A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

meaning to the vanishing point. A massive number of cases were reduced via what was often a
rote application of quotidian explanations—light refraction, misidentified heavenly bodies and
conventional aircraft. Those remaining cases were written off as conspiracy, confabulation or
madness of one variety or another. Whatever may have been left over remained because it
slipped through the screen of rational explanation, emerging as unanswered questions. UFO
sightings that were not explained away remained unexplained. Abduction likewise enacted this
deferment of meaning. The call for forgetting by both alien and psychotherapeutic interlocutors,
the general silence of the alien Others and the inscrutability of their actions all lent themselves to
this dynamic. Of course the absence or deferment of stable meaning also suggests its obverse.
The saucer and/or abduction as signifier without clear signified functioned as speculative engine.
The absence of definitive explanation allowed for multiple and contradictory explanations.
The basic narrative that filled in the period of lost time was articulated in these early
sessions. Betty and Barney were flagged down by figures in the roadway, led onto the awaiting
craft and subjected to physical examinations on different parts of the ship. Following their
examination, the two were returned to their car with the injunction that they would recall nothing
of the experience. Further details would emerge in later sessions, but the basic series of events
remained constant. Barney would recall further elements of his examination, the taking of skin
samples via scraping, the creatures running their hands over his body in a way similar to that
described by Betty. Again, this motif of medical examination, which would become a standard
trope in the abduction narrative, spoke to a number of basic matters. It placed the abductee in a
subservient position, rendered them as an object to be observed and assessed, and underlined the
fundamental embodiedness of the experience. Aside from moments of pain, it is rare that we are
so aware of our bodies as organisms than when the object of medical scrutiny. The examination
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