A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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extraterrestrial teachers via trance states or voluntary journeys aboard the latter’s vessels, abductees are taken from their cars and bedrooms, against their will and subjected to terrifying ordeals. Chapter four focuses on the case of Betty and Barney Hill (the first widely known and discussed case of abduction) and the basic abduction scenario and examines the question of how such a horrific scenario can possibly be read as utopian. Given the nightmarish nature of alien abduction as described by its ostensible victims it is hard to imagine it as a process that leads toward the transcendence of need. The interpretive work that links horror and utopia comprises the latter portion of this closing chapter. Genealogy tells the history of the present. But given that ruminations on the Other are simultaneously workings through of contemporary social fears and desires, my account attends to the situatedness of each iteration of alien-human communication as well as to its implications for the current case of alien abduction. This project is concerned centrally with analyzing different cultural moments in an ongoing history of communication between the human and the radically Other, from Mesmerism and Spiritualism, through Space Brother religions and alien abductions. The stories that recount and surround these instances of communication constitute the basic object of analysis for this project—an analysis I hope will yield insight into our own shifting understandings of the self, the utopian and the Other. There are many stories and many moments that might begin such a project. Let us begin with one. 21
Ch.1 The Dead INTRODUCTION Since the end of World War II, creatures and craft from outer space have intermittently fascinated America. Space Brothers, flying saucers and alien abductions have all occupied the public imagination—manifesting simultaneously as lived experience, popular culture and “mass hysteria.” In examining this fascination in the light of the socio-historical moments to which it belonged one can readily find various worldly fears and desires subtending the phantasmagorie of little green men and fleetingly glimpsed interstellar craft. Flying saucers as harbingers of the communist menace, as displaced fears of the atom’s power unleashed—visions of alien abduction and the engineering of a human-alien hybrid race as indicative of misgivings concerning emergent bio-technologies and the specter of the post-human—the fantasy of the alien has clear, contemporary, social referents. Even so, the apparently topical nature of the “extraterrestrial” potentially masks its more perennial character. It is only in a broader historical and cultural context that the full resonance of the contemporary extraterrestrial emerges. That broader context is the primary concern of this chapter. In terms of genealogy, this chapter concerns itself with earlier appearances of the tropes that later coalesce around abduction and the gray. The familiar alien of the second half of the twentieth century arrived via the “flying saucer” of the immediate post-war period and its attendant science fiction analogue, ending its passage across the intervening 50 years in the form of the “gray,” that stalwart of alien abduction lore, whose popular presence is marked at one end by Spielberg’s Close Encounters and at the 22
Page 1 and 2: The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
Page 3 and 4: The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
Page 5 and 6: III. Chapter 2: Contact…………
Page 7 and 8: oth in their rich and bizarre detai
Page 9 and 10: Fukuyama also describes the histori
Page 11 and 12: and belonging that are native to th
Page 13 and 14: modernity, Weber stressed over and
Page 15 and 16: While positivism would emerge as th
Page 17 and 18: figure that serves as a medium betw
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Page 21 and 22: The series of moments and discourse
Page 23 and 24: estful comprehension. It straddles
Page 25: The second chapter examines the eme
Page 29 and 30: sense this dream of perfected commu
Page 31 and 32: political registers as well. This c
Page 33 and 34: In the late eighteenth century, Mes
Page 35 and 36: inverted form) along which the unde
Page 37 and 38: consciousness that is highly mobile
Page 39 and 40: up the process of thinking”. 38 S
Page 41 and 42: umor - and irony - would have it, w
Page 43 and 44: sense that Swedenborg’s researche
Page 45 and 46: Spiritualist movement, whose medium
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Page 49 and 50: etween humans and God as unthinkabl
Page 51 and 52: esearches was a tailor by the name
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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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Page 65 and 66: hearts of men to help their brother
Page 67 and 68: the corrupting influence of the wor
Page 69 and 70: All manner of proscribed activities
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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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