A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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constantly rush away from rational comprehension and control. Traditional psychoanalysis struggles to unearth and normalize those internalized and repressed experiences and sensations that trouble the individual analysand. At the levels of culture and society, and thus more in keeping with Deleuze and Guattari, psychoanalysis as world view and techne strives to normalize those collective experiences which traumatize and haunt collectively constituted and convened modes of being. From Freud to Lacan, there runs a sense of an underlying chaos that precedes and runs tangentially to the successful formation of the Subject. That chaos, which Lacan dubs the “Real,” must be repressed for the integrated subject to emerge. The individual must reiterate the collective human struggle to escape the vagaries of animal being, thus Freud’s claim that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. While on the level of the individual, analysis can ostensibly exorcise the demons accrued through trauma, the Real persists as a substratum which forever, inescapably, threatens the integrated subject. At the collective level, the Real persists as a threat to the socially convened norms and practices that bind together society on a moment-to-moment basis. Any reemergence of the Real highlights the arbitrary and contingent nature of social facts. One way of articulating the links between the Real, the dissolution of the self and the displaced utopian imaginary is via the concept of the Gaze. This seems especially appropriate given the proliferation of motifs of visuality in alien discourses—long-term surveillance, the emphasis on “sightings”—as well as the consistent mention of the power of the gray’s eyes as its most unnerving feature. This sense of the eyes of the Other exerting a special power is repeated throughout the literature, and recalls nothing so much as the eyes of the mesmerist. One example of the apparent powers of the eyes of the Other can be found in the case of Betty and Barney 209
Hill. Barney recalled his first glimpse via binoculars of the craft that he and his wife Betty had been observing at that point for several hours. Behind the clearly structured windows he could see the figures, at least half a dozen living beings. They seemed to be bracing themselves against the transparent windows, as the craft tilted down toward his direction. They were, as a group, staring directly at him. He became vaguely aware that they were wearing uniforms. Betty, now nearly two hundred feet away, was screaming at him from the car, but Barney has no recollection of hearing this. The binoculars seemed glued to his eyes. Then, on some invisible, inaudible signal, every member of the crew stepped back from the window toward a large panel a few feet behind the window line. Only one remained looking at him, apparently a leader. In the binoculars, Barney could see appendages in action among the apparent crew at what seemed to be a control board behind the windows of the craft. Slowly the craft descended lower, a few feet at a time, as the fins bearing the two red lights spread out further on the sides of the craft, an extension lowered from the underside, perhaps a ladder, he could not be sure. He sharpened the focus of the binoculars on the one face remaining at the window. His memory at this point is blurred. For a reason he cannot explain, he was certain he was about to be captured. He tried to pull the glasses away from his eyes, to turn away, but he couldn’t. As the focus became sharp, he remembers the eyes of the one crew member who stared down at him. Barney had never seen eyes like that before. 301 Barney later stated, “I was told to close my eyes because I saw two eyes coming close to mine. And I felt like the eyes had pushed into my eyes.” 302 This sense of being seen as invasive is a common trope in tales of abduction and as we shall see is one point of entry into the utopian implications of the phenomenon. Travis Walton, another celebrated and controversial abductee, recalled that his alien interlocutors “had no eyebrows, no eyelashes. They had very large eyes—enormous eyes— almost all brown, without much white in them. The creepiest thing about them were those eyes. Oh man, those eyes, they just stared through me.” 303 One Streiber correspondent, whose communiqué is reprinted in The Communion Letters, recalls awakening and experiencing the 301 Fuller, 16-17. 302 Fuller, 118-119, 123-124. 303 Jerome Clark, Walton Abduction Case in “The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial” (Detroit: Visible Ink, 1998) 646. 210
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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III. Chapter 2: Contact…………
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oth in their rich and bizarre detai
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Fukuyama also describes the histori
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and belonging that are native to th
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modernity, Weber stressed over and
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While positivism would emerge as th
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figure that serves as a medium betw
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sources of Spiritualism, Swedenborg
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The series of moments and discourse
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estful comprehension. It straddles
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The second chapter examines the eme
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Ch.1 The Dead INTRODUCTION Since th
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sense this dream of perfected commu
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political registers as well. This c
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In the late eighteenth century, Mes
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inverted form) along which the unde
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consciousness that is highly mobile
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up the process of thinking”. 38 S
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umor - and irony - would have it, w
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sense that Swedenborg’s researche
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Spiritualist movement, whose medium
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minded, loves to roam in the woods
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etween humans and God as unthinkabl
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esearches was a tailor by the name
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concerns and from the fact that the
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simultaneously in the world of the
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which God has revealed to them and
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assessed the Fox sisters as the “
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each in turn Lockwood elaborated hi
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as miraculous or supernatural? 85 T
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hearts of men to help their brother
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the corrupting influence of the wor
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All manner of proscribed activities
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dawn of a new era, and you must not
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qualities the coarser and heavier t
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full of mischief as any child in th
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keynote in public (and much of the
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masculine traits), the figure of th
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The first was that all world religi
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space brother religion, The Great I
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and the menopauses.” 141 A genera
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Ch.2 Contact INTRODUCTION Contact w
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as spiritual aspirations embodied.
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magazine, the latter edited by icon
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featured female characters who were
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keeping with the recurring integrat
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harmony with the universe (“if yo
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world were still struggling to asce
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hermetic credo as above, so below,
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insistence on the survival of the i
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evolutionary nomenclature of the co
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Pelley exhibited a variety of trait
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Chelas, which in the Hindu traditio
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the Theosophical Society along with
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Ballard was told during his initial
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Masters. Members of the I Am Ascend
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operative in most later “space-br
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promises of evolutionary progress h
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such as St. Germain could make thei
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Ch. 3 The Saucer INTRODUCTION The t
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The arrival of the saucer promised
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salvation through the union of oppo
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potential public responses to the f
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as rationally comprehensible and a
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attached to cultivating a following
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percentage of unidentifieds to the
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extraterrestrial communicant suppli
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perpetrators of willful deception i
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signing.” 210 Gill’s amused res
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practicing theoretical astrophysici
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DOROTHY MARTIN While ufology began
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attention. Without knowing why, I p
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One message from an assistant of Sa
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Dr. Laughead first encountered Doro
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In the case of Dorothy Martin and h
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II space brother religions to large
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he could think of to obtain permiss
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other myth. You will recall that in
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and a Saturnian named “Ramu.” 2
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Page 245 and 246: BIBLIOGRAPHY Aber, W.W. “A Guide
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Page 249 and 250: _____. Discipline and Punish: the B
Page 251 and 252: _____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
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Page 255: Streiber, Whitley and Anne, ed. The
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