A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

communism. The connection between the communist menace and aliens had played out in the
1950’s and 1960’s not in narratives of “actual” contact with UFO’s but in the narratives of
science fiction. If anything, in the ostensibly real narratives of the alien, specifically in the tales
of space brothers, socialism still operated as a primary utopian modality. The case of Betty and
Barney Hill and the emergent narrative of alien abduction seemed to catch the nexus of alienhuman
communication up to some of the more slippery misgivings of the cold war. William
Dudley Pelley had certainly engaged with a broader sense of the dangers of Bolshevism, but his
alien interlocutors operated in the space brother mode, offering a source of clarity and advice
rather than menace. It was not until the advent of abduction that the communication between
human and Other took on the creeping hues so aptly represented by the tales of alien paranoia
that flourished in the science fiction cinema of the cold war.
This belated alignment occurred at roughly the same time as the very misgivings (the
dangers of gross materialism, depersonalization and conformity) attached to communism came to
be applied to American culture. The Beats, the efforts of critical sociology, e.g. Whyte’s
Organization Man, and the beginnings of the psychedelic gospel as taught by Leary et al. all
spoke to an emergent sense that the wholly rational vision of the world was in some fundamental
sense foreshortened and sterile—perhaps even inimical to the prized individualism so long held
as the antithesis of and antidote to communism. The beginnings of alien abduction embody that
basic sense of discouragement in the context of the displaced utopian imaginary. Ufology,
however, would continue to attempt engagement with the Other on the terms set by positivism—
operating with full faith in the promise offered by the latter. Tales of abduction were only
reluctantly engaged by mainstream ufologists. They seemed more in line with the stories told by
space brother contactees than with anything empirically verifiable. Abduction lay outside the
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