A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

the service of freeing the human spirit, it was—in a more faithful rendering of the positivist
ethos—in the service of achieving mastery over an object.
Barney was never to recall his experience with the level of detail exhibited by Betty’s
account. The sense that the creatures placed some sort of device over his genitals received no
further elaboration aside from a strange physical manifestation.
Barney brought up the fact that the small circle of warts that had developed in an almost
geometrically perfect circle around his groin some four months after the incident at
Indian Head had become inflamed after his therapy with Dr. Simon had begun. As the
conscious memory of what had been revealed under hypnosis came back to him, he
became aware of the recollection that in the examination on the craft, a circular
instrument had been placed at exactly the same point where the warts had now appeared.
He wondered: Had these been caused by the examination and the instrument used?
Barney was also intelligent enough to realize that the opposite could be true: The warts
might be a psychosomatic symptom connected with the feelings experienced under
hypnosis. And yet, Barney reasoned, they had initially appeared back in 1962, when he
had no conscious memory of the events aboard the craft. Now, in 1964, during the
session, they became inflamed (242). 270
The attention paid to genitalia and matters of reproduction is another consistent motif throughout
abduction accounts up to the present day. Males report sperm extraction while female abductees
report egg implantation, pregnancy and mysteriously disappearing fetuses six weeks into the
pregnancy. This focus further reduces abductees to bio-units—humans as breeding stock. It also
raises the specter of the alien-human hybrid. 271
One operative scenario is that the grays are a
dying race and that to perpetuate themselves they must create a hybrid creature with some other
type of being. The race that would succeed them, and assumedly us, would be a hybrid of gray
and human—both but neither.
One related observation concerning the gray both strikes an interesting tension with the
anal/genital focus of abduction and exhibits a suggestive parallel to the ghosts of Spiritualism.
Abductees identify aliens as male and female but they are unable to describe any
differences in body shapes or characteristics between the two sexes. Neither sex has
apparent genitals or secondary sexual characteristics. The area where genitals would be
270 Fuller, 242.
271 Budd Hopkins’ Intruders (New York: Random House, 1987) first broadly introduced the genetic hypothesis into
UFO discourse.
183