ON  A  PSYCHIATRIST's  couch  at the  Fort  Royal  Medical  Centre  in Victoria,  British  Columbia,  Canada,  in  September  1976,  after  a miscarriage   and   200  hours  of  therapy,  Michelle   Smith   began remembering. After  22 years she unearthed and re-lived deeply buried  memories  of her past. From the age of four Michelle had suffered appalling sexual, physical  and  emotional abuse at the hands of a coven  of  Satanists, including her own mother. 

In  bizarre black magic ceremonies she witnessed  debauchery,  murder, the sacrifice of babies, the mutilation of animals and the drinking of unspeakable  substances  including  blood. The power of  God  was  her ultimate salvation. 

Michelle  and  her therapist Lawrence Pazder went to the Vatican  to alert  the  church about previously unheard dangers to  children  from Satanic  cults  worldwide.  To  warn the  world  they  wrote  Michelle Remembers,  published  in 1980 and in Britain, by Michael  Joseph  the next year.

Sue Hutchinson said that in the past six months she has dealt with  10 helpline calls a week from fellow survivors of Satanic abuse. Some  of the 50 cases she was counselling involved cannibalism.

Women  had told her how babies were induced before they were due,  and sacrificed.  Children  were hung up by their feet and  suspended  over electric saws. They suffered all forms of sexual abuse including rape, buggery, and bestiality.

Ms  Hutchinson's horrifying claims were supported by several  speakers at the fourth international conference on Incest and Related  Problems which  took  place  over three days at  Northwick  Park  Hospital.  It received a great deal of publicity. 

Vera  Diamond,  a Harley Street psychotherapist who  co-organised  the conference,  said  several  children had been  killed  during  Satanic rituals.  Afterwards she told this newspaper she had treated 20  adult survivors of ritual abuse. 

Norman Vaughton, a psychotherapist from Nottingham - where the biggest child abuse investigation in Britain last year led to the imprisonment of  nine  adults  for incest and cruelty - said  that  there  were  an estimated  10,000  human sacrifices a year in America,  most  of  them "foetuses that have been bred specially".

Newspapers reported that figure without any qualification. A couple of police  officers  present asked for corroborative evidence.  But  they accepted Satanic child abuse was probably happening in Britain, albeit  on a small scale.

Over  the past two years the British public has been hearing more  and more  about  this  new phenomenon as  social  workers,  psychiatrists, therapists,  the  NSPCC, voluntary groups and churches  all  report  a growing number of cases of Satanic, ritual abuse. But  are these Satanic abuse survivors' stories fantasy or  fact?  Are children in Britain being sadistically abused and tortured by  witches and Satanists in covens? 

Are  teenage girls being used as "brood mares", made pregnant and  the foetus aborted so it can be sacrificed,m and in some cases eaten? More  and  more  child care specialists are telling  us  yes. 

But  an investigation  by the Independent on Sunday has found that nobody  has produced evidence to support these claims. There  have  been police investigations across the United  States,  in Canada, the Netherlands, and now in Britain. They  have  produced no evidence. No bodies, no bones, no  covens,  no underground  tunnels,  no animal carcasses, no  bloodstains.  Nothing. Just  the  occasional court case where the  pretence  of  supernatural powers was used to obtain silence and submission. 

There  is,  of  course, no question that some  children  are  sexually abused by adults. But why have an increasing number of  professionals, police  officers, charities, including the NSPCC, and clergy  come  to believe  that  there  are  covens  of  witches  killing  children  and sacrificing babies? 

Because  children have described seeing horrors they surely could  not have invented, and because exactly the same stories have been told  in other countries. Our   investigations  have  revealed  that  the  Satanic  abuse   myth originated  in  the  United  States. It has  been  spread  largely  in fundamentalist  Christian circles, and it is now accepted as  fact  by many psychotherapists and police officers. The  allegations  began to surface only after the publication  of  the book Michelle Remembers.

