A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

scientifically sympathetic figure, assumed that position. The contactee functioned as a direct
interlocutor with alien intelligences. In the case of abduction, although the abductee experiences
direct contact, the abductee is often unable to fully recall—much less communicate—the
substance of that contact. The abductee requires the hypnotherapist to complete the circuit of
communication, just as many spirit mediums required a mesmerist. Even if the abductee can
recall elements of the experience, the meaning of it all remains elusive. As in classical
psychotherapy, the dreamer needs help in recalling the dream and in discerning the meaning
therein. Thus the privileged interlocutor, the communicative fulcrum, in the case of abduction is
not a figure centrally located in the experiential web of alien contact, as in the case of the
contactee, but a figure that resides rather in a space of clinical remove. As the experience of
contact grew increasingly embodied and concrete, via abduction, the process by which the
experience was understood became increasingly abstracted. The degree of clinical remove on
the part of the hypnotherapist varied from case to case. The earliest example of Dr. Benjamin
Simon, the hypnotherapist in the Hill Case, represented a fairly complete clinical distanciation.
Simon was initially not at all sympathetic to the belief that the Hills had actually been abducted
while remaining sympathetic to the understanding that the Hills believed that they had been
abducted.
The hypnotherapist functions in a classical psychoanalytic mode. Acting as psychopomp,
the therapist guides the abductee through the nether regions of repressed self-knowledge. During
the process of regressive hypnotherapy, prior to the therapist’s full revelation of what emerges
under hypnosis, the analysand is shielded from this lost self-knowledge. It is while under
hypnosis that the abductee most closely resembles the spiritualist medium, conveying previously
hidden communiqués in a trance state, unaware of what they reveal. However, these
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