A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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Thus began the famed 1938 Mercury Theater broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” As is well known, the broadcast was met with mass panic. Minus the demarcation between “fact” and “fiction,” Orson Welles’ adaptation of the H. G. Welles’ 1897 serialized novel was interpreted by the listening public as a news broadcast of an actual alien invasion. The timing was propitious. Some seven months previously, the American public had heard, via the airwaves, accounts of Germany’s March 13 invasion of Austria. The Japanese and Chinese were at war. The Loyalists and Falangists continued their struggle in mainland Spain. Europe was careening toward one of the major conflagrations of the twentieth century, and in America, the Martians had arrived. Beginning in 1947, some eight years after Welles’ celebrated hoax, the American public was confronted with an alien presence not so readily dismissed. As noted in a July 6 New York Times article, on June 24, pilot Kenneth Arnold reported that he had “observed nine objects flying at ‘1,200 miles an hour in formation, like the tail of a kite,” over Washington State’s Cascade Mountains. Arnold gauged the speed (at 1656.71 mph rather than the Times more conservative 1200) by timing the objects’ passage between Mt. Adams and Mt. Rainier. He described the motion of these objects, stating, “they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” On the following day, newspaper reporter Bill Bequette of the Pendleton, Oregon East Oregonian, coined the term “Flying Saucer” to describe what Kenneth Arnold had seen. This incident, cited by ufologists as the originary moment of the “modern age” of flying saucers, was followed by an unprecedented flurry of sightings nation-wide. Americans coast-tocoast were observing flying “dimes, “hubcaps,” and “ice cream cones.” Thus began the first in a series of American flying saucer “booms.” 119
The arrival of the saucer promised a change in the topography of the displaced utopian imaginary by its very physicality. These were objects, seen not in the dimness of the parlor or in the confines of an aspirant’s mind, but in the open air by a wide variety of witnesses. But the apparently revelatory promise of the saucer was never to be realized. Welles’ vision of a clearly demarcated moment in which the aliens arrive fueled much of post-World War II science fiction cinema. The aliens arrived and made their presence and purpose clearly known. The arrival of the saucers never achieved such finality—rather they advanced and receded, certain in neither their reality not their intent. This chapter tracks two trajectories— the efforts to rationally verify the presence and purpose of the saucers—or, in short, the beginnings of ufology, in which the rigors of verification proved only to nullify the phenomenon, and the ongoing trajectory of the ascended master in which the saucer appeared merely as a detail added to contactee lore. The two paths of the ufologist and the contactee, like the previously discussed moments of the displaced utopian imaginary, were both in their own ways concerned with closing the gap between a world view that allowed for spirit and one that hewed wholly to the rational. The closing of this gap was understood within the precincts of the displaced utopian imaginary as the engine of the “next thing,” the movement toward some social and evolutionary leap into the light. The fact that enlightenment was the goal of the various mystical movements detailed herein leads one to a fundamental irony. Spiritualism, Theosophy and the philosophies of William Dudley Pelley and the Ballards shared the goal of full comprehension of the natural and social worlds with the project of the big “E” Enlightenment and to a great extent shared its understanding of the central import of systematic investigation in achieving that understanding. But the point of focus of Spiritualism, Theosophy and the space brother religions was the very realm that the project of the Enlightenment, especially as realized in the positivist ethos, sought 120
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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III. Chapter 2: Contact…………
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oth in their rich and bizarre detai
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Fukuyama also describes the histori
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and belonging that are native to th
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modernity, Weber stressed over and
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While positivism would emerge as th
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figure that serves as a medium betw
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sources of Spiritualism, Swedenborg
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The series of moments and discourse
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estful comprehension. It straddles
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The second chapter examines the eme
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Ch.1 The Dead INTRODUCTION Since th
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sense this dream of perfected commu
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political registers as well. This c
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In the late eighteenth century, Mes
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inverted form) along which the unde
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consciousness that is highly mobile
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up the process of thinking”. 38 S
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umor - and irony - would have it, w
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sense that Swedenborg’s researche
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Spiritualist movement, whose medium
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minded, loves to roam in the woods
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etween humans and God as unthinkabl
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esearches was a tailor by the name
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concerns and from the fact that the
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simultaneously in the world of the
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which God has revealed to them and
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assessed the Fox sisters as the “
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each in turn Lockwood elaborated hi
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as miraculous or supernatural? 85 T
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hearts of men to help their brother
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the corrupting influence of the wor
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All manner of proscribed activities
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dawn of a new era, and you must not
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Page 87 and 88: Ch.2 Contact INTRODUCTION Contact w
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Page 91 and 92: magazine, the latter edited by icon
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Page 99 and 100: world were still struggling to asce
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Page 123: Ch. 3 The Saucer INTRODUCTION The t
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Page 145 and 146: DOROTHY MARTIN While ufology began
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Page 155 and 156: II space brother religions to large
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science. 256 The Hill case was the
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abduction scenario in a variety of
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In September of 1963, some two year
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car and gone into a field with bino
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The cadences of Barney’s recollec
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And he said it was a pregnancy test
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motif also speaks to a relationship
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on a human is smooth and rounded. S
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seems to have suggested that humans
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The mesmerist and hypnotherapist bo
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communiqués emerge not from the la
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David E. Mack, a Harvard trained an
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dystopian, or in the language of No
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In the space brother scenario, the
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Everything is now. The past is now;
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effectively cut off from that possi
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eaching our innate potential. The h
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It is in this desire for dissolutio
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abductees feeling like guinea pigs.
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attack. Nietzsche writes of the blo
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Hill. Barney recalled his first gli
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The Gaze as philosophical and psych
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constituted modes of visuality. To
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traum or dream further indicates th
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educed not in the relatively benign
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will of the abductee—all speak to
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esultant exposure to the Real. The
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understood moorings, left to drift
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desired utopian state. The Others c
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were, more or less, ascended master
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Reports back from the spirit realm
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generally silent, but when they do
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to narrative structural positionali
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sensibilities, though one that woul
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of full transparency between interl
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aber, W.W. “A Guide
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_____. “Adamski, George (1891-196
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_____. Discipline and Punish: the B
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_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
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_____. Something about Soulcraft. N
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Streiber, Whitley and Anne, ed. The
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