This was a ROCKEFELLER psyop to see how the world would be affected by this propaganda. His family did it over 50 years ago when Orson Welles read "War of the Worlds" on the radio to see how the public would panic to a fake alien invasion.
Today we’ll be examining a deeply fascinating quote from Daniel Hopsicker, author of Mad Cow Morning News, which is a pretty f***ing remarkable website. He’s also written one of the best works on 9-11, “Welcome to Terrorland”.
His contention is that the infamous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast of Orson Welles was more than just an inspired and infamous prank—it was a deliberate experiment in mass panic, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Considering the Rockefellers have funded a number of very sinister people --- and especially considering the Rockefellers are currently funding Dr. Stephen Greer of the Disclosure Project --- this would be a very important precedent, if it were true.
And there’s the tricky part --- is it?
From Daniel Hopsicker:
Rockefeller’s Favorite Martian
The Rockefeller family got interested in the reptoids earlier than most, and apparently for different reasons. Most use stories of UFO’s for mild amusement. Not the Rockefellers, though. They were interested in using the stories for control. In fact, if it weren’t for the Rockefeller Foundation’s previous mass psychology experiments, which starred the Martians, today’s cover-up effort by American officials might not be proceeding as smoothly as it has.
Here’s what happened:
At precisely 8pm on the evening of October 30th 1938, the Mercury Radio Network interrupted the music of Ramon Rachello and His Orchestra for a special news bulletin. A huge flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, had fallen on a farm near Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Moments later comes a correction:
“Its not a meteorite, no! Incredibly, there are Martian cylinders falling all over the country!”
The famous War of the Worlds broadcast has begun. With its terrifyingly real descriptions of an invasion from Mars, before the night is out a million people will run panicked into the streets.
But what has been—for almost fifty years—a closely guarded secret, is this: Orson Wells’ broadcast was no mere show business stunt, but an Experiment in Fear, a psychological warfare test conducted for the Rockefeller Foundation.
Here’s a quote from “America Under Attack: A Reassessment of Orson Welles War of the Worlds” by Paul Heyler of Willfrid Laurier University:
“A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to Princeton University helped create the Princeton Office of Radio Research. The director was Paul Lazersfeld, an Austrian Jewish emigre and a social psychologist whose expertise in quantitative methods was tempered by a humanist leaning. He teamed with two associates, psychologist Hadley Cantrell and CBS researcher Fred Stanton, a PhD in psychology who would eventually become network president.”
The broadcast was a psychological warfare experiment conducted by The Princeton Radio Project. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the project in the fall of 1937. An Office of Radio Research was set up with Paul F. Lazersfeld as director, and Frank Stanton and Hadley Cantrell as associate directors. Using demographic data on the broadcast’s audience gleaned from a 10-page interview questionnaire given to 135 people, they created a book, “Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic.”
The results were available to only a few, apparently, with no talk of any paperback release Yet more than 12 percent of the American radio audience had listened to the broadcast. More than half that number took it seriously. By sociologist Hadley Cantrell’s account, published in a landmark study for the Rockefeller Foundation, more than a million people were frightened by Welles’ broadcast.
So is Hopsicker Full of Shit?
Actually, his 9-11 research is some of the only credible work we’ve found on that topic. Let’s take a closer look at what evidence exists:
1. Hadley Cantrell was a typo
Actually, it’s Hadley Cantril, and Hadley really did write a book entitled “Invasion From Mars”. You can get it on Amazon for less than $5.
2. The Rockefeller Connection
Here’s a quote from “America Under Attack” A Reassessment of Orson Welles War of the Worlds�? by Paul Heyler of Willfrid Laurier University
Things fall apart when you try to dig up that Rockefeller report. Paul Heyler is a name that only exists in other versions of Hopsickers’ report. (The “Echo Chamber” effect of internet conspiracy theories.)
Another typo: there is a Wilfrid Laurier University up in Canada. Apparently they just refer to themselves as “Laurier” these days.
However.
