Hypnotic Regression     A method of extracting material from the unconscious that may relate to previous lives or alien abduction is hypnotic regression. This involves sending an experimental subject into a deep trance and getting him or her to produce concealed memories relating to perhaps an abduction in the present life or a past life.     As far as getting suppressed memories of the present life into consciousness, hypnotic regression has a long and fairly respectable history. It was used, for example, by Freud in the 1890s to enable some of his patients to remember traumatic events which had taken place in early childhood.     In the 1950s some hypnotists began to use regression in order to obtain recollections of earlier lives. In 1965 a book detailing one such regression experiment, Morey Bernstein's The Search for Bridey Murphy, became a best seller.     The book concerned a Colorado woman, Virginia TIghe, who under hypnosis, regressed to a life in nineteenth century Ireland.     Tighe supplied a mass of information about her life as Bridey Murphy, supposedly born in Cork towards the end of the eighteenth century. She gave, for example, the names of Belfast stores at which she had shopped, spoke of the pipes played at her funeral in 1864, and showed some knowledge of Irish folklore.     Morey Bernstein was completely convinced of the authenticity of Tighe's memories and drew the case to the attention of the editor of the magazine Empire, who was sufficiently impressed to despatch a psychic investigator to Ireland in order to check the historical facts. The results seem to validate some of Tighe's statements. The Belfast stores she had mentioned had actually existed. However, there was no record of the baptism of Bridey Murphy, but an enormous number of such records had perished in the Irish troubles of the early 1920s.   Madam Blavatsky