The Dark History of Hypnosis: From Mesmer’s “Magnetic” Trances and Surgery in Bengal to CIA Mind-Control Experiments and a Death Row Memory

A woman sits in a courtroom and looks across the room at a man accused of murder.

She says she is certain.

Not fairly sure.

Not probably sure.

Certain.

The problem is that when police first tested her memory, she could not identify him.

Then investigators hypnotized her.

More than a year after the crime, she identified him in court.

That man, Charles Don Flores, has spent decades on Texas death row. The state that convicted him later prohibited testimony produced during or after investigative hypnosis because of concerns about unreliable memory. Yet the law was made prospective, leaving Flores unable to benefit from the new rule simply because his trial happened years earlier. In June 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court declined without comment to take his latest appeal.

It would be easy to turn this into a story about hypnosis being sinister.

That would be wrong.

Hypnosis is real, but not in the Hollywood sense. It is not a supernatural sleep, a secret doorway into perfect memory, or a method for turning an unwilling person into a programmable assassin. Modern psychology defines hypnosis as a procedure or state in which suggestion can alter sensation, perception, cognition, emotion and voluntary experience. People differ substantially in how responsive they are to it.

Its actual history is stranger.

Hypnosis grew from an 18th-century physician's false theory about invisible magnetic fluid. It passed through one of history's earliest sophisticated placebo-style experiments. It was used as apparent surgical anesthesia in colonial Bengal before ether and chloroform transformed medicine. It became entertainment, psychotherapy and neurological research.

Then intelligence agencies wondered whether it could break the human will.

Police wondered whether it could unlock hidden memories.

Both ambitions collided with the same uncomfortable fact:

Suggestion can sometimes change what people experience without giving the hypnotist magical control—and it can make a person feel more certain about something that never happened.

That is the paradox at the heart of hypnosis.

It can help someone genuinely experience less pain.

It can change attention and perception measurably in the brain.

It can be useful in carefully selected clinical settings.

And it can also transform uncertainty into confidence without transforming error into truth.

Before Hypnosis, There Was Mesmerism

The modern story begins with Franz Anton Mesmer, born in 1734.

Mesmer was a physician working at a time when medicine still included treatments that would look extraordinary today. Bloodletting, purging and speculative theories of invisible bodily forces remained common.

Mesmer proposed another invisible mechanism.

He called it animal magnetism.

According to his theory, a universal fluid permeated living beings and the cosmos. Disease could result when this fluid became obstructed or imbalanced. A skilled practitioner—the magnetizer—could supposedly manipulate the fluid and restore health.

Mesmer initially experimented with magnets but came to believe that the therapeutic force existed in the practitioner rather than in ordinary magnetized metal.

The word “mesmerize” survives from his name.

Mesmer’s Paris Treatments Became Spectacles

Mesmer became enormously fashionable in Paris.

Patients gathered around devices known as baquets—large tubs containing bottles, water and iron rods that supposedly concentrated magnetic fluid.

People might hold rods against affected areas of their bodies while music played and practitioners performed passes with their hands.

Some participants reported dramatic reactions:

• Trembling
• Fainting
• Convulsions
• Emotional outbursts
• Temporary paralysis
• Relief of symptoms

To supporters, these reactions proved that Mesmer's invisible force was powerful.

To skeptics, they looked suspiciously like expectation and social contagion.

King Louis XVI eventually commissioned scientists and physicians to investigate.

Among them were two names far more famous for other reasons:

Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier.

The 1784 Investigation Accidentally Became a Landmark in Experimental Psychology

The commissioners did something remarkably modern.

They tried to separate what subjects believed was happening from what was physically being done.

In some experiments, participants were blindfolded.

They were told they were being magnetized when they were not.

In other situations, supposedly magnetic procedures were applied without the subject knowing.

The pattern was devastating for Mesmer's fluid theory.

People could experience powerful effects when they merely believed magnetism was being applied.

When magnetism was supposedly applied without their knowledge, the expected effects often disappeared.

The commission concluded that no evidence established the existence of Mesmer's proposed magnetic fluid and attributed the dramatic reactions primarily to touch, imitation and imagination.

Mesmer's physics was wrong.

But something important remained.

Expectation could alter experience.

Suggestion could alter sensation.

People could enter unusual states without pretending.

The investigators had disproved the explanation while leaving the phenomenon itself alive.

That distinction eventually became hypnosis.

Mesmer May Have Been Wrong About Magnetism but Right That the Mind Could Change the Body

Calling Mesmer simply a fraud misses the most interesting part of the history.

There was no detectable magnetic fluid.

But some of his patients were experiencing genuine changes in perception, movement, pain and emotion.

The mistake was interpreting those effects as evidence of a mysterious physical force passing between bodies.

Modern hypnosis research describes a much less supernatural process involving attention, expectation, suggestion, perception and cognitive control.

In that sense, the 1784 commission did more than attack mesmerism.

It helped separate the effect from the story people told about the effect.

That distinction still matters today.

James Braid Removed the Magnetism

A major conceptual shift arrived in Britain during the 1840s.

Scottish surgeon James Braid watched a public mesmerism demonstration and became fascinated.

Unlike Mesmer's followers, Braid did not think a mysterious fluid was moving from operator to subject.

He investigated whether intense concentration, eye fixation, expectation and suggestion could explain the behavior.

Braid introduced the term hypnotism in the early 1840s and helped move the subject from animal magnetism toward a psychophysiological explanation. Medical historians regard his work as an important turning point because he treated hypnotic phenomena as potentially understandable processes of the nervous system and mind rather than occult force.

Ironically, Braid initially associated the state with sleep.

He later recognized that hypnosis was not simply ordinary sleep.

The terminology survived anyway.

