A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

sources of Spiritualism, Swedenborg, stressed how very much the afterlife resembled the world
of the living. In the case of Theosophy and much of contactee culture, the actors were so-called
ascended masters – humans become demi-gods. These were no mere mortals passed beyond the
veil, but creatures now angelic in stature, residing in a space between God and man.
Of course, there were alien contacts within contactee culture. But while they came from
other planets, they looked like beautiful humans and spoke perfect English. These “aliens”
communicated freely and openly with their human contacts. In the case of abduction and its
central actor, the gray, the scenario offers a creature whose point of origin is some unknown
planet or plane and whose resemblance to humans is tenuous at best. Furthermore, their mode of
communication is coercive, highly secretive and their message often obscure. This change over
time, which will be treated more fully over the full course of the dissertation, might be viewed as
one in which the Other centrally enfigured by displaced utopian dreams over time becomes
stranger or more alien. When these dreams are read specifically as displaced utopian desire
however, this change might just as readily be construed as increased alienation from the
possibility of radical social change. As we shall see in the closing chapter, the emergence of
abduction points less to an alienation from utopian possibilities than to a more complex, subtle
and profound alienation from self.
I should be clear that I am not attempting to draw out a narrative of evenly paced,
progressive estrangement. The goal of this document is merely to chart a series of moments in a
history of utopian thought that remains largely unmapped. As discussed in the first section of
this introduction, I intend to track the genealogy of the contemporary phenomena of abduction.
This particular genealogy holds no claim to exhaustiveness or definitive status. It is merely one
14