A lesser-known but prolific Pakistani author and political psychologist, S.M. Hafeez Zaidi, undertook a series of studies on how Pakistanis view the United States. He conducted these researches during the 1950s, 1960s and then in the late 1970s. The most interesting one in this context was undertaken in 1979. The intriguing bit about it was that Zaidi recorded the views and opinions of a number of Pakistani men and women about the US on July 9, 1979 — just two days before Skylab (the bulky American space station) came crashing down to Earth. The results of this particular study were published in the autumn 1981 issue of Political Psychology, an academic journal.

Although in his previous studies Zaidi had investigated the political reasons shaping the opinions of common Pakistanis about the US, in his 1979 research, he tried to figure out how an event like the falling of an American space station influenced their views about America. Skylab, a 77-ton orbiting workshop, was launched into space in 1973. Its orbit began to decay in 1978 and in July 1979 it was expected to enter the Earth’s atmosphere. To avoid having it crash in a populated area, the American aeronautical agency, NASA, fired the station’s booster rockets so that it would fall into the Indian Ocean.

A week before the station was to enter the Earth’s atmosphere, NASA released a statement that Skylab was expected to tumble into the Indian Ocean. However, the state-owned Radio Pakistan and Pakistan Television reported that Skylab was most likely to fall over Pakistan, India or Bangladesh. Zaidi, who conducted his study just two days before the station was expected to come down, noted that panic had gripped the country and attendance in mosques grew manifold.

Studies show that the Pakistani perception of American politics and policies has varied over the years

I was 12 at the time and clearly remember how ‘special bulletins’ on PTV would interrupt regular programmes to inform viewers about the whereabouts of the space station hurtling down to Earth. In the late 1990s, I discovered that a much older journalist colleague of mine had the recordings of these bulletins on a VHS tape. When I saw them again as an adult, I was rather amused to notice that the newscaster reading out the bulletins would apprise viewers about the exact location of the station without stating where he was getting this information from. My colleague, whose VHS tapes I was watching, told me that when these bulletins were claiming that the station was over Pakistan, it was most likely to have been somewhere over Australia or Papua New Guinea.

Even more striking was the fact that PTV did not call any known Pakistani scientists to comment on the event. Instead, newscasters, after asking people to pray, invited clerics to shed some light on the impending crash of Skylab. The clerics went on to equate the falling station as a tumbling aafat (catastrophe) brought on by the wrongdoings of the people.

In his research paper, Zaidi alludes to this and mentions that though most Pakistanis were panicked, the panic was more pronounced among the urban middle-classes, many of whom saw the falling station as a “sign of qayamat (doomsday).” Zaidi writes that people began to frequent mosques for prayers more than before. Interestingly, this phenomenon of attending mosques continued to prevail in the coming decades; whereas, according to a 2011 report by Abubakar Siddique and A. H. Kakar (published on the Radio Free Europe website), fewer Pakistanis frequented mosques until 1978.

In his study Zaidi writes that the “mood was apocalyptic.” The possibility of a 77-ton space station crashing over Pakistan was enhanced by what had already taken place that year in the region. In February 1979, the military dictatorship of Gen Ziaul Haq which had come to power through a coup in July 1977, announced its first instalment of stringent and so-called “Islamic laws” which created various political, social and constitutional complications in the coming decades. In April 1979, Z.A. Bhutto, the country’s first elected prime minister, was hanged following a controversial trial.

Meanwhile, the Muslim world was changing. In Afghanistan, a violent communist coup had taken place which triggered the invasion of Soviet forces later in December. In Iran, radical clerics and their supporters had toppled the monarchy in an Islamic Revolution; and in Saudi Arabia, a group of fanatics were planning to take over the Grand Mosque in Makkah which materialised in November 1979.

Zaidi tried to investigate just how the fear of an American space station crashing over Pakistan controlled people’s views of the US. Zaidi quotes from four of his previous studies conducted in 1956, 1958, 1967 and 1971. His 1956 and 1958 studies had found Pakistanis praising the Americans for being “hard-working, intelligent, democratic and zinda dil (jolly).” In his 1967 study, when the US had begun to court India and halt military aid to Pakistan, Zaidi found that Pakistanis were describing Americans as “cunning, selfish and drunken.” During his study conducted after 1971’s East Pakistan debacle, he found Pakistanis describing the Americans as “scientifically-minded, intelligent and opportunistic.” According to the political psychologist, this was mostly because US President Richard Nixon (at least in his rhetoric) had favoured Pakistan during the December 1971 Pak-India war.

The 1979 study was conducted when the US was not yet a major donor and ally that it would become during the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan in the 1980s. In fact, in 1979 President Jimmy Carter had decried the Zia regime’s human-rights violations. Consequently, in his July 1979 study, Zaidi found most Pakistanis not only saw the plunging station as a sign of doomsday, but as a “curse of the superpower America which wanted to destroy Pakistan (by making its space station fall over it).”

Nevertheless, Skylab did not crash in Pakistan. When it entered the Earth’s atmosphere, it burned up and shattered. Its debris fell in the sea and over a desert near the coast of western Australia. If only PTV would have invited a scientist or read out NASA’s statements, instead of predicting infinite doom and destruction.

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 18th, 2018