Then Hypnosis Entered an Operating Room in Bengal

At almost exactly the same time that Braid was trying to reconstruct mesmerism scientifically, a Scottish surgeon in British India was conducting a far more dramatic experiment.

His name was James Esdaile.

Esdaile was an Edinburgh-trained surgeon employed in colonial Bengal.

By the 1840s, he had spent years performing conventional surgery in India.

Then he began using mesmerism to produce what he described as profound insensibility during operations.

This was before modern chemical anesthesia had become standard.

That historical timing is essential.

Surgery before effective anesthesia could be terrifying.

Speed mattered because patients were conscious and pain could be extreme.

Ether anesthesia would be publicly demonstrated in Boston in 1846.

Chloroform would enter medical use soon afterward.

Esdaile began his mesmeric surgical experiments in Bengal in 1845.

The First Famous Experiments Took Place at Hooghly

Esdaile worked at Hooghly, north of Calcutta.

His patients were overwhelmingly Indian.

Historical accounts describe him using prolonged mesmeric passes to induce deep trance-like conditions before operations.

The procedures were sometimes extraordinary by modern standards.

They included the removal of enormous scrotal tumors associated with elephantiasis, along with other major operations.

Esdaile published his experiences in Mesmerism in India, and its Practical Application in Surgery and Medicine in 1846.

In his own reports, he claimed that patients underwent operations with little or no apparent pain while deeply mesmerized.

Esdaile Eventually Claimed Hundreds of Painless Operations

In later records, Esdaile reported 261 surgical procedures performed under mesmerism, excluding numerous minor procedures he said were not formally counted.

He also reported mortality figures from major tumor operations that he believed compared favorably with conventional surgery of the period.

Those figures have helped make him a legend in hypnosis history.

But they should not be interpreted like the results of a modern randomized clinical trial.

There were no blinded comparison groups.

Definitions of pain response were different.

Patient selection may have mattered enormously.

Records were created inside a colonial medical system with profound inequalities of power.

And Esdaile strongly believed in his own explanation.

The strongest historical conclusion is not that he proved mesmerism could universally replace anesthesia.

It is that something capable of producing remarkable alterations in pain experience was being observed before modern anesthetic drugs became widely available.

The Colonial Setting Makes the Story More Complicated

Esdaile's Bengal experiments are sometimes retold as a heroic story of a visionary European physician ignored by conservative Western medicine.

Recent scholarship paints a more interesting picture.

Historian Kapil Raj argues that Esdaile's mesmeric surgery developed through interactions with indigenous practices and practitioners of trance induction and must be understood within the social and political structure of colonial medicine.

Esdaile's work eventually received enough official support that a dedicated mesmeric hospital was established in Calcutta.

But the history raises questions that are difficult to reconstruct retrospectively.

How freely could colonial patients refuse experimental treatment?

How were their subjective experiences translated and interpreted?

Did cultural expectations influence responsiveness?

How much of the apparent anesthesia resulted from hypnosis, dissociation, suggestion, patient selection or other factors?

The surviving record cannot answer every question.

Chemical Anesthesia Arrived—and Mesmeric Surgery Lost the Competition

Whatever hypnosis could accomplish, ether and chloroform offered a major advantage:

They were comparatively predictable.

A surgeon did not need to spend hours determining whether a particular patient could enter a profound hypnotic state.

Chemical anesthesia could work across a much larger range of patients and procedures.

Esdaile's mesmeric hospital eventually disappeared as chemical anesthesia transformed surgery. The recent historical review of his work describes the institution as effectively overtaken by newer, cheaper and more reliable anesthetic methods.

Hypnosis did not vanish.

It migrated.

From surgery, it moved increasingly toward neurology, psychiatry, psychology and entertainment.

Hypnosis Became Associated With a Dangerous Myth: The Mindless Subject

Popular culture transformed hypnosis into something far more sinister than clinical suggestion.

The hypnotist became a master.

The subject became a puppet.

Stories imagined people who could be commanded to steal, kill, reveal secrets or fall in love.

The figure of Svengali, popularized in George du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby, helped establish this image of hypnotic domination.

Later films amplified it.

By the 20th century, hypnosis was culturally associated with a frightening possibility:

What if someone could bypass your will?

That question eventually reached intelligence agencies.

The CIA Really Did Experiment With Hypnosis

This part is not conspiracy theory.

Declassified CIA records explicitly document it.

Before the infamous MKULTRA program, the agency conducted projects known as BLUEBIRD and later ARTICHOKE.

A 1951 CIA document describing BLUEBIRD states that the program concerned special interrogation methods intended to obtain information considered important to U.S. security.

A later CIA review states that as early as 1949–1950, agency personnel were experimenting with drugs and hypnosis under BLUEBIRD.

ARTICHOKE continued research into unconventional interrogation using combinations of:

• Drugs
• Chemicals
• Hypnosis
• Isolation
• Psychological pressure

The Goal Was Disturbingly Explicit

A declassified 1953 program description said researchers wanted to perfect techniques involving drugs, hypnosis and other methods for extracting information from individuals whether willing or not.

That language places hypnosis inside one of the darker chapters of American intelligence history.

The experiments were not simply meditation research conducted in comfortable laboratories.

They were connected to interrogation, coercion and Cold War fears that foreign powers might possess advanced “brainwashing” techniques.

ARTICHOKE Combined Hypnosis With Drugs

Declassified material describes at least one 1954 ARTICHOKE interrogation in which a covert asset was subjected to hypnosis alongside what the CIA record called massive use of chemicals.

The subject was held under ARTICHOKE techniques for approximately 12 hours, according to the surviving memorandum.

That does not prove hypnosis created a controllable human robot.

It demonstrates that the CIA was willing to test whether altered states, chemical intoxication and psychological manipulation could make interrogation more effective.

