Leon Festinger’s When Prophecy Fails is the classic study on cognitive dissidence and its role in religious and apocalyptic thinking. The book is built around the study of a UFO group. The leader of the group claimed to be receiving revelations from aliens. According to these aliens the Earth would soon be struck with a series of cataclysmic disasters. The aliens promised, though, that, before these cataclysms occurred, they would send a ship to save the members of the group, the true (...)