Strangeer Rivals is a production of iHeart Radio and Grin and Mild from Aaron Mackey.
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This episode contains discussions of sexual violence. Listener discretion is advised.
Because you have to.
Remember, they've had a lot of time and energy invested in you, and and and I can't just you.
Know, be incapacitated that what's the point. There's no point in that. It's pointless.
I mean they want your help. Yeah, if they're ready you so to Speaker.
Of the Year, I mean, and then they can't have your help at all.
As a year rid of me. Well I don't they You still have your help, so.
Certainly you It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. See what I mean, as you said before, and as I have said, and as everybody says, it does seem like empty.
Friends, because I mean you're.
You're really a person of value to them, you know.
Yeah.
But at the same time they do drag you around.
And sexual assault and all the rest of that kind of stuff.
So there is there is a lot of physical intimidation.
I think, get you didn't come time.
I'm Toby Bald and this is strange Arrivals, Episode six, The Case of Emma.
Woods Well, I use a pseudonym Emma Woods, and I was a research subject of David Jacobs, who is a well known and in induction researcher, and he was an associate professor of Temple University at the time that I was his research subject. I had many hypno secessions with him over about two years, and then I became quite concerned about what was happening, and I then ended my association with him. And then a few years later I made it known in the UFO field quite widely, became
quite a controversy in the UFO field. And yes, that's pretty much how I came to be known in the UFO field, through the controversy over what happened when I was a research subject of David Jacobs.
In the last couple of episodes, we've heard the name David Jacobs a few times. The next three episodes will focus on his work, particularly with Emma Woods. Jacobs, Bud Hopkins, and John Mack were the most important self styled alien abduction researchers in the eighties and nineties and into the early two thousands. The height of public interests in the phenomenon.
As we have seen previously, Mac's particular theory about the abductions was that they were carried out by beings interacting with humans to try to save the Earth's future and promote a spiritual awakening. Hopkins and Jacobs agreed with Mac on the fact that abductions were occurring, but not necessarily the nature of the abductors and certainly not their intentions.
Will never know what doctor Mack would have come to have thought at this point in time. I like to think that maybe he was a bit credulous. Hoping to find something important in an existential way is what may have led him off of the less ill in foreign path, But I don't know. He died in two thousand and four, so we don't know what he would have thought about what the genre came to be today. I'm Jack Brewer.
I write the UFO Trail blog. It's dedicated to posting credible info on incredible topics, and I have written two self published books. The first was The Graves Have Been Framed Exploitation in the UFO Community, and my more recent book is Wayward Son's Nightcap.
In the ic.
Bud Hopkins maintained until his death in twenty eleven that there was a alien nuts and bolts presence that was kidnapping human beings, en mass millions of people, that this was happening too, and David Jacobs he went in this vein as well, and Mac was kind of a space brothers, this is a good thing evolution perspective. Bud Hopkins was a bit more, I don't know, this doesn't look good. People are horrified, and that seemed to grab some attention,
and then David Jacobs was full on the threat. Literally, this is raping and pillaging, sexual molestation. The intent of the aliens is to hybridize the human race. The math didn't even add up. It was completely mad scientists territory.
Like Mac and Hopkins, Jacobs relied on hypnotic regression sessions with people who had self identified as believing they might have had one or more, sometimes many more, alien abduction experiences. One of the three were actually trained hypnosis experts.
I also came to feel that the lack of willingness to take any hypnosis training was a means to deflect from any potential lawsuits or recourse on behalf of what really amounted to research subjects or potential subjects of paperback books. They didn't want to be part of any type of board certified organization, and that whatever was going on was just casually between consenting adults.
Jacobs and Hopkins both were very concerned that their work had the veneer of legitimate science. There is an irony here because the one scientist in their group, mac rejected Western science as being inadequate to study the phenomenon. Hopkins and Jacobs, however, wanted their work to be considered scientifically sound.
But this had problems which they probably understood because they also put themselves forward as counselors to the people who they were hypnotizing, providing services that the medical profession, because it did not recognize alien abduction.
Would not.
