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we were wrong?” Not a chance. At 4:45 A.M., as morning approached, Mrs. Keech told them that she had received another message: the cataclysm had been called off because of the believers’ devotion. “Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth,” she said, “has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room.” And then she told the group to go spread the word of this miracle. One member walked out, fed up with Keech’s failed predictions, but the others were jubilant. In the days that followed, Festinger and his colleagues reported, cult members who previously had shown no interest in proselytizing now put their energies into gaining converts. They became even more committed to their cause after seeing what any reasonable person would conclude was shattering proof that they had been completely wrong.

Why should this be? The reason, Festinger tells us, is that it is psychologically painful to be confronted with information that contradicts what we believe. For Mrs. Keech’s followers to concede error would have meant admitting they had been colossal fools. But convincing others of their beliefs would not only avoid any such embarrassment, it would provide some false comfort, as though more believers would constitute more proof.

The Keech cult is an extreme case, but the discomfort at being confronted with evidence of error is a universal human emotion. It’s just no fun to admit we’ve been wrong. So we strive to avoid that unpleasant feeling of psychological conflict—what Festinger calls cognitive dissonance—that occurs when deeply held beliefs are challenged by conflicting evidence. Keech’s followers could have reduced their dissonance by abandoning their religious beliefs, but instead some of them adopted an explanation of the new evidence that was compatible with what they already believed. Cognitive dissonance is a fancy term for something all of us feel from time to time. Decades of social science experiments have shown that, in a sense, there’s a little UFO cultist in everybody.

The Moonbat Effect

A more recent example took place in 2006 when a website called truthout.org reported the political equivalent of a UFO landing that didn’t happen. On Saturday, May 13, the truthout contributor Jason Leopold reported that President Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, had been indicted for perjury and lying to investigators in a CIA leak investigation, that Rove’s lawyer had been served with the indictment papers during a fifteen-hour meeting at his law offices the previous day, and that the prosecutor would announce the charges publicly within a week. All this was reported as fact, without any “maybes” or qualifications.

The news was celebrated by followers of truthout, a liberal, anti-Bush site. One commenter on the website’s “Town Meeting” message board even suggested a war crimes trial, saying “How about sending him and his bosses to The Hague?” Another gloated, “All that needs to be done now is to send him to the crossbar hotel, under the loving care of Bubba & No-Neck.” The fact that no major news organization was reporting the Rove indictment was brushed off as evidence of the supposed pro-Bush, antiliberal bias of the “MSM” or mainstream media.

But the story quickly drew strong denials. Rove’s lawyer said he, the lawyer, was out of his office that day taking his sick cat to the veterinarian and certainly hadn’t been served with an indictment. Days passed with no indictment announced, and on Thursday truthout’s executive director, Marc Ash, said that “additional sources have now come forward and offered corroboration to us.” At the end of the week in which the indictment was supposed to be announced, Ash issued a “partial apology,” but only about the timing: “We erred in getting too far out in front of the news-cycle.” He kept the original story on the website. On May 25 Ash wrote, “We have now three independent sources confirming that attorneys for Karl Rove were handed an indictment.” On June 3 he wrote, “We stand by the story.” And still no indictment.

A number of readers expressed disappointment