A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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Introduction A STUDY IN GRAY The commanding cultural presence of the outer-space alien and the UFO is attested to both by the number of individuals claiming to have been abducted by aliens (estimates based on a 1992 Roper poll ranging from 4 to 33 million) and the proliferation of books, articles, films, television programs and ephemera treating the phenomena. 1 Public fascination with the UFO and the alien has cycled on and off since the 1950’s. Books in Print currently lists 73 titles under the heading “Alien Abduction” and 754 under the heading “Unidentified Flying Object.” Compare this to the 200 titles in print under the heading “Richard Nixon.” Jodi Dean points out that by the mid-nineties the abduction narrative is established enough for The New York Times Magazine to satirize abductee meetings and put “World leader in alien abductions” at number four on a list of “What’s Right With America.” The New Yorker can publish alien abduction cartoons, secure that readers will get the joke. 2 The primary goal of this dissertation is to assay a history of the contemporary phenomenon of alien abduction and the figure of the gray (the alien type most frequently cited as abductor). In doing so I will be telling not only the story of the alien presence in American culture but also the stories caught up and carried in the nexus of those tales. Close examination of communication between human and Other reveals much about the shifting relations between rationality and irrationality, science and religion, self and other. The narratives that spin out the details of contact between humans and extraterrestrials speak to more personal questions as well—the stability of self, the vagaries of mortality, the nature of the links between self and cosmos. Stories of contact with otherworldly beings are vastly interesting in and of themselves, 1 The Roper Organization, Unusual Personal Experiences, (New York: Roper, 1992). 2 Jodi Dean, “The Familiarity of Strangeness: Aliens, Citizens, and Abduction” in Theory and Event V.1#2 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v001/1.2dean.html, 2 (accessed November 3, 2005). 1
oth in their rich and bizarre detail and the shifts they exhibit over time. Their reverberations along multiple lines of association make them even more arresting. By way of introduction to the extended discussion of these tales that comprises the heart of this dissertation, I will discuss a series of interrelated matters: the nature of genealogy as historical enterprise; the driving dialectic of the peculiar history traced by this dissertation; and the links between the figure of the extraterrestrial and utopian thought. As to the historical enterprise—I look to Foucault, and particularly to his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” as a cautionary influence. 3 My understanding of genealogy dictates that one write a history of the present rather than a history of the past. This operative distinction captures something essential of the approach. A history of the past imagines the present as somehow predestined. It is “a history whose perspective on all that precedes it implies the end of time, a completed development.” 4 One recent and much ballyhooed example of such a history is Frances Fukuyama’s 1992 The End of History and the Last Man. In his book, Fukuyama argues that liberal democracy is the end of the line—the end result toward which all “history,” “understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process” has led. 5 It is this sense, of history as singular, coherent and evolutionary, that genealogy as a practice seeks to challenge. Genealogy opposes this tidy vision by viewing the passage of events as characterized by multiplicity, division and uneven change. The first of these terms, multiplicity, opposes the sense of singularity espoused by traditional historiography, and addresses, among other historical matters, the question of origin. While Foucault does deploy the term “singularity” in the aforementioned essay, he does so not to describe the overall process of history, but rather the 3 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984) 76-100. 4 Foucault, 86-87. 5 Frances Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 2
Page 1 and 2: The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
Page 3 and 4: The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
Page 5: III. Chapter 2: Contact…………
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
Page 19 and 20: sources of Spiritualism, Swedenborg
Page 21 and 22: The series of moments and discourse
Page 23 and 24: estful comprehension. It straddles
Page 25 and 26: The second chapter examines the eme
Page 27 and 28: Ch.1 The Dead INTRODUCTION Since th
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
Page 47 and 48: minded, loves to roam in the woods
Page 49 and 50: etween humans and God as unthinkabl
Page 51 and 52: esearches was a tailor by the name
Page 53 and 54: concerns and from the fact that the
Page 55 and 56: 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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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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