The following is adapted from a piece I wrote for this book.
“Cognitive dissonance” is what the psychologist Dr. Leon Festinger called the horrible grinding noise of two conflicting ideas in your head. The term is making a comeback in the world of Internet comment boards, where flame warriors use it to describe what happens when, for example, Orly Taitz, the Orange County dentist who claims the president was born secretly in Kenya, perseveres in the face of overwhelming evidence, including an actual 1961 announcement of his birth in the Honolulu Advertiser.
How the “cognitive dissonance” thing got its start is sort of an amazing story, involving the mischievous university psychologist and his unwitting flying-saucer fanatic subject. The story begins on a depressing Christmas Eve in Chicago in 1954.
This was the night 44-year-old physician Dr. Charles Laughead stood outside a house in the western suburbs of Chicago, desperately watching the skies for his 6 p.m. ride, while he and his followers sang carols. Five years before Plan 9 From Outer Space, reporters were having a field day with the doctor and his series of failed predictions. But tonight was really going to be it. He planned to be on another planet at this time tomorrow. One headline read: SECT EXPECTS TO LEAVE EARTH TONIGHT.
They had staked everything on the prediction of the allegedly clairvoyant Ms. Dorothy Martin, 61. At 6 p.m. the creatures Laughead affectionately called “the boys upstairs” would land in space pods to evacuate Man from a flood that would turn Cook County into a seafloor. A crowd of reporters, spectators and hecklers gathered to take in the futility.
* * *
“I’ve given up just about everything,” Laughead had said, preparing for one more attempt to leave Earth. “I’ve taken an awful beating in the last few months, just an awful beating.” Worst was he’d lost his job at the medical school. Alien rescue or not, his boss didn’t like that Laughead was stressing out students by claiming the U.S. was about to become an archipelago.
BELOW: Story from the Chicago Tribune, January 1, 1955–one of my favorite news heds.
Where the hell were the space pods? This wasn’t the first time the cosmos had left him swinging in the wind. Yet he persevered in a way that fascinated the Stanford psychologist Festinger. The psychologists got such a kick out of this that they planted a mole in his group to write down the details, laying the groundwork for Festinger’s landmark 1956 book When Prophecy Fails.
An earlier due date had come and gone already. The first time, some of the UFO people cried. Not Laughead. He got on the phone with reporters; he sent a press release to newspapers across the country, explaining opaquely: “Due to the confusion which has arisen from the prophecy, we have decided to unite forces to complete the prophecy.”
Because of press coverage, the phone was ringing off the hook with jokesters claiming to be the spacemen. One identified himself as Captain Video. Laughead’s daughter tried to tell him that Captain Video was the TV character who sewed a thunderbolt on his jumpsuit. But Laughead wanted to keep open the possibility it was a coded message. Everyone was so coiled up for first contact.
A second jokester phoned and invited everyone to his party across town. Mrs. Dorothy Martin, the matriarch of the UFO group, said this was it, this was the message.
“Put your coats on,” she said, and led a delegation across town, only to return, disappointed. The other humiliations had included a reporter’s cheap shot in the Chicago Tribune, observing that the Laughead kids must not think the flood was coming, seeing as how they’d set up ornaments in the living room for Christmas morning. And as the night grew long, other practicalities mounted: If the Earth wasn’t going to be doused, what was Dr. Laughead going to do about presents?
The phone rang and this exchange took place, transcribed by one of Festinger’s researchers:
REPORTER: Dr. Laughead, I wanted to talk to you with reference to this business about—you know—your calling the paper to say you were going to be picked up at six o’clock this evening. Ahh, I just wanted to find out exactly what happened…. Didn’t you say they sent a message that you should be packed and waiting at 6 P.M. Christmas Eve?
DR. LAUGHEAD: No.
REPORTER: No? I’m sorry, sir. Weren’t the spacemen supposed to pick you up at 6 P.M.?
DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, there was a spaceman in the crowd with a helmet on and a white gown and what not.
REPORTER: There was a spaceman in the crowd?
DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, it was a little hard to tell […]
REPORTER: […] Did you talk to him?
