2013 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

16 ANTHROPOLOGY I Jesus College Annual Report 2013
An Anthropologist Investigates Flying
Saucers
Timothy Jenkins
How a closer look at belief in flying saucers offers new insights
for anthropologists
Hitherto, with honourable exceptions,
academic research into flying saucers
has mostly been to explain how mistaken
some people can be. This approach has
routinely resulted in psychological accounts –
seeking explanations at a mental level, such
as the deception of others, or self-deceit in
the form of compensation for deprivation or
disillusion. Some accounts in the past have
invoked neurophysiology – the mistaken
input of the senses, hallucinations and so
forth, whether individual or collective. It
might be more interesting, however, to ask
the standard anthropological questions: what
are people doing when they resort to these
notions? What do they achieve by doing so?
And under what social conditions do claims
for the existence of flying saucers appear?
Flying saucers emerged as a popular
phenomenon in the aftermath of the Second
World War, although there are plenty of
precedents in earlier fiction. They were much
discussed in the media and became a topic of
interest to various informal groups
(including what were called flying saucer
clubs in the 1950s). They formed part of the
Cold War originally.
There was a brilliant study made of one
such informal group in the Chicago area,
entitled When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger
and others (1956). This group not only
discussed flying saucers, but also received
messages from “spacemen” through the
group’s spirit medium. The spacemen told
their medium contact that they had been able
to penetrate the earth’s atmosphere with their
craft because of the recent disturbances
caused by the exploding of atomic weapons.
They had been surveying human industrial
activity and the build-up of arms. Moreover,
they had seen signs of a coming natural
catastrophe, when land masses would fall
and the seas would rise, causing the flooding
of much of the North American continent.
Their proposed reasons for making
contact were twofold: first, to warn human
kind of the coming disaster; next, to gather a
selected group of humans to be taken to
another planet where they would be trained
and returned to earth in order to lead the
recovery of the human race.
The social scientists who studied this
group were interested in the patterns
exhibited by groups who expected some great
event: the coming of the Messiah, or the end
of the world; moreover, how groups coped
with the disappointment of their
expectations. The social scientists joined this
group, posing as fellow enthusiasts. They
subsequently wrote accounts offering
detailed descriptions of the group in its dayto-day
activities, while the supposed date of
the crisis approached and passed. They
proposed a theory labelled “cognitive
dissonance” (how people cope, under
different conditions, with hopes and facts
that do not match up) to account for the
group’s mental coping-mechanisms. The
theory, widely invoked to explain all kinds of
behaviour, has now entered ordinary
educated conversation.
Re-reading the book fifty years on, a
number of aspects strike the reader: not least,
whether it was entirely ethical to infiltrate a
group without permission or knowledge of
the participants. But the primary impression
is of the richness of the description, which
accounts in large part for the book still being
in print. It is clear that the series of events at
the heart of the book was not produced solely
by the group and their medium but the
interactions between three sets of people.