Elephants on Acid

by Alex Boese

  Surprisingly, the man who weighed other people’s souls didn’t bother to arrange to have his own soul weighed when he died, which he did in 1920, succumbing to liver cancer at the age of fifty-four. However, MacDougall remained interested in the process of dying right up to the end, closely observing his body as it succumbed to disease. According to his obituary in the local paper, he described his own death as “the most interesting he ever watched.”

  MacDougall, D. (April 1907). “Hypothesis Concerning Soul Substance Together with Experimental Evidence of the Existence of Such Substance.” American Medicine 2 (4): 240–43.

  The Day The World Didn’t End

  It is ten minutes to midnight. Fourteen people sit staring at a clock as the second hand creeps forward. They grip their overcoats tightly, ready to leave at any moment.

  “Charles, do you remember the password?” a thin, middle-age woman sitting at the front of the group asks.

  “Yes, Dorothy. We’ve practiced it a hundred times.”

  “Let’s practice it just once more, to be sure.”

  Charles sighs, then nods. “Okay. At midnight, the spaceman will knock on the door. I will answer and ask, ‘What is your question?’ ” He looks at Dorothy.

  “He will reply, ‘I am the porter,’ ” she says.

  “And I will say, ‘I am my own porter.’ ”

  Dorothy nods with satisfaction. Silence falls on the room again as the group returns to its vigil, watching the minute hand approach midnight.

  Six minutes pass. Dorothy shifts nervously in her seat. She clasps her hands together, looks upward as though in prayer, and says emphatically, “And not a plan has gone astray!” The others nod appreciatively.

  The minute hand is only inches away from midnight. The tension in the room feels like a physical presence pressing down on everyone. The minute hand moves closer, closer, and finally slides over the number twelve. The clock begins to chime. Each note echoes in the room.

  Everyone holds their breath as they strain to hear a noise at the door. But there’s nothing.

  Minutes pass. No one has knocked at the door. The members of the group look toward Dorothy questioningly. She stares downward, lost in her thoughts. Then, at last, she breaks the silence—“There has been a slight delay.”

  In late September 1954, American newspapers reported some bad news. In just three months, on the morning of December 21, a massive flood would create a vast inland sea stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico. Chicago, Detroit, and all the other towns and cities in the Midwest would be destroyed by tidal waves. Simultaneously, cataclysms would submerge the western coasts of the Americas, from Washington State to Chile. Similar disasters would devastate much of the rest of the world. Most of the planet’s people were going to die.

  What was the source of this dire prediction? A team of university researchers? A maverick scientist perhaps? No. It was a fifty-three-year-old Chicago grandmother named Dorothy Martin. She, in turn, was told of the impending holocaust by space aliens from the planet Clarion.

  The media treated the prediction as a big joke, but it fascinated Leon Festinger, a young psychology professor at the University of Minnesota. Dorothy Martin obviously deeply believed her prediction, as did her small band of followers. They had risked public ridicule to warn the world of its approaching doom. But what was going to happen, he wondered, when the world didn’t end? How would Martin’s group deal with such a blow to their convictions? Festinger realized a natural experiment in the “disconfirmation of belief” was unfolding before his eyes. He resolved that the phenomenon be studied in person.

  Festinger quickly put together a Mission Impossible–style team consisting of himself, two other social psychologists (Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter), and a couple of graduate students. Their mission, which they all chose to accept, was to infiltrate Martin’s group by posing as believers, to observe and record the actions of the group members in as much detail as possible, and to be there on December 21 when the world failed to end. They wanted to witness, firsthand, the group’s reaction.

  Festinger had a prediction of his own about how it all would turn out. He theorized that the dramatic disconfirmation wouldn’t weaken the group’s beliefs in the least. In fact, it would intensify them and prompt the group to make efforts to recruit more members. Why did Festinger predict this? Because he had been developing a theory he called “cognitive dissonance.”

  Festinger argued that people need their beliefs to be consistent and compatible. Incompatible beliefs (dissonant cognitions) cause psychological tension. For instance, if your belief system tells you the world should have ended, but it didn’t, you’ll need to resolve this discrepancy. A simple way to do so would be to discard your disproven beliefs. However, if you have already deeply committed yourself to those beliefs—for instance, if you have quit your job, left your spouse, and risked getting locked away in a mental asylum on account of your convictions—accepting that you were wrong might not be so easy. In such a case, it might paradoxically be easier to try to strengthen your belief by attempting to recruit other believers—because convincing someone else to share your ideas is like getting a vote of confidence. Suddenly your being right seems possible again. Festinger wrote, “If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must, after all, be correct.”

  The team of observers went to work infiltrating Martin’s group. This required some creativity because Martin and her followers were—despite their message to the media—a quiet, reclusive bunch. They weren’t seeking new recruits. So there was no application form the researchers could fill out. Instead, the observers approached the group individually with invented reasons for wanting to join that involved stories designed to appeal to the believers’ philosophy. One grad student claimed she had dreamed of a terrible flood, and then had seen the prediction in the paper. Another observer told of meeting a mysterious, space-alien-like stranger in the desert. The deception worked, and soon all the observers were warmly accepted into the group.

