When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of A Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World

Books routinely fall out of vogue and slip out of print. Non-fiction books are especially vulnerable, discarded when their subjects lose popularity or when more updated information becomes available. Regardless of the innovation, mastery, or irreproducibility of their stories, these books are doomed to obscurity in labyrinthine secondhand bookstores or among the dusty, stamped stacks of libraries. When Prophecy Fails is one of these books.

It is the middle of the last century. Interest in outer space is keen. The US government is conducting investigations into UFO sightings. Reputable Americans are reporting strange things. A team of sociologists from the University of Minnesota studying millenarianism (the belief that the world will undergo a cataclysmic change or apocalypse) stumbles across the following headline in a reputable newspaper: “Prophecy From Planet Clarion Call To City: Flee That Flood. It’ll Swamp Us On Dec. 21, Outer Space Tells Suburbanite.” The sociologists infiltrate the group and settle in to dispassionately investigate the disconfirmation of end-of-world beliefs.

The resultant narrative is not a soap opera of powerful cults with charismatic leaders winning converts and cash, but rather the story of unexpectedly ordinary people—a middle-aged housewife and her small group of ragtag followers—the kind of people who might watch soap operas. The group spends the majority of its time waiting in suburban living rooms, removing all metal from its persons in preparation for the spacecraft. Time and
time again, the participants are left standing in the yard for pick-up, sock-footed in the snow, waiting for a salvation that never comes. It’s a tragedy of a particular time and place, borne of outer space faddism and the American myth of rebirth via relocation.

As the book progresses, the impartial observers become entangled with their subjects’ lives, creating an odd equilibrium: the research theory builds and solidifies as the group collapses. Though the tone remains dry and professional at all times, oddly intimate, funny, sad, and scholastically unnecessary observations creep in, shifting the book from a theoretical text to an exploration of our shabby realities. When Prophecy Fails is about the mechanisms of bolstering our glamorous dreams and the irresistibility of dreaming them.

– Kim Velsey

When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of A Modern
Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World
Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter
Paperback, 351 pages
$15.95, Da Capo Press