A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

apparently at will—spoke to the ongoing presence and unfathomable nature of mystery. Its
apparent solidity, granted some level of official status by the sobriquet unidentified flying object,
seemed to locate it in the world of positivism. As object, mystery was made amenable to the
rigors of empiricism. Its status as object implied that it must be knowable in terms of the
coordinates of observable reality. As Welles’ broadcast foretold, the emergence of the flying
saucer seemed to promise an envoy from worlds beyond amenable to “both the observations of
science and the evidence of our eyes.” Simultaneously, the UFO symbolized the impossibility of
the rapprochement between the spiritual and the material—or more precisely the rapprochement
between spiritual and materialist worldviews. As an object of scientific inquiry it resisted any
definite interpretation. Like the will o’ the wisp, it seemed to disappear upon close examination.
In the present day, after nearly half of a century, the study of UFO’s has yet to produce any
material evidence that definitively establishes the existence or non-existence of the phenomenon.
As we shall see, the very nomenclature that defined the field of ufology from the 1970’s on
suggested that the full comprehension of the UFO was somehow asymptotic.
Ufology constituted a kind of limit case for the rational engagement with the world of
spirit. The UFO as object all but disappeared under the rigors of empiricism. Its elusiveness, its
tendency to exhibit behaviors apparently contradictory to physical laws (appearing and
disappearing, maneuvering in impossible ways, accelerating at inconceivable rates), and its
capacity to invoke awe in its witnesses all invited the rigidities of staunch skepticism. The
central irony of ufology was that it attempted to examine an object with a set of tools the very
nature of which denied the possibility of the object in question. In examining ufology, this
chapter will treat a series of narratives, personalities and objects. The U.S. military was the first
to systematically analyze UFO reports. Given the UFO’s unknown point of origin and the
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