The ethical problems are obvious.

The scientific results were considerably less spectacular than the mythology.

MKULTRA Expanded the Search for Control Over Human Behavior

MKULTRA, formally launched in the 1950s, became an umbrella for a wide range of research into drugs and behavioral manipulation.

LSD became its most famous component.

Hypnosis also appeared within the broader research environment.

Declassified MKULTRA records include human behavioral experiments and projects concerned with suggestibility, personality and altered states.

Some historical details remain difficult to reconstruct because CIA director Richard Helms ordered many MKULTRA records destroyed in 1973.

But enough documentation survived to establish that the programs were real.

Did the CIA Discover How to Create a Hypnotized Assassin?

There is no persuasive evidence that it did.

This is where documented history and popular mythology separate.

Hypnosis can influence behavior.

People can become unusually absorbed in suggestions.

They can experience suggested sensations as real.

But that is not equivalent to erasing personality and installing an arbitrary command.

Psychologist David Patterson, discussing the evidence with the American Psychological Association, noted that experimental work does not support the cinematic idea that hypnosis can simply compel an otherwise unwilling person to commit murder or antisocial acts.

Modern clinical descriptions likewise emphasize that hypnosis is not mind control and that patients remain active participants rather than unconscious puppets.

The CIA found a psychological phenomenon.

Hollywood invented a remote control.

Why Stage Hypnosis Looks Like Mind Control

Stage performances create a misleading impression because the audience sees only the people who responded strongly enough to participate.

That is selection.

Hypnotic responsiveness varies considerably.

A small group of people are highly responsive, many are moderately responsive, and some respond very little. Stanford researchers estimate that roughly 15% of adults are highly hypnotizable, while approximately two-thirds show at least some responsiveness.

Stage performers are also operating in a powerful social environment.

Volunteers:

• Know they are at a show
• Expect something unusual
• Have chosen to participate
• See other participants complying
• May enjoy performing
• Understand implicitly that absurd behavior is part of the event

A person clucking like a chicken onstage is not proof that their moral agency has disappeared.

It often demonstrates a combination of responsiveness, expectation, absorption and willingness to play the role.

So What Is Hypnosis Actually Doing?

There is still no single universally accepted theory explaining every hypnotic phenomenon.

A 2024 systematic review of major theories found that hypnosis can reliably alter perception, cognition, action and the sense of agency, but competing theories explain those effects in different ways.

A 2025 neuroscience review reached a similarly cautious conclusion: hypnotic responses are behaviorally robust, but brain-imaging results are heterogeneous enough that scientists should be wary of claiming one unique “hypnosis center” or universal neural signature.

What researchers increasingly see is a set of interacting processes involving:

• Focused attention
• Reduced awareness of competing stimuli
• Expectation
• Mental imagery
• Suggestibility
• Changes in perceived agency
• Top-down modulation of sensation and emotion

Hypnosis is better understood as a way of organizing attention and suggestion than as entering a magical alternate consciousness.

Brain Scans Show That Hypnosis Is Not Simply Pretending

One influential Stanford study used functional MRI to compare highly hypnotizable and minimally hypnotizable participants.

Researchers reported three notable patterns during hypnosis among the highly responsive group.

First, activity decreased in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in monitoring salience and competing demands.

Second, connectivity increased between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and insula, networks involved in cognitive control and bodily processing.

Third, connectivity decreased between executive-control regions and the default mode network, which is strongly involved in self-referential thinking.

These findings fit the subjective description of hypnosis:

Intense absorption.

Less distraction.

Greater responsiveness to imagery and suggestion.

A reduced sense of consciously initiating some responses.

But even here, caution matters.

Later reviews find substantial variation between studies. There is no single brain pattern that proves a person is “under hypnosis.”

Scientists Can Even Temporarily Increase Hypnotizability

A particularly intriguing experiment was published in Nature Mental Health in 2024.

Stanford researchers recruited people with fibromyalgia who were not already highly hypnotizable.

Using individualized transcranial magnetic stimulation targeted toward a brain region associated with hypnotic responsiveness, they delivered only 92 seconds of stimulation.

Participants receiving active stimulation became temporarily more hypnotizable than those receiving sham stimulation.

The effect lasted roughly an hour.

That does not establish that scientists have found an “on switch” for hypnosis.

It does provide evidence that hypnotic responsiveness is connected to modifiable brain-network function rather than being mere theater.

Hypnosis Can Change Pain Without Making an Injury Imaginary

Pain is one of the clearest examples of why hypnosis is scientifically interesting.

Pain is not simply a damage meter.

Tissue injury matters, but the experience of pain is constructed by the nervous system using sensory input, attention, expectation, emotion and context.

That is why identical injuries can feel different under different conditions.

Hypnotic suggestion can target this perceptual processing.

A person may still receive sensory signals from the body while experiencing those signals as less painful, less threatening or emotionally distant.

Modern neuroimaging and experimental research support genuine changes in pain processing rather than simple verbal claims that pain has disappeared.

Modern Evidence for Hypnotic Pain Relief Is Promising but Not Magical

A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis examined dozens of randomized trials involving hypnosis added to usual treatment.

The analysis found small additional reductions in pain for several clinical categories, including chronic pain and procedural or surgical pain.

But the authors rated the overall certainty of evidence as low or very low, meaning the true effect could differ substantially from the pooled estimate.

A separate 2025 meta-analysis reported a significant benefit for acute pain but did not find a significant benefit for chronic pain in the trials it selected.

That apparent disagreement tells us something important.

Hypnosis should not be marketed as universal anesthesia.

Effects vary according to:

• Condition
• Study design
• Suggestibility
• Practitioner
• Type of suggestion
• Comparison treatment

The clinical evidence is real enough to study seriously and inconsistent enough to resist miracle claims.

