The American experience with UFOs has several key figures that weave through its early history. Names like Gen. Nathan Twinning, Capt. Edward Ruppelt, and CIA Officer Edward Tauss will be familiar to many with an interest in the 40s and 50s. Their respective contributions to UFO policy are, in many cases, documented and well understood by the historians who cover the period. But what if they’re missing someone important?
Go a little farther back and you’ll find a man whose every move suggests an outsized impact on UFO policy. Renowned academic, presidential advisor, and Cold War spy. But could this man also be the architect of UFO secrecy? If we truly want to understand the UFO phenomenon, it’s about time we start asking …
Who is Hadley Cantril?
Hadley Cantril was born in Hyrum, Utah on June 16, 1906. While little is written about his personal life or his early childhood influences, we know that Cantril went to college at Dartmouth where he completed a Bachelor of Science in Sociology and acted as his class valedictorian in 1928.12 Shortly before the stock market crash of 1929, Cantril went overseas to do graduate work in Munich and Berlin where, among other experiences, he happened to see a young Adolf Hitler speak in a café. He eventually returned to the United States, this time attending Harvard University to complete a PhD in Psychology in 1931.3
Cantril began his career as an instructor of sociology at Dartmouth (1931-32) and an instructor of psychology at Harvard (1932-35). In these early years of the Great Depression, he also began a prolific book-writing career including the extremely well-timed Psychology of Radio (1935). By 1936, he had made the move to Princeton University where he would remain on the faculty for most of his life.4
In 1938, America was gripped by the supposed panic stemming from Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast. Newspaper coverage highlighted physical injuries, hysteria, and reported suicides in response to the infamous radio play, which suggested that Martians had invaded the United States.5 At the time, one of the leading experts in radio psychology happened to be located 3 miles away from the fictional invasion site at Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. In his classroom at Princeton, Cantril threw out all of his pre-planned teaching material for the year and began immediately lecturing on the War of the Worlds broadcast. Within three days, he was offering the conclusion that “almost anyone could have fallen for the hoax” as (1) the recent war crisis over Czechoslovakia had conditioned Americans to believe in newsflashes, and (2) pulp fiction on extra-terrestrials had made a Martian invasion seem possible. Layered onto this was his belief that years of economic turmoil and the threat of war had left Americans unsure of “the basic and fundamental meaning of it all, anyway” and that the broadcast essentially hypnotized its listeners.6
Here we get some insight into how Cantril thinks which is extremely important when considering the quality of the advice he might have offered later. One scholar of the period would remark that “Cantril had not had time to do much research beyond reading the newspapers before coming to these conclusions.”7 And, as would only become clear almost 75 years later, those newspaper stories were largely false.8
That didn’t stop Cantril from pushing ahead with his thesis. Together with his colleagues at The Princeton Radio Research Project, Cantril began a formal study into the psychological impact of the broadcast while memories were still fresh. But the leg work was mostly done by colleagues Paul Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, and Hazel Gaudet.9 While Cantril “[managed] the study from afar,” he had already reached his conclusion while it was still underway, saying to The Princeton News that “in almost every case fright was based on psychological insecurity due to worry over jobs, health, religion, family problems and so on.”1011
As the study came to a close, relations broke down between Cantril and his collaborators. What was originally supposed to be an academic paper, became, at Cantril’s insistence, a book that he would self-finance and publish. When a draft of the book was circulated for comment, the chief statistician on the project (Hazel Gaudet) indicated that they didn’t have any facts to back his psychological conclusions. The study was clearly pointing to a viral, word-of-mouth spread of fear in the very limited cases it occurred. Cantril was suggesting underlying anxieties, applicable to basically everyone, that impacted millions of Americans.12
The book was a sensation when it was published in 1940. For a dry academic tome, it received great reviews in the New York Times and substantial coverage in Hollywood.13 Even more important to consider was that it was published at a time when no other government agency was interested or capable of doing its own counter-analysis. There would be no sober assessment from some three-letter agency for future scholars to point at. The final verdict on the War of the Worlds broadcast would be offered by Cantril, a rising academic star and an expert in the field, who ultimately drew his conclusions long before any evidence got in the way. What were those conclusions? That:
“A panic occurs when some highly cherished, rather commonly accepted value is threatened and when no certain elimination of the threat is in sight.”14
“Frustration resulted when no directed behavior seemed [capable of addressing the threat].”15
“At least a million [Americans] were frightened or disturbed,”16 And
That the people most likely to panic, had, among other factors, religious insecurity, a general fear of war, and other anxiety related to the Great Depression.17
