A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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
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