Establishing a connection between Hadley Cantril and the Rockefellers is pretty simple, because it’s already done for us. Here’s an extended excerpt—cuz it’s full of juicy tidbits—from the academic journal Social Reality:
Hadley Cantril (1906–1969) occupies a unique place in the history of public opinion research and its establishment as part of the American system of power institutions. He was a psychologist and sociologist, philosopher of science and political scientist, journalist and diplomat. He was the pioneer in the exploration of the mechanisms behind mass conscience and behavior, someone brilliantly versed in the subtleties of polling technologies. It is from Cantril on that American presidents started directly cooperating with experts in public opinion research2((. He took part in the founding of several public opinion research centers, prepared a significant number of specialists, and was in charge of many research projects whose results have long been considered classics. As an author, co-author, and editor, Cantril published 20 books and many articles. He is one of the founders of Public Opinion Quarterly, the most famous and prestigious journal in the field.
At the same time, Cantril worked on governmental orders, not infrequently from secret services. He was one of those who to a certain extent influenced America's foreign policy before and during World War II, as well as during the Cold War. Cantril wrote in his memoirs published in 1961 what he deemed possible and necessary to say on his work for the government...
It is noteworthy that during the war, practically all leading public opinion analysts, as well as press and radio audience researchers, were to some extent involved in projects funded by the state and the secret services. This group includes Bernard Berelson (1912–1979), George Gallup (1901–1984), Hadley Cantril, Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–1976), Rensis Likert (1903–1981), Kurt Lewin (1890–1947), Harold Dwight Lasswell (1902–1978), Robert Merton (1910–2003), Elmo Roper (1900–1971) and many other researches from various universities of the country.
There was a bond of long-term collaboration and friendship between Cantril and Gallup. After Cantril's death, Gallup wrote: «Dr. Cantril was one of the first, if not the first, to bring to the classroom firsthand experience which he himself had gained in public opinion polling. He was equally at home whether dealing with theory or practice. On the basis of his opinion studies, he advised Presidents Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Kennedy at critical periods in history. Judging by subsequent events, his advice was exceptionally sound.» Doubtless, Gallup knew much more about Cantril's work for the government and his activity as presidential advisor, yet he could hardly say more in 1969...
A University Researcher Becomes a Pollster
Albert Hadley Cantril was born in Hyrum, Utah (a town still numbering fewer than five thousand people in the early 21st century), into the family of a doctor. In 1929, he graduated from Dartmouth College (Hanover, New Hampshire), one of America's oldest colleges, founded in 1769, where the teaching staff was very strong. Having obtained a Bachelor of Psychology degree, Cantril spent two years studying in Berlin and Munich. He completed his education in 1932 at Harvard University as a Doctor of Psychology. He taught sociology for a year at Dartmouth College and later returned to Harvard...
Although Cantril himself did not associate his early works with the subject of public opinion research, in reality, that is exactly what they were about. In a comprehensive book by William Albig entitled Public Opinion, published in 1939, the author gives a concise analysis of Cantril's research on the psychology of radio and of his Ph.D. dissertation. In Charles Smith's monograph, also published in 1939, Cantril's results are given as a proof of the efficiency of radio in the formation of mass conscience and behavior.
In 1934, Cantril published his article «Social Psychology of Everyday Life». Cantril notes in it, in particular, that social psychology is permanently at work devising new methods, while one could adapt the problems it attempts to solve and apply to them already-existing measuring technologies. In 1935, Cantril began reading newspaper and journal publications by Gallup, Roper, and Crossley3( and realized that their methods constituted a powerful new set of measuring tools for social psychology. That is why he enthusiastically accepted the offer from the New York Times to write a series of articles on the «scientific» methods of public opinion research...
...In 1936, Cantil became a professor at Princeton University. The decision to transfer to Princeton, he wrote, was dictated to a large extent by Gallup's offer to collaborate. Cantril's son wrote: «...proximity to Gallup's organization was what had most influenced Cantril's decision to accept the invitation to Princeton University...» Speaking about his father's long-term friendship with Gallup, Albert Cantril notes in the first place that they both understood the importance of using a set of empirical instruments in the investigation of public opinion and both shared the conviction that the people were wise when sufficiently informed.
