A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

seems to have suggested that humans simultaneously knew a lot about themselves and operated
with fundamental gaps in that understanding. As already noted, the story of long term
surveillance by aliens renders humanity itself as the object of empirical inquiry. In the case of
the space brothers the outcome of such surveillance was concern over humanity’s potentially
destructive ways and the offer to show humanity the way to earthly paradise. But in the case of
abduction, what is highlighted is the inherent violence of empiricism and the suggestion that
even with many years (if not centuries or millennia) of studied observation that aliens still really
don’t know humans. The suggested critique, of course, is that empiricism offers only the illusion
of knowledge. Framed by the implicit critique of the displaced utopian imaginary, perhaps it
would be more to the point to say that empiricism offers knowledge without wisdom.
MESMER RETURNS
It was only through hypnotic regression that the Hill’s gained direct access to their abduction
experience. The emergence of the hypnotherapist as a central figure was another point of
departure that marked the shift from contact to abduction as primary alien contact narrative,
bringing us full circle to the themes of mesmerism that open this dissertation. The configuration
of abductee, therapist and alien recalled an earlier triangle, one central to the opening chapter of
this dissertation. In the discourse of alien abduction, all three components, alien, abductee and
hypnotherapist are necessary in the production of meaning. The three function together as a sort
of machine or assemblage. The alien constitutes a field of Otherness that the abductee,
enfiguring quotidian reality, passes through. The hypnotherapist functions as the catalyst for the
release of the energies or meaning accrued via the abductees passage through the field of the
Other. Through the hypnotherapist’s intervention, the abductee’s nocturnal experience of the
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