Professor Graeme Wood: When Prophesy Fails by Leon Festing

Professor Graeme Wood had read this book before, so his recent encounter with it was a rereading. “It is about a psychologist from the Chicago area in the 1960s who is one of the founders of the concept of cognitive dissidence,” he explains, adding that he (the psychologist) sent researchers to infiltrate a UFO cult […]

Professor Graeme Wood had read this book before, so his recent encounter with it was a rereading. “It is about a psychologist from the Chicago area in the 1960s who is one of the founders of the concept of cognitive dissidence,” he explains, adding that he (the psychologist) sent researchers to infiltrate a UFO cult that believed that UFOs were coming to collect them at a particular time and he sent those researchers to observe the reactions when that time passed, to see how people react when the prophesy is disproven by the facts around them.
Graeme, who lived and wrote in the Middle East from 2002 to 2006 and has studied and written extensively on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), says that ISIS is incredibly in that statement of the fulfillment of the prophesy and they have already seen some of their interpretations of prophesy disproven by facts. “It is really a beautiful study of how the human mind works and how flexible it is in the face of countervailing evidence,” he concludes.