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This episode includes discussion of violence and sexual abuse that while they almost definitely did not actually happen, maybe disturbing to some listeners.
Surface readings register of but minimum requirements Tomorrow go below and bring up the Young Gargon specimen.
Now the decision depends on its reactions.
Wait, Captain, I have found evidence of intelligent beings on this planet.
Of what concerned our foreign being?
Of none to you, thor, just as you were so unconcerned when you destroyed the small creature so bravely.
It was no more than an insects, but it had life, and that life you had to take satisfy your endless hunger for killing China.
Both of you.
Proceed, bring the gargain that will not be necessary. Captain.
I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals. Episode eight, The Case of Emma Woods, Part three. In the past two episodes, we looked at the experiences of a woman going by the pseudonym Emma Woods, who worked with UFO researcher David Jacobs to uncover memories of what he believed to be alien abductions, violent alien abductions. We saw how Jacobs allegedly used hypnotic regression in a manner that was
both scientifically and ethically unsound. He also seemed to create a drama in the quote unquote real world, a drama that involved Emma, two other research subjects, Elizabeth and Brian, and hostile human alien hybrids. These hybrids apparently did not want Jacobs to continue with his research and threatened him
with harm if he did. In an attempt to convince these hybrids that he wasn't researching abductions, he hypnotically implanted a suggestion to Emma that she had multiple personality disorder and that was what he was researching. The idea was that the hybrids would read Emma's mind, find that information,
and be thrown off track. Jacobs even came up with aliases for himself that he wanted Emma to use when she contacted him, aliases like Aloha Norton, I'm not kidding researcher and writer Jack Brewer.
His premise was, you need to call me another name and write in code to me, because when the hybrids use their mind control on you. I want the hybrids to think that Aloha Norton is an expert in multiple personality disorder and that I am studying you because I have diagnosed you with multiple personality disorder.
It is frankly a weird, weird scenario and it doesn't even have an internal logic. You see, at this time, Jacobs was very public about his abduction research.
Emma pointed out to him, this doesn't even make sense. For instance, you publish books about studying this, and you're on the lecture circuit talking about hybrids all the time.
So what was going on here? Did Jacobs really believe that hybrids were here on Earth and that they wanted to use violence to stop his research or was there some other reason for Jacobs to concoct this odd drama. Emma Woods thinks it may simply have been a matter of creating material for his next book.
It may have been just a big exciting drama for his book. He had told me that he was going to write a book and it was going to feature Elizabeth, Brian Reid's mother who uses the pseudonym Alison, and me and the three of us. He had done a huge amount of hypnosis sessions with I think he did something like possibly forty five hypnosis sessions with Alison. He did thirty seven with me, and he did well over one
hundred with Elizabeth. He very much wanted my hypnosis to dovetail with elizabeths and he wanted me to be in contact with her, and I initially refused because I was worried that if I was in contact with her, it would affect my hypnosis.
At this point, Emma didn't know that her hypnotic regressions were already being compromised. Jacobs was constantly introducing narratives to her while she was under hypnosis.
I didn't want her to know my identity, but eventually I realized that he'd already told her my identity, and then I just gave into the pressure.
This is not ethical research behavior. Jacobs should not have been sharing subjects identities with each other, particularly if a subject had specifically said that she didn't want her identity shared, but he did so anyway. Elizabeth claimed that hybrids were controlling her body and sending threatening text messages to Jacobs from her computer.
When Elizabeth started having hybrid instant messaging, Jacobs told me that he was going on the run from the hybrids because they were after him, and basically he just went on holiday to Cape Cod, which he did every year in August.
So Jacobs decided to go on the run from the hostile hybrids. He chose to hide out in Cape Cod, where he normally vacationed. Anyway, if you were really trying to hide, would you go to your annual vacation spot or did he use his vacation as a way to
heighten the drama that he created. Regardless, Emma was becoming skeptical of Elizabeth's claims that hybrids were coming to her house and texting Jacobs from her computer, she suggested that Jacobs take a very basic step to confirm that what Elizabeth was telling him was true.
