A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

ealm of mass culture, most specifically science fiction cinema. It was here that the link between
aliens, saucers and the red menace was most convincingly forged. The story of post war science
fiction has been the object of sustained critical inquiry in such studies as M. Keith Booker’s
Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War. 283
Films such as Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (a nicely literal anticipation of alien abduction) capture the unease of the uncanny, in
which the self, while still outwardly recognizable, is rendered alien. It is this displacement of the
purely physical conundrum of unidentified flying objects with stickier metaphysical questions of
self, sentience, and recognition that most effectively capture the shift to abduction.
While negative interpretations of the presence of unidentified aerial objects in the skies of
America can be understood as a reflection of misgivings about the communist threat in the years
immediately following Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting of unidentified craft over the Cascade
mountains, as abduction became the central mode of extraterrestrial/human contact, the source of
that threat was increasingly imagined as cosmic rather than terrestrial, with the imagined threat
of the extraterrestrial operating not as metaphor but concrete referent. In addition to the
displacement of standard fears about communism—loss of freedom, dissolution of self—onto
alien presence, the scale of that threat was expanded to a scenario in which the relation between
humans and aliens was not merely contemporary, but part of a process that had been unfolding
throughout the history of human kind. This process, in its most elaborate form, was marked by a
long term surveillance and intervention in which humanity was the object and the alien the actor,
a scenario which should by now be familiar given the earlier discussions of Blavatsky’s Great
White Brotherhood and the space brothers of the Ballards and Adamski.
283 M. Keith Booker, Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of
Postmodernism, 1946-1964 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001).
195