A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

the grays’ inscrutable analysis of the human subject. At the end of a century and more of
imagined devices offered as explanation and vehicle for the communing of mortal human and
alien Other, the displaced utopian imaginary yielded an estranged vision of the human itself.
Two dynamics that attended the passage of the displaced utopian imaginary over the
years discussed in the pages of this dissertation are the tendency toward the increasing
strangeness of the alien interlocutor and the tendency toward the increasing embodiedness of the
encounter between human and Other. In terms of increasing strangeness, the first spectral
interlocutors discussed in these pages were the dead. While the dead were strange, they were
separated from the living only by their passage to heaven. They had once been human and in
many ways still were. Communion with the dead was no new affair—ghosts had haunted the
Western imagination through all of recorded history. What was new was the systematic,
ostensibly technical, and willed nature of the communication. The next discussed interlocutor
was the ascended master. Ascended masters too had been human, but became Other via a
process somewhat more mysterious than death. They had become Other via occult training and
practice, clinging to their humanity in only the most tenuous fashion as western bodhisattvas—
having reached enlightenment but making the conscious decision to remain bound to human
affairs as teachers. The masters were not merely dead—in fact they were not dead at all, but
rather ascended—suspended in some state between the mortality of the human and the
immortality of the gods. The masters were more rarefied and decidedly less democratic than the
dead, appearing only to those high in the occult hierarchy. They remained hidden in the fastness
of terrestrial wilderness or in even less accessible interplanetary realms. It was the masters that
provided the most immediate model for the next round of alterity. The space brothers were
modeled primarily on the occult hierarchies articulated by Blavatsky and her followers. They
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