...it's important to keep in mind that hypnotic regression has proven to be a very unreliable means of gaining access to accurate memories of real events, especially now that it's been proven that it's not typical of a victim of some sort of trauma to suppress memory of the event. Instead, the exact opposite tends to happen, as manifested with the well known medical condition of post-traumatic stress disorder.

First of all, it's very possible for a person to lie under hypnosis, even if under the inadvertent direction of a therapist's leading questions. The "memories" recovered from hypnotic regression tend to be a confabulation of real and imagined events, sometimes with dream imagery blending with real remembered events to produce false or highly distorted memories that the subject can become convinced are very real. Importantly, it's also known that media influences and popular cultural narratives can strongly influence the nature of the confabulations, which explains the pervasiveness of both alien abduction, Satanic, and non-fantastical familial sexual abuse scenarios, as they are each strong cultural narratives that clearly manifest in hypnotic regression as a means of "dealing" with sexual issues. The alien experimenters, the Satanic robed figures, and the cultural conception of the ubiquitous otherwise nondescript child molester serve as three different faces of the same cultural bogeyman that our society is conditioned by media and government influences to have an irrational fear of: the sexual violator of the child (and in some cases, women in general). Popular sci-fi imagery, Judeo-Christian inspired fears, and crime show tropes are each powerful media influences that create the chimeric forms that these bogeymen can take in the faux recovered memories.

This is why currently, many researchers of strange reported phenomena and agents of the law and court system alike do not recommend hypnotic regression of alleged victims who claim they cannot consciously recall events--especially not if no evidence exists to support the contention that something "unremembered" occurred--despite the great popularity of this technique during the 1980s and early '90s, largely thanks to the popularity of the fully debunked book Michele Remembers, helped along by Bud Hopkins' nearly simultaneously published book Missing Time (yup, Hopkins started the modern tropes of the alien abduction scenarios thanks to his irresponsible use and strong belief in hypnotic regression techniques, beating Whitley Strieber by several years, whereas the Satanic ritual abuse imagery and the concept of the repressed memory syndrome in general were popularized by Michelle Smith's therapist--and later husband--Lawrence Pazder).