A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

latter. Pelley of course, like Theosophy before him, reinforced racial boundaries, adding
mystical and world-historical wrinkles to operative racist ideologies. With the exception of
Spiritualism, the displaced utopian imaginary as discussed herein has not favored “an
identificatory alignment” with socially disprized bodies. The future human as enfigured in pre-
World War II scenarios, and in those encounters after World War II that continued along the
lines established by the space brothers, was over all radiantly beautiful and if not altogether
white, at the very least Aryan. While the displaced utopian imaginary in many ways favored a
highly mobile subject, it did so in ways that fell short of any transformation that would render the
human unrecognizable or racially “inferior.” There were and are no brothers among the space
brothers.
While it is often posited as a postmodern dynamic, it is arguable that an increasingly
mobile subject is in fact a modern phenomenon. The emergence of a middle class, the sundering
of feudal hierarchies, the processes of industrialization and urbanization, and the emergence of
republican and democratic systems of governance all underwrote that increasing mobility.
Following Silverman, it is perhaps the movement toward an increased mobility in bodily
identification that better marks the postmodern and it is this turn toward the body that most
marks the changes in the narratives of the displaced utopian imaginary following the second
World War. The first avatar of communication between human and Other following the war was
not only not white, it was not even human. The UFO appeared as an aircraft, but one that
maneuvered in such ways that any human passenger or pilot would be destroyed by its very
passage. Its very mobility was inimical to the human. The UFO has been imagined as, among
other things, a living being. 325
If so it was, and is, an order of being quite alien to terrestrial
325 On this peculiar notion, see especially Trevor James Constable, Sky Creatures: Living UFO’s (New York: Pocket
Books, 1978).
235