I said to him at that point, well, maybe you should ask Elizabeth to set up a webcam to make sure that this is real, because it was so far out that I started to have doubts about Elizabeth. And then I felt guilty about that because of you know, she'd been sort of nice to me that I started tipped out about who. And then he kind of said, well, I can't ask her to do that, And then he did ask her and she had all these excuses for why she couldn't do.
It again Jack Brewer, for reasons that only Elizabeth and her creator might know. She never agreed to do that again. I think a more skeptical mindset would have a pretty good idea why that might be.
Elizabeth is an interesting player in this drama. She was presumably undergoing a similar hypnotic regression experience with Jacob's as Emma was. But then there's this strange twist in the tail where she's actively originating emails that are supposedly being composed by hybrids.
The what's interesting about this Elizabeth character is back when Jeff and I were doing Katopia, we were reaching out to everyone.
This is researcher, writer, and podcaster Jeremy Vaney, who, along with his podcast partner the late Jeff Ritzman, were among the first to cover this story on their Peratopia podcast.
We reached out to Elizabeth and she actually indicated that she wasn't really thrilled with what was going on. She didn't necessarily even believe it herself, but she didn't want to speak publicly because she didn't want any repercussions from Jacobs. I got the idea essentially doing what he ended up doing with Emma Woods, which I guess could hurt her career somehow or her family maybe you know, that type of thing. So she just didn't want that put on her.
So I don't know how true that is, because I mean, if she's the one who's doing the texts to date schif gods, then presumably she's in on the lie.
So I started to realize that there was something really wrong with Elizabeth story because of the hybrid I am, and the threats and Jacob's being on the run, and it just it was so ridiculous that started to break through. But I still thought that he believed it. At that point. I was also still having hypnosis and remembering a lot of similar things, so I wasn't fully breaking out of it, and I wasn't fully understanding it, but I was at that point realizing that things were not okay.
In other words, despite doing hypnosis sessions where Jacobs was reinforcing the real world drama involving Elizabeth, malicious hybrids and threats against Jacobs, things had finally become so outlandish that Emma began to doubt the narrative. Don't underestimate how difficult
this is to do. Once you have committed to a worldview, it can be very hard to make peace with the idea that you might be wrong with the hypnotic reinforcement added, Emma showed great resilience to move away from Jacobs and Elizabeth.
He also wanted me to set up instant messengers so that we could have three way instant messaging, and this is after the hybrid instant messaging, and I think he wanted me to be involved with that, and I just refused. I just felt that there was even at that stage when I was still being very intensively hypnotized and I still wasn't really understanding, I could feel that I just mustn't do that. I was starting to realize that things were going really wrong. So I think possibly it was
just literally for his book. I think he also got a lot of personal gratification from the sort of sexual and violent aspects of it, so it may have been my personal gratification as well. And other than that, I don't know what his agenda would have been, but I don't think he believed it. It took probably about eight months. I think I went through this process of starting to realize that this was not.
Okay again, Jeremy Vaney.
Something about her hybrids, going after David and going after Emma. It just became too much. It became too much of la an International Hybrid Spy and intrigue novella for her, I think, and she just wanted out.
And then I eventually ended my association with him, and he wanted to stay in contact with me, and he was just sending me email saying, why aren't you talking to me? I want, you know, Laudi blah. But I felt like I had to kind of disengage from him because I was a complete mess by the time I ended it. I was in a really bad state and it took me about three months to recover from the hypnosis. And I think he didn't want to let me go.
This was in two thousand and seven, and while this was the end of her sessions with David Jacobs, it was not the end of the story. After the break, strange arrivals will return in a moment. In two thousand and seven, Emma Woods ended her work with David Jacobs. He did not want her to discontinue the sessions, but that was not all. He also didn't want the story of his research efforts with her to become public. In two thousand and nine, Emma began listening to the recordings
of the hypnosis sessions that Jacobs had sent her. The session about multiple personality disorder was the final straw.
I listened to my hypnosis sessions and I heard the MPD suggestions, and that shot me absolutely to the call, and I decided I was going to make it known. I sent an email with that audio cliff attached to just about everybody I could find in the UFO field, all the organizations, all the main known researchers, and that made it public.
