A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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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. 139
DOROTHY MARTIN While ufology began from science in its attempt to engage the irrational (the materialization of the spiritual), there was a corollary movement that began in the realm of the fantastic and moved toward science (spiritualization of the material). Ufology functioned as an exemplar of the former while much of the discourse around the space brothers functioned in the latter mode. Typically, space brother contactees after World War II continued to receive messages via traditional occult means: dreams, visions, voices in the head, automatic writing etc. One post- World War II example of this type of contact is particularly well documented in the classic sociological study When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World. 215 Even though Dorothy Martin, the primary subject of When Prophecy Fails, held forth as contactee in a moment where public knowledge of and interest in UFO’s had been clearly established, flying saucers played no appreciable role in her cosmology. Her primary contacts were indeed from other planets, indicating the continuing ascendancy of the extraterrestrial in the displaced utopian imaginary, but they appeared sans saucer. In Martin’s case, while such objects were reported with startling frequency in American skies, they did not enter, in any appreciable fashion, into her received wisdom. Martin’s case exemplified the type of post-saucer space brother religion in which the saucer was marked by its absence. Published in 1956, When Prophecy Fails is a study of a group that coalesced around Dorothy Martin of Chicago in the early 1950’s. The three researchers who authored the study were concerned with a specific behavior that seemed to recur in a particular kind of social movement. In groups where specific prophecies are made and the events prophesied fail to 215 Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, & Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World (New York: Harper and Row, 1964). 140
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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.
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magazine, the latter edited by icon
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Page 123 and 124: Ch. 3 The Saucer INTRODUCTION The t
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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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