This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantan.

It's December 1954, around dinner time in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

A group of Christmas carolers is performing before a huge crowd of about 200 people.

It all seems perfectly normal.

Except when you get closer, you can see something about the scene is off.

Few people in the crowd appear to be in the Christmas spirit.

Instead of cheering, they are taunting the carolers.

Eventually things reach such a frenzy that police are called in.

The carolers are unfazed.

They keep singing, their eyes on the sky.

They're on the lookout for flying saucers, aliens who are going to transport them to

another planet.

One woman tells a newspaper reporter, we have been instructed to sing carols while we

wait to be lifted up.

You might think the carolers were stupid or hopelessly gullible.

Yet the psychological phenomenon that had them in its grip turns out to be surprisingly

common.

You have certainly experienced it in your own life.

Today we're going to tell you about the events that led up to that December evening in 1954

when flying saucers failed to appear over Oak Park.

We're also going to tell you a second story, a modern story about what happens in our

minds when our biggest dreams fail to materialize.

...