A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

distinguishing the strictly human. And between these two are all forms and exhibits of
intervening rates, perpetuating the effects of such vibrations in physical surroundings. 161
The Jews were understood as operating at a low vibratory rate, whereas “Nordic Aryans”
apparently resonated at the threshold of the next level past “Human.” Pelley’s writings were part
of a broader public discourse of scientific racism. Harkening back to the optimism of nineteenth
century dreams of positivism and progress, the eugenics movement rested on the tacit
assumption that the collection and collation of information on undesirable traits in individual
humans and in classes of humans was a necessary step in constructing the perfect society. The
discourse on genetics and race mimicked the spiritual discourses emerging from the nexus of
alien-human communication in one fundamental way. In an attempt to maintain a place in public
discourse for defamatory discourses of race, the eugenics movement was concerned with
rearticulating old, non-rational arguments about race in a scientific language.
Along with such contemporaries as Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and Walt Disney, all
of whom he counted as supporters, Pelley argued that the International Jew lay at the bottom of
the world’s current woes. In his travels through Russia as Y.M.C.A. representative in the year
following the 1917 revolution, Pelley claimed to have learned of the Jewish conspiracy
underlying Bolshevism and international banking. His revelations following his “Great Release”
further led him to understand, in a fashion similar to theosophists (though she publicly eschewed
anti-Semitism, H.P. Blavatsky has long been rumored to be the author of the infamous Protocols
of the Elders of Zion), that race was a function of spiritual hierarchy and whites had “attained
something cosmically which Semitic Asiatics have not attained.” 162
It was on battling the
conspiracy of these lesser souls that his efforts increasingly focused. This struggle, as in the
161 William Dudley Pelley, Soulcraft Eightieth Discourse: Races: The Necessity for Racial Divisions of Humankind
and the Purposes they Serve (Noblesville IN: Soulcraft Chapels Press). Undated material recovered from
Noblesville, Indiana Public Library’s vertical file archive on William Dudley Pelley in July of 2005.
162 Ribuffo, 58.
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