Hopkins and Jacob's and those who followed in their footsteps really blurred the lines of what the purpose of the relationship was. Sometimes they would even refer to the subjects of their books as patients or clients, as if it
was some type of therapeutic relationship. In my opinion, from looking closely at this, that served as an advantageous means to deflect criticism that if they got called out for a lack of scientific objectivity, which they claimed to be undertaking scientific study and were presented under the move on umbrella often and David Jacobs actually even on his website and often would claim to be observing and working under scientific principles, which again by definition, simply is not true.
Blurring the lines of the relationship served as a means to deflect criticism, and if they were called out about a lack of scientific objectivity, they could claim to just
be providing emotional support. If it was pointed out they had ZILT training and providing emotional support and a professional capacity, they could say that they were conducting an investigation about the most important story in the history of mankind, that they were the only people willing to look get and couldn't be ignored.
Which brings us back to Emma Woods.
I've had what I see as anomalous experiences. I've had them all my life, but I didn't connect them to uphology or the air in abduction phenomenon. I just didn't know what they were. In my sort of late thirties, I read a magazine article listing signs that you're an alien abductee type of thing, and I was really surprised because a lot of those were things that I had had. I was seeing a therapist about life issues, and I had talked to him about some of my experiences and
he took a very neutral view on it. And his view was basically that we don't know everything about reality, and you know, it's fine to explore it, but just keep an open mind. And that's kind of how I naturally do things anyway, So that worked really well for me.
Emma told her therapist about the magazine Art article and how it seemed to relate to her life. Her therapist, as you might expect, found this to be outside the normal scope of his work. He consulted with colleagues, but that went nowhere, so he looked for assistants elsewhere. This is Jeremy Vanny, who is largely responsible for breaking the Emma Wood story along with his co host Jeff Ritzman on the podcast Peratopia and in an article in UFO magazine.
Here's David Jacobs, at the time working for Temple University. On his website, claims to be giving speeches in front of universities, specifically psych departments. Claims to be able to train you to hypnotize and give this pseudotherapy to abductees. All of that stuff looks like it's got the stink of official approval on it, and so he contacted David Jacobs on her behalf.
Jacobs sent Emma's therapist a packet of information along with his contact information, saying that Emma could get in touch with him if she wanted. Emma continued working with her therapist, who suggested that she write a history of her anomalist experiences and start keeping a record of them when they happened.
So I started doing that and I shared that with him, and then he became quite interested in that. He still was very much like, we don't know what this is. We've got to keep an open mind, but stay neutral, because he basically didn't want to accept any explanation without solidly knowing what it was. And I was absolutely fine with that, because that's how I was also looking at it.
As she continued with this work, she began to conclude that she had experienced cases of alien abduction throughout her life.
It was quite distressing to kind of realize that, oh that actually I might be, you know, one of those people. And I had to sort of look at my own stigma and get past that in order to sort of approach the UFO, and I think that's partly why I had a bit of a crisis around it, and I had to sort of come to terms with that.
During this period, she was in contact with David Jacobs, though infrequently, and he was not yet doing hypnosis sessions with her.
I was just in communication with David Jacobs for a couple of years, just sort of infrequent emails, some phone calls, and then he had a lot of interest in the record of my experiences that I was making, so I sent him a small sample of it and he asked me to send him everything that I had. And then in two thousand and four, I did a very detailed one year record of my experiences and Jacobs helped me set that up. And this is before I was having hypnosis.
He was just sort of talking to me in assisting me, and he gave me ideas of things to record, like I recorded all my dreams for a year. He suggested I take pregnancy tists once a month, and he sent lead tests from the US to do that, and I just did this one year record and he was very interested in that.
This was two thousand and four, starting in January. By December. Jacobs was intrigued enough that he suggested to Emma that he start hypnotizing her, and then the real problems began. After the break, strange arrivals will return in a moment. After the nineteen ninety two Alien Abduction conference at MIT, a small roundtable was put together to debrief. The group included both Bud Hopkins and David Jacobs. Among the things discussed was the tendency of some researchers to his gribe
intent to the alien abductors. Hopkins introduced the topic.
