Elephants on Acid (30 page)

Finally, after three hours and forty minutes, the patient exhaled for the final time. At the same instant, MacDougall wrote, “the beam end dropped with an audible stroke hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce.”

MacDougall, in the best scientific fashion, tried to eliminate all other possibilities that might have accounted for this sudden weight loss. He ruled out a bowel movement or evacuation of the bladder, since the weight of these would have remained on the bed. Rapid evaporation of moisture from the patient’s skin and lungs seemed unlikely. To exclude exhalation of air from the lungs, MacDougall lay down on the bed and exhaled as forcibly as he could while another doctor watched the scale. The beam of the scale didn’t move. That left only one possibility, he concluded. The three-fourths of an ounce must have represented the weight of the soul.

Over the following months, MacDougall weighed five other patients with similar results—although he did admit to some problems that marred the reliability of his data. For instance, in one case people opposed to his work disrupted the experiment. MacDougall didn’t elaborate on why they were opposed, but we can assume they were affiliated with one of the many religious groups hostile to his work, believing that the soul was an intangible object of faith and not something to be placed on a scale by scientists. Another time the patient died just as MacDougall was adjusting the scale.

You also get the sense that MacDougall was not a researcher who was about to let negative findings get in the way of his theories. He noted that in one patient the weight loss actually occurred a minute after death, but he breezily chalked this up to the patient’s sluggish temperament. The man’s soul, he asserted, was evidently as phlegmatic as the man’s personality, causing it to linger in the body before departing.

When MacDougall subsequently conducted his experiment on fifteen dogs but found no loss of weight at death, he explained away this discrepancy also. He simply concluded that dogs do not have souls.

His work, when he published it in 1907, attracted the attention of the media, but didn’t garner much respect from fellow scientists. The
Lancet
dismissed his findings, attributing them to “a peculiar bias on the part of his scales or on the part of the friends who assisted him.”

Even those who shared MacDougall’s interest in psychophysical phenomena treated his results with caution. Hereward Carrington, a member of the American Society for Psychical Research, advised that “the conditions attendant upon death are so little known, and the human organism is subject to such queer variations in weight, even when alive, that many and positive proofs will have to be forthcoming before [MacDougall’s] interpretation of the facts, even though they themselves should be established, can be accepted by science.”

However, Carrington, despite his caution, did propose a more rigorous version of MacDougall’s experiment. He imagined using condemned prisoners as the subjects. An electric chair would be placed on a scale, and a glass hood fitted over the criminal’s head, so that no moisture could escape from the lungs. “Then turn on the current, and at the instant of death watch for a loss of weight.” No prison warden has ever taken Carrington up on this suggestion.

Since 1907, the mainstream scientific community has almost entirely ignored MacDougall’s work, leaving it to the likes of Lewis Hollander, an Oregon sheep farmer, to continue this line of research. In 2001 Hollander reported the results of an experiment in which he weighed eleven plastic-wrapped sheep (and one goat) as they died. The plastic wrap was to
⁷⁵
contain “any voiding and fluid losses.” Surprisingly, Hollander observed a brief weight gain of 18 to 780 grams at the moment of death. Where this extra weight came from, he didn’t speculate. He published his study in the
Journal of Scientific Exploration
, a journal that appropriately describes itself as “committed to the rigorous study of unusual and unexplained phenomena.”

Despite the lack of scientific interest in MacDougall’s experiment, the idea that the soul has a weight has lived on in popular lore. The concept even found its way into the title of a Hollywood movie,
21 Grams
, starring Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro. The movie’s screenwriter converted three-quarters of an ounce (the soul-weight that MacDougall had measured) into metric to arrive at twenty-one grams. Of course, the movie didn’t have anything to do with the experiment, but MacDougall would certainly still have been pleased by the publicity.

