A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

carceral regime, surveillance, the dulling effects of mass culture. The prevalent positive freedom
is often imagined as some sort of self-realization or self-abnegation. The gray and the whole
process of dehumanization attendant in the abduction scenario point less to a revolution in
society than to a revolution in self, a revolution difficult, if not impossible, to communicate
directly. The figure of the Other in the displaced utopian imaginary—at least in the iterations
discussed herein—constitutes a kind of perfected self. The dead of Spiritualism spoke of what
we would become after passing beyond the veil. They were the promise of perfection beyond
the grave. The space brothers represented that toward which we aspired—radiant, beautiful, at
peace with themselves and the cosmos. If only we would follow their instructions we could be
as they. The dead and the space brothers were recognizably human. If the grays, like their
spectral forbearers are visions of our future selves and are barely recognizable to us, what does
that mean? Part of the answer to that question lies in the recognition that the utopian ideals
attached to the earlier iterations of the displaced utopian imaginary are consistent with a Modern
ethos.
Visions of spirits and humans from other plane(t)s might reasonably be viewed as
distinctly un-modern in that such visions are irrational. But the imagined future conveyed by
these visions proceeded along rational lines. The future was seen as an extension of the present,
the result of progress toward perfection. The movement toward the future, even if it did involve
the assistance of beings that have no place in a rational world-view, was linear. It was all a
matter of taking the tools and systems already available and using them in a way that was aligned
with the logic of the cosmos. The vision of a perfected society, in which perennial problems of
discrimination and unequal distribution of goods and labor were fully and finally addressed, was,
within the modern myth of progress, a matter of becoming more human. It was a question of
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