A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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the former to the latter mark a key dynamic in the changing nexus of communication between humans and the Other. Angels, as creatures of spirit, reside in the realms of spirit—displaced from the world of matter, the world of the observable. Their place of residence, heaven, is difficult to locate. Particular coordinates do not moor its status as place. Spiritualism went a long way toward imagining and articulating a fully manifested and habitable heavenly realm. Swedenborg’s earlier equation of angels and dead humans demystified and lent a familiar sort of materiality to the angel. Spiritualism’s attempt to limn the contours of the afterlife lent a similar materiality to heaven. Even so, heaven remained and remains a place without location. The movement from spirit to ascended master to alien marked a trajectory of increasing materiality. This trajectory was of course uneven in that the three aforementioned types—spirit, ascended master, alien—coexisted. The suggested arc is one of shifting pre-eminence rather than outright replacement. Spiritualism strove to articulate spirits that were recognizably human—a marked contrast to the angels that preceded them. The exact location of the spirits’ home, however, remained a mystery. Ascended masters occupied a state of being between human and spirit. They were humans who had evolved beyond mere humanity yet still fell short of being purely spiritual entities. Their locale, while comprised of a shifting series of places, was concrete: Venus, Mars, Tibet, and Mount Shasta. They resided in spaces not off the map. Aliens, while they may have found ways around or through the laws of time and space, were ostensibly biological entities. They may have been more evolved spiritually, but they were still embodied. And, for a while, their homes were known. 143 They could be seen in the night sky. Venus and Mars had been spoken of and celebrated for millennia. The alien and the ascended master acted 143 As the century progressed, their point of origin became less clear and more far-flung, reaching out to Zeta Reticuli and Sirius. 83
as spiritual aspirations embodied. This embodiment, in turn, enacted the ongoing materialization of the spiritual. With the exception of Swedenborg, most extraterrestrial contacts were with denizens of Venus and Mars. Contact with figures from those locales continued into the twentieth century, and with some notable changes, culminated in the emergence of religions based upon the messages of our space-faring brethren—the “space brothers.” It is the business of this chapter to explore the intermediary phase between the occult revivals of the nineteenth century and the post- World War II emergence of the flying saucer. We will examine, in turn, two principals that maintained the traditions discussed in the previous chapter while laying the groundwork for the space brother religions that followed. The two principals in question are William Dudley Pelley and the Ballards, both of whom built followings from ostensible ongoing contact with Others. The chapter will treat each in turn, focusing on the nature of the contact between these principals and their extraterrestrial interlocutors, the nature of the interlocutors themselves, and the content of their messages. At issue in this treatment is: the early twentieth century maintenance and transformation of the tropes previously established as part of the nexus of alien-human communication; the connections between the sociopolitical aspirations inherent in the communication between human and Other and the more traditionally articulated politics of the day; and the transmogrification from spirit to alien, including both the increasingly common claim that these spectral interlocutors hail from other planets and the movement toward embodied contact with those interlocutors. The extraterrestrial as framed by the contactee narrative functioned as a variant on the entities that populated Theosophy and Spiritualism. The Great White Brotherhood was central to the spiritual system elaborated by Blavatsky. The brotherhood, a conclave of “ascended 84
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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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Page 123 and 124: Ch. 3 The Saucer INTRODUCTION The t
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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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