A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

In the space brother scenario, the surveillance under which we unknowingly labored was
benign. Our spectral overseers worked to nudge us toward realizing our potential as a species
and away from squandering our birthright. So, in the paranoid version, why are we being
watched? In one scenario, the watchers/abductors are beings whose home planet and genetic line
are exhausted. They want nothing less than our blood and our land. These aliens are bent on
either sapping or usurping the earth and its inhabitants of its vitality, whether through the
creation of an alien-human hybrid whose emergence will eclipse both “parent” species (a
scenario whose resonance with fears of the end result of miscegenation is abundantly clear in
science fiction novels like Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis) or through a broader pattern of
extracting the vital life force of the earth as living organism (as per Wilhelm Reich’s notion that
UFO activity is directly linked to the process of desertification, the ongoing encroachment of
desert onto surrounding, arable land - either through extraction of orgone energy, or through
dispersal of deadly orgone rays). 284
This evil alien force is deadlocked in battle with the forces
of good. The general understanding is that this longstanding, ongoing battle is between the grays
and the Nordics (the latter of whom we have met in their guise as the space brothers), and has
earth as its unwitting battleground and humans as its unwitting proxies.
The ambiguity evidenced by varying accounts (sometimes the Nordics are the bad guys
and the grays the good, sometimes they work in collaboration) of this battle both parallels and
feeds upon the ambiguity seen in the attempts to bring meaning to the abduction phenomenon.
Are the horrific accounts of abduction evidence of a malefic force bent on the sowing of
madness, dissipation and ultimately, destruction? Or do they point rather to a long-term plan for
humanity’s ultimate transcendence of its own terrestrial and embodied enslavement? On the face
284 Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (New York: Warner Books, 1987); Octavia E. Butler, Adulthood Rites (New York:
Warner Books, 1988); Octavia E. Butler, Imago (New York: Warner Books, 1989); See http://www.orgonelab.org/
for info on current Orgonomic work on desertification.
196