One of the aspects of the conference, which suggested a bit of a problem to me is there seems to be a tendency from time to time to slip into discussions of the nature of the alienste whatever they may be, as to whether they're helping us, hurting us good guys versus versus.
To get people.
I think, away from those judgments.
What happens when it's the experiencers who make that judgment and we see that happening.
I think that I think that one of.
The problems is that the investigator and or a therapist involved can have an undue influence in that area.
Later in the discussion, Jacobs said.
This, The danger is having the therapist or the investigator have a structure of his or her own that they overly on the experience and sort of steer the abductee into that structure, and that has a totally different agenda, and that can be quite quite dangerous.
So it is a little surprising that before he begins his hypnosis sessions with Emma Woods, he asks her to read his books.
I read his book Secret Life of the Threat, and then just before I had the hypnosis, he told me to read his books again, so I read them again, and then all the way in our communication, he was very clear that it was alien and so on, and I didn't mind that because I've never minded people having their own opinions. I still had an agnostic view of it.
Even before her first hypnosis session, Emma was versed in Jacob's analysis of the alien abduction.
Phenomenon up until the hypnosis. I still have my own view, but I did understand Jacobs's view, and I'd read his books, and I knew that's how I seal it.
For season one of Strange Rivals, I interviewed Carol Rainey, who was Bud Hopkins research partner and was married to Hopkins for a decade. In our interview, she talked about how people who believe they were experiencers were influenced by the researcher even before their first hypnosis session. While she's talking specifically about Hopkins here, you will see that this dynamic applies to Jacob's as well.
So the new possible abductee would be sent as kit of material, and I think it varies sometimes, but it was information about the abduction phenomenon. They had also often read one, two, or three of his books previously, so when people would first call and begin talking to him, he could go on easily for an hour with each person over the phone, and he would often tell them
about the new cases that he was working on. And the cue that sends to the person on the other end of the phone is that if you want the attention of his television personality in Bud Hopkins, you might do well consciously or unconsciously to have your own memories that were similar to the ones he was interested in. And that is where the tailoring of tales began, long
before he even met the people. You don't have to lead anybody under hypnosis after that, they already know which way to go, and that happened often.
Emma's hypnosis sessions with Jacob's began in December two thousand and four because she lived in New Zealand and he taught at Temple, which is in Philadelphia. These sessions were conducted over the telephone.
Hey said that it would be fine to over the phone. I had had no idea that you could do hypnosis over the phone. And basically I was just in my apartment. I was on my bed, relaxed. I had the phone next to the bed. I used to lie down on the bed because he does a relaxation exercise, which is easier to do because your body gets really heavy and so on so forth. And then I just had the phone and he would just talk to me on the
phone and he would do the induction. And I discovered that I'm very, very hypnotizable, so it was very easy for me to go into that state. He had told me that it would just be a relaxed state, that it was like a relaxation exercise. But when he did it, I realized I went far deeper and it was quite a different state. And I was aware of that the first time that he did it.
You might think that conducting hypnosis over the phone is unusual, and you'd be right. In fact, it is far from ethical practice.
You're taking them me, you're inducting them, and then you're bringing them out of it. But to do something like that over the telephone is just completely unprofessional. I'm doctor Karen Stallsner, and I'm a linguist.
I'm an author, an academic researcher, and a host of the Monster Talk podcast. Some people think with hypnosis that it's a kind of a truth serum and that it's going to be this window into a person's past, but it just doesn't function like that. If the memories aren't there, the person is just going to resort to their imagination. But certainly doing that kind of thing over the telephone
is just not standard practice. And the fact that he had her undergo hours of this hypnosis as well, you'd be very exhausted by the end of that, and I just don't think you could possibly get any truth out of a situation like that.
David Jacobs recorded these telephone hypnosis sessions.
He recorded them and then he would make a copy of the tapes, and then he'd nail me the tapes, and then later he also gave me digital copies of the hypnosis sessions. I was researching my own experiences, and I told him that I also wanted copies of the hypnosis sessions because I thought that was going to help me to understand what was going on with my experiences.
