A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

scope of serious inquiry. It would take some twenty years after the first broadly discussed case
of alien abduction—the Hill case—for ufology to fully embrace the abduction narrative and thus
cast its fate outside the confines of the rationally possible.
As we enter the realm of abduction, the stakes involved in both confirmation and
rejection of percipients’ claims increase, just as the gap between reported experience and
available explanations not solely dependent upon psychosocial factors widens. The perception
of inexplicable objects is central to all modes of encounter, and thus the percipient is always a
functional component of the phenomenon. But with the shift to abduction, the level and nature
of contact shifts away from the relatively abstract space of visual perception and simultaneously
brings vision to the fore in a very different sense—wherein the witness becomes the witnessed.
Visual contact is abstract in that there is always a potential gap between the seeing and the thing
seen. Thus we see quotidian explanations for such encounters framed in terms of misperception,
with supposed spacecraft explained away as misconstrued conventional aircraft, celestial objects
or swamp gas. Third kind encounters up the ante in terms of posited explanations, pushing
rationalization past frames of misperception and into the realm of psychopathology. One is
unlikely to simply "misrecognize" a terrestrial creature as a space monster. Abduction further
increases the weight borne by quotidian explanations. As Jodi Dean observes, “the closer the
alien gets, the more foreign it becomes.” 253
Abduction is an embodied experience that offers no
mundane correlate for the purposes of debunking.
This chapter tracks both the emergence of the abduction narrative, primarily via an
examination of the case of Betty and Barney Hill, and the implications of the shift from contact
in the style of space brother communiqués to the more bizarre and violent mode of abduction.
253 Jodi Dean, “The Familiarity of Strangeness: Aliens, Citizens, and Abduction” in Theory and Event V.1#2
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v001/1.2dean.html, 6 (accessed June 12, 2005).
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