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Skeptical Talk. The legal implications are important, said Spiegel. To begin with, the statements of a person under hypnosis are clearly not guaranteed truth, despite his obvious belief in what he is saying. Dr. Spiegel suggested further that prosecution witnesses or defendants are perfectly capable of telling a self-damaging story that they have been hypnotized into believing. Some persons, he says, are extremely susceptible and can even induce a "spontaneous trance state" in response to any pressure, for instance the pressure of a police interrogation. Then, if suggestions are made, the subject might well pick them up, incorporate them into a story and eventually make and sign a confession. The belief could endure through a trial, or the entire incident could be forgotten, thus accounting for suspects who cannot remember confessions they have already made.
Some of Dr. Spiegel's colleagues had doubts about his theory. McGee, it was pointed out, was aligned with Dr. Spiegel in the mind of the subject. Could the subject have been made to tell his story to the FBI? The current experiment did not answer that question, but to Dr. C. Knight Aldrich, a psychiatrist at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, the Spiegel film was nonetheless persuasive. "I am not saying that testimony under hypnosis has no place in a court of law," he said, "but it must be viewed as not having superior validity. Courts should be highly skeptical of testimony given under hypnosis."