post-hoc rationalization.

Number three is pretty feeble also. I should point out that many of those who went to the witches Sabbats / Black Masses also always remembered them. Many witches voluntarily went to the authorities with their tales.

Number four is mere assertion. Nowhere does Prof. Jacobs provide evidence that this is in fact the case at all. Certainly Prof. Jacobs’s implication that this is true of all Abductees is simply false. It in fact appears to be the case that the majority of time no one is looking for the Abductee. Also supposedly Prof. Jacobs is aware that the phenomena of missing time is a common psychological phenomena not requiring Alien Abduction to happen.

Number five is risible. In fact one of the arguments of Witch hunters was how interrogated witches would independently confirm each other’s attendance at the Witches Sabbat / Black Mass thus confirming that the events were real.

In fact what is striking is how similar Prof. Jacobs “proofs” are to the “proofs” provided by the Witch hunters. And the crunch so to speak in showing how utterly absurd it is, is Prof. Jacobs alleged careful interrogation of the evidence is the conspiracy he concocts.

In Prof. Jacobs conspiracy. Insect like Aliens have been abducting people to harvest their sperm and eggs and occasionally to have sex with them. In this Prof. Jacobs replicates the sexualized aspects of the Witches Sabbat / Black Mass with its sex with demons / Lucifer. The purpose of this harvesting is to create hybrids in order to further infiltrate human society. The Alien’s goal is to biologically survive and they aim to do that by infiltrating and dominating human society and they are working towards that goal. Further like the witches of old they leave something like witches marks in the form of “implants”.

The Aliens and their hybrid allies / offspring, are cold blooded and ruthless and care little for humanity and the implications for us when that becomes clear are likely dire.10

The similarities that this bears to the great Satanic Witch conspiracy to subvert and destroy Christendom are close. Including even the Witches being flown off to the Satanic Black Mass and breeding babies that become demons or are sacrificed. According to Prof. Jacobs this conspiracy has infiltrated all levels of human society and the end is more or less inevitable. In other words we are doomed! Doomed!!

Thus we get such paranoid delusional thinking as this:

1. The Abduction Program. The aliens initially selected human victims around the world and instituted procedures to take these humans and their progeny from their

environments without detection.

2. The Breeding Program. The aliens collect human sperm and eggs, genetically alter the fertilized embryo, incubate fetuses in human hosts, and make humans mentally and physically interact with the offspring for proper hybrid development.

3. The Hybridization Program. The aliens refine the hybrids by continual alteration and breeding with humans over the generations to become more human while retaining crucial alien characteristics. Perhaps humans are also altered over time and acquire alien characteristics.

4. The Integration Program. The aliens prepare the abductees for future events. Eventually, the hybrids or the aliens themselves integrate into human society and assume control.11

Also Prof. Jacobs gives as the Alien’s goal:

Reshma Kamal was told that after The Change, there will be only one form of government: The insect like aliens will be in complete control. There will be no necessity to continue national governments. There will be "one system" and "one goal."

…

There is yet another very disturbing aspect to the aliens' view of the future. When they refer to the "humans," they are talking about abductees. The future of, and with, nonabductees is rarely the subject of much conversation. They told Reshma Kamal that nonabductees will be kept as a small breeding population in case the hybridization program has unforeseen problems. Allison Reed was led to believe that nonabductees are expendable. The evidence seems to suggest that the future will be played out primarily with aliens, hybrids, and abductees. The nonabductees will have an inferior role, if any at all. The new order will be insectlike aliens in control, followed by other aliens, hybrids, abductees, and, finally, nonabductees.12

Obviously Prof. Jacobs has left earth orbit and is now streaking at faster than light speed out of the rational Universe. It is clear that with this level of crazy, his prudential talk is just that talk and empty of meaning. His fantasy is nothing more than a re-imagining of the great Witchcraze hysteria and conspiracy and like it empty of substance. Prof. Jacobs has surrendered his ability to think rationally and has also surrendered to the most absurd kind of conspiracy thinking.

It is enough to note that Prof. Jacobs has provided no evidence that the alleged hybrids infiltrating human society exist, neither has he provided any, except the most risible, corroboration of his fantasies. He has instead produced  a modern Witch hunter’s manual. Although rather cannily he does not suggest anyway to combat the Alien threat except more research. The reason I suspect is that going around accusing people of being evil Alien Hybrids or encouraging people to unmask them just might get Prof. Jacobs into trouble. So he does not suggest doing much of  anything unlike the Witch hunters who were gun ho for rooting out the evil Demonic, Satanic Witch conspiracy.

Instead Prof. Jacobs sells to his credulous fans resignation and the “knowledge” that they “know” the “truth” and as such are in some respect “special” and the “elect”. I suppose that is “progress”.

1. Kramer, Heinrich, & Sprenger, Jacob, Malleus Maleficarum, (Originally published 1487) a translation can be found at Malleus Maleficarum Here. See Barstow, Anne L., Witchcraze, Second Edition, Harperone, New York, 1995.

2. See Sheaffer, Robert, The UFO Verdict, Prometheus Books, Buffalo NY, 1980, ch. 7, The Scientific Study of Witchcraft, pp. 66-79.

3.See Kramer et al, and Trevor-Roper, H.R., The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1969, pp. 92-101,

4. Jacobs, David Michael, The Threat, Simon and Schuster Inc., New York, 1998.

5. David Michael Jacobs, Wikipedia Here.

6. Jacobs, p. 9.

7. IBID, pp. 10.

8. IBID, p. 22.

9. IBID, pp. 23.

10. IBID, Entire Book but see summing up pp. 154-173.

11. IBID, p. 171

12. IBID, pp. 172.

Pierre Cloutier