A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

And he said it was a pregnancy test. I said, ‘I don’t know what they expected, but that
was no pregnancy test here.’ And he didn’t say anymore. 266
Betty’s narrative of unwanted medical attentions established a baseline of humiliation
that would run throughout later iterations of the abduction scenario. She was subjected to an
ostensibly medical procedure, made the object of an unwanted application of technical expertise.
The invasiveness of the procedure, the fact that it occurred without her consent and the clinical
detachment of its execution all pointed to the ways the abduction scenario renders its participants
as objects. As Dr. Simon brought the session to an end, he repeated his therapeutic mantra,
“We’ll stop here now. You’ll be relieved, relaxed and at ease...When I wake you up, you will not
remember anything that has transpired here. You will not remember anything that has transpired
here until I tell you to recall it.” 267
The doctor’s injunctions eerily recalled the instructions
Barney recalled in a later session. “I was told in my mind that I would forget what happened. It
was imprinted on my mind...And he told me that I should be calm and I should not be afraid.
And that no harm would come to me. And that I would be left alone to go on my way. And thatI
would forget everything, and I would never remember it again.” 268
This motif of forgetting points to a dynamic of meaning deferred. In the previous chapter
I discussed the opposing narrative strands of ufology and the space brother religions. In the case
of the latter, as had been the case in the previously discussed modes of the displaced utopian
imaginary, the otherworldly interlocutors in question were endlessly voluble and quite explicit as
to the meaning of their presence. Conversely, in the case of the UFO, the other in question
refused engagement. The “behavior” of the UFO hewed toward evanescence and disappearance.
The empirical engagement with the phenomenon was often characterized by a recession of
266 Fuller, 162-163.
267 Fuller, 163.
268 Fuller, 199.
180