Towards late 1935 – early 1936, Cantril began his effective, diversified and long-term collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, established in 1913 by the great philanthropist and titan of American business John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937). Scientific research funding has always been one of the Rockefeller Foundation's priority directions, and from the mid-1939 on, it began to actively stimulate research in the field of propaganda.
John Marshall (1903–1980), who occupied leading posts in the Foundation for almost forty years, acted as the initiator of this enormous work. At that time, when most social researchers and liberal intellectuals in America had a negative outlook on propaganda, Marshal believed democratic propaganda was necessary for the country. He strove to unite psychologists' and public opinion researches' efforts in working out the scientific principles of influencing people's consciousness.
Marshal took an active interest in Cantril's and Alport's book on the psychology of radio. He saw in Cantril an intellectual and spiritual leader of this field of research. It is possible that one of Marshal's considerations was that Cantril was personally acquainted with Nelson A. Rockefeller (1908–1979), an important businessman, ambitious politician and well-known philanthropist, the great-grandson of the Foundation's founder. Cantril and Rockefeller met while studying at Dartmouth.
In 1936, with Marshall's support, Cantril and Frank Stenton, (born 1908) founded the Princeton Radio Research Project, within which many studies on the role of radio in society's life were conducted. The research on panic, which emerged in the course of a radio play «The War of the Worlds», an adaptation of the famous novel by H. G. Wells produced by Orson Wells (1915–1985), the author's then very young (quasi-) namesake, has been acknowledged as a classic work in social psychology and sociology.
At 8 PM on October 30, 1938, on Halloween eve, American radio listeners heard a report about a Martian landing on Earth. The sound effects used in the radio play produced the impression of a commencing battle with the Martians and growing panic among the population. Not everybody listened to the radio program from the very beginning. Those who tuned in a little later believed it to be reportage from the scene of the event. The announcer reported that the Martians were spreading out into New Jersey, that police had been sent to intercept them, laser weapons had been used, and that victims ran into the thousands. One heard the voices of «witnesses», «official announcements» were made... The listeners started calling relatives and friends in other states. Those who took the time to listen to the end realized it had been a play. Yet many, seized by fear, fled their homes, highways were jammed with vehicles, people broke into churches interrupting public worship and recounted the events. Telephones went crazy in newspaper editorial offices and in radio studios...
The study of the population's attitude towards the radio program made it possible to discern many intrinsic laws related to the effects of communicational influences on the behavior of large groups of people in a informational environment of anxiety. The reasons and mechanisms of panic's emergence were described by Cantril and his co-authors in the book The Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, which is still topical today.
In 1936, at Princeton, with the Rockefeller Foundation's financial support, Cantril established an analytical enterprise of his own, the Office of Public Opinion Research (OPOR). The initial goals set by OPOR consisted of a systematic study of public opinion measuring technologies, an in-depth elaboration of its psychological aspects, and the creation of a data archive to be used in monitoring during the war, which had already begun in Europe. When in 1940, America's intention to participate in the war became evident, Cantril outlined the three most important problems OPOR had to solve: elaborating questions, responses to which would to a fuller extent elucidate the population's attitude towards the war, formulating trend questions to be used regularly as a reaction to certain events, and finally, checking the stability of the measurement results obtained from small samples.
Work for the President
Prior to World War II, public opinion polls were only beginning. There was a short (five-year) period of searching for the optimal polling technology and organizational methods, when their social functions were undergoing a certain crystallization. The war and the necessity to solve complex new political, military, social, propagandistic, and other problems favored the involvement of a enormous number of intellectuals in government work. Various government structures needed more information on the consciousness and behavior of the population of the US and other countries, so state institutions began to collaborate with social researchers, including public opinion analysts...
In September 1940, on the initiative of Nelson A. Rockefeller, who was head the Inter-American Relations Committee in Roosevelt's administration, a new study was started under Cantril and Gallup's leadership. It was to investigate the potential reaction of the population of Latin America to Nazi propaganda, if it were to be carried out. Lloyd A. Free (1908–96), one of the pioneers in international and cross-cultural public opinion polling, took part in the research... Free and Cantril's book The Political Beliefs of Americans. A Study of Public Opinion, which sums up the results of many polls, has been acknowledged a classic of political psychology...
