A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

as rationally comprehensible and a variety of explanations accordingly emerged, in rough and
wishful agreement with the scientific and technical knowledge of the day. The dead had
developed a material technology, the spiritual telegraph, as a medium for communicating with
the living. Communication between the dead and the living was explicable in terms of the
molecular level of reality. Theosophy as well sought a rapprochement between science and
religion, or the material and the spiritual.
Space brother communiqués likewise enacted this dynamic of materializing the spiritual.
Christ existed, as did angels, but they were not supernatural beings but rather material beings
from other planets. Heaven was outer space (and, in the language of one memorably entitled
UFO books, God drives a flying saucer). 198 Thus an underlying directive of the displaced utopian
imaginary in its spiritualist as well as space brother mode would appear to be to bring the world
of the spirit into plain sight. Rather than pursuing a strictly materialist agenda in which matters
of the spirit and the “supernatural” were relegated to the status of embarrassing anachronism, the
displaced utopian imaginary repositioned the spirit as materially explicable and posited its
centrality in the further unfolding of human potential. In keeping with a narrative of progress
and Weberian rationalization, the story of extraterrestrial contact as told in this dissertation thus
far is one of progressive materialization—a distinctly Modern story. From the vaporous
materializations of the dearly departed, to meetings with fully fleshed masters in the mountains,
to journeys aboard space craft with aliens who might pass as businessmen, contact took on a
increasing solidity. While the arrival of the flying saucer suggested an extension of this dynamic
of materialization, its presence was oddly weightless.
198 R. L. Dione, God Drives a Flying Saucer (New York: Bantam Books, 1973).
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