A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

contradiction within discourses of the alien. These discourses include notions that there is some
deep and abiding link between humans and extraterrestrials—that we have in fact been under
observation for thousands of years. Humans were created from alien genetic material. Aliens
have been observing human civilization for many millennia and have a great stake in the future
of those civilizations. Aliens are building an alien-human hybrid race. Aliens coerce particular
emotional responses from their human subjects. Thus a picture emerges wherein the alien both
knows humans and their emotional and physical makeup exceedingly well and simultaneously
exhibits a comic level of confusion over such basic things as teeth and time. In cases where
communication does occur between occupants and abductees, “time, lifespans and the
individuality of humans seem to be recurrent topics” of confusion. 273 Similar to the sense that
recurs across case studies of abduction, in which the alien seems both strange and familiar to the
human subject, humans are both known and utterly foreign in the eyes of the alien. This mutual
lack of recognition stands in stark contrast to earlier scenarios and suggests a fundamental shift
in the displaced utopian imaginary. Even Streiber’s accounts oft times suggest a cross between
familiarity with and simultaneous confusion about human matters on the part of the gray. In
Communion he describes one visitation in which a gray appears to him wearing an absurdly
outsized “cardboard” suit in the style of a 1930’s movie gangster.
The displaced utopian imaginary has functioned as a critique operating from some
imagined Archimedean point—a critique leveled from beyond the pale, from other planets. The
tale of long term surveillance from afar suggests a displaced version of humanity’s own long
history of reflexivity. If you imagine these narratives as a way of commenting at a distance on
humanity’s long and arduous inquiry into the human and the nature of the self, the commentary
273 Thomas Bullard, “The Rarer Abduction Episodes” in Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study
Conference, ed. Pritchard et al. (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Press, 1994) 72.
185