Gut-Directed Hypnotherapy Has Become a Real Treatment for IBS

One of hypnosis's most accepted modern clinical applications is gut-directed hypnotherapy for irritable bowel syndrome.

This approach does not tell patients their symptoms are imaginary.

IBS involves complex interactions among gut motility, visceral sensitivity, stress, cognition and brain-gut signaling.

Hypnotic sessions use suggestions designed to alter the experience and regulation of gastrointestinal sensations.

The American College of Gastroenterology includes gut-directed hypnotherapy within the broader category of gut-directed psychotherapies that may be used for global IBS symptoms, although its recommendation reflects limited-quality evidence.

This is modern hypnosis at its least sensational:

Not secret commands.

Not recovered past lives.

A clinician helping a patient's nervous system interpret bodily signals differently.

Hypnosis Is Not Equally Effective for Everything

The word hypnotherapy is sometimes marketed as though it can treat virtually any problem.

That is not evidence-based.

A Cochrane review of hypnosis for smoking cessation, for example, found insufficient evidence to conclude that it works better than other approaches or no treatment with high confidence.

Claims that hypnosis can reliably:

• Recover forgotten childhood trauma
• Reveal past lives
• Cure cancer
• Force weight loss
• Erase addiction instantly
• Expose hidden truth

should therefore be treated very differently from carefully studied clinical interventions for pain or functional gastrointestinal symptoms.

The word hypnosis can refer to scientifically legitimate therapy and extremely dubious practice.

The difference is evidence.

The Most Dangerous Myth May Be That Hypnosis Unlocks Perfect Memory

This brings us to the darkest modern application.

Forensic hypnosis.

During the 1970s and 1980s, some police departments became interested in hypnotizing witnesses who could not remember details of crimes.

The underlying model sounded intuitive.

Memory was imagined like a video recording.

The event was supposedly stored intact in the brain.

A witness might consciously be unable to access all of it.

Hypnosis could bypass the blockage, rewind the internal tape and recover the missing detail.

Perhaps the witness would suddenly remember:

• A face
• A license plate
• A tattoo
• A weapon
• A voice
• A street sign

The problem is that human memory does not work like a video recorder.

Memory Is Reconstructive

Every act of remembering involves reconstruction.

The brain combines traces of the original event with:

• Later information
• Expectations
• Questions
• Prior beliefs
• Imagination
• Emotional reactions
• Other memories

This does not mean memory is useless.

Humans remember enormous amounts accurately.

It means remembering is not equivalent to opening an untouched computer file.

Every retrieval creates an opportunity for information to be altered or incorporated.

That is why leading questions can matter.

It is why repeated identification procedures can matter.

And it is why hypnosis creates special danger.

Hypnosis Can Generate More Detail Without Generating More Truth

A hypnotized witness may produce additional information.

Some of it may be accurate.

Some may be guessed.

Some may be constructed from suggestion.

The critical problem is that the witness may not know which is which.

A U.S. Justice Department review of forensic hypnosis warned that a well-intentioned hypnotized witness can effectively become an “honest liar”—not because the person is deliberately deceiving investigators, but because confabulated details can later feel like genuine memories.

That is much more dangerous than an ordinary lie.

A liar knows the story is false.

A false-memory witness may be absolutely sincere.

Confidence Is Not the Same Thing as Accuracy

Hypnosis can worsen the problem by increasing confidence.

Suppose a witness begins with:

“I think his hair was dark, but I'm not sure.”

After repeated imagery, prompting and hypnotic suggestion, the mental representation becomes vivid.

Later the witness may say:

“I remember his black hair clearly.”

The change in confidence feels like improved memory.

It may instead reflect repeated imagination.

Texas lawmakers explicitly cited this scientific concern when they moved to prohibit investigative hypnosis evidence, noting research that hypnosis can make witnesses more confident in memories even when those memories are false.

This is the crucial lesson:

Vividness is not verification.

Courts Began Realizing the Problem

Concerns over forensic hypnosis were well established by the early 1980s.

In People v. Shirley, the California Supreme Court reviewed research finding that hypnosis could intensify the same vulnerabilities already present in ordinary eyewitness memory, including suggestibility and confabulation.

Different U.S. jurisdictions developed different rules.

Some excluded hypnotically refreshed testimony.

Others allowed it with safeguards.

Texas continued training law-enforcement officers in forensic hypnosis for decades.

By 2021, however, the Texas Department of Public Safety suspended its hypnosis program.

Then Texas went further.

Texas Finally Banned Investigative Hypnosis Testimony in 2023

Texas Senate Bill 338 changed state criminal procedure.

The law defines investigative hypnosis as a law-enforcement technique using hypnosis to enhance a witness's memory of legally relevant events.

It makes statements produced during or after such hypnosis inadmissible against a defendant when the hypnosis was conducted by law enforcement to investigate the offense.

Physical evidence independently corroborating the crime can still be admitted.

The legislature's analysis was remarkably candid.

It said scientific research had found an alarming amount of unreliable eyewitness identification associated with forensic hypnosis and highlighted the danger of increasing confidence in false memories.

There was one enormous limitation.

The law was prospective.

It did not automatically reopen older convictions.

One of those older convictions was Charles Don Flores's.

The Charles Flores Case Is the Perfect Nightmare of Forensic Hypnosis

On January 29, 1998, 64-year-old Elizabeth “Betty” Black was killed in her home in Farmers Branch, Texas.

Investigators believed two men had arrived at the house.

Neighbor Jill Barganier saw two men entering the property.

Her first descriptions matter enormously.

According to records summarized in Flores's later appeals, she initially described two white men with long hair.

Charles Flores is Hispanic and at the time had short hair.

