A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

J. Gordon Melton, a noted commentator on American religion, has argued that the only
thing that was added to the contactee story by the arrival of the saucer was the saucer itself.
[T]he saucer remains the only new element in the contactee story. It tends to replace
astral travel as the means of getting around, both by extraterrestrials and by earthlings
tripping into outer space for the first time. The saucer is not essential, however, and in
many accounts in which it appears, it is obviously an additional frill. In many contactee
accounts during the fifties, no flying saucer is included at all. 199
While Melton is right to note that the emergence of the saucer did little to alter the content of the
contactee narrative, it nevertheless does play a role in the process of materialization. While the
gap between terrestrial contactee and e.t. entity had before been closed by some occult expedient,
astral travel being the foremost, with the arrival of the saucer the passage of communicants was
now through physical space via a material vessel. Communication acquired a new technological
component (in addition to the spiritual telegraph and the Ballards’ light and sound ray). Both
contact and communication became increasingly embodied.
The ostensible presence of interstellar craft invited empirical study and implied a material
explanation. If physical craft were repeatedly visiting earth, then clearly there must have been
some physical evidence left behind. The saucers themselves, rather then some sentient Other,
became a principle object of inquiry, their very name changing in time to the more clinical
“unidentified flying objects.” The emergence of ufology in response to the large number of
sightings in the years following World War II is a story and study in its own right (told notably
in the pages of Curtis Peebles’ Watch the Skies; A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth). 200
There was little crossover between the story of the contactees and that of ufology. The latter
basically wrote off the former as cranks. The careers of the Ballards, Adamski and their kith
smacked too much of an all-too-familiar brand of religious hucksterism. The clear personal gain
199 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.
200 Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.
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