A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

will of the abductee—all speak to an erasure of self. Some unknown in turn replaces that self.
In the previous quotation, the human interlocutor imagines that unknown to be “total evil.” Most
abductees respond to their experience as a violent attack against their most intimate self, an alien
invasion at the level of the psyche. Surely, the creatures that carry out such practices must be
evil and in their invasion must render their victims evil as well. But the process via which
abductees accept the reality of their experience involves an alchemical act via which fear, hatred
and evil are transformed into love and acceptance. Many come to understand their alien
interlocutors not as abductors, but as liberators. The fundamental transformation of the human
called for by the utopian vision must by its very nature be violent. To become something Other
could not be other than painful. The actions of the alien interlocutors in the abduction scenario
constitute a sort of sublime wickedness in which the self is freed by its very destruction.
Just as the will to truth that drives the philosophical quest to unmask or deconstruct the
“self” is fundamentally cruel, so to is the abduction scenario. Whereas the former strived for its
goal via argument and performance, the latter does so in a distinctly Nietzschean fashion—via
force. The response to this use of force, while initially one of abject fear, is ultimately a laying
down of old conceptions of the self. This sacrifice of self in the face of some larger power may
strike some readers as reminiscent of the fascist impulse. But there are important differences
between the fascist impulse and laying down one’s “humanity” in the face of the
overwhelmingly strange. The fascist impulse involves replication of the same in terms of the
worst elements of humanity: deification of the will to power, greed and hatred. The movement
of fascism is toward “purification” and concrete worldly ends—power, lebensraum, and
eradication of difference. While one might justly refer to the end results of fascist policies as
“inhumane,” what is duplicated through fascism is fundamentally human. In abduction (the
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