Police hoped hypnosis might improve Barganier's memory.

The Hypnotist Was a Police Officer Who Had Never Conducted Hypnosis Before

Barganier was hypnotized by Farmers Branch police officer Alfredo Roen Serna.

According to Flores's Supreme Court petition as reported by The Texas Tribune, this was the first hypnosis session Serna had conducted.

During the session, Barganier continued describing long hair.

The officer nevertheless asked questions about whether one suspect might have shorter, trimmed hair.

This matters because suggestive questions can introduce information into a witness's reconstructive process even without anyone intentionally trying to implant a false memory.

She Still Did Not Identify Flores After Hypnosis

Immediately after the hypnosis session, police showed Barganier a photographic lineup.

Flores was in it.

She did not identify him.

That is an extraordinary fact considering what happened later.

More than a year passed.

Flores went to trial.

Then Barganier saw him in the courtroom.

And for the first time, she identified him as one of the men she had seen on the morning of the murder.

She expressed complete confidence.

The “100 Percent” Identification Is Why This Case Matters

At trial, Barganier identified Flores with what The Texas Tribune described as “100 percent” certainty.

That confidence is emotionally powerful.

Jurors understandably find confident witnesses persuasive.

But from a memory-science perspective, the sequence matters more than the confidence.

Her earliest memory did not match Flores.

She failed to identify him in a lineup.

She underwent hypnosis.

She was exposed to information connected with the investigation and subsequent prosecution.

Then, 13 months later, she identified the one defendant sitting in court.

No amount of later confidence can erase that sequence.

Flores Was Sentenced to Death

Flores was convicted in 1999 and sentenced to death for his role in Black's murder and robbery.

His case has been contested for years.

The prosecution and Texas authorities have continued defending the conviction.

Flores has maintained his innocence.

His attorneys emphasize that no DNA, fingerprint or comparable physical evidence introduced at trial tied him to the crime scene.

The controversy is not that hypnosis was the only evidence in the entire case.

It is that a hypnotized witness's changing identification became a critical component of a case carrying the ultimate punishment.

Texas Stayed His Execution in 2016

Flores had been scheduled for execution in 2016.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stopped the execution while considering his challenge involving developments in memory science and forensic hypnosis.

The court ultimately did not overturn his conviction.

Meanwhile, scientific and legal opinion continued shifting against forensic hypnosis.

In 2023, Texas prohibited the very category of evidence at the center of the controversy.

But because the statute applied prospectively, Flores remained on death row.

The U.S. Supreme Court Was Asked to Intervene Again in 2026

Flores's lawyers filed another petition with the U.S. Supreme Court in February 2026.

The case attracted amicus briefs from an unusual coalition that included:

• The American Psychological Association
• Wrongful-identification advocates
• Texas Defender Service
• Magicians Penn & Teller

The official Supreme Court docket records those filings.

The legal issue was not simply whether hypnosis is scientifically dubious.

Flores wanted the courts to give meaningful consideration to his claim under Texas's “junk science” framework.

On June 15, 2026, the Supreme Court denied the petition without comment.

As of August 2026, Flores remains under a death sentence while his attorney says she intends to continue pursuing available avenues of relief.

A Supreme Court Denial Does Not Mean the Court Declared the Hypnosis Reliable

This distinction is essential.

When the Supreme Court denies certiorari, it normally does not issue a ruling that every factual or scientific conclusion in the lower-court case was correct.

The Court simply declines to hear the case.

In Flores's 2026 proceeding, the petition was denied without comment.

So the correct summary is not:

“The Supreme Court ruled hypnosis reliable.”

It did not.

Nor is it:

“The Supreme Court ruled Flores innocent.”

It did not.

The legal system left his conviction standing while Texas's current law simultaneously says comparable law-enforcement hypnosis-derived statements should not be admitted in a new criminal trial.

That tension is what makes the case historically important.

The Case Reveals the Most Dangerous Property of False Memory

False memory rarely feels false.

That is why the subject is so unsettling.

Someone experiencing a weak or uncertain memory may recognize doubt.

Someone who has mentally rehearsed a reconstructed version dozens of times may experience something entirely different:

Clarity.

Detail.

Emotion.

Confidence.

The memory can become more psychologically convincing even while becoming less connected to the original event.

Hypnosis is particularly dangerous in forensic settings because it combines:

• Focused attention
• Expectation
• Authority
• Suggestive imagery
• Repeated retrieval
• Pressure to remember

None of these requires deliberate manipulation.

A well-meaning investigator can contaminate memory accidentally.

Hypnosis Does Not Create a Human Lie Detector Either

Another recurring misconception is that hypnotized people cannot lie.

They can.

Hypnosis does not bypass deception and expose an objective truth stream.

A subject can:

• Lie deliberately
• Misremember
• Confabulate
• Respond to demand characteristics
• Mix imagination with memory

The hypnotic state therefore offers no magical solution to interrogation.

This makes the CIA's early fascination especially revealing.

The agency wanted tools that could force truth from unwilling minds.

Human cognition does not offer such a simple mechanism.

The Difference Between Clinical and Forensic Hypnosis Is the Goal

The same psychological property can be useful in one context and dangerous in another.

Clinical hypnosis asks:

“Can suggestion help you experience this pain differently?”

Absolute historical truth is not usually required.

If a patient safely experiences less procedural pain, the treatment may have succeeded.

Forensic hypnosis asks:

“What exactly happened at 6:45 a.m. 13 months ago?”

Now factual accuracy is everything.

A vivid but false detail can imprison someone.

That is why evidence that hypnosis changes perception does not support its use as a memory-recovery machine.

The stronger hypnosis is at altering subjective experience, the more careful forensic investigators should be about using it to reconstruct historical fact.

