Between roughly 1980 and the mid-1990s, large parts of the English-speaking world became convinced that an organised network of Satanic cults was abusing and murdering children on a mass scale. It was a moral panic, and the finding that it had no substantiated basis is not a matter of opinion.
The trigger is usually dated to Michelle Remembers, a 1980 memoir by a Canadian psychiatrist and his patient describing recovered memories of Satanic abuse; its central claims were later shown to be unsupportable, including by contemporaneous records that contradicted them. What made it spread was a combination of factors: therapeutic techniques including hypnosis and suggestive interviewing that reliably generate confident false memories, particularly in young children; a daytime television and news market rewarding the most alarming version available; and law-enforcement and social-work training seminars that taught investigators to look for a phenomenon whose existence was assumed rather than shown.
The consequences were real even though the cults were not. The McMartin preschool case in California ran from 1983 and became the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history to that point, ending without a single conviction. Comparable cases occurred across the United States and in Britain, and people were imprisoned for years on evidence that would not now be admitted.
The decisive assessment came from inside law enforcement. Kenneth Lanning, a supervisory special agent at the FBI Behavioral Science Unit and an experienced investigator of child sexual abuse, reviewed hundreds of reported ritual-abuse cases and published his conclusions in 1992: there was no corroborating physical evidence for large-scale Satanic cult crime, no bodies, no sites, and no surviving victims of the killings alleged. He was careful to add that children are genuinely abused in large numbers, that some offenders do use occult trappings, and that the collapse of the cult theory should not be read as scepticism about abuse itself.
The panic receded, but it did not disappear. Its narrative structure (a hidden elite, ritual crime against children, evidence suppressed by the authorities), was recycled directly into later conspiracy movements. Modern Satanists, who were among the accused, generally treat the episode as the defining event in their public reception.