The Most Important Book You've Never Heard Of
Could this be what sparked UFO secrecy?
The most important book you’ve never heard of is called The Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. In this 1940 analysis of the War of the Worlds broadcast, Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril presents the case on why the American Public freaked out during that infamous radio play. The fact that the American Public didn’t really freak out is irrelevant. This book was the assessment available to Presidents and policy makers during this crucial decade of UFO history and, as you will learn later in this article, Cantril made himself available to Presidents and policy makers as well.
For too long, the UFO Community has ignored the War of the Worlds broadcast as a silly distraction to the less fictional events that began occurring in 1947. In this article, I hope to offer you the argument that those events, including the hypothetical decision to withhold information from the public, should be interpreted through the lens of the War of the Worlds broadcast and this book’s take, in particular.
Let’s start by asking:
Why Is This Book Important?
While initial news coverage after the War of the Worlds broadcast clearly indicated some kind of panic, there was still a degree of uncertainty in the stories being reported at the time. Newspapers were filled with anecdotal accounts of physical injuries, heart attacks, and suicides but technological limitations and lax reporting standards prevented the kind of context we would expect to see today.1
Coming two years after the initial broadcast, The Invasion From Mars brought legitimacy to the idea that there was a serious public panic. Presented by an up-and-coming academic star (Cantril), this book was said to be the result of a formal study, with hundreds of interviews, filtered through the lens of a psychology PhD, and published with the institutional backing of the Princeton University Press. Where some newspaper accounts could be written off as fraudulent or convenient to the reporters presenting them, here was a man putting the full weight of his academic future behind his conclusions.
One of those conclusions was that the panic impacted 1.2 million Americans.2 Later claims that “millions of people panicked” stemmed largely from this one estimate and that remained the unchecked public assumption until around 2013, 73 years later.3 Now internally, this was checked. Cantril’s collaborators in this research project did not believe anywhere close to that many people were convinced by the broadcast, and they questioned the shoddy statistical methods he used to arrive at that figure.4 But ultimately, those people weren’t in the public eye and Cantril was. His book became the final verdict on how an innocent radio play snowballed into a significant national security threat and he conveniently cherry picked 135 frightened interview subjects to do it.5
But How Is This Relevant to the Modern UFO Movement?
It’s easy to dismiss the War of the Worlds broadcast because, to our modern ears, it’s just so obviously fiction. The story included, among other things, the destruction of whole army units with Martian death rays and the mass extermination of civilians with toxic gas. If some people ultimately did panic in the face of those reports, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume they were panicking about the destruction and death instead of the extra-terrestrial angle? Wouldn’t policy makers draw that same conclusion?
The problem is that Cantril ultimately wrote a book that broadens out his diagnosis of panic in a way that makes it applicable to anything. Consider his assessment of “when a panic occurs” and ask yourself if this is only limited to Martians with death rays:
A panic occurs when some highly cherished, rather commonly accepted value is threatened and when no certain elimination of the threat is in sight. The individual feels that he will be ruined, physically, financially, or socially... Frustration resulted when no directed behavior seemed possible.6
So even though this book was written to tackle a specific fictional story about killer Martians, here you find a definition of panic that could just as easily be triggered by a flying saucer landing on the White House lawn, crashing into a field, or buzzing a military installation. As long as that contact prompts a “threat to a commonly accepted value” and “no directed behaviour” would “eliminate that threat” you get panic, according to Cantril. In fact, when asked to comment on the draft of the book before it’s publication, one of Cantril’s chief collaborators noted how broad this was, saying that “If you center the study around the fact that we are all full of anxiety and therefore believe everything, you can’t help much because our anxiety will remain for a long time and dangers will happen all the time.”7
Belief was, of course, the other thrust of this supposed study. Just by nature of his academic background, Cantril was much more interested in what led people to accept the broadcast as true before they arrived at the panic stage. Little time was dedicated to the citizens he felt were “not suggestible,” but when it came to the people who were very frightened by the War of the Worlds broadcast, the “highly suggestible” listeners, as he puts it, Cantril neatly summarized four driving factors:
The individual had a negative worldview that was already consistent with what they were hearing.