Why “Recovered Memory” Therapy Became Controversial Too

The forensic controversy overlaps with another dark chapter: therapeutic attempts to recover supposedly repressed trauma through hypnosis and suggestive interviewing.

During parts of the late 20th century, some clinicians assumed that symptoms might indicate hidden childhood abuse and used hypnosis, guided imagery or repeated questioning to search for memories.

Memory research demonstrated the danger of this approach.

Suggestion can alter autobiographical recollection.

Repeated imagination can increase familiarity.

A patient can develop sincere confidence in a reconstructed event.

This does not mean traumatic amnesia never occurs.

It means hypnosis cannot distinguish a genuine recovered memory from an imagined or suggestion-contaminated one.

Claims involving previously unknown crimes therefore require independent corroboration.

Hypnosis Is Not Sleep

The word itself encourages another misconception.

A hypnotized person may appear deeply relaxed.

Eyes may be closed.

Breathing may slow.

But hypnosis is not simply unconsciousness.

People commonly hear the hypnotist.

They can think.

They can remember sessions.

They can evaluate suggestions.

Modern clinical descriptions emphasize focused concentration rather than literal sleep.

That is why the stereotypical phrase “you are getting sleepy” is culturally memorable but scientifically incomplete.

Hypnosis Is Not a Truth Serum

It does not create perfect memory.

It does not guarantee honesty.

It does not reveal secret knowledge inaccessible by ordinary cognition with forensic certainty.

It does not reliably distinguish imagination from reality.

Its ability to increase subjective vividness is precisely why it can be dangerous when accuracy rather than therapy is the goal.

Hypnosis Is Not Mind Control

There is no established technique by which a hypnotist can erase someone's moral identity and transform them into a completely obedient automaton.

Participants retain agency.

They can resist.

They can disengage.

They can reject suggestions.

Cleveland Clinic's clinical guidance explicitly emphasizes that hypnosis is not brainwashing and that patients remain in control.

That does not mean hypnotic situations are ethically harmless.

People can still be manipulated through ordinary mechanisms:

• Authority
• Social pressure
• Deception
• Trust
• Fear
• Repetition

But those mechanisms exist outside hypnosis too.

Hypnosis Can Still Feel Involuntary

This is where the subject becomes psychologically fascinating.

Under successful hypnotic suggestion, a person may experience an action or sensation as though it is happening automatically.

A suggested arm movement can feel involuntary.

A suggested numbness can feel genuinely numb.

A suggested visual experience can alter perception.

Researchers sometimes describe changes in the sense of agency—the feeling that “I am causing this action.”

Modern theoretical reviews emphasize that hypnosis can change subjective agency without requiring a loss of literal behavioral control.

The experience of “this is happening to me” can be genuine even when the brain itself is producing the response.

Why Some People Are Easier to Hypnotize

Hypnotizability is not simply gullibility.

Highly hypnotizable people are not necessarily unintelligent, weak-minded or easily manipulated in ordinary life.

Research treats hypnotizability as a relatively stable individual characteristic.

Studies have found differences in functional connectivity among attention and salience networks in people with high versus low hypnotic responsiveness.

The trait appears to involve an unusual capacity for:

• Absorption
• Imaginative involvement
• Focused attention
• Responsiveness to suggestion
• Altering subjective experience

That can be therapeutically useful.

It does not make the person a puppet.

The Dark History of Hypnosis Is Really a History of Overclaiming

Look across the centuries and a pattern appears.

Mesmer saw real psychological effects and claimed invisible magnetic fluid.

Esdaile saw extraordinary pain control and interpreted it through mesmerism.

Cold War intelligence agencies saw suggestibility and wondered whether the will could be erased.

Police saw enhanced recall and assumed more details meant more accurate memory.

Alternative therapists saw vivid recollections and sometimes assumed vividness meant historical truth.

Each mistake involves the same leap:

A genuine psychological effect is observed, then given a much larger explanation than the evidence supports.

Modern hypnosis research becomes far more interesting once those exaggerated explanations are removed.

What Modern Hypnosis Can Legitimately Claim

Evidence supports the idea that hypnosis can alter subjective experience.

It can influence:

• Pain
• Attention
• Perception
• Emotional responses
• Bodily sensations
• Sense of agency

It may provide useful adjunctive treatment in selected conditions, especially certain pain settings and gut-directed therapy for IBS.

Brain-imaging research demonstrates measurable changes during hypnotic responding, although no single universal neural signature has been established.

Those findings are impressive.

They do not require pendulums, magnetic fluid or mind control.

What Hypnosis Cannot Reliably Claim

There is no sound evidence that hypnosis can reliably:

• Turn an unwilling person into an assassin
• Recover memories with photographic accuracy
• Reveal hidden truth
• Detect lies
• Recover past lives
• Guarantee smoking cessation
• Permanently erase traumatic memories
• Make everyone equally suggestible

When extraordinary claims appear, the correct question is the same one Franklin and Lavoisier's commission effectively asked in 1784:

What happens when expectation is separated from the claimed mechanism?

That question transformed mesmerism once.

It still protects people today.

From Mesmer’s Salon to a Texas Death Row Cell

The historical arc is almost unbelievable.

In 1784, scientists blindfolded participants to determine whether invisible animal magnetism existed.

In the 1840s, a Scottish surgeon in Bengal used mesmeric trance while cutting enormous tumors from patients before reliable chemical anesthesia was widely available.

A century later, American intelligence officers combined hypnosis, drugs and coercive interrogation while searching for methods to control or extract information from unwilling minds.

Police departments then used hypnosis for a different kind of extraction:

Memory.

And eventually a Texas legislature concluded that the technique was unreliable enough that hypnotically influenced statements should no longer be admitted against defendants in new criminal trials.

