The People of Outer Space Could Communicate With the Group by Phone
There was a spaceman in the crowd with a helmet on and a white gown and whatnot
Midnight came and went without incident. Hope renewed for a moment, as someone noted that a clock only showed 11:55. At 12:10, it, too, signaled the arrival of the new day. The crowd stood silent, stunned. Hours before, they had sung carols to entertain the press. Now they could only continue waiting. Precisely for what, however, no one could say.
It was nearly five hours before the next message arrived. For the first time since the transmissions began, however, it was one of hope. “The little group,” it read, “sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction.”
Forty-five minutes prior, Dorothy Martin was in tears. But now her own words renewed her hope. It wasn’t the kind anyone had expected as they gathered at the home to greet the end of the world. Now it was clear that this group of believers had staved off global catastrophe by the mere act of believing it true.
The following afternoon, a press blitz began.
It was an abrupt change for a group that had previously been shied away from media attention. An embarrassment viewed from the outside, the event had only hardened the faith of those followers committed to Martin’s words. It was, perhaps, something observer might have predicted, as the December 20th event was far from the first false alarm from the small but devoted Chicago doomsday cult.
Three days prior, a phone call from outer space a stirred similar excitement. Identifying himself as “Captain Video,” the man informed Martin that a flying saucer was set to land in her backyard around 4PM. The group scrambled to prepare for the arrival.
“All telephone messages had to be taken seriously,” one member would later write, “the people of outer space could communicate with the group by phone, but often had to use coded messages.”
The man who penned those words would later reveal himself as a non-believer, adding that Captain Video was undoubtedly a prank caller. The writer detailed the story of infiltrating The Seekers in 1956’s When Prophecy Fails. The group would also serve as inspiration for the social psychologist’s follow up, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change,” Leon Festinger wrote in the 1957 volume. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”
In December of 1954, no could truly doubt The Seekers’ convictions. Martin, a 54-year-old housewife living in the Chicago-adjacent village of Oak Park, had first learned about the end of the world through her own experiments with automatic writing. The one-time Scientology adherent channeled the warning through her pen, inspiring a newspaper story titled, “Prophecy from Planet Clarion.”
Run on the back page of the Lake City Herald in September, the piece detailed Martin’s shocking findings,
These beings have been visiting the earth, she says, in what we call flying saucers. During their visits, she says, they have observed fault lines in the earth‘s crust that foretoken the deluge.
Hailing from a planet hidden behind the moon, the benevolent aliens planned to swoop in to save Martin’s followers from an earthquake and the subsequent tidal wave and flood set to wipe out much of the Earth’s population. Around 20 true believers devoted themselves to the cause, dropping out of work and school in hopes of being among the lucky few saved by alien intervention. Festinger and two colleagues also joined up for a front row view as the events unfolded.
When the trio visited Martin in early October of that year, they found the woman welcoming, but surprisingly reticent to discuss her prophecies. “My latchstring is always out,” she said warmly. “I have been told that my door is to be always open to those who are ready.” She would not actively recruit. Those who were “ready” would be “sent” to her by the powers that be, she explained.
On December 23rd, Martin received another transmission from the Clarion Guardians. The group was instructed to stand outside her home at 6PM on Christmas Eve, singing carols. A press release was sent to the media, noting that the long-awaited flying saucer would finally arrive. A massive crowd showed up outside of her home, but the UFO never did.
The press once again pounced, asking a spokesperson why the ship never arrived. “Well,” he told the reporter, “there was a spaceman in the crowd with a helmet on and a white gown and whatnot.”
Oak Park Police arrested Martin for "inciting to riot” over the large crowd that gathered outside her home on Christmas Eve. She was involuntarily institutionalized and eventually left the country for Peru, only to return to the States with a newly cemented vision. Now known as "Sister Thedra," she founded the Order of Sananda and Sanat Kumara, named for two of the Guardians who had initially alerted her to those cataclysmic events.
She continued to relate the Guardian prophecies to those who would listen until her death in 1992.
Sources:
When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger
Prophecy Fail https://slate.com/technology/2011/05/apocalypse-2011-what-happens-to-a-doomsday-cult-when-the-world-doesn-t-end.html
Apocalypse Oak Park https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/may-2011/dorothy-martin-the-chicagoan-who-predicted-the-end-of-the-world-and-inspired-the-theory-of-cognitive-dissonance/
The Christmas the Aliens Didn’t Come https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/the-christmas-the-aliens-didnt-come/421122/