Strange Rivals is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron making for the best experience listen with headphones.
This episode includes discussion of violence, sexual abuse, and suicidal ideation that while they almost definitely did not actually happen, maybe disturbing to some listeners.
Could this be the man whose experiments with hypnotism were finally to become a legitimate part of science which today cures the mentally ill. Did you have a vision beyond your time, doctor Mesmer? Were you entirely a healer or entirely a fraud?
I held a key it might have I'm not.
Adored an unknown world.
I could not think that those who fell up a man of science. I wand.
They will find a footprint left by.
Miss ms Jock.
I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals. Episode seven, The Case of Emma Woods, Part two. In the last episode, we began to look at the case of a woman who goes by the pseudonym Emma Woods. With the help of her therapist, Emma contacted alien abduction researcher David Jacobs, who taught history at Temple University in Philadelphia. Because of the distance between Philadelphia and New Zealand, where Emma lived, Jacobs began to conduct hypnotic regression therapy over the phone.
He also taped the sessions and provided Emma with copies of these recordings. When Emma later listened to these tapes, she realized that her sessions raised many questions, not about her experiences, but about Jacob's methods and intent. Jacob's claimed to understand the purpose of these hundreds of thousands of alien abductions a plan to take control of the Earth with human alien hybrids. Aliens engaged in this plot were evil and violent, and because of the importance of creating
hybrid children, their violence included sexual assault. This was the narrative that he believed, or at least he claimed he did, and it drove the direction of his work with Emma. As we look at the quote unquote research that Jacobs undertook with Emma, there are three things to keep in mind. First, the way he conducts these sessions, how he acts when Emma is under hypnosis. We have heard how critical certain guidelines are when questioning people who have had an experience.
Guidelines such as not suggesting possible answers and allowing the respondent to speak without interruption. These guidelines are even more important when the subject is in a hypnotic state and especially prone to suggestion. And in the case of people seeking out researchers like David Jacobs or John Mack or Bud Hopkins, they're beginning with a set of assumptions about the nature of their experiences.
These people who find these hypnotists, they're already in a state of belief. They already believe in aliens, they believe in UFOs, they believe in the potential for being aliens.
Linguist researcher and host of the Monster Talk podcast Karen Stalls.
Now, so you have that as a kind of foundation for this belief. But when these people are put into.
A state of hypnosis is very dangerous because the person doing the hypnosis can actually, instead of recovering memories, can create false memories, basically remembering an event that didn't take place.
The third thing is how when he ignores these guidelines, Jacobs is working toward a narrative that supports his view of the abduction issue. Remember, Jacobs has written books about the threat posed by aliens, who he believes are trying to control humanity. A major part of this plot is the creation, through sexual relations between humans and aliens of hybrids. This narrative was present from the very start of Jacob's work with Emma.
He started with the kind of sexual assault, the sexual procedures right from my first hypnos descision.
Sexual assault would be a recurring theme throughout her work with Jacobs. Emma graciously allowed me to use some of the recordings of her sessions with Jacobs. This particular recording is not from her first session, but gives a sense of the tenor of the sexual assault content. You will also notice Jacob's introduction of other people's stories into the hypnosis session.
There have been episodes of one of the women I worked with have of pure sexual assault and sexual assault from say, let's sexually three them.
I once.
And it is as absolutely pure sexual so not that you remembered anything next day. But the way he was described was was fairly.
You can just tell these guys didn't care what they did to this.
Woman because they she was unier freaking anyway, so they could do anything you want to do her, and they did, you know, uh, and and.
That was that was that was a whole big deal. And I've heard that from from from several people.
So here, Jacobs introduced a story of hybrid sexual violence to Emma while she was in a highly suggestible state of hypnosis. Clearly, introducing any third party story to a subject in this state undercuts a researcher's ability to get an uninfluenced account. To introduce a story as violent as this one is troubling behavior. And it was continual, and as their sessions progressed, Jacobs began to suggest again through other people's stories that hybrid violence against abductees took many forms.
It kind of progressed into a lot of violence that he told me about one of his other subjects. She uses a pseudent in Elizabeth about how khybrids had thritten to sexually assault her child and her husband was going to strangle her children and all that sort of stuff.
They had done a lot of sexual assemination. They'd shown her around the room bit they brought out her daughter and said they'd be having sex with her too, and that sort.
Of stuff, And they actually brought her daughter out of the bedroom, saw out and.
You know that mess sort of thing.
They put her mind.
That I would be armed and then I would be in fact, killed, and they.
Would just go ahead and kill me and someone or me kill myself.
And they were fairly heavy duty, fairly heavy duty weather.
Because of protecting this guy.
