A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

such as St. Germain could make their appearance in embodied form is that they had ascended
without dying. Ascended masters moved to the next plane of existence in an embodied form.
Their very embodiedness called for some physical locale. If they existed as bodies, they must
also have had a concrete place—as opposed to the wispy nowhere of heaven—for those bodies to
reside. Where did the masters stay when not visiting their chosen students? Perhaps they stayed
on Venus, perhaps Mars. As spirits turned to ascended masters, so did heaven turn to other
planets.
Aside from the intimations of physicality carried by Christian Economics and the Great I
AM Religious Activity, Pelley and the Ballards marked the entry of a certain kind of paranoia
into the human-Other nexus. While spiritualist interlocutors spoke primarily from a position of
hope, promising a utopian future in heaven if not in this life, Pelley’s teachings and those of the
Great I AM spoke as well of the forces of destruction that must be vanquished by those in
harmony with the Cosmos. Those forces, imagined as Jews or the Roosevelt administration,
were understood to be operating as agents of greater forces. While the sense that powers beyond
rational comprehension were guiding events from afar was part and a parcel of Spiritualism and
Theosophy, the sense of the centrality of diabolical agency was not.
It bears repeating that the displaced utopian imaginary—the utopian desire and thought
shaped by the human-alien communication nexus—is less concerned with politics per se than it
is with the apocalyptic. The desire expressed is for dramatic and inalterable social change. That
this desire might manifest around the possibility of negative change at the hands of some
diabolical agency should come as no surprise, though of course such agency was not fully
understood in the traditional Christian sense. 192
The forces behind Roosevelt and the Jewish
192 A whole other story might be told from a traditional Christian perspective from which all of the movements and
figures discussed herein would be understood as diabolical.
116