Finally, in January of twenty ten, an experiencer named Kim Carlsberg published the first story about Emma's experience on her blog out There Zone. Later that month, she published a follow up post claiming she had heard through an intermediary that Jacobs would sue anyone disclosing his work with Emma. Kim altered some of her blog entries as a result
of this warning. She went on in the same post to write, if anything happens to me as far as my physical or mental well being or my reputation in the near future, please investigate who knows whether her fears were realistic, but it does indicate the paranoia that was swirling around the world of alien abductions and ufology at the time. Vaney and Richman picked up the story from
Carlsberg's blog and saw firsthand Jacob's efforts at obstruction. In February, doctor Scott Lillienfeld, a psychology professor at Emory University, appeared on the Paratope podcast to discuss hypnosis and its use or misuse in UFO research. The Woods case, just recently made public was a natural topic. Jacobs wanted to warn Lillian Feld off, but in a bit of sitcom timing, contacted Lilianfeld at the very moment he was being interviewed on the podcast.
And we were actually running by one of the hypnosis tapes by him that Jacobs had done with Emma Woods and saying is this credible or what do you make of this? And he actually told us during the interview that Jacobs had found out we were interviewing him and contacted him and said, hey, don't do the show. You don't know all of what's going on, blah blah, you know that sort of thing.
Vaney was undeterred. Later in twenty ten, UFO magazine published his article Aliens Versus Predator The Incredible Visitations at Emma Woods, which laid out in detail Emma's experience with Jacobs. Here too, Jacob's tried to intervene, contacting publisher William Burns.
Jacobs actually called Burns. I think he played me the answering machine tape message from Jacobs, who is irate? Who is threatening to SNeW And Bill Burns actually told me he had a conversation with him where he said to him, you know, David, what are you gonna do. You're gonna walk into a court of law and you're gonna say all of this is true. You know, tell the judge about these alien hybrids, and you're gonna somehow say that you're being defined. How do you think that's gonna go?
So naturally he didn't do that, but it just it makes you wonder, like is this guy even smart? Like is he delusional?
I wanted to interview David Jacobs for the podcast to get his take on his work with Emma Woods, but my attempts to reach him when unanswered. He did, however, create a web page with the rebuttal to the charges made by Emma and others about his conduct. It was titled Emma Woods The Real Story, but was taken down a few months before this episode was published and hasn't as yet been restored. It touched on a number of
aspects of his relationship and work with Emma. I was concerned that using short clips provided by Emma of what were much longer hypnosis sessions might not be fair to Jacobs. Were there contexts that would make these brief moments more acceptable? As I read his rebuttal, though, I quickly realized that context was not the issue. The text on the website began.
Since two thousand and seven, Emma Woods, a pseudonym, has made unfounded public accusations against me for the past nine years. She has accused me of incompetence and negligence, criminally threatening her family, intentionally imposing emotional distress and abuse upon her in sexual perversion. These false charges are reflective of a
very disturbed person. After reviewing our communications, I have come to realize that I did my very best for her as far as I could, and it is clear that I was much too kind to her and I should have stopped working with her much earlier. This was a major mistake.
I'm not going to go through this document point by point. I do want to touch on some parts of it, though, and I think one of the things that I find most telling about it is that his explanations exist in the strange world that he co created with Emma and other hypnosis subjects. It is the world of mass kidnappings, sexual violence committed by aliens and hybrids, and a master
plan of colonization. I guess he really had no choice but to stick with the overall narrative, but Bill Burns was right that it is hard to take it seriously as an explanation for real world acts.
Emma's intense isolation gave her abductors an unusual amount of free reign over her life, as they were not constrained by time or circumstance. Emma was alone nearly all of the time. Thus her abductions were extremely frequent and at all hours of the day and night. Between September twenty seventh, two thousand and five and December ninth, two thousand and six,
violence against her and threats against me increased. Security for the abduction phenomenon increases enormously when abductees help hybrids who might or might not be living here. By June two thousand and six, her abductors were seriously attempting to stop her from talking with me, rather than simply telling her not to deal with me, which they did many times. They also engaged in increasingly physical and sexual violent behavior against her when she continued to disobey.
