A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

The menace of the extraterrestrial both assaults abductees’ sense of coherent subjectivity
and exemplifies the uncanniness of the individual’s collapse. In terms of the latter, abductees,
upon recalling their experiences, point out how the individual e.t.’s seem bound together, as if
they were merely iterations of the same being. The grays, in particular, appear to constitute a
sort of “hive-mind,” in which apparently independent entities act and move in concert, not as a
matter of choice, but as an expression of their very nature. With the exception of the figure of
the “leader,” grays are often compared to drones or worker bees. The grays are described as
consistently emotionless and expressionless. They exhibit no transparency in terms of
“personality”— the outward manifestation of individuality. This lack of expressiveness or affect
is one of the striking things about the e.t. according to abductee accounts. It is surprising for
abductees, if not shocking, to see such creatures locomote, as if volition were incompatible with
the affectless “self-presentation” so often exhibited by the grays. Their very appearance also
renders their animation uncanny. One correspondent of Streiber’s notes that “They seemed to be
made out of plastic, like one of those bendable action figures you buy at the store. They didn’t
seem to have any sort of ‘structure,’ as far as I could see, in terms of skeleton or muscles or
anything like that. They didn’t even seem like living creatures, more like animatronic
puppets.” 294 This characterization recalls nothing so much as that exemplar of Freud’s uncanny,
the doll. 295
To abductees, the gray’s lack of affect suggests a fundamental lack of recognition.
The e.t. not only fails to exhibit individualist traits, but fails to recognize the abductee as a
“person.” Abductees feel that the e.t.’s never see them as anything more than one iteration of
“human.” As Jerome Clark has noted, “(t)he humanoids usually behave in a manner that leaves
294 The Communion Letters, ed. Whitley and Anne Streiber (New York: Harper Prism, 1997) 189.
295 Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’” [Das Unheimliche] in Standard Edition, Vol. XVII, trans. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth Press, 1955) 217-256.
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