"A lot of it was having a spiritual vacuum, created by the fact that the 1960s promise of this cosmic, spiritual consciousness didn't really pan out. Then you had this 1970s uptick of paranormal investigations, ESP, an interest in UFOs, really climaxing with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But the aliens never actually landed, you know?

I think it led to a cynicism that led to kind of a cultural paranoia: there is no meaning. There was already an uptick in fundamentalist Christianity. The Reagan Right had begun to dominate politics. And it was the beginning of a cultural war; that's when the Parents Music Resource Center started to put labels on album covers to warn against profanity or even references to the occult. It was a perfectly ripe stew for [Satanic Panic.] In a way, believing that Satan is running the world is still [offering] a kind of order to things, in a world that can feel very disorderly."

In the wake of all this paranoia came a slew of high-profile cases involving day-care workers, which were a perfect storm of paranoia about Satanism, cutting-edge psychotherapy that claimed to recover the children's repressed memories, and a gathering awareness of the problem of child sexual abuse. It's important to remember that the 1980s didn't just see unfounded dread about Satanists. Prior to the late 1970s, law enforcement did very little to prosecute sexual abuse of children. But in the 1980s, the Department of Justice stepped up its fight against child pornography, with measurable success, and laws revolving around the reporting of child abuse were revamped, with an eye toward protecting innocent victims.

A lot of the interest in patients claiming to have recovered buried memories of Satanic ritual abuse began with a 1980 book entitled Michelle Remembers, written by psychiatrist Lawrence Pazer and his patient (and later, wife) Michelle Smith, says Pamela Freyd, PhD, the executive director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, a nonprofit (met with some varying opinions in the scientific community) that mostly works with parents who have been accused of childhood abuse by their now-adult children.