Feb 26 2008
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When UFO Prophecy Fails
One of my favorite books on the UFO subject and contacteeism is the 1956 classic When Prophecy Fails. The story surfaced through a morally questionable (in today’s terms) university study of a flying saucer group headed by a woman who channeled what she described as alien intelligences who told her that the world was going to end. The members of the group gathered in the leader’s home in Lake City, Minneapolis and waited for the saucers to come and pick them up, which of course, never happened. A couple of the cult members were actually students from the psychology department of the University of Minnesota, who disguised their motives and took detailed notes. The leader, known as “Marion Keech” (a pseudonym) told her followers that the aliens had rewarded the group’s faith by saving the planet from destruction. Sounds typical, right?
But as “Emperor” writes at the fascinating Cabinet of Wonders site, the case also had Men In Black visits, and an encounter with a small group who tried to convince Keech that she had been in error all along. What were these visitors after? Were they government employees trying to figure out if Keech was a communist agent, or stopping her group before it could get a better foothold?
The quote (in part) from Jacques Vallee’s Dimensions is illuminating:
…Mrs. Keech had been visited by strange people. The first incident followed the disclosure of her flood forecast in the local papers. Two men came to her door and asked to talk to her; one of them was a perfectly ordinary human, but his companion was very strange and did not say a single word during the visit. She asked who they were, and the first man replied, “I am of this planet, but he is not.” The point of their discussion, which lasted for half an hour, was that she should not publicize her information beyond what she had already done. “The time is not right now,” the man said before leaving with his companion. This encounter had been deadly serious. As a result Mrs. Keech gave up her plans to publish a book about her experiences.
My favorite quote from the book, uttered by one of the members after the failed prophecy goes something like “I broken every tie, I’ve burned every bridge. I can’t afford not to believe.”
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February 27th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Wow.
Did Vallee actually confirm this story, or was he just repeating it?
Could this have been an experiment?
BTW, I don’t think that what the researchers did was unethical.
February 27th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Absolutely fascinating Greg. I gotta find out what happened to the cult leader.
February 27th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I remember the time I attended a UFO conference when I was a teenager, and some guy ——who at that time was a semi-important figure in mexican Ufology—— made the statement that on New year’s eve of that same year, there was going to be a huge number of UFO sightings over Mexico city.
So obviously on the 31st I stayed almost all night enduring the cold winter on my uncle Fernando’s rooftop (I even managed to convince one of my cousins to join me). As you might expect, nothing happened, apart from some idiots that threw a couple of metallic ballons the next day. So that served me as a lesson that you should be careful about those wild statements of so-called prophets in touch with the ’space-brothers’.
But I guess my experience was not so bad, considering what happened to other people who decided to accept the words of some wild-eyed loony, and drank some funky apple-juice…
February 28th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
disowned,
I am not sure if Vallee checked up on the story, however, since he deplored the failure of a follow-up by the original researchers, he was putting his reputation on the line by repeating the story. The reference may be in Dimensions. Do you have a copy?
The strange visits may have been experiments, but where are the findings? Secret experiments?
I found the methods of the U of M researchers vaguely unethical, in light of the fact that the group was doing no real harm to anyone, and everyone was there of their own will. Members were allowed to leave if they wished. in other words, if their activities were illegal or more importantly, harming anyone, I’d have very little problem with the infiltration.
In any case, good and/or bad, I’m glad that the study did take place, and that the experimenters’ findings were published.
February 28th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
RPJ,
I read far too many abduction books in the 1980s and lived in fear of aliens for a couple of years, until nothing happened. Whod’a thunk?
February 28th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Ben,
I wouldn’t be surprised if Keech was dead now. I can’t seem to find much online about her whereabouts after the group disbanded, except that part of the group continued to listen to Keech’s channelings for a few years after the first failed prophecy.
February 28th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Hi Greg,
Have read this many years ago now, but was interested to read some pertinent comments in Jay Rath’s The M-Files (1998, ISBN: 0-915024-66-7, pgs. 62-84) on the situation inside the group about which When Prophesy Fails was written. Because the researchers may have comprised a significant percentage of the group itself, and also may have known things through their research and network of contacts (about meeting schedules for example) that other attendees would not have known, Rath wonders in print if the researchers themselves didn’t unduly influence the group and perhaps may have even been suspected of being space people amongst the Earthling attendees.
- Jim Klotz
February 29th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Hello Jim,
Good to hear from you.
I think I remember reading about this. If true, it reinforces my feeling that the study was not only unethical, but possibly inaccurate as well.
It also seems similar to accounts of CIA infitration of groups and publications during the 1950s and ’60s where the spies were so thick that in some cases there were more of them than actual radicals.
March 1st, 2008 at 9:30 am
Thanks for the mention.
I find this fascinating from all sorts of angles:
You would imagine apocalyptic cults setting dates would be a self-defeating process but apparently they all seem to do this. I recently watched a documentary about a small cult and the documentary makers waited outside as the time passed. They might have been waiting for some mass suicide or something but it was far scarier than that as they all appeared from the dark grinning saying that things had been postponed due to their hard work.