And it was through listening to these tapes that Emma eventually understood the nature of her hypnosis sessions with Jacobs. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Emma generously allowed me to use parts of her tape hypnosis sessions in this podcast to show what happened. This is how her sessions with him. Worked.
He asked me to send him details of some events that he could do hypnosis on, and I would stand him details of three or four events, or sometimes a dream or something like that, and then he would choose
which one of those he wanted to work with. We'd kind of talk about it together, but he basically made the decision, and then he would do the hypnotic induction, and then he would start talking about the event, and I would start to go back and remember it, and this would be a real event or a real dream, but then the hypnosis would start to weave the story into that real event or dream, and then at the end as we came out and he'd ask me again
about the tail end of the real event. So I think that's partly why it felt incredibly real, is it was woven into an actual, real event or a real dream and it became indistinguishable. So it felt really, really real.
And this story that he wove into her hypnosis sessions, well, it was in keeping with his theories about the methods and purpose of alien abductions. This was the subject of his nineteen ninety eight book The Threat, The Secret Agenda, What the aliens really want and how they plan to get it. Here he gives a quick summary of his thoughts, read by an actor.
We now know that the abduction phenomenon as a whole is not for the purpose of research. The evidence suggests that all the alien procedures serve a reproductive agenda, and at the heart of the reproductive agenda is the breeding program, in which the aliens collect human sperm and eggs, incubate fetuses and human hosts to produce human alien hybrids, and cause humans to mentally and physically interact with these hybrids for the purposes of their development.
And why are they doing this well. The book is called The Threat. Jacob's vision is a long ways from John Max's theories of spiritual awakening.
All the evidence seems to suggest that the integration into human society is the alien's ultimate goal, and all their efforts and activities appear to be geared toward complete control of humans on Earth.
This is the story that Jacob's wove into the hypnosis sessions with Emma. It is a harrowing story of sexual violence, threats, and fear.
Look at the time, while I was having hypnosis, it was very intensive. They were like five or six hours long. It was regular, and he was in constant contact with me in between, and I lost my ability to think critically during that period. But looking back, and once I went back and listened to the hypnosis sessions, it was very clear that he was deliberately, in my opinion, implanting false memories that he wanted that he could then use in his book.
But the characters to sort of know here is that.
And they were using you for sort of a variety of reproductive events. And what they did not want to have is a mixing of sperm. You see with the hybrid guy, because the hybrid has his sperm and anybody else's got his, and so that's the thing to avoid. The reason I know this is because I had exactly this situation before, and one woman who was married.
That the guy had had a bad sectomy, sure, and she was about to have an affair.
With some other guy he met, and they did.
Not like that at all.
That was they prevented it from happening, and they admonitor her and they and I mean, it was a big deal, a big deal, and you knew it was for it was for that reason.
He was licked hearing me while I was hypnotized, telling me what I was going to remember, telling me what other people remembered, explaining what was going on. I was all just going into my head while I was under hypnosis, and then I was remembering things along those lines. So I think he was intensively coaching me to come out with a story that he wanted that fit his theories. And I think also that he was going to use in his book.
Even for UFO researchers as prominent as David Jacobs and Bud Hopkins, it was financially necessary to continue to write books because they couldn't simply repackage the same theories again and again. This need created a dynamic of ever more sensational accounts. Here is Carol Rainey again talking specifically about Bud Hopkins, but about a situation that applied to Jacobs as well, as she acknowledges.
At the end, we went to talk to a couple of editors at publishing houses. This must have been the early two thousands, and what they said categorically, don't come back unless you have a brand new, never seen before.
Idea for a UFO book.
So the push is always for new, bigger, better, more outlandish. And I would say that Dave and Bud definitely delivered on that in each of their books, and.
The book that Jacob's planned to write on his work with Emma Woods and others would cause him to steer hypnosis sessions to very strange places and ultimately push ethical standards beyond the breaking point next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild Aaron Manky. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by rima Il Kayali.
Jesse Funk, and Noami Griffin, with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Manke and supervising producer Josh Thame, with voice acting by Dylan Fagan. Learn more about the show at grimminmild dot com, slash Strange Arrivals, and find more podcasts from iHeartRadio by visiting the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.