James Webb Young (1886–1973), an intellectual who worked both on the theory and practice of the American publicity industry, helped initiate Cantril's work with the U.S. president ... Just before the war, Young established the War Publicity Foundation and was one of its leaders.
In early December 1940, Rockefeller asked Cantril to meet with Young and acquaint him with the results of the Latin American study. Young thought this information would be useful for the president. Cantril prepared a special report and forwarded it to Roosevelt... In his memoirs, Cantril mentions projects prepared especially for Roosevelt, which he took into account while making political decisions of the utmost importance.
«Roosevelt regarded the reports sent to him the way a general would regard information turned in by his intelligence services as he planned the strategy of a
campaign. As far as I am aware, Roosevelt never altered his goals because public opinion appeared against him or was uninformed. Rather he utilized such
information to try to bring the public around more quickly or more effectively to the course of action he felt was best for the country. I am certain he would have agreed with Churchill's comment that "Nothing is more dangerous than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup poll, always taking one's pulse and taking one's temperature... There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be
right and not to fear to do or say what you believe to be right».
Another leader in the publicity business deserves a brief mention. According to Cantril, he contributed a great deal to regular public opinion polls used by the president in developing national policy.
On an early Sunday morning soon after the Pearl Harbor events, as Cantril recalls, he got a phone call from a Princeton colleague who he did now know personally. It was Gerard Barnes Lambert (1886–1967), asking whether he could be of any use to Cantril in his work for the president, which he found out about from a mutual friend. Cantril and Lambert met. Their conversation began in the morning and was not over until suppertime at Lambert's house. Lambert offered his assistance in developing ideas, writing up reports and funding.
Lambert was a unique entrepreneur and a most talented man. He had obtained his degree at Princeton and Columbia University, served in the army during World War I, and in 1921, started working at the firm owned by his father, one of the inventors of the well-known antiseptic Listerine. In 1922, Lambert opened a publicity agency in New York and managed to increase the firm's revenues on Listerine production by a factor of 60.
Until that time, all information collection for OPOR was done by the Gallup Institute. It was Lambert who suggested creating a separate all-national polling system that would be comparable to Gallup's. In early 1942, a non-profit organization called Research Council, Inc. was established. Every month, Cantril would send Lambert's New York office a report on research expenditures and a check would come back to cover them. There were no financial limitations whatsoever, so that all the research Cantril and Lambert deemed useful to the White House (or that was ordered by it) was conducted. Much of the work was done at Lambert's house in Washington. Cantril wrote: «Jerry was a most imaginative and creative partner in much of the work done for Roosevelt during the war, and his generous financial aid made it possible for me
to conduct any research for Roosevelt I never wanted to depend on or accept government funds of any kind.»
Sixty years after these events, in 2003, Prof. Jerome Seymour Bruner (born 1915) ... recalled some of the circumstances of his own work with Cantril. He noted, among other things, that Cantril had a profound belief in the value of public opinion as a democratic institution and admired the fact that "Roosevelt 'led' public opinion rather than followed it... Cantril had never seen a president simply obey opinions.» Seymour Sudman (1928–2000), who did plenty of work for the improvement of polling methods and possessed an excellent knowledge of the history of polling, noted Roosevelt's central role in the development of public opinion polls in the country. He believed that «here, an important role was played by FDR's [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] pragmatic character and the brilliant teem of collaborators he had gathered around himself; this created an atmosphere where emerging public opinion research could grow and prosper. FDR could address the American people as a friend, so to speak, sitting by the fireplace; he could also listen to people through public opinion polls.» Lambert and Cantril were doubtless among those who created this atmosphere of mutual trust and laid the foundations of the tradition of a serious, attentive attitude of the higher government elite towards poll results.
Sudman expresses aphoristically Roosevelt's outlook on public opinion: «He was always ahead, but not too much ahead of social attitudes. After Roosevelt, virtually all American presidents ... followed public opinion to some extent and took it into consideration in their politics.»