Many academic books, even well-rated ones, don’t travel very far beyond a university campus. But in Cantril’s case, the publication of this book just happened to coincide with the beginning of his clandestine national security career and a personal friendship with the President of the United States. In 1940, at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller (the President’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs) Cantril was asked to “set up mechanisms that would gauge public opinion in Latin America.” At the time, Nazi Germany was getting increasingly cozy with several Latin American regimes, and the United States was looking for a covert assessment of how effective their propaganda was. Cantril was their choice and when his assessment was brought to the attention of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the President personally re-tasked him into a domestic surveillance operation which involved gauging the public’s willingness to end U.S. neutrality laws and supply military aid to Britain during the early days of WWII.18
Later in the war, Cantril was directed to Vichy-French Morocco ahead of a planned Allied invasion of North Africa. There, he was tasked again with a covert assessment of public opinion, which would impact force disposition and diplomacy in the region. His conclusion (that the French in that region deeply hated the British and their “Free French” partners) changed the composition of the invasion force and the landing sites for Allied troops.19 Not an insubstantial impact for a humble professor of psychology.
As the Truman administration began in 1945, Cantril’s biographical details once again become muted. Dedicated enthusiasts will know that it was during this administration (in 1947) that major events in UFO lore including the Kenneth Arnold sighting and the alleged Roswell Crash take place. And it is here that speculation must act as a placeholder for hard fact. In the year these events took place, Hadley Cantril had written the only policy assessment of extra-terrestrial interaction ever. He was a leading expert on public opinion with strong, established ties to the White House and the burgeoning National Security State. Do you think they called him? And, if so, do you think he might have offered the same opinion he championed all the way back in 1940? Two questions for future researchers and scourers of Presidential calendars alike.
In 1948, Cantril found himself working in Paris serving as the Director of the UNESCO “Tensions Project,” which mostly aimed to diagnose and resolve the international tensions that caused wars.20 His European residency seemed to keep him away from some of the more explicit committees set up to fight the Cold War on behalf of the United States, including President Truman’s Psychological Strategy Board, for which he would have been a leading candidate. While we know he corresponded with the Psychological Strategy Board at minimum, his clandestine work during this crucial period of American history is still not well understood.21
After another round of Fellowships and accolades, Hadley Cantril left Princeton University in 1955 to co-found the Institute for International Social Research (IISR) with Lloyd A. Free.22 And while this sounds like a benign title for an academic research institution, the IISR was actually an explicit CIA front organization with its fingers in every part of the Cold War. As a later CIA source in The New York Times would indicate, the organization “derived nearly all of its income from the CIA in the decade that it was active.” The source would go on to say “they were considered an asset because we paid them so much money” and “Cantril, an acknowledged pioneer in public opinion polling had ‘just sort of run’ the council for the CIA.”23
What kind of work did it do? Well, notably, Cantril conducted covert opinion polling in Cuba in advance of the planned Bay of Pigs invasion in 1960.24 He was also able to penetrate the Iron Curtain and glean actual insights from everyday citizens living under totalitarian communist regimes. These results went directly to the CIA with many of the less sensitive conclusions working their way into his 1960 book Soviet Leaders and Mastery Over Man.2526
But in 1969, Hadley Cantril suffered a stroke in his sleep and died at the relatively young age of 62.27 For those trying to understand his life, a death at this age is significant as it only tends to be much later that clandestine intelligence figures open up about their history. There is every reason to believe Cantril remained involved with the U.S. National Security State until his death and the details of his Cold War activities only started to trickle out about a decade later in 1977. Even then, some players in that game remained overly cautious. When Cantril’s WWII ties to British intelligence were to be revealed in a memoir of Sir William Stevenson, a former colleague wrote begging him “to remove all references to Hadley Cantril and Dr. Gallup... [As] Dr. Gallup was and still is, a great friend of England. What you have written would cause him anguish - and damage. One does not want to damage one's friends... In subsequent years Hadley Cantril has done a vast amount of secret polling for the United States Government. What you have written would compromise him - and SIS [MI6] does not make a practice of compromising its friends.”28
So what is to be said of Hadley Cantril at this juncture of study? Cantril wrote the only book tackling UFO policy before the beginning of the modern UFO era. He ingratiated himself to Presidents, key government figures, and the burgeoning U.S. National Security State before the government had to seriously start tackling the issue in 1947. His involvement with that security state deepened to an explicit role with the CIA and he had an established resume of covert public opinion assessment both at home and abroad. He advised every President from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy and he died before the great airing of dirty laundry that really started to take place in the 1970s.2930 It’s too early to point to any of the content in this article as a smoking gun and we must acknowledge the possibility that Cantril’s only involvement with UFO policy could have been a shoddily written book that solidified the public panic myth. But beyond that possibility lies a more intriguing one: that Cantril was indeed asked what the government should tell the public and he answered it.
