A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

potential public responses to the flurry of reported sightings, it was clearly in the interests of the
federal government to offer an official explanation for the phenomenon. After some 20 years of
research tainted by the overriding concern of “national security”—both research and taint to be
discussed below—various independent factions arose to carry out an ostensibly less partisan
research program. One heuristic both central to the enterprise of ufology and particularly
revealing of ufology’s self-imposed limitations emerged out of this latter phase. The range of
“close encounters” defined by J. Allen Hynek carved out a set of cases that were something of a
departure from those thus far discussed as constitutive of the displaced utopian imaginary. As
we shall see, following the model of “close encounters,” meaningful communication between
human and Other was beyond the pale of “traditional” ufology. Hynek’s heuristic will provide a
guide to both ufology and UFO encounters up to, but not including, the point of contact.
After a discussion of ufology, the chapter will then proceed to a discussion of the second
element of the post-saucerian displaced utopian imaginary under consideration—the ongoing
saga of the space brothers. The development of a connection between the UFO and the ongoing
discourse of the space brothers was uneven. In the decades following World War II, there were
both instances in which contactees continued to convey communiqués from extraterrestrial
entities yet made no mention of UFO’s and cases where saucers whisked contactees away to
stellar destinations. In these latter cases, the UFO made no meaningful addition to the space
brother myth, merely serving as a mode of transport. Yet while space brother narratives seemed
unconcerned with the novelty of the saucer’s arrival the advent of physical travel versus the
expedients of trance-based communication did speak to the previously discussed dynamic of the
increasing embodiment of communication between human and Other. The chapter treats two
particular cases from the lore of the space brother, one that enacted the dynamic whereby the
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