Cross-Cultural Public Opinion Surveys
Let us now turn to events that took place after the war and talk about the history of one of the most important of Cantril's research fields, the study of different nations' perceptions of each other.
It all began with humble experiments by Adelbert Ames Jr. (1880–1953)... One modern encyclopedia writes about Ames: «...American researcher who studied the optics and psychology of visual perception. He came to the conclusion that much of what is seen by an individual depends on what he expects to see based (whether consciously or not) on his experience.»
In the early 1930s, Canril's theoretical basis in his studies on psychology was that a person's outlook of the world was by no means a mechanical reaction to the environment, but rather a transact of everything the person is surrounded with, as well as his experience, accumulated wherever he plays the role of an active agent. This approach to human behavior, in Cantril's opinion, can be called «transactive psychology»... In 1947, Cantril began his close collaboration with Ames. Cantril saw in Ames's experiments a confirmation of his own psychological views and a theoretical basis for public opinion research.
Cantril's work with Ames lasted many years and was only interrupted by Ames's death. Together, they published a series of philosophical-methodological articles, elucidating the nature of transactive processes. In 1960, a collection of Ames's work edited by Cantril was published. A socio-psychological interpretation of Ames's experiments led Cantril to the formulation of the concept of transactive perception of the world. This concept became central to Cantril's theoretical studies and was the methodological basis for many public opinion studies that he conducted during the last years of his life. Death interrupted Cantril's work on his book on transactive psychology, where he planned to recapitulate the results of his long-term work on the subject carried out together with Ames and William Kenneth Livingston, (1892–1966)...
Socio-psychological experiments that made use of Ames's inventions became the methodological basis of one of the most thriving fields in public opinion research, the image of countries in the consciousness of other countries' populations. During the last decades of the 20th century, when issues of the world's global structure were gaining topicality, this type of study became common for public opinion analysts, sociologists, and social psychologists.
In the spring of 1952, Lambert invited Cantril to lunch... Several Princeton alumni took part in this informal get-together. Cantril ... explained the nature of visual illusions and offered analogies between a human being's individual vision and the perception of the world by large groups of people. Lambert's guests, as Lambert himself, were multimillionaires. They apportioned money for a three-year program to study the image of the US as seen by the peoples of other countries.
Cantril was extremely busy teaching and performing administrative work at Princeton and could not get fully involved in the program. He invited his friend Lloyd Free to head it. By that time, Free had some experience in international polling and knew the essence of Cantril's transactive psychology. The polls were administered in four countries - Japan, Thailand, Italy, and France - selected on the basis of the diversity of their sociopolitical structures and particular issues they faced. Three hundred copies were forwarded to governmental and academic institutions. The studies were academically acclaimed and provoked a significant interest in political circles. What happened next was unexpected, even for Cantril and Free.
In 1955, Rockefeller ... upon reading Free's report, invited him and Cantril to his home in Washington and queried them on how they would like to expand their current research. Cantril and Free, however, considered their project finished and were already planning work on new subjects. Rockefeller then asked them how much money they needed to be able to do what they liked for the rest of their lives. Cantril asked for two million dollars for the two of them. Rockefeller replied that he would try to get one million at the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation (of which he was the president), and that in case that didn't work out, he himself would give them the money himself.
Consequently, Cantril left Princeton and Free refused many tempting job offers. They founded a non-profit corporation called The Institute for International Social Research. Cantril and Free directed many polls that revealed the attitudes of the populations in various countries towards the US...
A Leading Journal: the First Decade
...In 1937, a group of Princeton professors initiated the establishment of the Public Opinion Quarterly journal, whose goal was to develop methods of scientific analysis of people's consciousness and behavior, as well as to unite experts who worked on a broad set of public opinion research issues. This journal became a strong factor in the consolidation of academic and applied research...
The first editor of the journal was Harwood Lawrence Childs (1898–1972), who worked in a number of areas on social cognition. In the late 1920s – early 1930s, he published a number of books on the politics of labor relations and the nature of propaganda in dictatorial societies. Propaganda by Short Wave, a book summarizing the monitoring results of the Princeton Center from December 1939 to May 1941, was published in the beginning of 1942, with Childs as was one of the editors...
