As part of some new research, I'm currently reading a classic in social psychology:
by Leon Festinger et al, 1956. Somebody may have assigned it to you in college.
If not, here's the rapid-fire Cliff Notes: A team of psychologists infiltrate a group of space-age cranks who believe that beings from other planets are communicating with them directly, and warning them of a vast cataclysm that is going to rip the United States asunder (and yes, it involves the reappearance of Atlantis). The scientists narrate it all in clinical style, factual, detached, e.g.: "scarcely a day passed without a communique of some kind from outer space." And: "Later, a few of the young people also attempted levitation of one another, though this venture also failed." The religious followers eventually come up with a very specific prediction of disaster, and they then begin to proselytize about it. And ...