  The only problem? By showing up en masse with all these wild stories, the observers powerfully reinforced the groups’ beliefs. Martin decided the space aliens were sending people to her for instruction and committed herself even more fervently to her beliefs. So, instead of merely observing, the researchers had, from the start, altered the course of events through their presence.

  The researchers established a home base in a hotel room a few blocks from Martin’s house and took turns hanging out with the group. They took notes about ongoing events whenever they could, sometimes by excusing themselves to go to the bathroom (though not often enough to attract attention) or by stepping outside and frantically scribbling down observations in the dark. Or they waited until they got back to the hotel and immediately dictated everything they could remember into a tape recorder.

  The biggest challenge the researchers faced was maintaining a neutral role in the group. Martin’s ideology, they wrote, “aroused constant incredulity.” Often they wanted to shout, What are you guys thinking! Instead, they had to smile and go along with everything.

  Martin’s belief system was an eclectic mix of Christianity, New Age mysticism, and pulp zine science fiction. She claimed to be receiving messages from Clarion, a planet where bodies automatically adjusted to the outside temperature, people ate snowflakes, and no one ever died. Messages came to her through the spirit of Sananda, who apparently was Jesus Christ going by a different name. She received the messages by going into a trancelike state and allowing the aliens to guide her hand as she wrote down words on a piece of paper—a process called automatic writing.

  Martin told her followers floods would destroy much of Earth on December 21, but space aliens would descend in a ship and rescue them, the true believers, before then. She set the time of the rescue at midnight on the 21st, but she expected the ship might show up early. Therefore she was constantly sending her followers out on “saucer watch,” scanning t
he skies for stray spacecraft. She urged everyone to remain in a state of readiness by keeping metal, such as zippers or belt buckles, off their persons. On a spaceship, contact with metal would cause severe burns. Martin never explained why this was so but assured everyone it had to do with advanced alien technology.

  The researchers expressed amazement at what easy marks the group made themselves for the pranksters who, as December 21 approached, targeted Martin with increasing frequency. She and her followers would almost always take the bait, no matter how ridiculous or obvious the trick was. One time a young man called claiming to be “Captain Video from Outer Space.” He told them a spaceship would pick them up at noon. Obediently, the group members trooped outside to wait in the snow for the ship. Another time some boys called up saying they had a flood in their bathroom that they wanted the group to see. Martin, believing the boys were spacemen in disguise, had everyone go over. About the only invitation they didn’t accept was one to an “end of the world cocktail party” a reporter suggested they attend.

  The tension steadily built until the night of December 20, when the entire group gathered in Martin’s living room to wait for midnight. They waited and waited, but no spacemen appeared. At 12:30 a.m. there was a knock at the door, which caused a flurry of excitement. A member went to answer the door as Martin called after him to remember the secret password, but he returned seconds later with the news that it was just some boys playing games. Finally, at 2:30 a.m., Martin announced she had received another message from Sananda. He wasn’t apologizing for blowing them off. Instead, the important message he had beamed all the way from the planet Clarion was that he wanted them to take a coffee break.

  As the members of the group milled around, drinking their coffee, the observers pressed them for their reactions to the nonarrival of the spaceship. Many of Martin’s followers had staked everything on the assumption that spacemen were going to spirit them away. They had quit their jobs and spent all their money. What were they going to do now that they were stuck on Earth? But no one felt like talking. There was a mood of uncomfortable tension. Some members walked around blankly, seemingly disillusioned. Confusion reigned. They were all waiting for Martin to explain why nothing had happened, and at 4:45 a.m. she finally did exactly that. She announced the receipt of a new message from Clarion:

  For from the mouth of death have ye been delivered and at no time has there been such a force loosed upon the Earth. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room and that which has been loosed within this room now floods the entire Earth.

  What did it mean? It meant, she explained, that they had saved the world! Their devout belief had averted the catastrophe. That’s why the spaceship hadn’t come. Soon, a second message arrived. The spacemen wanted them to spread the “Christmas Message” of joy and salvation to the entire world. Everyone needed to know of the glorious redemption.

  It was just as Festinger had predicted. The stunning disconfirmation of the prediction hadn’t dented the followers’ beliefs at all. Instead, it made their convictions stronger and mobilized the group to seek out new members. Whereas before, Martin and her followers had shunned publicity, the morning of December 21 found them on the phone to reporters, drumming up media attention. Martin made audiotapes of her messages available. She issued a press release. Later, the entire group sang Christmas carols on the lawn, both to spread the message of joy to their neighbors and in a last-ditch attempt to attract a spaceship.

  However, despite great efforts, the group didn’t attract a single convert. It turned out they were lousy at proselytizing. The researchers wrote:

  For about a week they were headline news throughout the nation. Their ideas were not without popular appeal, and they received hundreds of visitors, telephone calls, and letters from seriously interested citizens, as well as offers of money (which they invariably refused). Events conspired to offer them a truly magnificent opportunity to grow in numbers. Had they been more effective, disconfirmation might have portended the beginning, not the end.