This time, this woman, Elizabeth has a larger role to play in Emma's story, which we will get to later in this episode. In the meantime, though, Jacob's behavior during the hypnosis sessions continued in directions that were both weird and ethically questionable. It begins with Jacob's pressing Emma for details about what he believes to be a sexual encounter.
He at one point asked me to He said that he wanted to get of my unwashed Nicholas my underpants so that he could test them for hybrid DNA, and he asked me to send him my underpants and then not remember doing it.
You're laying on the bed with your shoes off and your past program.
Yea, so none of them have sp sexual study editor from I wrong. Okay, now what are you wanting? Underpants? Yeah? Did you wash the underpants? Probably if you can know it was yesterday, I can have a look. I have a look.
Put in the plastic bag if you find the ones. If there's are going to be intercourse involved here. They're going to have to take advantage of the station. Okay, well let's find that if there is.
First, they spend some time discussing the appearance of the person that Emma had sex with, the implication being that he was a highbred. Then comes this.
Part basically on day on top of you. In other words, yeah, well if you is.
The new hands, without even saying about it, just put them in a plastic bag, put him in an envelope.
Then just sam off to me totally greely appreciate it. Do not even think about it, just do it automatically. Yeah, go fus, no mess, Yeah.
Researcher Jack Brewer, he says, find them, drop him in a plastic bag, no fuss, no, must mail them off to me, and adds, don't think anything about it, don't give it another thought, And at the end of the session even gives her instructions to not remember this specific session and counts her down backwards. And it was something he would call a memory block. We're gonna put the memory block on it. I won't spend about what all that's about. Again, I think some of it, it's obviously concerning.
At best, we would have to assume he lost his mind.
Look, there's two things going on here. First, Jacobs wants Emma to send him her unwashed underwear. That is strange and troubling. Jacobs can claim that he wants to recover any DNA that might be found on them, but why tell her to forget she's done it? What purpose does that serve if his interest in them is for his research. I reached out to David Jacobs several times to get his response to these allegations, but he never replied. He has, however,
written a long rebuttal to Emma's assertions. We will look at some of these points in the next episode. Anyway, Jacobs continued his strange behavior in the tapes. He seems fixated on his belief that hybrids are having sexual relations with Emma. His advice on how to address this situation is probably not what you'd expect.
He asked me to war if he could send me a chastity belt.
You know, years ago, maybe I told you this.
I had this idea of buying personal I was sort of with a chastity belt.
Maybe this would be the time they get one. They can't take it off.
It's got a little lock and a key.
And where I with.
A vaginal opening is it's got a couple of nails sticking across. It's a dead stop, or no doubt about it.
Jacobs talks about using a chastity belt with a previous subject and thinks that it might, as he puts it.
Sort of throw a cake into their plans. It's not like you're totally accessible at all times.
It makes them wor little harder.
I remember seeing something they had some maybe they still had in Philadelphia. This is so many years ago. I don't even know they have these sex shops, you know. And I went into one that specialized in bondage dominance, place that I frequented quite often. And but I was looking for the one thing. I was looking for chastity belts. And they had all these dungeon type whips and chains and this, and I says, and here was that they
had a chastity belt in there. Yeah, so there's that's that's something.
Yeah, it might be worth a try.
So Jacob's plan for Emma is to wear a chastity belt, which, well, it won't stop these violent and sadistic aliens, will, as he says, piss him off. Karen stalls.
Now, so the requests that he made, we're talking about unprofessional behavior, but how he continually talked about personal matters and was asking her to send through her underpants, so that I'm just wondering what he planned to do with those, How was he going to test those or very suspicious? And then the whole chastity belt narratives and his obsession with alien reproduction.
This behavior brings up other issues as well, such as how much Jacobs himself believes the narrative he is feeding Emma.
Well, the obvious sexual stuff is in question, but also how serious is he about all of this where he thinks, like, I know, why don't I anger these alien hybrids.
This is Jeremy Vaney who we heard from in the previous episode.
My name is Jeremy Vany.
I am an experiencer of high strangeness. Let's put that in quote votes and I've written about and podcasted about that type of thing with a heavy concentration on quote unquote alien abduction and alien UFO phenomena for far too many years now.
On the suggestion of wearing a chastity belt, Jeremy has this to say.
That sounds good. Won't stop them, but it'll upset them. I mean, there really is the weird blurring of the line where you don't quite know what he believes and what he doesn't, except I think you can see in his actions afterward.
