A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

motif also speaks to a relationship between human and alien that is distinct from the earlier alienhuman
communication nexus. Whereas the spectral interlocutors of those earlier moments knew
humans better than humans knew themselves, the gray evidences a fundamental lack of
understanding concerning the human in many matters. As noted abduction researcher Budd
Hopkins relates, “There’s really no way we can tell what they understand about us. Their
understanding might be incredibly subtle in some ways, but miss on some other major things.
There’s no way to know.” 269
The collection and assumed collation of biological data speaks to
the positivist desire to render the human transparent. Under the eyes of the gray the individual
case is reduced to its role in some overall pattern. In the abduction scenario the human is
rendered as an object of empirical analysis. Whereas previously, the phenomenon—ghosts or
flying saucers—had been the object of analysis, in the abduction scenario it was the human that
came under the lens. Arguably all the stories that fed into the displaced utopian imaginary were
stories about humans groping for self-understanding but in the case of abduction it is explicitly
so. It was as if after empirical analysis utterly failed to make any sense of the saucers the tools
of empiricism were cast back onto the human. This was certainly the case in skeptical ufology,
especially in cases of close encounters of the third kind, where debunking explanations shifted
from the outer world—temperature inversions, refractory properties—to the inner. The point of
analysis became not “what are these objects in the sky?” but “what is wrong with the people who
see such things?” In abduction, not only was the lens of empiricism cast back onto humans, it
was done so by non-human entities. This was also not without precedent. The space brothers
after all had been observing earth and its human inhabitants for many millennia. The difference
with abduction was that rather than—as was the case with space brothers—the analysis being in
269 “Interview with Budd Hopkins,” in UFOs and the Alien Presence,ed. Michael Lindemann (Santa Barbara, CA:
The 2020 Group, 1991) 164-165.
182