A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

Man, as Man, is not indigenous to this solar satellite by any means. Contingents of Man
species have come to this planet from time to time over the aeons from a wide variety of
similarly populated heavenly bodies. They have come in spiritized form—that is,
Thinking Units lacking organism, but appropriating or otherwise acquiring the ape
organism to “clothe” themselves, because over long periods of observation the ape
organism seemed to be the most facile organism to get physical effects in the material
world that was the Earth’s composition. 174
Thus the writings and philosophy of William Dudley Pelley both replicated many of the central
tropes established by Spiritualism and Theosophy and anticipated both the rise of space brothers
and the increasingly paranoid politics of the mid-to-late twentieth century exemplars of the
displaced utopian imaginary.
THE GREAT I AM
It was in the year that Pelley’s legal problems began in earnest, 1934, that Guy and Edna Ballard
began their bid to appropriate Pelley’s membership. The Ballard’s Great I Am is generally
understood to be the first true space brother religion. As Gordon Melton notes in The
Contactees: A Survey:
Not only did Ballard become the first to actually build a religion on contact with
extraterrestrials (as opposed to merely incorporating the extraterrestrial data into another
already existing religion), but this emphasis was placed upon frequent contact with the
masters from whom he received regular messages to the followers of the world contactee
movement. 175
The Great I Am is a classic example of both religious syncretism and religious hucksterism. The
Ballards came to prominence in a time of religious and political ferment, working as
contemporaries of Father Divine and Aimee Semple McPherson as well as Father Coughlin.
They combined elements of Buddhism, Hinduism (e.g. their followers were referred to as
174 William Dudley Pelley, Soulcraft Seventy-Eighth Discourse: Redemption: How the Early States of Man worked
for Spirit’s Concept of Society (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.
175 J. Gordon Melton, “The Contactees: A Survey” in The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds,
ed. James R. Lewis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) 7.
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