A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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potential story of how we have arrived at a social moment during which otherwise normal people claim to have been abducted by creatures from outer space. DREAM, MYTH, UTOPIA The forms of social estrangement found herein, unlike other expressions of social alienation across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tend to not prescribe any concrete revolutionary program or call on organized socio-political action as a motive force for social change. Yet they are concerned with social change nonetheless, social change of the most sweeping kind. They envision changes that involve massive restructurings of society, global shifts in priorities, even actual geographical/geological changes. Each of the articulations discussed, while archetypal, are also clear, if displaced, expressions of the socio-historical moment of which they are part. So while each articulation shares commonalities, each also utilizes symbols that serve to condense and displace the concerns of the historical moment to which it is native. Following Freud’s writing on dream work in The Interpretation of Dreams, I use the term “condensation” to describe the process through which latent or implied dream content is compressed into manifest form—the process of metaphor. 18 The narrative of any dream is extremely dense metaphorically. Condensation often generates hybrid forms in which the attributes of a variety of figures are collapsed into one. Displacement is the process via which latent dream content is consigned to the margins of the dream itself—the process of metonymy. Thus the import of a dream is not generally found in its central narrative thrust but in its details. I argue that the mechanisms of condensation and displacement operate not only at the level of the individual psyche but at the level of discourse as well. At the level of discourse, the dream’s analogue is myth. 18 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Oxford University, 1999). 15
The series of moments and discourses discussed herein belong both to the realm of dream and the realm of myth. Northrop Frye’s comments on myth clearly call up the mechanism of condensation when he notes that myth functions in “a world of total metaphor, in which everything is potentially identical with everything else, as though it were all inside a single infinite body.” 19 This sense of collapsed/collapsible identity will be familiar to anyone who has ever vividly recalled a dream. A figure walking next to you might first be your mother and in the next moment a friend and then yourself. You may converse with a person whose visage is utterly unknown to you who nonetheless you recognize as a friend – a friend who in waking life looks nothing like the figure in your dream. Objects are unstable, as in early animation, and might change at any given moment from one thing to another. The telephone in your hand is a banana is a knife is a parakeet. This sort of fungible identity recurs throughout the cases discussed in this dissertation. One clear example is the spiritualist medium. The medium becomes another person entirely through entry into a trance state, transforming temporarily into a puppet for some spectral interlocutor. The medium exhibits the human body and mind as fundamentally plastic – a key motif in imagining radical social transformation. As Jameson suggests, it is only if the human as such is susceptible to fundamental transformation that utopia is approachable as a reality. Also residing in the realm of dream, trance recurs as a motif throughout the dissertation. From the earliest moment discussed, that of mesmerism, through the latest, alien abduction, trance is central. From the somnambulant state induced by mesmeric “passes” to the trance states induced by alien abductors and hypnotherapists – the trance state is a key element in these mythic imaginings of utopia. The trance state is, like so much in and about the discourses under discussion, liminal in nature. It is a state between waking and sleeping. These incursions of the 19 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University, 1957) 130. 16
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Page 5 and 6: III. Chapter 2: Contact…………
Page 7 and 8: oth in their rich and bizarre detai
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Page 27 and 28: Ch.1 The Dead INTRODUCTION Since th
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Page 33 and 34: In the late eighteenth century, Mes
Page 35 and 36: inverted form) along which the unde
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Page 43 and 44: sense that Swedenborg’s researche
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Page 49 and 50: etween humans and God as unthinkabl
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Page 57 and 58: which God has revealed to them and
Page 59 and 60: assessed the Fox sisters as the “
Page 61 and 62: each in turn Lockwood elaborated hi
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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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Dr. Laughead first encountered Doro
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In the case of Dorothy Martin and h
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II space brother religions to large
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he could think of to obtain permiss
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other myth. You will recall that in
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and a Saturnian named “Ramu.” 2
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ecome small, self-sufficient commun
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paranoia in another context but in
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the space brother narrative further
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Adamski—the UFO was effortlessly
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communism. The connection between t
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The shift from contact to abduction
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science. 256 The Hill case was the
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abduction scenario in a variety of
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In September of 1963, some two year
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car and gone into a field with bino
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The cadences of Barney’s recollec
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And he said it was a pregnancy test
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motif also speaks to a relationship
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on a human is smooth and rounded. S
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seems to have suggested that humans
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The mesmerist and hypnotherapist bo
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communiqués emerge not from the la
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David E. Mack, a Harvard trained an
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dystopian, or in the language of No
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In the space brother scenario, the
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Everything is now. The past is now;
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effectively cut off from that possi
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eaching our innate potential. The h
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It is in this desire for dissolutio
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abductees feeling like guinea pigs.
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attack. Nietzsche writes of the blo
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Hill. Barney recalled his first gli
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The Gaze as philosophical and psych
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constituted modes of visuality. To
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traum or dream further indicates th
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educed not in the relatively benign
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will of the abductee—all speak to
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esultant exposure to the Real. The
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understood moorings, left to drift
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desired utopian state. The Others c
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were, more or less, ascended master
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Reports back from the spirit realm
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generally silent, but when they do
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to narrative structural positionali
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sensibilities, though one that woul
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of full transparency between interl
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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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A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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