A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

homunculi known as the grays. The only things “alien” about the beings such as those met by
Adamski were their apparent perfection, their technological capacities and their ostensible point
of origin, whereas in the case of the grays the proportion of familiar to strange seems the inverse.
The humanoid form of the gray recalls the human but in a distorted fashion—huge eyes, vestigial
nose, mouth and ears, four-fingered hands, apparently no true orifices—and it is its humanoid
form that is the most familiar aspect of the gray. Otherwise, these creatures seem to offer very
few points of identification.
The power relation between the abductee and alien Other serves to heighten the intensity
of the abductee’s objectification even further. Abductees, unlike contactees, are wholly
powerless. While George Adamski was hosted aboard a space ship, with all his of queries fully
and politely addressed, and the reasons for his hosts’ attentions thoroughly explained, the
abductee experiences no such niceties. In the now classic domestic abduction, the human
interlocutor generally awakes in a state of panic—a panic that is intensified when he realizes that
he is unable to move. One correspondent with Whitley Streiber illustrates both the sense of
paralysis that abductees often experience as well as the power of the experience to not only crack
open the facade of narcissism but explode the very self.
I reckon my head had been on the pillow for less than thirty seconds when, for want of a
better word, it exploded—the only way I can describe that shocking sensation is that I
thought a bomb had blown me to pieces and that “I” was nowhere and had ceased to be.
After a few seconds, the vacuum of what used to be was filled with an entity of total evil.
This evil thing so terrified me that I wanted to start fighting, until I became conscious that
I was unable to move my limbs. Although I was screaming to my wife to wake up and
help me, my lips barely moved and the screams were whispers. 317
It is the fear of erasure and replacement, so aptly illustrated by the preceding, that comprises the
central motif of abduction. Paralysis—terror that reduces the abductee to his or her animal
self—the rendering of the body as thing by invasive “medical” procedures performed against the
317 Streiber 1997, 120.
219