FBI Supervisory Special Agent · Behavioral Science Unit, Quantico
Kenneth V. Lanning served more than thirty years in the FBI, twenty of them in the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico as a profiler specialising in the sexual victimisation of children. When allegations of “satanic ritual abuse” began reaching him in the early 1980s, he initially believed them — then spent years consulting on case after case and could not find corroborating evidence for the organised cult crimes being described at law-enforcement seminars. His October 1989 analysis and his 1992 Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of “Ritual” Child Abuse became the documents that broke the back of the Satanic Panic from inside American policing, and the line everyone now credits to Carl Sagan is a sentence from that work.