A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

masters,” consisted of entities that resided alternately in exotic terrestrial locales (Tibet) and
abodes extraterrestrial (in particular Venus). The brotherhood, according to the lore of
Theosophy, guided the development of humanity from the time of the latter's emergence as a
species and thus had a vested interest in their collective fate. The earlier space brother religions
followed a similar logic to that of the ascended master. They were generally framed around a
message originating with some extraterrestrial intelligence and conveyed via a privileged conduit
or medium. The sender was most often a self-identified entity who, out of great love and
concern, decided to impart his/her wisdom to a chosen recipient. This entity was often a
professed member of a cohort of planetary civilizations who, bound together in an interstellar
league, shared a longstanding and ongoing interest in the earth’s development.
WILLIAM DUDLEY PELLEY
The first of the recognized space brother religions was the Great I Am, a group that arose in
1934, under the leadership of Guy and Edna Ballard, from the ashes of William Dudley Pelley’s
Silver Shirts, a.k.a. the “Foundation for Christian Economics” and the “Christian Party.” At the
time of the Ballards’ recruitment of the Silver Shirts’ membership, Pelley was embroiled in a
series of lawsuits. Matters more pressing than the maintenance of his membership took up his
attention and the Ballards’ de facto coup went unchallenged. In that Pelley provided a clear link
between the Spiritualism of the nineteenth century and the first true space brother religion, we
will now examine the details of his case.
Pelley was both a successful writer of sentimental fiction and plays and a self-taught
philosopher whose life and politics reflected the life of his times. Young Pelley began his selfeducation
with the Communist Manifesto, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Philistine
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