P.S. This article presents new research that tries to improve our understanding of UFO history. If you’d like to see more content like this in the future, please:
Elliot, Nancy. “In Memoriam Hadley Cantril '28.” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, July 1969. https://archive.dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/article/1969/7/1/deaths. Pg 54.
Schwartz, A Brad. Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2015. Pg 173.
“The Aftermath of Mars: An Interview with Professor Hadley Cantril.” Princeton News, February 9, 1939. https://theprince.princeton.edu/princetonperiodicals/cgi-bin/imageserver.pl?oid=LocalExpress19390209-01&getpdf=true. Pg 5.
Elliot, “In Memoriam Hadley Cantril '28.” Pg 54.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 7, 99–103
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 173.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 173.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 8.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 178, 185.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 185, 193.
“The Aftermath of Mars: An Interview with Professor Hadley Cantril.” Pg 5.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 187–188.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 190.
Cantril, Hadley. The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940. Pg 199.
Cantril, “The Invasion from Mars.” Pg 199.
Cantril, “The Invasion from Mars.” Pg 199.
Cantril, “The Invasion from Mars.” Pg 191, 194.
Sproule, J Michael. Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pg 184.
Note: Gauging Public Opinion, a 1944 book by Hadley Cantril remains prolific in academic circles and is still in publication today.
“Cantril Aided Landings in Africa.” The Princeton Herald, December 3, 1965. https://theprince.princeton.edu/princetonperiodicals/cgi-bin/imageserver.pl?oid=princetonherald19651203&getpdf=true. Pg 1.
Gallup, George. “In Memoriam: Hadley Cantril, 1906–1969.” Public Opinion Quarterly 33, no. 3 (January 1, 1969): 506. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1086/267731.
See “Harry S. Truman Papers Staff Member and Office Files: Psychological Strategy Board Files.” Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, 1951. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/truman-papers/harry-s-truman-papers-staff-member-and-office-files-psychological-strategy.
Elliot, “In Memoriam Hadley Cantril '28.” Pg 54.
“Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.” The New York Times, December 26, 1977. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propaganda-network-built-by-the-cia-a-worldwide-network.html.
Thomas, Robert Mcg. “Lloyd A. Free, 88, Is Dead; Revealed Political Paradox.” The New York Times, November 14, 1996. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/14/us/lloyd-a-free-88-is-dead-revealed-political-paradox.html.
“Cantril Conducts Group Now Visiting Russia.” The Princeton Herald, November 12, 1958. https://theprince.princeton.edu/princetonperiodicals/cgi-bin/imageserver.pl?oid=princetonherald19581112&getpdf=true. Pg 2.
“SOVIET UNITY SEEN BY PSYCHOLOGISTS; Dr. Cantril Says U.S. Group Found Economic Tie Binds People to Government.” The New York Times, January 2, 1959. https://www.nytimes.com/1959/01/02/archives/soviet-unity-seen-by-psychologists-dr-cantril-says-us-group-found.html.
Elliot, “In Memoriam Hadley Cantril '28.” Pg 54.
Simkin, John. “Hadley Cantril.” Spartacus Educational, September 1997. https://spartacus-educational.com/SPYcantril.htm.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 193–194.
Gallup, “In Memoriam: Hadley Cantril, 1906–1969.”