A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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casts the world, and the subject, into a vertiginous space, a space in which the both the “self” and “world” appear to be utterly arbitrary constructions. Bryson argues that both Sartre’s and Lacan’s account of the gaze posit such momentary encounters as, rather than fundamentally disruptive of subjectivity, redemptive. “The je reemerges from its encounter with nihility, reinforced in its position as the center of its experience...the subject’s sense of being a subject is heightened, not undone.” 314 What does all this have to do with the hypnotherapist and alien abduction? Just as Sartre’s encounter with the other in the park and Lacan’s with the sardine can invoke a certain decentering of the self, so too does the experience of alien abduction. Just as both Lacan and Sartre try to frame the momentary encounter with the gaze as redemptive, hypnotherapy attempts to frame alien abduction as benign and enriching. In some ways the description offered by abductees indicates a space somewhere between Sartre’s watcher and Lacan’s can. The gray as figure seems to potentially harbor some subjectivity, given its humanoid form, while simultaneously it appears to be devoid of “personal” presence, appearing rather as some fundamentally inert machine blessed by locomotion. In that subjectivity is often equated with the capacity for emotion (humans who do not exhibit a full range of emotion or whose emotional responses do not hew to accepted standards are often described as inhuman or monstrous) and the gray often appears to be utterly devoid of emotion, its subjectivity is in doubt. Through its apparent suspension of physical laws and its nightmare-like impact, abduction ruptures the screen of socially convened conceptions of reality. The abduction experience is a trauma in the most literal sense. The Greek root of “trauma” conveys the literal sense of wound. A wound is an opening where there is supposed to be closure. The German 314 Bryson, 85, 86. 215
traum or dream further indicates the precision of the relationship between the abduction experience and trauma. The parallels of the abduction experience to dream are multiple. While the Hills were abducted from their car (one classic abduction scenario), abductees have increasingly reported being taken right from their beds. Interestingly, the statistical skew on automobile versus domestic abductions assigns the former as more typically the experience of males and the latter as more typically that of females. 315 In terms of abduction as an experience that troubles discourses of mastery it seems evidence of an uncanny precision that men are plucked from their cars and women from their homes. Such domestic abductions generally occur when the abductee is either just going to sleep or in the process of waking, the so-called hypnopompic or hypnogogic states, states that are directly adjacent to phases of high REM activity, which in turn correlate with active dreaming. The abduction experience evidences a variety of standard dream tropes, the suspension of physical laws, the sensation of flying, an overall sense of unreality or surreality, and the sense of profound dread which is oft-times felt most acutely in dreams. The links between trauma as wound and traum as dream are clear enough. Dream space is interstitial. It is an opening between spaces that we like to think of as discrete—between “reality” and “fantasy,” between waking consciousness and the “unconscious,” between the particular and the universal. The effect of abduction is to rupture the screen, creating an open wound through which the subject is exposed to the Gaze. The net effect is blindness, paralysis and forgetting. The role of the hypnotherapist is to help the analysand reexperience the trauma and to suture the wound through casting the experience as narrative and placing it within a frame of reference - the abduction scenario. The abduction experience is one that in many ways outstrips the capacities of language, which is part of how abduction 315 Thomas E. Bullard, “A Comparative Study of Abduction Reports Update” in Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference, ed. Pritchard et al. (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Press, 1994) 45. 216
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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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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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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
Page 253 and 254: _____. Something about Soulcraft. N
Page 255: Streiber, Whitley and Anne, ed. The
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