Editor's Note: The accuracy of the italicized portion of this story has been questioned.

In case you haven't noticed, this site is currently being bombarded by a certain strand of conspiracy theorist. I'm still not entirely sure what these people believe in, apart from being absolutely certain that the government is developing brain-eating vaccines, spiking the water with lithium and trying to subdue the population with "reactive" medicine. While it's always sad to see so much angry ignorance on parade, it's also a fascinating case study in cognitive dissonance.

The theory of cognitive dissonance - one of most influential theories in social psychology - was pioneered by Leon Festinger, at the University of Minnesota. In the summer of 1954, Festinger was reading the morning newspaper when he encountered a short article about Marion Keech, a housewife in suburban Minneapolis who was convinced that the apocalypse was coming. (Keech was a pseudonym.) She had started getting messages from aliens a few years before, but now the messages were getting eerily specific. According to Sananda, an extra-terrestrial from the planet Clarion who was in regular contact with Keech, human civilization would be destroyed by a massive flood at midnight on December 20, 1954.

Keech's sci-fi prophecy soon gained a small band of followers. They trusted her divinations, and marked the date of Armageddon on their calendars. Many of them quit their jobs and sold their homes. The cultists didn't bother buying Christmas presents or making arrangements for New Years Eve, since nothing would exist by then.

Festinger immediately realized that Keech would make a great research subject. He decided to infiltrate the group by pretending to be a true believer. What Festinger wanted to study was the reaction of the cultists on the morning of December 21, when the world wasn't destroyed and no spaceship appeared. Would Keech recant? What would happen when her prophesy failed?

On the night of December 20, Keech's followers gathered in her home and waited for instructions from the aliens. Midnight approached. When the clock read 12:01 and there were still no aliens, the cultists began to worry. A few began to cry. The aliens had let them down. But then Keech received a new telegram from outer space, which she quickly transcribed on her notepad. "This little group sitting all night long had spread so much light," the aliens told her, "that god saved the world from destruction. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room." In other words, it was their stubborn faith that had prevented the apocalypse. Although Keech's predictions had been falsified, the group was now more convinced than ever that the aliens were real. They began proselytizing to others, sending out press releases and recruiting new believers. This is how they reacted to the dissonance of being wrong: by becoming even more certain that they were right.

There is, of course, something deeply troubling about cognitive dissonance, since it suggests that we double-down on our beliefs in light of conflicting evidence. While neuroscientists have begun to decipher the anatomy of this mental flaw - you can blame your anterior cingulate cortex - I sometimes worry that the internet is making things worse. Although we're all vulnerable to cognitive dissonance (and the paranoid style has always been a loud presence in American politics) we seem to squander ever more oxygen on worthless conversations about Obama's birth certificate and the North American Union. After all, thanks to Google we can find "evidence" in support of practically any belief. If you can imagine the conspiracy theory, there is a website out there ardently promoting it, and a clan of fellow believers who share your peculiar obsession with fluoridated drinking water and the New World Order. The end result is that we never have to recant. We can always find another link to "prove" that the government is trying to "zombify" us, or that aliens are going to destroy the earth at midnight.