A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

human. The heaven foretold by the deceased was a vision of order triumphant – one in which
the human traits then most admired achieve dominance. Communication with the dead was
definitely uncanny, but the dead’s message often merely confirmed what the living already held
to be true. By the 1960’s, and in the movement toward alien abduction, the actors involved and
the future envisioned become increasingly estranged. The alien interlocutors had become so
strange that they were difficult to recognize even as sentient beings. The future they foretold
became increasingly difficult to fathom, not representing some clearly desired potential utopia,
but rather an occluded, frighteningly strange future. While there is an ongoing struggle on the
part of believers to read earlier narrative structures and understandings of agency onto abduction
phenomena, there is a basic misfit between those structures and understandings and the nature of
the phenomenon as reported by abductees (or “experiencers” as they now prefer to be called – a
telling effort to rescue some sense of agency). This increasing estrangement mirrors both a
creeping sense of powerlessness and of alienation from the possibilities of communication and
the human condition itself and heightens the complexity in a scenario that in many ways
constitutes the center of this dissertation—communication across lines of difference.
With this sense of estrangement in mind, I argue that these various historical moments, or
articulations, are not merely disparate iterations of alterity but are linked in series. While alien
abduction is very much of the moment and there are things about the discourse of abduction that
differ markedly from the earlier articulations, there are also clear lines of thematic and symbolic
continuity that run through each “dream” up to the present. Furthermore, there is a line of
development in which the central actors of these dreams become more alien over time.
Beginning with Spiritualism, the actors were the dead. While they were uncanny inasmuch as
they speak from beyond the grave, these actors were recognizably human. One of the main
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