Also it is interesting from the other direction as most people seem to consider this as having been explained. Jim makes a good point - it’d be difficult to come to any conclusions about a system you are measuring where you are actually part of that. Also as Vallee points out there does seem to have been something anomalous going on, although if that had anything to do with strange entities, the secret services or hoaxers (like Gray Barker?) it is difficult to say.
It is a good point about whether Vallee checked the facts. I (obviously) have Dimensions to hand so I’ll check now…
It is discussed on page 242-247 and as the book doesn’t have a reference section it is difficult to assess his sources (he clearly uses When Prophecy Fails but also seems to draw on material from within the cult) but he doesn’t mention that he spoke to anyone personally. Not that it would have enlightened things much as you’d have to be relying on what people said (which they had already been published in his sources) but it could have throw something up. Also in some ways the critical part for the point he was making is what they believed and the way the scientists failed to even bother addressing the high strangeness.
And there is a lot of oddity - he mentions a prediction of a spacecraft due to land at a military airfield and a small group drove out there. No UFO turned up but “suddenly a man approached the party and , upon looking at him, all present felt an eerie reaction to his appearance. No one had seen him approaching. He was offered something to drink and declined. He walked with a curious, rigid bearing. A moment later he was gone, but no one had seen him go away!” (page 243)
Interestingly, on the same page Vallee mentions “One of the leaders of the sect was ‘Dr. Armstrong,’ whose real name was Laughead, a man who later became involved in the Uri Geller affair.” So was Vallee, of course, but Laughead is an interesting figure.
Dr. Puharich’s involvement with breaking the Uri Geller story is an interesting one:
www.zem.demon.co.uk/dpaug.htm
However, Laughead seems to have been one of the people involved with “priming” him.
In 1952 he was approached by a Dr. Vinod who displayed some impressive abilities. in 1955 Charles Laughead turned up:
–
Three years later, Puharich was travelling in Mexico when he met an American doctor called Charles Laughead. Upon learning that Puharich’s companion, Peter Hurkos, was psychic, the doctor revealed that he and his wife had recently attended channelling sessions during which a young man went into trance and delivered messages from space beings.
Puharich remained sceptical and thought the doctor to be a little impressionable; subsequently forgetting the encounter. Until he later received a letter from Dr Laughead explaining that the channelled entities had requested he forward Puharich a message from them. The channelled message was from ‘M’ of the Nine. Puharich was amazed and knew it would have been impossible for the American doctor to know of what had transpired with Dr Vinod three years before, in another country.
–
www.bio.net/bionet/mm/dros/1997-March/002988.html
The consistency between the two “independent” accounts and Geller’s convinced Puharich he was legit, as was the information imparted.
From his book Uri:
http://www.galactic-server.net/rune/uri4.html
Your own piece in FT 118 touches on the connections connected with Laughead:
–
In 1955, at the second convention, speakers included George Hunt Wiliamson, George Adamski and another new star, former physician Charles Laughead, who had very likely met Williamson in the intervening year and begun a lengthy series of changelings in their home base of Whipple, Arizona. Laughead was the model for ‘Dr. Armstrong’ in the seminal psychological study When Prophecy Fails (1956 – see FT117:47) which examined the dynamics of a channelling group when a prophesied UFO landing did not occur. Laughead was also instrumental in promoting the activities of Dr. Andrija Puharich and Uri Geller when they psychically contacted the hawk-headed alien entity they called ‘Spectra’.
–
www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc1904.htm
Another reading of this is that someone was tinkering with belief systems. The whole WPFs/Keech affair predates Barker’s book but with hindsight a number (but not all) of the encounters would tend to be classed as MiBs.
If this is some kind of weird intelligence operation that actively influenced them (that MiB incident was early on in the group’s history and helped add to their evolving mythos) or was merely monitoring them (we know they can keep an eye on such things - Ian Fleming seems to have been involved with the WWII prosecution of Helen Duncan under the Witchcraft Laws because they thought she had somehow leaked information about D-Day).
If so the group may have contained members of the secret service as well as scientists - the genuine members of the group may have even been outnumbered (I’ve read at least one story where everyone in a group ends up revealing they are undercover and have been studying each other). So this may not tell us if what they experienced was “real” (although you could spend a long time debating what “real” means in this case) but it could tell us a whole lot more about an awful lot of other things.
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:21 pm
The MN-based Center for Reichian Crypto-Anthropology has applied it’s secret motto: Numen Est Omen (Name is Fate from Nandor Fodor) to this agent of alien disinfo:
Charles Laughead.
After various NSA-patented compression algorithms, the results are in:
Charles Laughead is an ancient Enochian name from a Sumerian reptilian god mentioned in a text that will be channeled “back from the future” by Sitchin, Steiger or Strieber or a similar para-faction author of late.