We have found that many of the persons who did not even try to check the broadcast had pre-existing mental sets that made the stimulus so understandable to them that they immediately accepted it as true. Highly religious people who believed that God willed and controlled the destinies of man were already furnished with a particular standard of judgment that would make an invasion of our planet and a destruction of its members merely an “act of God.” This was particularly true if the religious frame of reference was of the eschatological variety providing the individual with definite attitudes or beliefs regarding the end of the world.
Other people we found had been so influenced by the recent war scare that they believed an attack by a foreign power was imminent and an invasion—whether it was due to the Japanese, Hitler, or Martians—was not unlikely. Some persons had built up such fanciful notions of the possibilities of science that they could causally believe the powers of strange super scientists were being turned against them, perhaps merely for experimental purposes.8
The individual sought further confirmation, but they were misled by unreliable sources nearby.
We found that persons who checked unsuccessfully tended to check against information obtained from friends or neighbors. Obviously, such people were apt themselves to be tinged with doubt and hesitation which would only confirm [their] early suspicions.9
None of the individual’s prior life experience allowed them to understand what they were hearing, so they latched on to the first possible explanation out of desperation.
On such occasions, the individual’s mental context is unstructured … The less well structured is his mental context, the fewer meanings he is able to call forth, the less able will he be to understand the relationship between himself and the stimulus, and the greater will become his anxiety. And the more desperate his need for interpretation, the more likely will he be to accept the first interpretation given him… Other persons who may normally have exhibited critical ability were unable to do so in this situation because their own emotional insecurities and anxieties made them susceptible to suggestion when confronted with a personally dangerous circumstance.10
The individual lacked the mental capacity to think critically at all.
[Where] an individual not only lacks standards of judgment by means of which he may orient himself but lacks even the realization that any interpretations are possible other than the one originally presented. He accepts as truth whatever he hears or reads without even thinking to compare it to other information.11
Again, my view here is that these explanations for the “highly suggestible” listeners are so broad as to be applicable to anyone. Beyond the fact that you will find all four of these archetypes at your family Thanksgiving, there simply wasn’t enough evidence to draw these conclusions from the interviewees. As one of Cantril’s other collaborators would put it “some psychoanalytic theories are bad enough when they have all the facts of the world behind them… So I think it’s pretty risky to base an analysis [here] on no facts.”12
But Cantril did not let facts stand in his way. Datasets that indicated very little panic were ignored. Interview subjects were sought out specifically for their self-stated fright, and, where Cantril could, he fit their experiences onto theories he had already decided on well-before the study was finished.13 All this chicanery, wrapped in a bow of statistical manipulation that projected these results onto 1.2 million Americans.14
Consider that from the perspective of the White House in the 1940s, the conclusions in this book would have seemed like a very good reason to manage the flow of information going out to the public on any issue, let alone UFOs. And as some of the more well-known events in UFO history began to unfold, policy makers would be presented with plenty of information that played into these broad conclusions.
Take, for example, the famous Kenneth Arnold sighting where, in 1947, Arnold began receiving letters from evangelical preachers who interpreted his benign sighting as a sign of the end-times. One preacher who called him from Texas went on to say that “the strange objects he claimed to have seen were harbingers of doomsday and he was getting his flock ready for the end of the world.”15 As Arnold was cooperating with Air Force investigators at the time, all of this information would have been reported up and ready to confirm the prior assumptions of any policy makers familiar with Cantril’s book. And keep in mind, the Kenneth Arnold sighting was a brief 3-minute sighting in the air. That doesn’t hold a candle to the “panic” that could be caused by an event like the alleged crash at Roswell.
The Curious Case of Hadley Cantril
Some readers may get the impression that I’m assigning too much significance to one obscure book on the War of the Worlds broadcast when there are so many other considerations that might have impacted UFO policy. Published in 1940, this book is just one of eighteen written over the course of Hadley Cantril’s career and many professors write books that never leave the bubble of academia.16 But that was not the case here. On publication, Invasion from Mars was a hit, receiving stellar reviews in the New York Times and outsized coverage in Hollywood.17 There were no government agencies that offered a competing take on the War of the Worlds broadcast and this one book, with all the credibility attached to it, became the only policy assessment available.
