A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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projected consciousness—his “astral” body. The denial of bodily needs used by Swedenborg— the dramatic slowing of respiration-- has traditionally been a key method in the induction of the trance state. A broad range of traditions have long utilized fasting, sleep deprivation and exhaustion induced via ecstatic dancing or other means to achieve a visionary state. There is an implicit tension present in this set of methods, a tension between body and spirit. In order to access the spirit realm, one must deny or abjure the body in some fashion. This sense of body and spirit as irreconcilable would run throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century iterations of the displaced utopian imaginary. The general sense operative in the moments preceding the arrival of the saucer after World War Two, and ultimately the advent of alien abduction, was that the body in utopia would be somehow more ethereal and less visceral than on Earth. Trance was also central to the communication between human and Other in the spiritualist tradition. In the case of the spiritualist medium, trance was generally either spontaneous—often as a function of age and gender—young girls being especially prone—or induced by a third party, the mesmeric controller. The encounter between medium and spirit was in a fundamental way embodied. Media were more or less possessed. They became embodied representatives of spiritual entities—a conduit for those entities’ expression. In another sense, the encounter was fundamentally disembodied—the medium was necessarily absent while the spirit was present. The self had to be erased to allow the Other to present itself. Much of the trappings of Spiritualism were primarily focused on establishing the physicality of the spirit presence. The floating instruments, sounded by otherwise invisible presences, the percussion of coded raps, the modulation of gravity both in its abeyance and amplification and the visible energetic fields of ectoplasm all spoke to the difficulty of closing on the basic selling point of Spiritualism—the physical reality of spiritual phenomena. 229
Reports back from the spirit realm tended to support the sense that while the afterlife maintained many of the contours of terrestrial life, it did so in a form stripped of the needs of the physical bodies. The needs for sustenance and elimination, for sex and clothing were all diminished and ultimately purged. The spiritual body, while wholly recognizable as an individual human was altogether less animalistic. Just as Christ left behind his human self in ascension so too would humans leave behind their animal selves. In the cases of Blavatsky and Pelley, while communications were most often received via automatic writing and disembodied voices, both also received visitations from fully embodied messengers. With the Ballards and the space brother religions that followed them, embodied encounters between humans and extraterrestrial messengers increased in frequency. Rather than exemplifying a calculus via which self and Other could not be fully co-present—one having to be effaced to allow for the presence of the other—the space brother religions began to create a space that allowed for that co-presence. Of course the inherent terror of this co-presence was greatly mitigated by the graciousness and physical beauty of the space brothers themselves. Such an encounter was more readily sustained when the Other’s presence occasioned sensual pleasure and ease of recognition. The combination of the tendencies discussed above, the increasingly alien nature of the Other and the increasing embodiedness of the encounter suggested a larger dynamic of burgeoning strangeness, a dynamic that would begin to shift the basic narrative structure of the displaced utopian imaginary following the end of World War II. The end of World War II brought a new character to the fore—the flying saucer. A depersonalized, wholly space-age embodiment of the Other, the flying saucer cum unidentified flying object constituted both a further embodiment or materialization of the Other and a further estrangement of same. The UFO was more material in that it was evidently a machine, a product 230
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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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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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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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