The 1956 study by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, in which the authors infiltrated a small Chicago group awaiting a flood and a rescue by beings from the planet Clarion, stayed with it through the failure of the prophecy, and recorded what happened next.
The finding
Disconfirmation did not disperse the group. The members who had committed most, who had given up jobs and possessions, responded to the failure by proselytising harder, and the group produced a revised account in which its own faith had averted the disaster. The study introduced cognitive dissonance to psychology and is the origin of a body of work that now runs well beyond it.
Why it belongs in this vault rather than in a psychology one
Because the group in question was a Contactee Movement group, and because The Invisible College returns to it twice. If the phenomenon’s product is belief rather than information, as the Control System Hypothesis argues, then this is the mechanism by which the product is manufactured, and it is the one part of the whole apparatus that has been demonstrated experimentally. It also cuts at the disclosure movement itself: a prediction that fails and produces more advocacy is the pattern the book identified seventy years ago.
Connections
Contactee Movement · The Invisible College · Control System Hypothesis · Jacques Vallee · Schedule of Reinforcement · UMMO Affair · Billy Meier · UFO Researcher Syndrome