He tried to explain some of his more notorious practices, again within the narrative of a hostile alien and hybrid incursion. He mentions a Betsy here, who's presumably another of his subjects.
The multiple personality disorder RUSE came up when I had used a version of this for Betsy some months before under an assumed name. I emailed her saying that I was a multiple personality disorder researcher and she probably had this condition. She left the message on her computer screen in her head hybrids looked at it. When Emma's hybrids were torturing her and threatening me, I decided to change direction.
I would once again become a quote multiple personality disorder researcher unquote, and expressed to her that this was the condition that allowed her to think that she was being abducted. When I brought up the MPD diagnosis. We both laughed throughout the discussion. I had hoped that my fictional MPD diagnosis would cause the hybrids to reevaluate me as a harmless person who did not believe them as testimony.
Here's a clip from the MPD diagnosis session.
Damn.
My opinion is that yours is a classic case and that the only thing that will help you medication yours stories. I'm only interested in the fact that those stories, because multiple personalities are all different. As you know that in multiple personality disorder comes out. I think that we've been dealing with the four personalities here, or as he is, in fact Muscile personality disorder.
The tape is a little difficult to understand, but he is saying that he is only interested in her stories because she has multiple personality disorder, and that he thinks they are dealing with three or four separate personalities. But the important thing is tone. Does it seem as though this is a laughter filled conversation. Jacobs also tries to make the request for Emma's unwatched panties seem more palatable.
He claims they had talked several times about the benefits of getting some type of seamen sample after a sexual assault so that the DNA could be analyzed. The chastity belt episode is also brushed off. Is merely an idea that had worked with another client and that he had suggested once and then dropped when it wasn't followed up on. And then there's this extraordinary passage about the increased hostility towards abductees cooperating with Jacob's.
As Emma's hybrids were making progress with her to get to me, they had also become extraordinarily violent.
Over his previous years of work, Jacob's claimed aliens and hybrids had simply reprimanded abductees for their involvement with his research.
But once the alien hybrid program transitioned to a new phase of assimilation on Earth, the very human looking hybrids whom I term hubrids, became even more wary and paranoid of my involvement. Their security measures increased enormously, often especially designated security hybrid now accompanying aductees and hubrids on many abduction events. His job was simple to protect the hubrids and to make sure that the abductees remained completely silent
about their experiences. This was the case with Emma.
He writes the following about his decision to no longer work with Emma.
I received an email from Betsy's hybrid's warning me about Emma's people and seeing that Emma's hybrids were very aggressive, more aggressive than his. This was disturbing to me. It provided me with the final impetus to break off from Emma. I told them that I would no longer do hypnosis with her. Events were out of my control. I was bowing out and I could not work with her anymore.
So Emma's hybrids were too violent and scared Jacob's off, leaving Emma, presumably to face them alone. So is he delusional or does he feel that he has the standing to put forward a narrative like this and have people believe him?
Jack Brewer, one of the recordings that she published, indicated that when she confronted him with this, that Jacob's threatened her that if it came down to public credibility between the two of them, that he would win and he would be believed about what had been taking place over her in a nutshell. She was the wrong person to
threaten to keep quiet, She obviously did not. Many people continued to support David Jacobs, as he had predicted a battle of reputations would favor him, and that was true to a certain extent. Richard Dolan was among those that tried to argue there were extenuating circumstances for Jacobs's behavior.
Richard Dolan is a prominent pro UFO author.
However, he never produced these extenuating circumstances or back that up, and it seemed to me there was a collective effort that Dolan was part of from the UFO community to not want to change streams, like we've built a lot on Bud Hopkins and David Jacobs and we're just not willing to change our mind about it.
Jeremy Vaney's efforts at exposing Jacob's misconduct with Emma also met with hostility from the world of ufology. Remember, Vany is not a professional skeptic. He, in fact, is an experiencer who simply wants UFO research to be held to a standard.
