Abstract
This chapter describes the changing forms of alien-human contacts and the context in which these encounters were discussed, before outlining the effects the social scientists produced as they entered the group as observers. The chapter then turns to the social scientists’ account of the group’s motivations (concerning the concealment and then proclamation of the prophecies), and then offers another account, organized around the indigenous categories of ‘election’ and ‘education’, proposing a sociology of secrecy. It concludes with a description of the final period of the group’s existence.
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Notes
It is worth remarking that the alleged flying saucer crash in 1947 in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, only gained prominence in the 1980s—see the careful analysis in Saler, Ziegler and Moore (1997).
The elders might also have had concerns about the political nature of the circles with which Armstrong was in contact.
In practice, not so surprising: I offered some brief remarks on the intelligence of Festinger’s proposal in the context of the period and the contemporary issues to which it responded in introducing the concept (see the section ‘The social scientists: (i) the hypothesis’). And I can offer some reasons for the enduring influence of the theory of cognitive dissonance, at least noting the consonance of the theory with wider changes in the Humanities in the post-War period: the linguistic turn, the shift to structural models of explanation in the human sciences, and the production of high functionalist elaborations in the face of the collapse of straightforward Utilitarian accounts. It is indeed an early signal in the shift in sociological interest to a concern with motivations and meaning. The striking aspect from my perspective is the enduring status of the theory as an accepted commonplace, not only to social scientists but also to the educated public.
Later, the authors attribute this early burst of activity to Dr Armstrong’s initiative, and distinguish it from the group activities following disconfirmation (Festinger 2008: 215).
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© 2013 Jenkins Timothy
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Jenkins, T. (2013). The Sociology of Secrecy. In: Of Flying Saucers and Social Scientists: A Re-Reading of When Prophecy Fails and of Cognitive Dissonance. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137357601_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137357601_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47328-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-35760-1
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