A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

educed not in the relatively benign fashion of Sartre’s watcher, merely by becoming an element
in another’s visual field, but rather more intensely. The example of the watcher in the park
nicely captures a kind of narcissism specific to a media-saturated culture. The watcher in the
park observes a vista that has been arranged for his or her delectation—land rendered as a
packaged experience. This was clearly the intent of such landscape designers as Frederick Law
Olmstead—the building of environments that serve to generate a particular kind of experience,
an experience wherein the watcher enjoys a sense of mastery. Things in the park are arranged in
such a way that they have a clear meaning—readily accessible to the observer. This sense of
pre-arranged meaning and illusion of mastery are central to contemporary media culture. The
end user has access to experience via an ever-proliferating array of media, all of which place the
user in a position both powerful and pampered. Powerful in that they assume an apparently
panoptic perspective on the world around them and pampered in that a world is presented to
them in a way that their pleasures and presuppositions are catered to. The moment in which
Sartre’s watcher finds himself observed constitutes a crack in the narcissism promoted by the
manufactured vista. The experience of abduction does so in a much more violent fashion.
The other whose visual field the abductee passes into is not another like themselves, as in
Sartre’s scenario, but an Other who is wholly strange. Some level of identification always
tempers the paranoia that might follow a sense of being observed by another human. The
potential motives of that other are tacitly understood. The abduction scenario presents little or no
purchase for identification or meaning. As previously discussed, most contactees tended to
report encounters with well-behaved, highly communicative beings who not only appeared in a
clearly human form, but in forms that were highly appealing aesthetically—noble creatures with
blond hair and high foreheads. Robust and beautiful, these beings were a far cry from the sickly
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