So in his hypnosis sessions, Jacobs has walked Emma through a narrative of violence, particularly sexual violence, and his real world actions with her were suspect both logically and ethically. And there was another dimension to this story, one that brought David jacobs beliefs about aliens and hybrids into the real world. After the break, strange arrivals will return in a moment. David Jacob's hypnosis sessions with Emma Woods were not the only way he involved her in his alien
abduction narrative. In addition to these one on one sessions, Jacobs brought Emma into a melodrama that he created involving hostile aliens and hybrids and two other patients of his, a woman with the pseudonym Elizabeth and a man going by the name Brian Reid. Let me quickly clarify that when I say that Jacobs created this melodrama, I mean I don't believe that there actually were any aliens or
hybrids interacting with these people in the real world. Jacobs may not have been the only person here making things up, but he was the main driver of the narrative that emerged back to Elizabeth and Brian. Both were patients of Jacobs. Brian's mother was also a patient of Jacob's. Elizabeth played the bigger role in this part of the story, with Brian coming in later. A key component of this was a move further away from the in person hypnosis session, further even than over the phone.
They took the bad idea of regressive hypnosis in person, where you essentially just close your eyes and tell the story the hypnotist wants to hear. They took that and evolved it to doing it by phone, because why bother to get together when you can just tell me this story over the phone. And then they took that and said, let's just text.
Just to be clear, Jacobs decided that it was possible and fine to conduct hypnosis sessions through techx messages. This is very strange.
And one of the things that was happening with Elizabeth is she was claiming by text that the hybrids, the et human hybrids, would come in her home render her helpless and put this mind control thing on her where they control her actions and she can't remember it later. And then they would text with whoever she had been texting with, and they came in at that point because
she was texting about her interactions with the hybrids. They wanted to put a stop to it and threaten David Jacobs by text that don't do this anymore.
So Elizabeth, who communicated through text during these hypnosis sessions, claimed that hybrids were breaking into our home, taking control of her body and texting directly with Jacob's. On the face of it, this would seem to warrant a little skepticism, but that was not the case.
Then he told me that he was having serious problems with Elizabeth, that her hybrids I think had started threatening him or he was very afraid of them. And every night he went on to instant messenger, and he spent time chatting to Elizabeth an instant messenger, and I think he did it to keep her in the loop, the same way that he kept emailing me to keep me
in the loop. And then one time she said to him that she had lied to him about everything and she was a bad person and she was sorry and goodbye, and he didn't accept that, and he's basically it came about that the hybrids had made her say that.
This seems to me as though it's probably a situation where Elizabeth, for whatever reason, admitted that she had been untruthful in some instances. She then regretted her admission and used the existing story of being controlled by hybrids to explain the confession away. Let's take a second because this gets a little complicated, and it's important to keep track of what is going on, how Jacobs is responding to it,
and what it all might mean. Earlier in the episode, we heard a piece of audio where Jacobs talks to Emma about how the hybrids or aliens have treated Elizabeth.
You hadn't hear they We have done a lot of sexual ascommodation. They've thrown her around the realm bitch. They brought out her daughter and head that they could be having sex with her too, and that.
Sort of stuff.
Elizabeth now claimed that her house was being in by hybrids who took control of her. If you believe that these creatures are in fact real, that Elizabeth is telling the truth, this clearly seems like a situation where Elizabeth and her family are in real danger? What does Jacobs do nothing? Jack Brewer interviewed Jacobs and asked him why he didn't try to intervene or do something to help her.
I spoke to him about that. I interviewed him in person, and one of the things I asked him about was if he believed that to be true. And if so, like, if you literally believe there is someone going to a woman's house claiming to be a hybrid alien and sexually assaulting her, why would you not be calling law enforcement? Like wouldn't the rational thing to be that these people claiming to be aliens aren't and that this is sexual
assault or something like that? Like, how can you not be conducting some type of investigation, like some forensic investigation, something other than instant messaging with the lady and hypnosis by phone and things like that.
In other words, whether you believe there were hybrids or aliens or not, you were hearing from Elizabeth that some beings maybe humans, were breaking into her house, and as he had heard from previous hypnosis sessions, physically and sexually assaulting her, why wouldn't Jacobs do something?
His response to that was so baffling. He framed it as if I was suggesting he'd drive to her home and hide and watch, which I of course was not. And his response to me was, she keeps the curtains drawn anyway, it would take me like an hour and a half to get there by car, and I wouldn't be able to see in the windows.
And I thought that.
Was just such a bizarre response. And of course he doesn't even address why you don't call LAE enforcement or something.
So while Jacobs doesn't seem overly concerned about Elizabeth, he was presumably becoming more stressed and afraid of the Hybrid's belligerence towards his subjects in himself, he came up with a plan to throw them off the scent.
The hybrids came on the Instant Messenger and started talking to him an instant Messenger, and the hybrid was pretending to be.
Her, the her in this case being Elizabeth.
