2001: A Space Odyssey (Space Odyssey, #1)

by Arthur C. Clarke

Bowman also listened, with a curiously detached interest, to Mission Control’s belated apologia for its programming. The voices from Earth seemed to have a defensive note; he could imagine the recriminations that must now be in progress among those who had planned the expedition. They had some good arguments, of course - including the results of a secret Department of Defence study, Project BARSOOM, which had been carried out by Harvard’s School of Psychology in 1989. In this experiment in controlled sociology, various sample populations had been assured that the human race had made contact with extraterrestrials. Many of the subjects tested were - with the help of drugs, hypnosis and visual effects — under the impression that they had actually met creatures from other planets, so their reactions were regarded as authentic. Some of these reactions had been quite violent; there was, it seemed, a deep vein of xenophobia in many otherwise normal human beings. In view of mankind’s record of lynchings, pogroms and similar pleasantries, this should have surprised no one; nevertheless, the organisers of the study had been deeply disturbed, and the results had never been released. The five separate panics caused in the 20th century by radio broadcasts of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds also reinforced the study’s conclusions . . .