Surprisingly, the man who weighed other people’s souls didn’t bother to arrange to have his own soul weighed when he died, which he did in 1920, succumbing to liver cancer at the age of fifty-four. However, MacDougall remained interested in the process of dying right up to the end, closely observing his body as it succumbed to disease. According to his obituary in the local paper, he described his own death as “the most interesting he ever watched.”

It is ten minutes to midnight. Fourteen people sit staring at a clock as the second hand creeps forward. They grip their overcoats tightly, ready to leave at any moment.

“Charles, do you remember the password?” a thin, middle-age woman sitting at the front of the group asks.

“Yes, Dorothy. We’ve practiced it a hundred times.”

“Let’s practice it just once more, to be sure.”

Charles sighs, then nods. “Okay. At midnight, the spaceman will knock on the door. I will answer and ask, ‘What is your question?’ ” He looks at Dorothy.

“He will reply, ‘I am the porter,’ ” she says.

“And I will say, ‘I am my own porter.’ ”

Dorothy nods with satisfaction. Silence falls on the room again as the group returns to its vigil, watching the minute hand approach midnight.

Six minutes pass. Dorothy shifts nervously in her seat. She clasps her hands together, looks upward as though in prayer, and says emphatically, “And not a plan has gone astray!” The others nod appreciatively.

The minute hand is only inches away from midnight. The tension in the room feels like a physical presence pressing down on everyone. The minute hand moves closer, closer, and finally slides over the number twelve. The clock begins to chime. Each note echoes in the room.

Everyone holds their breath as they strain to hear a noise at the door. But there’s nothing.

Minutes pass. No one has knocked at the door. The members of the group look toward Dorothy questioningly. She stares downward, lost in her thoughts. Then, at last, she breaks the silence—“There has been a slight delay.”

In late September 1954, American newspapers reported some bad news. In just three months, on the morning of December 21, a massive flood would create a vast inland sea stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico. Chicago, Detroit, and all the other towns and cities in the Midwest would be destroyed by tidal waves. Simultaneously, cataclysms would submerge the western coasts of the Americas, from Washington State to Chile. Similar disasters would devastate much of the rest of the world. Most of the planet’s people were going to die.

What was the source of this dire prediction? A team of university researchers? A maverick scientist perhaps? No. It was a fifty-three-year-old Chicago grandmother named Dorothy Martin. She, in turn, was told of the impending holocaust by space aliens from the planet Clarion.

The media treated the prediction as a big joke, but it fascinated Leon Festinger, a young psychology professor at the University of Minnesota. Dorothy Martin obviously deeply believed her prediction, as did her small band of followers. They had risked public ridicule to warn the world of its approaching doom. But what was going to happen, he wondered, when the world didn’t end? How would Martin’s group deal with such a blow to their convictions? Festinger realized a natural experiment in the “disconfirmation of belief” was unfolding before his eyes. He resolved that the phenomenon be studied in person.

Festinger quickly put together a
Mission Impossible
–style team consisting of himself, two other social psychologists (Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter), and a couple of graduate students. Their mission, which they all chose to accept, was to infiltrate Martin’s group by posing as believers, to observe and record the actions of the group members in as much detail as possible, and to be there on December 21 when the world failed to end. They wanted to witness, firsthand, the group’s reaction.

Festinger had a prediction of his own about how it all would turn out. He theorized that the dramatic disconfirmation wouldn’t weaken the group’s beliefs in the least. In fact, it would intensify them and prompt the group to make efforts to recruit more members. Why did Festinger predict this? Because he had been developing a theory he called “cognitive dissonance.”

Festinger argued that people need their beliefs to be consistent and compatible. Incompatible beliefs (dissonant cognitions) cause psychological tension. For instance, if your belief system tells you the world should have ended, but it didn’t, you’ll need to resolve this discrepancy. A simple way to do so would be to discard your disproven beliefs. However, if you have already deeply committed yourself to those beliefs—for instance, if you have quit your job, left your spouse, and risked getting locked away in a mental asylum on account of your convictions—accepting that you were wrong might not be so easy. In such a case, it might paradoxically be easier to try to strengthen your belief by attempting to recruit other believers—because convincing someone else to share your ideas is like getting a vote of confidence. Suddenly your being right seems possible again. Festinger wrote, “If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must, after all, be correct.”