So we're in We're the in crowd. We're not like some debunkers from outside of upology. This is actually happening to us. But if this aspect of it were real, we'd be all over it. Telling you that this that we believe, this aspect of it is real, But no, it goes the other way. In fact, we see what looked to me to be potential crimes, if not crimes,
certainly unethical behavior. And to expose that got us nothing but black lilisted from all of his cronies, all of his people in this cottage industry, which you can speak out about UFOs and things like that, like you can dissect certain cases, but you're not allowed to sort of speak truths to power about euthology itself. You're not allowed to call into question all of you follow she itself. That's a no no. And so to do that again is to be blacklisted. You know, you're not going to
get speaking engagements. These people certainly are going to come on your show anytime soon, and they're just going to trash you every chance they get. They have no problem with that, They have no problem with the misogyny of all of this.
Emma herself was vilified for telling her story. She mentions a Carol here, who is Carol Rainey who you heard from a couple of episodes ago and in season one she is Bud Hopkins' ex wife and former research partner.
And then there was a bit of a controversy because most people attacked me, and also Carol Rainey, who also came out and said what she had observed about bad Hopkins's research. And we were just quite savagely aspected that there were some people of the UFO field it realized just how bad it was, and then there was a
kind of a controversy between basically two opposing camps. In the end, people they thought that Hopkins and Jacobs were perfect, and that Caroline and I were these awful people, you know, for some reason, trying to tear them down, and then other people who realized that what was going on with Jacobs's research and Hopkins's research was just not okay. There's still a lot of support for Jacob's and Hopkins in the UFO field.
One final point in this saga is the role that David Jacob's academic institution did or didn't play in overseeing his research. There are strong regulations on how research can be conducted, especially what is called human subjects research. Academic and other institutions that engage in research involving human subjects have an institutional review board that evaluates research proposals to
see if they are compatible with human subjects regulations. David Jacobs was employed by Temple University, which which has an institutional review board that you think would have had some questions about Jacob's research, but that turned out not to be the case. Soon after discovering the multiple personality disorder tape, Emma filed a complaint with Temple University.
A few months later, I filed a complaint with Temple University, and they initially said they were going to investigate it, and then I didn't hear from them. They never asked to speak to me, they never asked for any of my evidence. And then I got this little letter saying that he wasn't writing a book, and they just ignored all that, the entire substance of my complaint, and I kind of realized at that point that, in my opinion,
they were just covering it up. A few months later, the following year, I then filed a complaint with the Office of Human Research Protections, who oversee Temples research to make sure that they're abiding by human subject protections. And then Temple then apparently made a case to them that Jacobs was not actually conducting research. He was just collecting oral history, and I think they did that because oral history is exempt from OHRP oversight.
Jacob's positioned his work with Emma and other abductees as collecting oral histories. Oral history projects documenting a person's history or getting their general reflections on the past, is not considered human subjects research. But needless to say, oral history projects don't entail planting hypnotic suggestions or even hypnotizing subjects in the first place.
But then they said they were still concerned about it and they would ask Temple to investigate it voluntarily. And then Temple then came back and said they couldn't investigate it because he wasn't doing research. Temple did nothing. They just covered it up, and he went on having clients and they knew what he was doing because they knew about like and they still allowed him to have clients. Knew that he was hypnotizing them.
So again, was Jacob's delusional. No one has probably thought about this more than Emma Woods.
So I don't feel that he was trying to learn anything, And looking back, I don't actually personally believe that he believes any of it. I don't know what his agenda was. It could be that he just wanted to write books, or it was helping him in his course at Temple University. But I actually now don't believe that he ever believed any of it. It was such deliberate leading, and he's
very aware that leading causes false memories. I mean, he's written about that, he's talked about that, and the leading was so overt and so deliberate. He was making sure that I remembered that under their gnosis.
In the end, after all that you went through with Jacob's and the after math of her exposing his research practices, she still lives with memories that he suggested to her while she was under hypnosis, and.
I still remember them now. They're part of my experience of my life. Even though I know most of it's probably false, it still there still feels real.
So we have looked at what happens when researchers develop specific, strongly held views about the existence of UFOs and the meaning of interactions with UFOs and aliens. But what does that mean for right now, as we are in the midst of a resurgence of interest. To answer that question, we have to travel back more than fifty years to a place on the border of West Virginia and Ohio 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, 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.