A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

uncanniness. As a figuration of some potential human future, the gray suggests a transformation
that goes beyond the borders of comprehension. The central trope that had heretofore grounded
the centrifugal force of the nexus of alien-human communication—the survival of individual
personality—more broadly, the survival of humanity as such—all but disappears in the abduction
scenario. The mode of communication that plays out in the abduction scenario is no longer
cooperative and reciprocal but highly coercive and largely unidirectional, with the aliens
receiving but not dispensing information. Whitley Streiber recalls in Transformation, “At first I
had called them ‘aliens,’ but there were too many things about them that suggested—if they were
aliens—they knew us very well. I did not like the sound of the word alien. It conjured up an
image of something so strange, so apart from us, that we would never come to understand its
true nature, to achieve a relationship with it. And I was desperate for understanding, desperate
for relationship [emphasis added].” 286
Contact, in the abduction mode resists identification as it
resists interpretation.
Streiber’s desperation highlights the existential stakes involved in the current iteration of
the displaced utopian imaginary. At issue is not merely the future of humanity but the future of
very category “human.” Rather than the volubility so evidenced by the dead of Spiritualism and
the space faring benefactors of the Great I Am, the grays—by far the most common alien actors
in the abduction scenario, in large part, offer no real communication—they resist interpretation.
In reading the gray and alien abduction as metaphor for the current state of the utopian
imaginary, it is tempting to read the gray’s reticence, its very “apartness” as indicative of an
overall estrangement from the possibilities of radical social change. The fact that we cannot
effectively communicate with the enfiguration of utopian possibility means that we are somehow
286 Whitley Streiber and William Morrow, Transformation: the Breakthrough (New York: Avon, 1989) 7.
199