Yet Charles Flores remains on death row after a case in which a witness who initially did not identify him later pointed to him in court with total confidence after undergoing police hypnosis.

That may be the most unsettling lesson hypnosis has ever taught us.

The human mind does not need to be controlled to become dangerous.

Sometimes it only needs to become certain.

Frequently Asked Questions About the History and Science of Hypnosis

Is hypnosis scientifically real?

Yes.

Hypnosis is a genuine psychological phenomenon involving focused attention and responsiveness to suggestion.

Researchers can measure behavioral and brain-function changes associated with hypnotic responding, although there is no single agreed neurological mechanism explaining every hypnotic effect.

Is hypnosis the same thing as sleep?

No.

People under hypnosis are generally conscious and responsive.

They can hear instructions, think about them and often remember the session afterward.

The word originated partly from early theories connecting hypnosis with a sleep-like state, but modern hypnosis is better characterized by focused attention and suggestion.

Who invented hypnosis?

There is no single inventor of the phenomenon.

Franz Anton Mesmer popularized animal magnetism in the 18th century, but Scottish surgeon James Braid helped transform mesmerism into modern hypnotism during the 1840s by rejecting Mesmer's invisible-fluid theory.

Who was Franz Mesmer?

Franz Anton Mesmer was an 18th-century physician who proposed that a universal invisible fluid called animal magnetism could influence health.

His theory was investigated by a French royal commission in 1784 and was not supported by the experiments.

Did Benjamin Franklin investigate hypnosis?

Franklin investigated animal magnetism, the precursor to modern hypnosis.

He headed a royal commission that used blinded and expectation-manipulation experiments to test Mesmer's claims.

The commission concluded that the supposed magnetic fluid had not been demonstrated and that imagination played a major role in the observed effects.

Was this an early placebo-controlled experiment?

It is often described as an important precursor to blinded or controlled clinical experimentation.

The commissioners deliberately separated what subjects believed they were receiving from what was actually being done, anticipating principles central to later placebo research.

Who was James Braid?

James Braid was a Scottish surgeon who investigated mesmerism in the 1840s and introduced the concept of hypnotism as a psychological and physiological phenomenon rather than the result of animal magnetism.

His work strongly influenced later scientific approaches to hypnosis.

Was hypnosis really used for surgery in India?

Yes.

Scottish surgeon James Esdaile conducted operations in colonial Bengal during the 1840s while patients were in mesmeric trance states that he said produced profound pain relief or anesthesia.

Where did James Esdaile perform mesmeric surgery?

Much of his early work occurred at Hooghly in Bengal.

His successes eventually attracted official attention and led to government-supported mesmeric medical work in the Calcutta area.

How many operations did Esdaile perform under mesmerism?

Esdaile's later records listed 261 counted operations under mesmerism, with additional minor procedures excluded from that figure.

These were historical clinical reports rather than controlled modern trials, so the numbers should not be treated as modern proof of efficacy.

Why did hypnosis stop being widely used as surgical anesthesia?

Ether and chloroform provided faster and more predictable chemical anesthesia.

As those drugs became available in the late 1840s, mesmeric anesthesia lost much of its medical appeal.

Did the CIA really experiment with hypnosis?

Yes.

Declassified records show that CIA projects BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE studied hypnosis, drugs, chemicals, isolation and other techniques for interrogation and behavioral influence.

Was hypnosis part of MKULTRA?

Hypnosis appeared within the broader CIA research environment that culminated in MKULTRA, alongside research involving psychoactive drugs and behavioral manipulation.

Surviving CIA records document MKULTRA subprojects concerning human behavioral experimentation.

Did the CIA successfully create mind-controlled assassins?

There is no credible evidence that hypnosis gave the CIA a reliable ability to turn unwilling people into programmable assassins.

Modern psychological evidence does not support the Hollywood model of hypnosis as unlimited control over another person's moral behavior.

Can a hypnotist make someone commit murder?

Evidence does not support the idea that ordinary hypnosis can simply override a person's values and compel them to commit murder against their will.

People remain active participants and can reject hypnotic suggestions.

Can people resist hypnosis?

Yes.

Responsiveness varies considerably, and hypnosis requires participation.

Some people are highly hypnotizable, many respond moderately and others show little response.

What percentage of people are highly hypnotizable?

Stanford researchers estimate that approximately 15% of adults are highly hypnotizable and around two-thirds show at least some hypnotic responsiveness.

Can hypnosis change the brain?

Hypnosis is associated with measurable changes in brain activity and functional connectivity.

Research has implicated networks involved in salience, executive control, bodily awareness and self-referential processing.

Is there a single “hypnosis center” in the brain?

No.

Modern reviews find that hypnosis involves interactions among multiple networks and that neuroimaging results vary depending on the person, suggestion and experimental method.

Can scientists make someone more hypnotizable?

A 2024 Stanford randomized trial found that targeted transcranial magnetic stimulation temporarily increased hypnotizability in participants with fibromyalgia.

The effect lasted approximately an hour in the study.

Does hypnosis work for pain?

It can help some patients.

A 2024 systematic review found small additional reductions in several categories of clinical pain when hypnosis was added to other care, but the certainty of evidence was low or very low.

Can hypnosis replace anesthesia?

It should not generally be understood as a universal replacement for modern anesthesia.

Some patients can experience substantial hypnotic analgesia, but responsiveness varies and modern surgical anesthesia is far more predictable.

Hypnosis may be used as an adjunct in selected medical settings.

Does hypnotherapy work for IBS?

Gut-directed hypnotherapy is one of the better-established clinical applications.

The American College of Gastroenterology includes gut-directed hypnotherapy among gut-directed psychotherapies that may help global IBS symptoms, though the recommendation is based on limited-quality evidence.