The co-author and psychiatrist Dr Pazder, who has  since  married Michelle, began organising  "Satanic  Cult  Crime" seminars across the United States for therapists and the police.In  the United States, Satanic cult panics began spreading  and,  from 1984  to  1989,  100 people nationwide were charged  with  ritual  sex abuse. 

Of  those, about 50 were charged and half convicted  of  child abuse  with no evidence other than the testimony of children,  parents and  experts  explaining  how  children behave  when  they  have  been traumatised. No evidence of Satanism was found in these cases. 

In other cases the allegations were dismissed as the worst outbreak of mass hysteria since the Salem witchhunt at the end of the  seventeenth century.  (During  the  course of the Salem trials,  141  people  were arrested as suspects, 19 were hanged and one was pressed to death.)

In  1987,  in the small town of Oude Pekala in  the  Netherlands,  100 children  eventually  told  stories of Satanism  and  pornography.  No corroborative  evidence  was found and the police concluded it  was  a case of mass hysteria.

So how did the Satanic child abuse myth  spread and cross the Atlantic to Britain? In  the  United  States, Robert Hicks, an analyst  with  the  criminal justice  department  in  Virginia who is writing a book on  so  called Satanic   cult  crime,  blames  "a  loose  network"   of   therapists, fundamentalist Christians, serving and ex-police officers and also the media  for  "perpetuating the myth". He told us: "There were  no  such stories before the publication of Michelle Remembers." 

Dr. Sherrill Mulhern, an anthropologist from the University of  Paris, who has studied self declared Satanic abuse survivors, said: "Michelle Remembers crystallised the Satanic abuse legend among psychotherapists. "Adult therapists began networking with one another and  with  child therapists.

I think the majority of adult survivors' accounts are the result of the interaction between the therapist, the patient and  the surrounding Satanic cult stories. "The  proponents  of  the rumour say all  the  survivors,  adults  and children, are saying the same thing. This is a paranoid reading of the data." 

Kenneth  Lanning, of the National Centre for the Analysis  of  Violent Crime at the FBI Academy in Virginia, wrote in a journal last October: "The  law enforcement perspective cannot ignore the lack  of  physical evidence.  Until  hard  evidence is  obtained  and  corroborated,  the American  people should not be frightened into believing  that  babies are  being bred and eaten, and that 50,000 missing children are  being murdered in human sacrifices. 

"Satanic and occult crime has become a growth industry; speaking fees, books, videos, prevention material, television and radio appearances."

Since the publication of Michelle Remembers, hundreds of women in  the United States, many of them psychiatric cases undergoing therapy, have begun remembering Satanic abuse from their childhood.

Some are writing books,  others are travelling the country addressing conferences,  and many are telling church congregations how they were "saved" from Satan by dedicating their soul to God. Such a book was published in Britain in 1986. Delivered to Declare, by Gabriele Trinkle, published by Hodder and Stoughton, tells how she was sold  to Satan as a six-month-old baby, subjected to  depraved  sexual abuse and witness to the sacrifice of babies. 

The book was lent to this newspaper by a Church of England vicar  from the  Dulwich area of south-east London. It was to help to explain  the story  he  had just related of the survivor of Satanic abuse  who  was sitting beside him. Feeling  suicidal last New Year's Eve, the woman telephoned the  vicar and  asked  for help. She has lived with the minister and  his  family ever since.

She suffered terrifying nightmares, and after eight months of gradual revelation she has come to believe - and so does the  vicar - that she was initiated into a black magic coven in south-east London and  dedicated to Satan in a ritual when she was a six-week-old  baby; married  to  Satan when she was 11; raped by several  members  of  the coven and also by demons; and witness to the sacrifice of animals  and babies. 

Some  of these murders and depravities happened in  a  public park.  Nobody noticed them (and this the vicar at first found hard  to believe)  because, she said, the power of Satan was so string  he  was able to make them invisible.

Another British survivor is Audrey Harper, who describes herself as  a former high priestess, who turned to Christ and now tours the  country warning  of  the dangers of the occult. She now says she knows  of  60 other survivors like herself in Britain. 

