When Prophecy Fails. Leon Festinger
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Thomas and Daisy Armstrong, Kansas born and raised, had served as medical missionaries in Egypt for one of the liberal Protestant churches. For about five years they spread gospel and health, returning on furlough to the United States just at the outbreak of World War II. The war prevented their return to the mission field until 1946, when they again set out, with high hopes and ideals, and with three children. This time, however, they had an unpleasant sojourn —at least Daisy Armstrong did, for she suffered a “nervous collapse” as she once described it. Bedeviled by nightmares that featured violence and bloody death, she could not rid herself of the obsession that her loved ones were in imminent danger of injury from sharp objects, especially knives, axes, swords, and the like. She had persistent dreams and fantasies of cuttings, stabbings, and beheadings. Even the simple tools on her husband’s workbench had to be put out of sight, since they terrified her.
Mrs. Armstrong’s anxieties did not yield to any of the attempts she and her husband made to overcome them. Although she recognized her feelings as unreasonable, she could not will them away. Nor did her husband’s reassurances, changes in the household regimen, and a short vacation do any good. Even prayer did not help. The Armstrongs were especially distressed by this last disappointment. As Mrs. Armstrong once put it, they could not understand why they had been singled out for persecution by such malignant emotion; after all, they had always led a good life, had tried to do the right thing, and were certainly engaged in good works. Why they then? “We finally decided there must be a reason,” she added, “and we started searching.” This may be why the Armstrongs turned to the study of mysticism and the occult, in which they read widely and eclectically. They studied some of the sacred writings of Hinduism, the Apocrypha, Oahspe, and books and pamphlets on theosophy, Rosicrucianism, New Thought, the I AM movement, and the mystical (though not, apparently, the political) writings of William Dudley Pelley. The ideas they encountered in this literature, and discussed at length, seem to have opened their minds to possibilities that many people regard with incredulity. They believed in the existence of a spirit world, whose masters could communicate with and instruct people of the earth; were convinced that extrasensory communication and spiritual migration (without bodily change or motion) had occurred; and subscribed to many of the more common occult beliefs, including reincarnation.
In 1949 they returned to the United States and Dr. Armstrong took a post as a member of the Student Health Service staff at Eastern Teachers College. His work there was evidently of a routine nature and left his mind and time free to continue exploration of esoteric literature. The Armstrongs continued to participate in orthodox Christian religious activities. They attended a nondenominational Protestant church, where Dr. Armstrong organized “The Seekers,” a group for young people, principally college students, which met once a week to discuss ethical, religious, metaphysical, and personal problems, always seeking truth. A tall man in his early forties, Dr. Armstrong had an air of ease and self-assurance that seemed to inspire confidence in his listeners.
Any topic was grist for the Seekers’ mill, so it may have been no surprise to most of the members when Dr. Armstrong began to show considerable interest in flying saucers. Just why his attention was drawn to this phenomenon is not clear. But one winter he found reason to visit southern California. While there he sought out George Adamski who, in collaboration with another, had recently published The Flying Saucers Have Landed. This book related Adamski’s meeting with a being who is alleged to have landed in a flying saucer near Desert Center, California. Adamski says that he talked with the man and his book contains a drawing of the footprints that the visitor left behind when he climbed back into the saucer and blasted off for Venus, his home base. Dr. Armstrong enjoyed a lengthy interview with Adamski and came away convinced that flying saucers were real, not illusory, that they came from other planets, and that they carried men, or beings, who were visiting the earth on missions of exploration and observation. He also came away with an enlarged copy of the drawing of the Venusian footprints, whose curious interior markings seemed to him symbols of a mysterious sort.
Upon Dr. Armstrong’s return to Collegeville, his wife also became interested and charged herself with the task of interpreting the message carried by these footprints —a task which she had completed to her satisfaction by May 22 of the year they met Marian Keech. Her interpretation of the footprints forecast a rising of the submerged continents of Mu and Atlantis, an event that would be consistent with the flooding of the North American continent. Much later on, in August, when Marian Keech received the prediction of a flood on December 21, Daisy Armstrong emphasized that this prediction was all the more likely to be correct since her own interpretation, arrived at independently, was corroborative evidence.
Sometime during late April or early May the Armstrongs learned of Mrs. Keech from the expert on flying saucers. The Armstrongs wrote to Mrs. Keech shortly thereafter, expressing an interest in her work and telling her something of their own explorations in the occult.
Meanwhile, according to Mrs. Keech, she had received a message from Sananda to “Go to Collegeville. There is a child there to whom I am trying to get through with light.” Since she knew no one in that town, she was extremely puzzled, and uncertain about what to do. She seized upon the Armstrongs’ letter with delight; it was too fitting to be a coincidence, she felt. This contact with people who had only yesterday been strangers in a town populated by strangers must have great significance. She subsequently decided that Daisy Armstrong was the “child” referred to in the instruction, a decision to which Mrs. Armstrong quickly assented since she felt that the Guardians had been trying to “get light through to her” for a long time and she felt that her own blindness and unreceptivity to these attempts had been the root of her “nervous collapse” in Egypt.
From the initial contact, developments proceeded rapidly, and not even the two hundred miles between Lake City and Collegeville inhibited the growth of a close friendship. Letters were exchanged during May and June and, in late June, the Armstrongs drove to Lake City to pay a visit to Mrs. Keech. It was evidently a meeting of like minds, for the Armstrongs not only prolonged their stay but invited Mrs. Keech to return their visit. She spent the Fourth of July weekend in Collegeville. The change in locale did not seem to interrupt the flow of communication from outer space. During July Mrs. Keech’s productivity remained high. She sometimes received as many as ten messages or “lessons” in a single day, and scarcely a day passed without a communique of some kind from outer space.
The contents of these messages were diverse, and they covered a vast range of topics from brief descriptions of the physical environment and diet on other planets to warnings and forebodings of war and destruction soon to plague the earth, intermingled with promises of enlightenment, joy, and unparalleled new experiences in store for those who would “listen and believe.” They varied considerably in length, from one or two sentences to as much as six or seven hundred words, although most were about two hundred fifty words long.
It is difficult to give a clear, simple picture of the entire belief system as it is revealed in these messages. The ideology was not only complex, but also pliant, changing this way and that in response to new influences (perhaps new people whom Mrs. Keech met, or new publications she saw). For the purpose of providing background, we shall set down the general propositions condensed from the messages, and illustrate them by extracts from the writings themselves. Wherever possible, we shall provide the “official” definitions of unfamiliar words or expressions, taken from the glossary provided by Mrs. Keech or from the usage current