A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

Ch. 4 Abduction
INTRODUCTION
Beginning in 1961, the beautiful, loquacious ambassadors from the stars were increasingly
displaced by grimly silent homunculi. Journeys of wonder and enlightenment began to give way
to ones of terror and confusion. Along with the beginnings of the abduction phenomenon in the
early 1960’s, the stakes of both ufology and contactee culture started to shift. Narrative
structures moved beyond both the psychic communications of the contactee and the purely visual
experience of the UFO witness to the fully embodied scenario of alien abduction. For ufologists,
the focus slowly shifted from the objective element of the craft to an increasingly bizarre set of
encounters between the occupants of those craft and various, bewildered, human percipients. For
those invested in the contactee narrative, the links between the ostensibly benevolent wishes of
ascended masters/space brothers and the presence of UFO’s became increasingly difficult to
sustain. How to read silent, invasive, nightmarish encounters as benign? The emergence of
abduction as an increasingly common form of alien-human interface unfolded slowly over the
course of a decade and while alien abduction as a mode of contact began in earnest with the 1961
case of Betty and Barney Hill, it was not until the nineteen-eighties that abduction fully took its
place as the central research vector in ufology and a standard form of human-alien
communication.
This gap between the Hill case and the emergence of abduction as the central trope in
UFO lore is consistent with the overall uneven development of the displaced utopian imaginary
in response to emergent themes of paranoia. The themes of paranoia and depersonalization that
so informed the abduction myth had initially emerged in Cold War discourses on the dangers of
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