Ms Harper began helping the Reachout Trust, a fundamentalist Christian charity  run  by  Maureen Davies, a former nurse from  Rhyl  in  North Wales.  it is dedicated to helping people who have been involved  with the occult and had begun to encounter other survivors of ritual abuse. Most are "born again" Christians. 

The  Reachout Trust sends out literature it receives from  America  on how  to  spot  ritual abuse. Maureen Davies  is  consulted  by  police officers  and  social  workers and has  lectured  at  police  training colleges  and to church groups. last year after setting up a  helpline for survivors, she was invited to lecture in America with Larry Jones, a  policeman  who  runs a newsletter on Satanic  crime  for  Christian police officers in the US. 

[Lt. Larry Jones, of the Boise, Idaho Police Department, publishes his hate literature and propaganda from the basement of his cult's church--something he doesn't mention in his cult newsletter called "File 18."

He believes Bob Larson's claim that 50,000 individuals a year are being murdered for "Satan," and "proves" it with bible quotes!] Information in Britain is also circulated by the Evangelical Alliance, which represents a million Christians in Britain. 

The  proponents  of  stories about Satanic abuse  clearly  believe  it exists and dismiss suggestions that it is merely a myth, arguing  that lack  of physical evidence is simply because all traces are  carefully destroyed. 

[Ms. Davies once said "Sometimes no proof is proof! [of a conspiracy]" She is considered an "expert" in England.] 

One case frequently cited by proponents of the Satanic  abuse  theory happened  in Nottingham. In 1988, two social workers in the city were encountering a particularly vile case of incest involving nine adults and 23 children who had been taken into care. 

According to Christine Johnston, a senior social worker, and Judith Dawson, the team leader, the children began telling  bizarre  stories which  they  could not understand. They called in Ray Wyre,  a  former probation  officer who runs a clinic in Birmingham for sex  offenders.

He  gave them a list of "Satanic indicators", a profile of  signs  and symptoms used  by  American police officers which he  told  the Independent  on Sunday he was given by Pamela Klein, a Chicago  social worker who lectures on Satanic abuse. 

Wyre had other literature on Satanic abuse from the United States, where he had first studied child abuse in 1984. He had picked up some of  the material himself on a visit in 1988; other information he  had been sent. 

Mr  Wyre  says  the  social workers initially asked  him  if  he  knew anything  about witchcraft because the children were  writing  strange things in their diaries. he said he told the social workers and foster parents  the  sort of things said by children who  had  been  ritually abused. 

Mr Wyre studied for three years in the early 1970s at a Baptist  bible college  in  Birmingham to become ordained as a  minister,  but  chose probation  work instead. He said his former beliefs were not  relevant to his work with sex offenders.

Ms  Johnston  and  Ms  Dawson also contacted  Dr  Russell  Blacker,  a consultant   psychiatrist  who  is  secretary  and  founder   of   the Association  of  Christian Psychiatrists. "They didn't know  where  to turn," he said.

Dr  Blacker,  based at a Cornish hospital, believes in  the  power  of exorcism  and says he also counsels adult survivors of Satanic  abuse. In MARCH 1989 he organised a conference on the subject.

In September 1989 at a conference in Reading Ms Johnston and Ms Dawson first  made  public their belief that the Nottingham  children,  whose abusers  had been jailed, had been victims of Satanic abuse.  But  the police could find no evidence.

A  joint inquiry team of police and social workers was set up  by  the chief  constable of Nottingham and the chief executive of  the  county council.  In  an  unpublished 650-page  report,  obtained  by  Central Television  in Nottingham, the team found no evidence  of  ritualistic abuse.

The report says most of the evidence arose as a result of  therapeutic methods.  For  instance, one member of the team said,  limited  choice questions included "you killed three or 30 babies?"

The  report concludes: "We are all aware it is easy to criticise  with the  benefit  of hindsight. However, we are concerned that  two  years later  an  unshakable belief in Satanic ritualistic abuse  appears  to have developed which could easily lead into a modern day witchhunt, as has happened in the US."