The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

by Malcolm Gladwell

Leon Festinger went on to become one of the most famous social psychologists in the country. And I’ve always wondered whether his experience with the Air Forces was the motivation after the war for his most famous study, an analysis of a cult out of Chicago called the Seekers. Festinger approached the Seekers with a question that must have crossed his mind years before, during that dire period when everything the Bomber Mafia believed in was proved false: What happens to true believers when their convictions are confronted by reality? As Festinger recalled, “The idea that you have to supply cognition that will fit with—that will justify—what you feel or what you do made this immediately the first thing we thought of: well, if this operates, it must be a very pervasive thing.” The leader of the Seekers was a woman named Dorothy Martin, who claimed to be in contact with a group of aliens she called the Guardians. The Guardians told her, she said, that the world was going to be destroyed by flood on December 21, 1954. But a few days before the apocalypse happened, she and her followers would be rescued by a flying saucer. It would land in her backyard. In preparation for this moment, the Seekers quit their jobs, left their families, and gave away their possessions. They gathered in Dorothy Martin’s house, in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. At first, Martin said, the flying saucer was supposed to arrive at four o’clock on December 17. The aliens didn’t come. Then at midnight, ...