The first issue of Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ) was released in January 1939. A one-year subscription for four issues cost four dollars, and a single copy cost one dollar...
Crossley became a member of the editorial board and quickly mastered a research area that was new to him. Besides Cantril and Crossley, there were three more scholars who stood at the heart of the journal: Harold Dwight Lasswell (1902–1978), the author of fundamental works on mass communication theory, E. Pendleton Herring (born 1903), an expert in political issues, and Oscar Wetherhold «Tom» Riegel (1903–97), an acknowledged specialist in propaganda research, politics and public opinion.
Crossley was responsible for the methodology and public opinion measurement methods, Lasswell conducted political research, Herring wrote on social structure (his section was called «Organized Groups»), and Riegel coordinated mass communication research.
A brief editorial address said that for the first time in history, public opinion had become a determinant of society's political and economic life, a criterion characteristic of the modern epoch. It noted that a recently-published bibliography on public opinion research comprised more than five thousand books and articles, and that the study of the issue was only beginning...
Cantril's first article in POQ outlined a serious issue, which notwithstanding its fundamental political and cultural significance, could only be subject to speculative analysis before the appearance of public opinion polls. Do people think about the future? What is the thematic area and temporal horizon of this future? How correct is its their vision of the future? The participants of the 1937 poll made about 70 different prognoses covering many aspects of life in the country and the world. These prognoses, some of which Cantril reproduced, showed that people were not indifferent towards the future and that their understanding of the course of history was correct in many respects.
The journal's high professional level was to a large extent determined by the fact that the founders of modern public opinion research technologies actively supplied it with their data. Thus, during the first two decades of the journal's existence, Cantril published about 20 articles in it, Gallup more than ten, Roper about ten, and Crossley, Robinson, and Cherington each published several articles. In addition, the journal, over a number of years, regularly published the distributions of answers to questions asked in studies by Gallup and Roper...
Much of the journal's content was affected by the activity of the members of the editorial board. Yet not all of them, as Walter Phillips Davison4( recalls, were equally active: «Hadley Cantril was always one of those who helped a great deal... I have met George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley at meetings of the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers, yet I don't recall having seen anyone of them at Princeton over the four years I spent as editor. Nevertheless, I talked to them and these contacts were very useful. As you undoubtedly know, George Gallup and Hadley Cantril were good friends and Professor Cantril often forwarded me Gallup's comments or comments by some of his collaborators...»
It seems appropriate to conclude with a passage from Phillips Davison's memoirs, where he described the atmosphere in AAPOR5(( and added something about the founders' attitude towards POQ: «You are right in that: in the 1940-1950s, most public opinion researchers appeared to be one happy family. AAPOR members' meetings resembled family get-togethers, and almost everybody came... Speaking of my relationship with the 'fathers', I was always close to Professors Cantril and Lazarsfeld, and later with Archibald Crossley, but I never knew the others well. Nevertheless, I admired their kindness: they always found the time to call or meet with potential authors. (And, as I have already noted, they always helped POQ stay afloat when the journal experienced financial problems.) They were much more prepared to collaborate than the younger researchers from whom it was more to be expected. »
Time, public opinion researchers' interests, the appearance of new specialized journals on issues previously discussed by POQ, serious changes in data collection and analysis technologies, and many other circumstances have changed the orientation of the journal. However, the Public Opinion Quarterly, created by the first generation of researchers, continues to consolidate the leading American public opinion analysts. POQ was the first, and for many years the only, journal on public opinion. Today it the world's leading publication in the field.
1 Excerpts from the chapter «Hadley Cantril» of B. Doktorov's monograph «Pathfinders in the World of Opinion: from Gallup to Grushin», currently in preparation for print by the Publishing House of the Public Opinion Foundation.
2 The first public opinion analyst who worked directly in the interests of the president and the Democratic Party was Emile Juria. His analysis, however, was limited to the sphere of electoral campaigns.
3 The first American public opinion researchers.
4 Walter Phillips Davison was the journal's leader from 1948–1951 and 1968–1972.
5 An American association of public opinion researchers.