DR. LAUGHEAD: No, I didn’t talk to him.
REPORTER: Didn’t you say you were going to be picked up by the spacemen?
DR. LAUGHEAD: No.
REPORTER: Well, what were you waiting out in the street for, singing carols?
DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, we went out to sing Christmas carols.
REPORTER: Oh, you just went out to sing Christmas carols?
DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, and if anything happened, well, that’s all right, you know. We live from one minute to another.
REPORTER: […] Uh, well how do you account for the fact that they didn’t pick you up?
DR. LAUGHEAD: As I told one of the other news boys, I don’t think a spaceman would feel very welcome there in that crowd…
Dorothy Martin had been first to bring word that the sky would be blackened with descending “peapod ships,” each with enough room for eight to ten humans, dropping like the mutant landers in that arcade game Defender. Word had reached her by seance: the aliens wanted her to be their Noah. Distant forces were planning a “housecleaning” for Earth, wringing out Earthlings and filling the bowl between the Alleghenies and the Rocky Mountains like a mop bucket.
But the aliens, in their alleged instructions, had pulled some TSA moves. Some stuff could not be brought on the pods. Space travel is like that. So: no metal. Maybe it would have jacked up the steering on the ships. No metal meant no bra clasps. Which meant the women took off their bras. The men, meanwhile, were using scissors to remove zippers from their slacks. As the clock ticked, Dr. Laughead discovered that one of the undercover psychologists had jeopardized everyone by forgetting to excise his zipper. Laughead performed last-minute surgery, hands trembling.
* * *
Hours later the sun rose over a normal Christmas morning. The pods hadn’t come, of course. But what did happen was that Laughead’s sister tried to have him committed to an asylum. At his hearing, however, a psychologist testified that the doctor “showed no obvious illusions or hallucinations and his conduct and manner seemed entirely normal.”
“END OF THE WORLD PROPHET FOUND IN ERROR, NOT INSANE,” reported the Tribune. The Chicago police chief wanted to charge the failed prophets with contributing to the delinquency of minors, telling a reporter that “children of the neighborhood had talked to Mrs. Martin about space travel with the result that some of the youngers had trouble sleeping afterwards.” It didn’t happen.
Years later, Dr. Laughead was still looking for the space brothers. He came to believe they were connected to an ancient South American civilization. Meanwhile, Dr. Leon Festinger and his team had begun to assemble a theoretical framework for understanding why the seekers hadn’t disbanded in shame after the failure of their prophecy but instead proselytized even more fervently about the “space brothers.” Reaching back to the failed doomsday prophecies of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and others, they explained the circumstances that trigger the Festinger syndrome:
Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, but he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: What will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.
* * *
So what ever happened to “cognitive dissonance,” that theory from 1956? Would you believe, it’s no longer P.C.? After hitting the library, I read that it’s now considered rude to call a religious prediction a failure just because the event in question didn’t happen. The leader of this school of thought is Dr. J. Gordon Melton, a Southern California scholar of religion who is prominent, and controversial. In 1997, memoirist Jeannette Walls profiled him in an Esquire piece, “Giving Cults A Good Name,” examining claims that Melton took money from groups like Scientology to buff up their image.
Melton’s thing is that if you are an outsider, you don’t get to decide if a prophecy fails or not. Take the 19th century Millerites of northern New York, who gathered several times to watch Jesus come back on precise calendar dates in 1843 and 1844, making up mathematical excuses before admitting that they had suffered The Great Disappointment.
To Festiger, they were an example of cognitive dissonance. But according to Melton and modern sociologists, predictions like these haven’t “failed”; they just have become “spiritualized.” A change has come. The literal (“The space brothers will land at 6 p.m.”; ”A comet will strike the earth”; “The ‘certificate’ that Mr. Obama has posted on his official Website is a ‘Certification of Live Birth,’ and not a ‘Birth Certificate’ from Hawaii”) has become metaphysical, a statement on the underlying nature of the cosmos. It’s all good! And something Orly Taitz might want to bring up next time a U.S. district judge orders her to show cause.