A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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of it, the abduction experience as described by abductees is difficult to conceive of as benign. The experiences and level of trauma described by abductees seem to indicate an inexplicable and apparently random spread of terror. How then is it that so many leading public figures engaged with the abduction phenomenon can point to the abductions as not merely benign, but salutary? As we have seen, the discourses that circulated around alien contact in the years preceding the emergence of the abduction phenomenon drew largely on previously established concerns and understandings—concerns and understandings that arose out of the nineteenth century precedents earlier discussed. The ideas and ideals associated with Spiritualism and Theosophy, as well as with the various progeny of these two movements, centrally informed the ways in which the post-World War II saucer boom was understood among believers. The notions of an imminently imperiled earth, of an occult source of wisdom, carried by beings whose central concern was the salvation of humanity and of mysterious contacts between those beings and chosen individuals in an effort to spread the wisdom that will bring about the aforementioned salvation—all of those basic constructions were maintained in the post-World War II era. So how is this utopian understanding of visitors from outer space conjoined with the apparently dystopian advent of abduction and the gray? One place to begin addressing this question is with noting that one of the abiding attributes of the UFO and its attendant discourses is its tendency to encompass diametrically opposed categories, a tendency that would allow for the co-presence of utopia and dystopia. Dr. Benjamin Simon, the therapist with whom Betty and Barney Hill underwent hypnosis, noted that this type of collapse is the hallmark of the logic of the unconscious. He stated in one of his last meetings with the Hills “The rules that operate for the conscious mind won’t operate for the unconscious. In the unconscious mind, consistency means nothing. Past and present don’t exist. 197
Everything is now. The past is now; the present is now; the future is now. Opposites exist together without any incongruity whatsoever. Things are and are not all at the same time [emphasis in the original].” 285 The logics of dream and myth, as discussed in the introduction to this thesis, centrally inform the displaced utopian imaginary. Myth, as defined by Northrop Frye, is centrally concerned simultaneously with both the “apocalyptic” and the “demonic.” The collapse of the binary utopian/dystopian is central to the way the UFO and the extraterrestrial are read culturally. The literature concerning the phenomenon (and here I am referring to literature that flows from a position of belief) tends to hew to either one or the other mode of understanding. The utopian view imagines the presence of alien visitors as a sign of benign intervention—an intervention that points the way to the full development of human potential. The dystopian view elaborates a vision of nefarious intruders, bent on the manipulation and exploitation of all humankind. Yet there is a third position, one that departs from the binary logic of either/or and construes the alien presence as both beneficent and destructive. It is this position that abduction brings to the fore. The application of the myth of the benevolent space brothers to the terrifying and bizarre incursions of the grays seems, prima facie, absurd. The struggle to read the abduction phenomenon through earlier tropes of alien contact is both evidence of the constant human tendency to render the alien in terms of the familiar, a sort of cultural anthropomorphism and a more general continuation of the established tendency to rescue some stability, some maintenance of sameness from a fundamentally centrifugal scenario. The urgency of this maintenance is stepped up in the abduction scenario. The alien is no longer recognizably human. In fact, its residual resemblance to the human figure heightens rather than undoes its 285 Fuller, 278. 198
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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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practicing theoretical astrophysici
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DOROTHY MARTIN While ufology began
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attention. Without knowing why, I p
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One message from an assistant of Sa
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Page 191 and 192: seems to have suggested that humans
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Page 197 and 198: David E. Mack, a Harvard trained an
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Page 235 and 236: Reports back from the spirit realm
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Page 245 and 246: BIBLIOGRAPHY Aber, W.W. “A Guide
Page 247 and 248: _____. “Adamski, George (1891-196
Page 249 and 250: _____. Discipline and Punish: the B
Page 251 and 252: _____. 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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A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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