San Francisco Chronicle, August 20, 1991, Page #A-3

Much Satanist child abuse occurs only in the minds of mentally-ill people, two researchers told the American Psychological Association yesterday.

Most reports originate from adults who claim they have survived ritual abuse - frequently they are people who suffer from a multiple personality disorder - or from the children and parents of children
in day care centers where rumors of ritual abuse have surfaced, said Dr. George K. Ganaway, director of the Ridgeview Center for Dissociative Disorders in Atlanta, Georgia. Both groups are "highly hypnotizable, highly suggestible, and fantasy-prone," he said.

An FBI expert in ritualistic abuse, Special Agent Kenneth Lanning, said that when he first began to hear victims' stories of bizarre cults and human sacrifice in 1983, "I tended to believe them. I had
been dealing with bizarre, deviant behavior for many years and had long since realized that almost anything is possible."

However, as the number of alleged cases began to "grow and grow", Lanning said that professional evaluations of the reports showed there was a dearth of physical evidence such as bodies or evidence left at the scene of these purportedly savage murders. "Until hard evidence is obtained and corroborated, the public should not be frightened into believing that babies are being bred and eaten, that 50,000 missing children are being murdered in human sacrifices, or that Satanists are taking over America's day care centers," he declared.

An international, highly organized conspiratorial system of criminal Satanic cults "may not in fact exist outside of the collective minds of those who believe in it," Ganaway observed.