When Prophecy Fails. Leon Festinger

atomic warfare can be found, in analogue or identity, in popular magazines, sensational books, and even columns of daily papers.

      The notions of reincarnation and spiritual rarification (through changes in “vibratory density”) are likewise echoed in many “modern cults and minority religious movements.”* There have been numerous accounts of the “continents” of Atlantis and Mu, and attempts to explain their “disappearance” into the oceans. The idea that heavenly representatives will visit earth to instruct mankind through chosen instruments and to rescue those whose conduct and beliefs have marked them for salvation is older than Christianity.

      [*To borrow a phrase from the subtitle of Charles S. Braden’s book These Also Believe (New York: Macmillan, 1949), which see for an objective, scholarly, readable account of several marginal groups of believers in America. See especially his descriptions of theosophy, the I AM movement, Psychiana, spiritualism, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.]

      Furthermore, there is evidence that all these ideas, singly or in combinations, are sincerely and fully believed by a great many people. Certainly, the books and periodicals in which they appear are widely read. Equally certain is that many of the readers engage in various actions that testify to their faith, such as joining particular groups, adopting certain ritual practices, giving money, and trying to convince others that the ideas are true.

      So, if the reader has come to the hasty conclusion that the ideology constructed by Mrs. Keech’s pencil is merely the unique raving of an isolated madwoman and that only “crazy people” would be able to accept and believe it, let him take further thought. True, Mrs. Keech put together a rather unusual combination of ideas —a combination peculiarly well adapted to our contemporary, anxious age — but scarcely a single one of her ideas can be said to be unique, novel, or lacking in popular (though not, for the most part, majority) support.

      The Armstrongs and Mrs. Keech had more than an abstract connection with other groups having interests similar to their own. The Armstrongs belonged to at least one flying saucer club and Mrs. Keech had often attended lectures on the subject. Both homes were on the subscriber lists for such publications as the Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom, the Round Robin of the Borderland Sciences Research Associates, and the Newsletter of the group called Civilian Research on Interplanetary Flying Objects. Such periodicals were often proffered to visitors at the Keech and Armstrong homes, and references to them were frequently made to substantiate Mrs. Keech’s point of view. Mrs. Keech declared that there were a number of other groups in the United States that were also receiving enlightenment from outer space, although from a different set of teachers.

      It was against the background of this ideology that the prediction of cataclysmic disaster began to emerge. With Mrs. Keech in Collegeville, she and the Armstrongs had formed a team. While Mrs. Keech wrote, Daisy Armstrong busied herself typing out carbon copies of the lessons, and the doctor scanned them, adding here and there a commentary or citing some evidence from another source that threw light on the more obscure passages in the Guardians’ discourses.

      The first explicit reference to the impending disaster had appeared among Sananda’s messages on August 2, the day after the visit of the sice. That message read: “the Earthling will awaken to the great casting [conditions to be fulfilled] of the lake seething and the great destruction of the tall buildings of the local city — the cast that the lake bed is sinking to the degree that it will be as a great scoop of wind from the bottom of the lake throughout the countryside. You shall tell the world that this is to be, for such it is given. To you the date only is secret, for the panic of men knows no bounds.”

      This startling information was considerably expanded in a long communique from Sananda on August 15, which read in part:

      “And the scenes of the day will be as mad. The grosser ones will be as mad. And the ones of the light will be as the sibets [students] of teachers who have drilled them for this day. . . . In the carting [plan] it is cast [conditions to be fulfilled] that the event will begin at dawn and end swiftly as a passing cloud — in the seen.

      “When the resurrected have been resurrected or taken up — it will be as a great burst of light . . . the ground in the earth to a depth of thirty feet will be bright . . . for the earth will be purified.

      “In the midst of this it is to be recorded that a great wave rushes into the rocky mountains — the ones of the covered area will be as the com [group] of the newly dead. The slopes of the side to the east will be the beginning of a new civilization upon which will be the new order, in the light. As it is recorded the three mountain ranges to stand at the cast of the guards, are the Alleghenies, the Catskills, the Rocky Mts.

      “Yet the land will be as yet not submerged, but as a washing of the top to the sea, for the purpose of purifying it of the earth-ling, and the creating the new order. Yet will it be of the light, for all things must first be likened unto the housecleaning, in which the chaos reigns first, second the order.

      “THIS IS DATED NOT IN SYMBOLOGY . . . THE REAL! OF REAL — REALITY YET.”

      Ten days later came the third great message which made explicit the further ramifications of the great events:

      “This is not limited to the local area, for the cast of the country of the U.S.A. is that it is to break in twain. In the area of the Mississippi, in the region of the Canada, Great Lakes and the Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico, into the Central America will be as changed. The great tilting of the land of the U.S. to the East will throw up mountains along the Central States, along the Great New Sea, along North and South—to the South. The new mountain range shall be called The Argone Range, which will signify the ones who have been there are gone — the old has gone past — the new is. This will be as a monument to the old races; to the new will be the Altar of the Rockies and the Alleghenies.”

      On August 27, Sananda filled out the picture of world-wide upheaval and change in a long, elaborate message that specifically forecast that Egypt would be remade and the desert would become a fertile valley; Mu would rise from the Pacific; the “uprising of the Atlantic bottom” would “submerge the land of the Atlantic seaboard”; France would sink to the bottom of the Atlantic, as would England; and Russia would become one great sea.

      We can only imagine the awe, the reverence, with which the Armstrongs and Mrs. Keech received these momentous pronouncements. Here, in the hands of three fairly ordinary people (by the world’s standards) had been placed the most important news of our time, if not of all recorded history. A grave responsibility, an incomparable privilege had been thrust upon them.

      It was Dr. Armstrong who saw his duty clearly and promptly did it. On August 30, he dispatched more than fifty copies of a seven-page mimeographed “Open Letter to American Editors and Publishers.” In it he proclaimed the coming catastrophe, cited precedents from the submersion of Mu, and Christian parallels from chapters of Luke, and gave an account, with examples, of Mrs. Keech’s “ESP lessons.” The body of the letter did not mention the specific date predicted but stated in several places that the cataclysm was “very, very near.” Copies of the release that we saw in October carried a handwritten addendum: “latest release — Date of evacuation Dec. 20.” Some of the releases actually sent to the press may have also borne this legend.

      The mailing of this press release marks the end of the first phase of Mrs. Keech’s and the Armstrongs’ activities. Up till now, the “lessons” had been virtually a private matter among Mrs. Keech and her friends. Dr. Armstrong’s action changed things. In one gesture, he made the news of the flood public property, he committed himself and his reputation to a specific prediction of world-wide cataclysm, and he took the first step toward the organization of a movement.