Can hypnosis make someone quit smoking?

The evidence is uncertain.

A Cochrane review did not establish with confidence that hypnotherapy is superior to other smoking-cessation approaches.

Can hypnosis recover forgotten memories accurately?

It is not a reliable forensic memory-recovery technique.

Hypnosis can increase the amount of reported detail while also increasing confabulation and confidence in inaccurate memories.

What is confabulation?

Confabulation is the production of information that feels like memory but is inaccurate or constructed.

The person may sincerely believe the detail is true rather than intentionally lying.

Can hypnosis create false memories?

Suggestion during hypnosis can contribute to false or distorted memories.

The risk becomes especially serious when people are encouraged to imagine details repeatedly or when an authority figure implies what they expect the person to remember.

Why can a false memory feel completely real?

Memory is reconstructive rather than a perfect recording.

Repeated retrieval and imagination can increase familiarity and vividness.

The brain can therefore become increasingly confident in a reconstruction even when the original evidence for it was weak.

Does confidence prove an eyewitness is accurate?

No.

Confidence can be informative under carefully controlled initial identification conditions, but confidence can be contaminated by repeated questioning, feedback, exposure and suggestive procedures.

Hypnosis is particularly problematic because it can increase confidence without guaranteeing accuracy.

What is forensic hypnosis?

Forensic or investigative hypnosis is the use of hypnosis by law enforcement in an attempt to enhance a witness's memory of a crime, suspect or other legally relevant event.

Texas law now formally defines and restricts this practice.

Why did police ever use forensic hypnosis?

Investigators hoped hypnosis could recover details that witnesses had perceived but could not consciously recall.

This approach was heavily influenced by the incorrect metaphor that memory works like a stored video recording.

Does Texas still allow forensic hypnosis evidence?

Texas enacted legislation in 2023 making qualifying statements obtained during or after law-enforcement investigative hypnosis inadmissible against defendants in new criminal trials.

When did Texas’s hypnosis law take effect?

The legislation took effect on September 1, 2023.

The legislative analysis states that its application is prospective.

Who is Charles Don Flores?

Charles Don Flores is a Texas death-row prisoner convicted in 1999 for his alleged role in the robbery and murder of Elizabeth “Betty” Black.

His case has become nationally known because a key eyewitness underwent investigative hypnosis before later identifying him in court.

Did the witness identify Flores before hypnosis?

No.

Jill Barganier initially gave a description that did not match Flores and did not identify him when shown a photo lineup after hypnosis.

She first identified him in court more than a year later.

What did the witness originally say the suspects looked like?

According to Flores's petition as summarized by The Texas Tribune, Barganier initially described two white men with long hair.

Flores is Hispanic and had short hair at the time.

How confident was the witness when she eventually identified Flores?

At trial, Barganier described herself as completely certain and identified Flores as one of the men she had seen.

The case illustrates why confidence acquired after repeated or suggestive procedures cannot automatically be treated as proof of accuracy.

Was there DNA linking Flores to the crime scene?

The Texas Tribune reported that no material physical evidence such as DNA or fingerprints tying Flores to the crime was presented at his trial.

Was Charles Flores ever scheduled for execution?

Yes.

He was scheduled for execution in 2016, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the execution while considering issues connected with the hypnosis evidence and new memory science.

Did the U.S. Supreme Court review Flores’s case in 2026?

Flores petitioned the Supreme Court.

On June 15, 2026, the Court denied his petition without comment.

Does that mean the Supreme Court said the hypnosis evidence was scientifically valid?

No.

A denial of certiorari is not a ruling endorsing the scientific reliability of forensic hypnosis.

The Court simply declined to hear Flores's petition.

Is Charles Flores still on death row?

As of August 2026, his conviction and death sentence remain in place following the Supreme Court's June denial, while his attorney has said she will continue pursuing available avenues of relief.

Is hypnotherapy dangerous?

Clinical hypnosis is generally considered low risk when practiced appropriately by qualified healthcare professionals, but it is not suitable for every person or every condition.

Special caution is appropriate when hypnosis is used to explore uncertain memories because suggestion can alter recollection.

Should hypnotherapy be performed by a trained professional?

Yes, particularly when treating medical or psychological conditions.

Patients should ideally seek a properly licensed healthcare professional with additional training in clinical hypnosis rather than someone whose only credential is a generic “hypnotist” certificate.

What is the biggest myth about hypnosis?

The biggest myth is that hypnosis gives another person complete control over your mind.

The most scientifically interesting reality is almost the opposite.

Hypnosis can change how your own brain allocates attention, interprets sensation and experiences agency.

That is powerful.

But it is not supernatural control.

What is the most dangerous misconception about hypnosis?

The belief that hypnosis produces truth.

It can produce vivid experience.

It can produce additional details.

It can produce extraordinary confidence.

None of those guarantees that a memory is accurate.

That distinction separates a useful therapeutic technique from a potentially devastating forensic mistake.

What does the history of hypnosis ultimately teach us?

The history begins with a nonexistent magnetic fluid and ends with measurable changes in brain networks.

That is genuine scientific progress.

But the darker pattern has remained remarkably consistent.

People repeatedly discover that suggestion can do something powerful—and then assume it can do much more.

Mesmer thought it was a universal force.

Intelligence agencies hoped it might conquer free will.

Police hoped it could rewind memory.

Modern neuroscience offers a less dramatic but more compelling answer.

Hypnosis is a way in which attention, expectation and suggestion can reshape subjective experience.

It can sometimes reduce pain.

It can alter perception.

It can make an action feel involuntary.

And under the wrong conditions, it can help a person become absolutely certain about a memory that was never reliable in the first place.

That may be more frightening than mind control.

A controlled mind could blame the controller.

A false memory can feel entirely like your own.