A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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the offered explanation was reduced to increasingly vertiginous models of hallucination, confabulation and conspiracy. The wide variety of explanations offered by Klass and Menzel speaks to the urgency and diligence of debunking efforts. In terms of the hoped-for rapprochement between science and spirit, at the far end of proximity, mere sightings and close encounters of the first kind, science trumped spirit. The most readily available explanations were based on known visual, atmospheric and astronomical phenomena. Questions of forces that lay outside the materialist conception of reality remained un-raised because unneeded. Something was seen, but those somethings were within the realm of the known. As encounters moved closer to the object, the objective correlates offered via scientific explanation dwindled to the point where the preferred explanation became psychological. Something was seen, but those somethings were misinterpreted via the mechanisms of mania or psychosis. Alternately nothing was seen and the supposed percipients were liars. So science offered nothing to the believer—there was no potential shared ground. At the far end of proximity, witnesses were informed that they were mistaken—they saw nothing that existed outside the boundaries of the known world. At the close end, witnesses of close encounters of the third kind were informed they were alternately stupid, liars or mad. The most vocal and visible figures within ufology have often been the debunkers. In turn, much of the meaning attached to the UFO has been provided by explanations that constitute the UFO as something else—an optical property or misperceived planet. As defenders of quotidian reality, debunkers function as true believers, keepers of the faith. Menzel was a classic example of how wishful thinking infects the debunker as effectively as those who believed UFO’s real. Donald Howard Menzel (1901-1976) had impeccable academic and scientific credentials—enrolled as an undergraduate at 16, graduate work at Princeton, one of the very first 137
practicing theoretical astrophysicists, Harvard faculty at 31, full professor by 37, director of Harvard Observatory, and president of the American Astronomical Society. Menzel made it his personal crusade to ensure that no concerted research efforts on UFO’s would be pursued by official science. In doing so, he was not always as scrupulous as science demands. Accusations made by critics of Menzel include misrepresentation of data and speculation unanchored by specific cases. James E. McDonald, a University of Arizona atmospheric physicist, and ufologist sympathetic to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, wrote of his unease concerning Menzel’s methods. My puzzlement stems from realizing that Dr. Menzel’s background in physics and astronomy is well-attested by his authorship of a number of texts and references in those areas. Despite that background, when he comes to analyzing UFO reports, he seems to calmly cast aside well-known scientific principles almost with abandon, in an all-out effort to be sure that no UFO report survives his attack. Refraction processes are quite well understood in optics, and the refracting properties of the atmosphere are surely as familiar in astronomy as in meteorology, if not more so. Yet in “explanation” after “explanation” in his books, Menzel rides roughshod over elementary optical considerations governing such things as mirages and light reflections. 214 Explanations as to the origin of Menzel’s single-minded efforts to discredit any agnostic treatments of UFO sightings included his own personal UFO encounter, which in his later explanation and dismissal of, he substantially revised. Thus he may have had personal reasons for such vociferous denial. Secondly, he served in a variety of official and unofficial capacities in the federal government. While this is far from unusual for a Cold War era American scientist, some have drawn the tempting conclusion that his debunking efforts were carried out at the behest of national security. From a scientific perspective the saucer represented a threat to the understood contours of the natural world. From the perspective of national security, the saucer represented a similar threat. If there were some set of objects moving freely through U.S. airspace, objects that successfully eluded both capture and explanation, than both the borders of 214 Jerome Clark, “Menzel, Donald Howard (1901-1976),” in The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial (Detroit: Visible Ink, 1998) 395. 138
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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
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Ch.2 Contact INTRODUCTION Contact w
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as spiritual aspirations embodied.
Page 91 and 92: magazine, the latter edited by icon
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Page 95 and 96: keeping with the recurring integrat
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Page 99 and 100: world were still struggling to asce
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Page 105 and 106: evolutionary nomenclature of the co
Page 107 and 108: Pelley exhibited a variety of trait
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Page 113 and 114: Ballard was told during his initial
Page 115 and 116: Masters. Members of the I Am Ascend
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Page 119 and 120: promises of evolutionary progress h
Page 121 and 122: such as St. Germain could make thei
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 141: signing.” 210 Gill’s amused res
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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Page 163 and 164: ecome small, self-sufficient commun
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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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