The story could end there: another academic finding a brief 15 minutes of fame only to fade again into obscurity. But it’s Cantril’s non-academic life that I think gives real weight to the impact this book may have had. Shortly after its publication, Cantril was tapped to begin sensitive and clandestine public opinion research on behalf of the United States government. This included monitoring Nazi propaganda in Latin America, steering U.S. public opinion toward entering WWII on the side of Britain, and determining how Vichy French officials in Morocco would receive the Allied invasion of North Africa (Operation Torch).1819 This work sparked a personal friendship with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, in his capacity as a public opinion expert and Cold Warrior, Cantril went on to advise every President through Kennedy.20
Did Cantril ever revisit his conclusions? No. As late as 1956, when Cantril had left academia and was now running an explicit front organization for the CIA, he was still appearing at Princeton to offer the exact same conclusions.2122 For our purposes, the question is whether Cantril was ever given an opportunity to advocate for his work when any number of Presidents were confronted with the UFO phenomenon. Cantril carries the notable distinction of having written the only book on the public’s psychological reaction to UFOs before the dawn of the modern UFO era in 1947. With a background in clandestine public opinion assessment and a national security career that spanned the rest of his life, it’s worth considering if he might have been asked about it.
I believe there’s a case to be made that this book, biased and error filled as it is, might have ultimately set the tone for 73 years of American UFO policy. The UFO community would do well to understand and get familiar with its core arguments. As for Cantril? You’ll be able to familiarize yourself with him … next week.
P.S. This is some truly new content that tries to advance our understanding of UFO history. To date, Hadley Cantril’s book has never been discussed by prominent researchers, authors, or podcasters inside the UFO Community. His work is still largely unknown. If you want to see that change, please:
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 7, 99–103.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 183–184.
Note: Cantril came to this figure by working with a Gallup Poll conducted a month and a half after the broadcast. Out of a survey of 3000 Americans, 12% said they had heard the broadcast. Cantril then applied the 12% to the U.S. population at the time and came up with an audience of 12 million people. But he noted this was quite a bit larger than where other ratings agencies had traditionally pegged the listenership of the radio program (around 4 million). So with that in mind, Cantril roughly averaged 12 million and 4 million to come up with an estimated audience of 6 million, as reported in his book. From there, Cantril went back to the Gallup poll, which had asked respondents if they had been “frightened” by the broadcast with no follow-up questions on what they thought the broadcast was about, how long they were frightened by it, or if they took any panicked action. Based on the percentage of respondents who indicated they were “very frightened” Cantril arrived at his public panic figure of 1.2 million.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 8.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 181, 188, 191.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 184–185, 191.
Note: Cantril and his team had access to a CBS survey of 1000 people conducted directly after the broadcast (Pg 178, 183) but they chose not to use it. There were early plans to try and reach out to different parts of the United States to get some kind of representative sample of the American public, but they abandoned that too. Ultimately, they limited their interview subjects to a small portion of New Jersey and only selected people who had been frightened by the broadcast. That’s how Cantril ultimately arrived at the 135 interviews showcased in this book, which he then projected onto the entire United States.
Cantril, Hadley. The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940. Pg 199.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 188.
Cantril, “The Invasion from Mars.” Pg 191.
Cantril, “The Invasion from Mars.” Pg 192–193.
Cantril, “The Invasion from Mars.” Pg 194–195.
Cantril, “The Invasion from Mars.” Pg 196.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 188.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 173, 186, 188.
Note: Some of Cantril’s major conclusions in the book began appearing in his college lectures only three days after the broadcast and prior to all interviews. In February 1939, while the study was still ongoing, he was already solidifying these conclusions in newspaper interviews with The Princeton News.
See discussion in Endnote #2.
Hobbs, Race, and Royce Fitzgerald. Interview with Kim Arnold. Eye Witness Radio, February 3, 2012. http://hiddenexperience.blogspot.com/2012/02/kenneth-arnolds-daughter-talks-about.html. At 22min 46s.
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.
Schwartz, “Broadcast Hysteria.” Pg 190.
Sproule, J Michael. Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
“Cantril Aided Landings in Africa.” The Princeton Herald, December 3, 1965. https://theprince.princeton.edu/princetonperiodicals/cgi-bin/imageserver.pl?oid=princetonherald19651203&getpdf=true.
Gallup, “In Memoriam: Hadley Cantril, 1906–1969.”
“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.
“Cantril Shows Dinner Crowd Panic Causes.” The Daily Princetonian, February 29, 1956. https://theprince.princeton.edu/princetonperiodicals/cgi-bin/imageserver.pl?oid=Princetonian19560229-01&getpdf=true.