  Of course, that a significant percentage of the members were planted stooges, cynically observing all that went on as part of a science experiment, somewhat undermined the group’s effectiveness.

  Festinger’s research offers a gloomy lesson about the resiliency of beliefs. Have you ever gotten into an argument with someone who wouldn’t change his mind no matter what facts, evidence, or logic you presented him with? The case of Dorothy Martin and her followers suggests you might as well give up the effort, because beliefs can easily survive being disproven—and can in fact become stronger as a result. Lurking in the background of Festinger’s thesis is the idea that disconfirmation may have been the triggering event responsible for the spread of many religions.

  So what was the aftermath of the failure of the world to end in 1954? Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter wrote an account of their research that they titled When Prophecy Fails. To protect Martin’s privacy and to shield themselves from lawsuits, they referred to Martin as Marian Keech and set all the events in a fictitious Lake City (rather than Chicago). However, it was never much of a secret that Dorothy Martin was the subject of their study. After all, the Christmas Message that Marian Keech delivers in When Prophecy Fails is the same, word for word, as Dorothy Martin’s Christmas Message, which appeared in many newspapers in December 1954.

  Martin carried on her career as a New Age prophet. She changed her name to Sister Thedra and traveled to South America, where she established a small religious center called the Abbey of the Seven Rays. She continued to predict a coming time of floods, when a new Atlantis would rise from the oceans, but she grew less specific about the date when all this would happen. Eventually she returned to the United States, where she died in 1988. Or perhaps, we should say, her spaceship finally arrived.

  Festinger, L., H. W. Riecken, & S. Schachter (1956). When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

  The Last Survivor

  It’s the end of the world. The bombs have fallen. The mushroom clouds have bloomed and faded on the horizon. Finally, nothing remains of human civilization except a charred, radioactive ruin. But one creature survives. It crawls from the smoking rubble, clambers to the top of the wreckage, and waves its antennae in victory. It is a cockroach.

  We’ve all heard the claim that in the event of a nuclear war, cockroaches will be the only survivors. But where does this idea come from? Do people say this just because the bugs look tough enough to survive anything, or has someone actually irradiated a bunch of cockroaches to measure precisely how many rads they can withstand?

  By now you can probably guess that, yes, someone has irradiated cockroaches. In 1959, at the Quartermaster Research and Engineering Center in Natick, Massachusetts, the Whartons (D. R. A. and Martha) performed what remains the one definitive experiment on this question. They filled polyethylene bags with twenty to twenty-five cockroaches (Periplaneta americana), inserted a breathing tube into the bag so the little guys had some air, and then placed the bags on a conveyor belt that ran through a two-MeV Van de Graaff electron accelerator. Different groups of roaches were exposed to varying amounts of radiation.

  Subsequently, the Whartons placed each cockroach in a beaker, gave it some dog food—apparently roaches love the stuff—and waited to see how long it would live.

  Surprisingly, given the reputation of roaches, the critters didn’t fare very well. One thousand rads will kill a human. The same amount made the roaches sterile. So even if they do survive the bomb, they won’t be breeding much. Ten thousand rads stunned them. At 40,000 rads they died.

  These amounts are far more than humans could survive, but the subjects’ response was not enough to guarantee roaches will rule a postapocalyptic planet Earth. So the legend of the radiation-proof roach is just that—a legend.

  The true lord of radiation
, it turns out, is the parasitoid wasp Habro bracon. It takes an unbelievable 180,000 rads to be sure of killing it, as the researchers R. L. Sullivan and D. S. Grosch discovered in 1953. Which means, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, the world will end not with the bang of bombs or the hiss of cockroaches, but with the buzzing of wasps.

  Wharton, D. R. A., & M. L. Wharton (1959). “The Effect of Radiation on the Longevity of the Cockroach, Periplaneta americana, as Affected by Dose, Age, Sex and Food Intake.” Radiation Research 11: 600–15.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my editor, Stacia Decker, for providing me with the opportunity to write this book and for the numerous improvements she made to it.

  Sally Richards deserves special credit for, week after week, offering her thoughts and comments on the manuscript—as well as for keeping me on target to finish on time.

  The love and support of my family and friends kept me going during the months of writing. Beverley—I absolutely couldn’t have finished without you. Mom and Dad—I’m incredibly lucky to have you as parents. Ted—once again, you came through with the coffee breaks. Charlie—how could I even begin to list all the things I should thank you for? Kirsten, Ben, Astrid, and Pippa—I wish I could see you guys more often, but at least I knew you were cheering me on from Malawi. Boo—as a spoiled little cat, I’m sure you know how important you are.

  Flora Streater greatly helped me by keeping the Museum of Hoaxes operating while I took a leave of absence to work on the book. And thanks to all the other site regulars, especially the gang from the Edinburgh get-together—Annette Hudson (Nettie), Rowenna Streater (Madmouse), Sarah Kirkham (Smerk), Amber Belken (Tru), and William Wilhite (Charybdis)—for keeping the site active while I went off chasing elephants.