The team of observers went to work infiltrating Martin’s group. This required some creativity because Martin and her followers were—despite their message to the media—a quiet, reclusive bunch. They weren’t seeking new recruits. So there was no application form the researchers could fill out. Instead, the observers approached the group individually with invented reasons for wanting to join that involved stories designed to appeal to the believers’ philosophy. One grad student claimed she had dreamed of a terrible flood, and then had seen the prediction in the paper. Another observer told of meeting a mysterious, space-alien-like stranger in the desert. The deception worked, and soon all the observers were warmly accepted into the group.

The only problem? By showing up en masse with all these wild stories, the observers powerfully reinforced the groups’ beliefs. Martin decided the space aliens were sending people to her for instruction and committed herself even more fervently to her beliefs. So, instead of merely observing, the researchers had, from the start, altered the course of events through their presence.

The researchers established a home base in a hotel room a few blocks from Martin’s house and took turns hanging out with the group. They took notes about ongoing events whenever they could, sometimes by excusing themselves to go to the bathroom (though not often enough to attract attention) or by stepping outside and frantically scribbling down observations in the dark. Or they waited until they got back to the hotel and immediately dictated everything they could remember into a tape recorder.

The biggest challenge the researchers faced was maintaining a neutral role in the group. Martin’s ideology, they wrote, “aroused constant incredulity.” Often they wanted to shout,
What are you guys thinking!
Instead, they had to smile and go along with everything.

Martin’s belief system was an eclectic mix of Christianity, New Age mysticism, and pulp zine science fiction. She claimed to be receiving messages from Clarion, a planet where bodies automatically adjusted to the outside temperature, people ate snowflakes, and no one ever died. Messages came to her through the spirit of Sananda, who apparently was Jesus Christ going by a different name. She received the messages by going into a trancelike state and allowing the aliens to guide her hand as she wrote down words on a piece of paper—a process called automatic writing.

Martin told her followers floods would destroy much of Earth on December 21, but space aliens would descend in a ship and rescue them, the true believers, before then. She set the time of the rescue at midnight on the 21st, but she expected the ship might show up early. Therefore she was constantly sending her followers out on “saucer watch,” scanning the skies for stray spacecraft. She urged everyone to remain in a state of readiness by keeping metal, such as zippers or belt buckles, off their persons. On a spaceship, contact with metal would cause severe burns. Martin never explained why this was so but assured everyone it had to do with advanced alien technology.

The researchers expressed amazement at what easy marks the group made themselves for the pranksters who, as December 21 approached, targeted Martin with increasing frequency. She and her followers would almost always take the bait, no matter how ridiculous or obvious the trick was. One time a young man called claiming to be “Captain Video from Outer Space.” He told them a spaceship would pick them up at noon. Obediently, the group members trooped outside to wait in the snow for the ship. Another time some boys called up saying they had a flood in their bathroom that they wanted the group to see. Martin, believing the boys were spacemen in disguise, had everyone go over. About the only invitation they didn’t accept was one to an “end of the world cocktail party” a reporter suggested they attend.

The tension steadily built until the night of December 20, when the entire group gathered in Martin’s living room to wait for midnight. They waited and waited, but no spacemen appeared. At 12:30 a.m. there was a knock at the door, which caused a flurry of excitement. A member went to answer the door as Martin called after him to remember the secret password, but he returned seconds later with the news that it was just some boys playing games. Finally, at 2:30 a.m., Martin announced she had received another message from Sananda. He wasn’t apologizing for blowing them off. Instead, the important message he had beamed all the way from the planet Clarion was that he wanted them to take a coffee break.