A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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scientifically sympathetic figure, assumed that position. The contactee functioned as a direct interlocutor with alien intelligences. In the case of abduction, although the abductee experiences direct contact, the abductee is often unable to fully recall—much less communicate—the substance of that contact. The abductee requires the hypnotherapist to complete the circuit of communication, just as many spirit mediums required a mesmerist. Even if the abductee can recall elements of the experience, the meaning of it all remains elusive. As in classical psychotherapy, the dreamer needs help in recalling the dream and in discerning the meaning therein. Thus the privileged interlocutor, the communicative fulcrum, in the case of abduction is not a figure centrally located in the experiential web of alien contact, as in the case of the contactee, but a figure that resides rather in a space of clinical remove. As the experience of contact grew increasingly embodied and concrete, via abduction, the process by which the experience was understood became increasingly abstracted. The degree of clinical remove on the part of the hypnotherapist varied from case to case. The earliest example of Dr. Benjamin Simon, the hypnotherapist in the Hill Case, represented a fairly complete clinical distanciation. Simon was initially not at all sympathetic to the belief that the Hills had actually been abducted while remaining sympathetic to the understanding that the Hills believed that they had been abducted. The hypnotherapist functions in a classical psychoanalytic mode. Acting as psychopomp, the therapist guides the abductee through the nether regions of repressed self-knowledge. During the process of regressive hypnotherapy, prior to the therapist’s full revelation of what emerges under hypnosis, the analysand is shielded from this lost self-knowledge. It is while under hypnosis that the abductee most closely resembles the spiritualist medium, conveying previously hidden communiqués in a trance state, unaware of what they reveal. However, these 189
communiqués emerge not from the land of the dead but from a twilit realm of impossible experience. It is not the banal proclamations of departed kith and kin that the analysand communicates, but rather their own embodied, yet alienated, experience. Uncannily echoing the demands of the alien abductors the patient undergoing hypnosis is repeatedly told by the therapist that they have nothing to fear, they are safe and more importantly, they are not to remember anything upon awakening. In a very real way, the analyst is the daytime face of the extraterrestrial intruder—the abduction is made consummate by the therapist. After beginning the process of listening to taped sessions of their hypnosis a telling exchange occurred between the Hills. “’I certainly,’ Betty laughed, ‘hope that Dr. Simon isn’t really a spaceman!’” Barney’s rejoinder recalled his response to Betty’s query, posed immediately after the craft took off at the end of their encounter, as to whether he now believed in flying saucers. “Don’t be ridiculous!” 278 In the context of the broader abduction discourse, the hypnotherapist occupies a priestly, or in concert with the abductee, shaman-like, position. It is the therapist who opens the avenues that make it possible for the abductee to dive deep and recover his memories of the experience. It is the therapist who helps the abductee process and suture his trauma. In early cases, such as the Hills, the primary goal of hypnosis was such a suture and the hypnotherapist seemed less interested in providing some raison d’etre for the phenomenon. This is explicable in part by the very fact that there was no established set of narrative tropes to draw upon at this point. The operative assumption was that any events that had occurred were either strictly subjective or that some quotidian explanation would suffice in contextualizing the analysand’s experience. It is also important to note that the relationship between therapist and “client community” changes 278 Fuller, 259. 190
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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III. Chapter 2: Contact…………
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oth in their rich and bizarre detai
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Fukuyama also describes the histori
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and belonging that are native to th
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modernity, Weber stressed over and
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While positivism would emerge as th
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figure that serves as a medium betw
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sources of Spiritualism, Swedenborg
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The series of moments and discourse
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estful comprehension. It straddles
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The second chapter examines the eme
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Ch.1 The Dead INTRODUCTION Since th
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sense this dream of perfected commu
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political registers as well. This c
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In the late eighteenth century, Mes
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inverted form) along which the unde
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consciousness that is highly mobile
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up the process of thinking”. 38 S
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umor - and irony - would have it, w
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sense that Swedenborg’s researche
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Spiritualist movement, whose medium
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minded, loves to roam in the woods
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etween humans and God as unthinkabl
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esearches was a tailor by the name
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concerns and from the fact that the
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simultaneously in the world of the
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which God has revealed to them and
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assessed the Fox sisters as the “
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each in turn Lockwood elaborated hi
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as miraculous or supernatural? 85 T
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hearts of men to help their brother
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the corrupting influence of the wor
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All manner of proscribed activities
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dawn of a new era, and you must not
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qualities the coarser and heavier t
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full of mischief as any child in th
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keynote in public (and much of the
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masculine traits), the figure of th
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The first was that all world religi
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space brother religion, The Great I
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and the menopauses.” 141 A genera
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Ch.2 Contact INTRODUCTION Contact w
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as spiritual aspirations embodied.
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magazine, the latter edited by icon
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featured female characters who were
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keeping with the recurring integrat
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harmony with the universe (“if yo
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world were still struggling to asce
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hermetic credo as above, so below,
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insistence on the survival of the i
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evolutionary nomenclature of the co
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Pelley exhibited a variety of trait
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Chelas, which in the Hindu traditio
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the Theosophical Society along with
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Ballard was told during his initial
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Masters. Members of the I Am Ascend
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operative in most later “space-br
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promises of evolutionary progress h
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such as St. Germain could make thei
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Ch. 3 The Saucer INTRODUCTION The t
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The arrival of the saucer promised
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salvation through the union of oppo
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potential public responses to the f
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as rationally comprehensible and a
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attached to cultivating a following
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percentage of unidentifieds to the
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extraterrestrial communicant suppli
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perpetrators of willful deception i
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signing.” 210 Gill’s amused res
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Page 145 and 146: DOROTHY MARTIN While ufology began
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Page 193: The mesmerist and hypnotherapist bo
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aber, W.W. “A Guide
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_____. “Adamski, George (1891-196
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_____. Discipline and Punish: the B
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_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
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_____. Something about Soulcraft. N
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Streiber, Whitley and Anne, ed. The
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