And then he realized it was a hybrid, and then he pretended to the hybrid that he was not investigating the alien program that he called it, but that he was really a space and MPD multiple personality disorder, and that she had multiple personality disorder and that's what he was interested in, and by doing that, the aliens would think, oh, they were safe, He's not investigating them, and they would not go after him.
So Jacob's plan was to try to convince the hybrids that he was not investigating alien abductions, but in fact doing research on multiple personality disorder despite all that had come before. This he seemed to think would throw them off the trail, and he extended this ploy to his
work with Emma, though with a crucial difference. You'll hear the acronyms MPD and MD, and these both refer to multiple personality disorder, which is now known as dissociative identity disorder and is generally considered to be extremely rare.
I had a hypnosis session with him very soon after he'd started having these instant messaging conversations with Elizabeth hybrids. And then in that hypnosis session, while I was hypnotized, he implanted hypnotic suggestions in me that I had multiple personality disorder.
My diagnosis is just muscle personality disorder and used to take us for it. Lots of cases of MPD and this absolutely is the MDD profile make me my professal diagnosis, therefore, is muscle personality disorder. I am studying it. I am writing a book about it. That is my next book. I feel it the whole sort of alien business is not a matter of muscle personality disorder. It's a much more widespread phenomena.
Than people think. Lots of people.
Working around it is nothing else a problem, and you are unfortunately suffering from.
And opinion is that Joys is a classic case.
He continues in this vein for a minute and a half before ending the session.
And this is where my studies are leading. My studies are going directly to possible personality disorder. And that's all there is to it. Howls have to want to bring you ont of this, and we'll talk about mpdia a little bit more.
So.
What you've just heard is Jacob's giving Emma a hypnotic suggestion that she had multiple personality disorder. He is trying to play the part of a therapist, so he claims a professional opinion that he has no standing to actually make. I'm sure he would claim that he's not actually making a diagnosis, but engaging in a ruse to throw off the hybrids. But the problematic nature of convincing someone under hypnosis that they have a very serious mental illness is pretty self apparent.
It's hard again to adequately emphasize the extent that by definition, this is not scientific investigation. I don't even know how to say it without like employing sarcasm or something. How egregiously poor this behavior is just stunningly inept and competent disregarding the I mean, if we're to believe this man and take him at face value, he was indirectly suggesting the mental health and community status of Emma Woods was
insignificant compared to his research. And just have her tell everybody she has MPD so everybody'll think that there's some person studying or for MPD. It is difficult too to transfer this narrative in a short conversation of how convoluted and irrational it became.
I mean, if you believe that David Jacobs believes what he's saying, there's no good scenario here. Either David Jacobs knows he's lying or he's delusional. And if he's delusional, then that bit of hypnosis makes a lot of sense because essentially he put her on a hypnosis, right. He tried to convincerve she had multiple personality disorder, and that's what he's going to write about. That's what he's going to say publicly, so that when the aliens read her mind,
they'll read that about him. And he's essentially throwing her under the bus, so that these aliens don't come after him, right Like, that's the best case scenario with David Jacobs is that he just puts someone under hypnosis try to convince them that they had multiple personality disorder, to throw off the alien who would read her mind and realize that's what he thought. Things.
Clearly, there is some strange logic working here. Jacobs wants Emma to believe that he is conducting multiple personality disorder research, so that when the hybrids read her mind, they will think that is what Jacobs is doing. He is not doing abduction research, and this will mean that they will be less interested in him. Meanwhile, Emma is left to believe that she actually has or is suspected to have multiple personality disorder.
Afterwards, he told me that I had to write emails to him as though I had multiple personality disorder. I didn't remember that he had put those hypnotic suggestions of MPD in my mind, I did remember that he had asked me to write emails or so I had MPD, And it was only much louder when I went back and listened to my had no secessions and I heard him doing it. That was the first time I realized that he had done it.
About where this started with Emma with thoughts that she had experienced paranormal events during her lifetime. Then, after being introduced to David Jacobs, she is thrust into a strange world where violent aliens and hybrids sexually assault women in order to repopulate in Earth that they can control. She is told that she is also being assaulted and asked to send underwear in the hope of recovering alien DNA.
She's encouraged to wear a chastity belt. She finds out that another of Jacob's patients is being controlled by hybrids and is sending threatening texts to Jacob's Much of this information is being introduced to her while she is in a highly suggestible state of hypnosis. Finally, Jacob suggests to her while she is hypnotized that she has a serious mental illness that she does not actually have. But it's not over how Emma's work with Jacob's ended, and Jacob's
response to Emma's class next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from 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 Mankey, and supervising producer Josh Thame.
Learn more about the show at Grimminmild dot com, slash Strange Arrivals
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