A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

and belonging that are native to the world of the infant. The subject that emerges to replace that
infantile entity has certain powers that offset that loss. But those powers, the powers inherent in
language, supposed self-determination and independence are dependent upon the maintenance of
a clear sense of self, a sense that is always under siege. The desire for integration seeks a final
and lasting assurance of the self’s existence.
One primary modality through which we seek that assurance is narrative. The series of
narratives that comprise the heart of this document are particularly ripe for the kind of
intervention offered by genealogy. The narratives that precede and inform the tales of alien
abduction, and the tales of abductions themselves, all of which continue to circulate through
contemporary American culture, are totalizing narratives. The stories of ongoing communication
in America between humans and aliens of differing kinds are all concerned with questions of
ultimate origins and destinies, questions fundamentally concerned with the nature of self and the
relation between the human and the cosmos. While it is tempting to read the series of stories that
make up the ensuing chapters as a progression--serial tales of wonder that lead inevitably to the
terror of current abduction tales—instead I present a series of linked yet discrete scenarios—a
simultaneously episodic and serial movement. Foucault writes of this tendency in genealogy,
arguing that in tracking recurring tendencies, “it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in
order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they
engaged in different roles.” 10
The story I will relate is not one of the Ursprung, a clearly
delineable origin, but rather that of an ongoing circulation of a series of key tropes, examined
within particular historical moments. The articulation of these tropes over time is driven in part
by a particular dialectic—a struggle between two distinct yet convergent dynamics—a dialectic
we shall soon turn to.
10 Foucault, 76.
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