The date was December 21st of 1954, and like any day in history, there was plenty going on.

Jane Fonda turned 17. The song

Home for the Holidays was number one in the U.S. charts. The very first Godzilla movie was

crashing its way through Japanese cinemas. But if there's one thing that absolutely did not

occur on this particular Tuesday, it was the apocalypse, which to one group of Midwesterners was a huge

bummer. They were called The Seekers, and they were a doomsday cult, led by a Chicago woman

named Dorothy Martin, the group believed that on December 21st of 1954, global catastrophe

would arrive in the form of a massive earthquake and a tidal wave.

But not to worry, Martin had a backup plan.

Aliens were going to swoop down, gather the seekers up in their flying saucers,

and carry them off to a planet called Clarion. Sounds legit, right?

However, little did the seekers know there was an imposter in their midst.

And no, I don't mean Dorothy Martin.

It was a social psychologist named Leon Festinger

who had infiltrated the group to study what would happen to them,

mentally speaking, when their beliefs did not come to pass,

which, of course, they didn't.

December 21st came and went,

and Festinger watched the seeker's struggle to make sense of it all.

He saw the group do wild mental gymnastics to keep justifying their faith,

against all evidence.

And it led Festinger to develop a new psychology theory

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