A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

the nation and, perhaps more importantly, the credibility of the nation and its leadership were at
risk. Just as the desires of the individual align around the propagation and maintenance of the
myth of the consistent and integrated self, so do the energies of science and state concern
themselves with boundary maintenance.
As we shall see, what meaning the adherents of contactee culture did attach to the
ostensible presence of UFO’s aligned with the previously established contours of the space
brother myth. In turn, sympathetic researchers sometimes offered broad explanations for UFO
phenomena, including the extraterrestrial hypothesis, but generally pled insufficient evidence for
any final conclusion. In debunking however, the UFO had its own particular meaning. The
saucer functioned as a placeholder, as an absence around which a variety of celestial,
meteorological, optical, psychological and psychosocial phenomenon orbited. The central object
of faith defended by this orbit was a world transparent and explicable given the application of
reason. The defense of this position often resembled the desperate attempts to maintain a sense
of integrated self in the face of disintegrative forces. It is ironic to note that the champions of
Spiritualism and the space brothers shared this same trope of reason triumphant and its implied
corollary of ineluctable progress. But while the spiritualists and contactees deployed their faith
in reason and progress to lobby the acceptability and transparency of the phenomena of contact,
UFO debunkers such as Menzel used said faith to isolate and banish those phenomena. This
spoke clearly to the hegemony of the positivist vision. Because of this hegemony, scientific
grappling with the UFO conundrum consistently resulted in either the disappearance of the
object under analysis—explained into oblivion—or the disappearance of science, with no models
available for the attempt to deal with UFOs as real.
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