A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

science. 256
The Hill case was the start of a slow shift within ufology that would lead to humanalien
interaction becoming the central node of inquiry in the study of UFO’s. As discussed in the
previous chapter, serious researchers interested in UFO phenomena shunned the contactee
movement. Contactees, at best, dwelt on the fringes of religion. At worst they were engaged in
calculated fraud. The central point of interest for this dissertation, the ostensible contact between
humans and beings not of this earth not only held no interest for mainstream ufology--it was an
outright anathema. Contactees were an embarrassment. It was hard enough to get the world to
take unbiased inquiry into the presence of Unidentified Flying Objects seriously without the
associated phenomena claimed by individuals like George Adamski--ongoing journeys to distant
planets and enlightenment gained at the feet of interstellar visitors. People like Adamski and the
claims they made cast ufology as pulp fiction—wishful thinking posing as science—and ufology
imagined itself as solely concerned with verifiable facts.
Ufology was concerned with questions of physical presence rather than questions of
meaning. In its incarnation preceding the advent of alien abduction, the study of UFOs
concerned itself with a much more immediate question. Were the objects repeatedly viewed in
the skies over America, and elsewhere, mere fancy or true objects with physical dimensions? It
was primarily in the case of the former that UFO discourse entered into questions of meaning. If
UFOs were the product of fancy, what explanation might be offered for the repeated nature of
their sighting—suggestibility, mass hysteria, Cold War jitters, the power of rumor? In the
positive case, in which UFOs were actual objects, the goal was not explanation, but verification.
How might it be established that UFOs existed as actual objects?
256 John G. Fuller, Incident at Exeter/The Interrupted Journey: Two Landmark Investigations of UFO Encounters in
One Volume (New York: MJF Books, 1966).
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