A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

human encounters: the terror of being seen, the terror of the Other, the terror of being reduced to
an object. All of these motifs had been in place as early as Spiritualism—the spirits watched the
living, they were not human, the medium was rendered flat and blank, a screen for the projection
of another’s will. But strangely enough, the séance room was not a place of fear. Wonder, yes.
Agreeable shivers, yes. But nothing like the terror described by the Hills and the many that have
followed. The encounter with the gray functions not as a moment of clarity or grace but as one
of horror and dissolution.
ABDUCTION AS PARANOIA
The tension between Hopkins and Mack over the net effect of abduction captures one of the
basic tensions of the displaced utopian imaginary. The displaced utopian narrative contains
within itself the seeds of its own dystopian doppelganger. While the utopian imaginary in its
positive phase connotes a sense that things are moving toward some desired end state, the
dystopian fears that the end approaching is one of horror. The displaced utopian imaginary often
illustrates the proximity, if not simultaneity, of the dystopian and utopian. While Dorothy
Martin’s contacts informed her that atomic explosions have opened up the channels of
communication between humans and the galactic federation, thus bringing us one step closer to
utopia, those same explosions herald another potential end, one of utter destruction. While
Spiritualists trumpeted the beneficent effects of closing the gap between the living and the dead,
mainstream commentators deplored the popularity of Spiritualism as a sign of cultural decadence
and occultists (Madame Blavatsky included) argued that the supposed spirits of the dead were in
fact “elemental” spirits whose council was not to be trusted. The phase of the displaced utopian
imaginary that emerged with alien abduction pushed the conflation of the utopian and the
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