A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

the space brother narrative further compounded this physicality: embodied messenger; locatable
point of origin; manifest mode of transport.
The drama of the space brother, as played out in the immediate post-World War II
context, continued its focus on the messenger and the message of potential perfection. With
Martin and Adamski, the formalization begun by Theosophy and its Great White Brotherhood
continued. Instead of the brotherhood, we find the beginnings of a Star Command—a hierarchy
of humans from other planets who are bound together in confederation and who seek the
enlightenment of the earth human. Their point of origin continued to recede to other planets—
most commonly Venus and Mars—and continued to become more concrete. The Other’s mode
of appearance was in the form of beautiful humans—visions of Nordic perfection. As in
Spiritualism and the movements that followed in its wake, the uncanniness of the Other was
undermined by its relative familiarity. The narrative that sprang from the alien-human nexus
continued to articulate the conundrum of radical change in a familiar form—a vision of alterity
that was comforting in its sameness.
Running parallel to the continuing saga of the space brother, the immediate post-World
War II period also witnessed the rise of ufology, a thoroughgoing attempt to align the increasing
appearance of strange objects in the sky with the consensus reality dictated by the standards of
empiricism. The point of focus for ufology was not the presence of some anthropomorphic
Other bearing glad tidings of future perfection but rather the recurring appearance of an
ostensibly physical phenomenon. In its struggle to account for the impossible with the tools and
ethos of positivism, ufology struggled to close the same gap that so centrally concerned the
movements previously discussed in these pages. Ironically, as the endeavor moved closer to its
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