A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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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. 127
attached to cultivating a following spoke strongly against considering such contactees reliable witnesses. Thus the research agenda of ufology in the 1950s was unconcerned with contact as we have previously discussed it, except as a point of embarrassment. While the so-called “extraterrestrial hypothesis” (holding that UFO’s are of extraterrestrial origin) was among the explanations put forward to explain the apparent presence of UFO’s, the focus was on the object, not on any ostensible occupants and certainly not on any “message” they might have for humanity. The first efforts at the systematic study of flying saucers or UFO’s were carried out by U.S. armed forces. In that the objects seen in the sky were potentially manned craft cruising U.S. airspace, the Air Force seemed a natural candidate for assessing the nature of the flying saucer. The Air Force had a long relationship with UFO phenomena that began shortly after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting over the Cascades in 1947. Following the recommendation of Lt. Gen. Nathan F. Twining, head of the Air Material Command, Project Sign began operation in January of 1948. In that first year of operation a clear split emerged between those sympathetic to the position that UFO’s might be intelligently piloted extraterrestrial craft (the e.t. hypothesis) and those wholly unsympathetic to the idea that UFO’s were anything that could not be conventionally explained. The early hypothesis that UFO’s were potentially a Soviet technology was quickly dismissed after initial investigations (though parallels between the Soviet menace and alien presence would continue to be explored within the precincts of popular culture). The split between the two factions came to a head when the pro-e.t. contingent prepared an “Estimation of the Situation” and sent it up the ranks. The existence of the document in question is controversial, the Air Force having denied its existence for years. No copy of it has yet surfaced. Ostensibly the document suggested interplanetary visitation as the most plausible 128
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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III. Chapter 2: Contact…………
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oth in their rich and bizarre detai
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Fukuyama also describes the histori
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and belonging that are native to th
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modernity, Weber stressed over and
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While positivism would emerge as th
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figure that serves as a medium betw
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sources of Spiritualism, Swedenborg
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The series of moments and discourse
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estful comprehension. It straddles
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The second chapter examines the eme
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Ch.1 The Dead INTRODUCTION Since th
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sense this dream of perfected commu
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political registers as well. This c
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In the late eighteenth century, Mes
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inverted form) along which the unde
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consciousness that is highly mobile
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up the process of thinking”. 38 S
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umor - and irony - would have it, w
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sense that Swedenborg’s researche
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Spiritualist movement, whose medium
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minded, loves to roam in the woods
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etween humans and God as unthinkabl
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esearches was a tailor by the name
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concerns and from the fact that the
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simultaneously in the world of the
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which God has revealed to them and
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assessed the Fox sisters as the “
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each in turn Lockwood elaborated hi
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as miraculous or supernatural? 85 T
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hearts of men to help their brother
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the corrupting influence of the wor
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All manner of proscribed activities
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dawn of a new era, and you must not
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qualities the coarser and heavier t
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full of mischief as any child in th
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keynote in public (and much of the
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masculine traits), the figure of th
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Page 87 and 88: Ch.2 Contact INTRODUCTION Contact w
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Page 91 and 92: magazine, the latter edited by icon
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Page 99 and 100: world were still struggling to asce
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Page 107 and 108: Pelley exhibited a variety of trait
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Page 123 and 124: Ch. 3 The Saucer INTRODUCTION The t
Page 125 and 126: The arrival of the saucer promised
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Page 145 and 146: DOROTHY MARTIN While ufology began
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Page 153 and 154: In the case of Dorothy Martin and h
Page 155 and 156: II space brother religions to large
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The cadences of Barney’s recollec
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And he said it was a pregnancy test
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motif also speaks to a relationship
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on a human is smooth and rounded. S
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seems to have suggested that humans
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The mesmerist and hypnotherapist bo
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communiqués emerge not from the la
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David E. Mack, a Harvard trained an
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dystopian, or in the language of No
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In the space brother scenario, the
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Everything is now. The past is now;
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effectively cut off from that possi
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eaching our innate potential. The h
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It is in this desire for dissolutio
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abductees feeling like guinea pigs.
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attack. Nietzsche writes of the blo
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Hill. Barney recalled his first gli
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The Gaze as philosophical and psych
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constituted modes of visuality. To
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traum or dream further indicates th
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educed not in the relatively benign
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will of the abductee—all speak to
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esultant exposure to the Real. The
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understood moorings, left to drift
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desired utopian state. The Others c
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were, more or less, ascended master
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Reports back from the spirit realm
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generally silent, but when they do
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to narrative structural positionali
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sensibilities, though one that woul
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of full transparency between interl
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aber, W.W. “A Guide
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_____. “Adamski, George (1891-196
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_____. Discipline and Punish: the B
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_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
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_____. Something about Soulcraft. N
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Streiber, Whitley and Anne, ed. The
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