The Hard Facts about Satanic Ritual Abuse

SRA Conspiracies and Evidence.

When SRA stories first surfaced in the early 1980s, first with Michelle Remembers and then in 1983 with the McMartin preschool case in Southern California, then the Bakersfield, California and Jordan, Minnesota cases, many journalists, law enforcement personnel, and mental health professionals tended to believe that SRA existed, at least hypothetically. We know horrible people do terrible things to others, that people often conspire, that there are satanists, and that abuse within a ritual context sometimes happens.[24] However, when dozens of stories turned into hundreds and then thousands of stories, none of which produced a single piece of corroborative evidence, some former believers became healthy skeptics. San Francisco police officer Sandi Gallant has qualified her former credulity, saying, "our largest problem is that we live in a negative environment that breeds negative behavior [and] has little to do with spiritual beliefs."

Supervisory Special Agent Kenneth Lanning, of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, has investigated over 300 SRA reports and has yet to find corroborative evidence. While still affirming his willingness to look for and find such hypothetical evidence, Lanning points out the problems inherent in the SRA conspiracy theory:

Any professional evaluating victims' allegations of ritualistic abuse cannot ignore the lack of physical evidence (no bodies or physical evidence left by violent murders), the difficulty in successfully committing a large-scale conspiracy crime (the more people involved in any crime conspiracy, the harder it is to get away with it), and human nature (intragroup conflicts resulting in individual self-serving disclosures are likely to occur in any group involved in organized kidnapping, baby breeding, and human sacrifice).[25]