A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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astronomical misattribution and misperception, hallucination, as well as simple hoaxing and confabulation. Thus in the set of cases classified as mere sightings (further away than 500 feet) or CEI (the types of cases most common in the immediate post World War II era) the distance between phenomenon and percipient was at its greatest and the distance between experience and potential quotidian explanation was at its most proximate. In terms of misidentification, sightings had been explained by misattributed sightings of planets (ironically, given the ostensible point of origin of extraterrestrial contacts—Venus and Mars are common candidates) and stars. Radar sightings were explained as the result of temperature inversions. Swamp gas was another widely ballyhooed explanation, as were light refractions caused by cloud-bound ice crystals. Explanations offered for CEI sightings sometimes depended less upon misattribution and more on gross misperception. In the case of the Nash Fortenberry sighting, arch debunker Donald Menzel initially offered the explanation that the two pilots had mistaken fireflies trapped between panes of cockpit glass for spacecraft. 207 Again, a UFO encounter where the witness sees a vessel less than 500 feet away was classified as a close encounter of the first kind. The second kind refers to sightings in which some physical effect is manifested by the vessel, such as scorched earth, flash burns suffered by witnesses and mechanical failures in the proximity of the UFO (the classic manifestation of which is a stalled automobile). In close encounters of the third kind witnesses actually saw the occupants of the vessel. Hynek's tripartite structure served as a basic classificatory heuristic for organizing massive numbers of reported encounters, and tracking the decreasing distance between witness and phenomenon. CEII’s began to close the gap between percipient and phenomenon. While debunkers and skeptics still drew on the full set of explanations, they became less convincing and more dependent upon the sense that the percipients were victims of gross misapprehension and/or 207 Keith Thompson, Angels and Aliens (New York: Addison Wesley, 1991) 24. 133
perpetrators of willful deception in the case of CEII’s. When evidence included the manifestation of “a physical effect on either animate or inanimate matter,” the argument that witnesses had in fact only seen some heavenly body or trick of the light became increasingly untenable. In the case of physical effects on animate objects, examples ranged from flash burns on areas of witnesses’ skin exposed during a sighting to hair loss and temporary paralysis. The skeptical explanation for such manifestations was to suggest that they were psychosomatic, or to use a less neutral term, hysterical. While such an explanation shifted attention away from the purported presence of a UFO, it left the causal nexus in the rather amorphous mind-body continuum, where it kept company with such medical oddities as stigmata and hysterical pregnancy. In the case of mechanical failure, such as the classic stalled automobile, the potential “rational” explanations were both obvious and numerous. In the instances of physical evidence manifested as a change in soil composition or plant biology, the case was less clear. There were few cases in which such evidence was held up to close scrutiny, due in part to the fact that the UFO was generally an anathema in the official scientific world. In those that had been extensively examined, the results were far from conclusive. The 1981 Trans-En-Provence CE2, which left clear markings of two concentric circles in the spot where a craft allegedly landed, underwent significant analysis by the Group d’Etude des Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non- Identifiés (GEPAN). GEPAN ultimately reported a loss of chlorophyll in surrounding flora and other effects consistent with the presence of some unknown electromagnetic field, all of which pointed, in the words of GEPAN’s official report, to the Occurrence of an important event that brought with it deformations of the terrain caused by mass, mechanics, a heating effect and perhaps certain transformations and deposits of trace minerals….We cannot give a precise and unique interpretation to this remarkable 134
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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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The first was that all world religi
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space brother religion, The Great I
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and the menopauses.” 141 A genera
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 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 155 and 156: II space brother religions to large
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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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