A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

to evacuate from the space of public discourse. Spiritualism and the movements that followed it
acted with the understanding that rational comprehension of that realm—the realm of spirit—was
the missing piece in the struggle to achieve earthly bliss. The engine of the displaced utopian
imaginary was nothing less than the impossible—the rational comprehension of the irrational.
UFOs, in contrast to their promise of material finality, proved rather to be emblematic of that
impossibility.
The two narratives, that of the UFO and attempts to arrest it and the ongoing space
brothers’ saga, stand in stark contrast. While the space brothers continued to offer the hope of
utopia achieved, the saucer appeared and disappeared—offering a fleeting glimpse of other
possibilities only to recede upon closer examination. Carl Jung suggested that UFOs, as
mandalic symbols of totality, appeared as an expression of the dissociation brought about by the
onset of the cold war. The iron curtain, in Jung’s view, delineated a traumatic dissociation—east
v. west—of two parts of a whole. The saucer promised a tantalizing vision of wholeness, a
stilling of the turmoil brought about by the violent sundering of east and west. 195
Jung argued
that the form of the saucer itself in its roundness recalled nothing so forcefully as the archetype
of totality and wholeness. In an era troubled by an unprecedented global split and the specter of
atomic war (set in motion by the splitting of the atom) the saucer held out the promise of
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Along with representing a healing of the dissociation brought about by the Cold War, the saucer was also
emblematic of the immanent threat of Soviet communism. One initial interpretation of the presence of flying saucers
in U.S. skies was that they were a Soviet secret weapon. While this hypothesis was quickly dismissed by official
government inquiries into the UFO phenomenon, it continued to haunt the public imagination—particularly in the
allegorical forms offered by science fiction cinema. In the visions of 1950’s and 60’s science fiction, saucers
functioned as harbingers of physical and cultural destruction at the hands of an alien ideology. This more paranoid
vision of the UFO figured centrally in neither ufology nor space brother religions in the period under discussion in
this chapter. It would not be until after the advent of abduction, the subject of the ensuing chapter, that the paranoia
of the Cold War truly came to roost within the precincts of the displaced utopian imaginary.
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