A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

dystopian, or in the language of Northrop Frye, the apocalyptic and the demonic, to its (il)logical
extreme.
The abduction scenario and the broader explanatory models offered to make sense of that
scenario evidenced an increasing paranoia. This paranoia, like the phenomenon as a whole in the
years following 1962, is both continuous with the tenor and content of responses to UFO’s in the
first 15 years following World War II and also clearly indicative of fundamental shifts in that
response. To understand the structuring mechanisms of that paranoia, one must note a thematic
in the years following the Second World War that runs counter to the one limned in chapter three
of this dissertation. While the pre-war themes of the benevolent space brothers continued to play
out in the flying saucer narratives during that period, they were paralleled by Cold War themes
of dehumanization and threats to individuality.
One explanation for the appearance of saucers over American skies that competed with
the extraterrestrial hypothesis was that said saucers were an aerial extension of the Soviet
menace. The initial hypothesis following the Arnold sighting was that the saucers were Soviet
secret weapons. 282 The line of paranoia that connects the contact and abduction eras flows less
from a believer’s perspective than from the understanding that the saucers might be a Soviet
secret weapon and the use of the alien as an allegory for the immanent threat of Soviet-style
communism. It is within the Cold War discourse about communism’s ostensible drive toward
dehumanization, the collapse of free will and the enslavement of the individual that the clearest
precedents can be found for the fears attendant to the later less sanguine interpretations of the
alien presence and agenda.
The fear that saucers might be a communist ploy found its fullest articulation within the
282 Curtis Peebles, Watch the Skies: A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution, 1994) 9.
194