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171 SPECIAL EFFECTS pists have no psychiatric training that would enable them to diagnose the real problems that may exist behind the stated symptoms these witnesses present. They do not know how to separate genuine witnesses of abductions from sincere but possibly deluded observers of unusual phenomena, or from victims of other sources of trauma such as child molestation or ritual crime. Even more significantly, they often distort what such genuine witnesses tell them, using the additional leverage that hypnosis gives them over impressionable patients, in order to fit the experience into a preconceived theory. The self-styled scientists who are doing abduction research today are nothing more than neocultists who are busy exploiting the public's fear of the unknown. They fill the vacuum official science has left behind when it walked away from the study of the UFO phenomenon. In many cases they are the ones who induce trauma in the witnesses they pretend to be treating or studying. This unfortunate trend toward sloppy research has left tragic casual- ties in the wake of a sensational UFO case in the Florida town of Gulf Breeze, where a local secret witness calling himself Mr. Ed produced a whole series of Polaroid shots of an extraordinary object. The pictures, according to the Washington-based Fund for UFO Research, were absolutely genuine. The group's director, Navy physicist Dr. Bruce Maccabee, said on several occasions that they "could not have been faked." The whole tale was hyped up by various amateur groups, notably the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), and it was published in a lavishly-illustrated volume for which Mr. Ed reportedly obtained a six-figure advance. A television mini-series was planned. In the ensuing months, unfortunately, the Gulf Breeze house of cards collapsed, taking with it much of the credibility still attached to the major UFO organizations in the United States. Mr. Ed, who turned out to be a local house builder named Ed Walters, had once hired a young man in his community to help him fake such Polaroid pictures. The young man had the courage to come forward and to confess publicly. A model of a flying saucer was found in the attic of Mr. Ed's former house. The physicist who had pronounced the photographs authentic was revealed to have received ten percent of the publisher's