A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

object of desire, the modes of explanation available veered increasingly into the nether regions of
the rationally possible.
The displaced utopian imaginary’s engagement with the flying saucer, both in the case of
ufology and that of the space brothers, was oddly marked by a dynamic of absence and
disappearance. In the case of ufology, the constant tug-of-war between agnosticism and outright
skepticism constantly threatened the UFO’s erasure. Even among researchers sympathetic to the
possibility of the UFO’s existence, the object of study was always already a residuum, a remnant.
It was only the cases that survived attempts at quotidian explanation that were rendered suitable
for analysis. In treating a phenomenon that seemed about proliferation and divergence, that
profligate energy was apparently put in service of explanations to the contrary. UFO’s were
swamp gas, errant celestial bodies, temperature inversions, willful deception. It was ironic that
the ostensibly centripetal forces of rational inquiry seemed bent on such dissolution, as if
infected by its object of study. Even the cases that made it through the vetting process were so
beset by skeptical interpretation that their significance was all but canceled out. For obvious
reasons such remaindered cases were perhaps the targets of the most energetic of skeptical
attacks. The game of skeptical ufology recalled the zero sum logic of the octoroon. If the case
was not all the way true (white) then it was all the way false (black). In its struggle to rescue the
integrity of a fully rational view of the world, this stark sense of the true or false binary did
nothing to approximate the both/and logic of the phenomenon.
In the case of the space brothers, the saucer did a different but no less notable
disappearing act. In the case of the so-called contactee mainstream, saucers were absent because
unneeded. Communication between human and Other using traditional occult means—telepathy,
astral travel, automatic writing—required no physical vehicle. In the case of contactees such as
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