A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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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 227
were, more or less, ascended masters from other planets. Here the strangeness factor was increased slightly in terms of point of origin—the masters of the space brother religions no longer hid away either in obscure eastern locales such as Tibet or on other planets, but resided exclusively off planet. All of the preceding iterations of the Other, discussed in the first three chapters, while evidencing an increasing distance from the human, were still recognizable as human. While the use of trance, the intrusion of the other-worldly and the held-forth promises of dramatic social change all spoke to the disruptive, centrifugal energies of the displaced utopian imaginary—they did so via messengers fundamentally comforting in their familiar forms. Spiritualism promised the maintenance of individual identity on the far side of death. The ascended master and space brother promised the maintenance of species identity on the far side of some less defined but equally momentous change—a change that promised to affect not individual humans one at a time, but all humans in some simultaneous leap forward. All spoke to a desire for radical change without an accompanying willingness to leave behind the familiar contours of human existence. All spoke to the possibility of achieving perfection without altering the fundamental self— finessing the tension between the basic drives toward maintenance of self and subsumption by some larger body. The second dynamic, the increasing embodiedness of the encounter between human and Other began at the far range of disembodiedment with the otherworldly travels of Emmanuel Swedenborg—the primary philosophical forbearer of American Spiritualism. Swedenborg, by slowing his respiration (you will recall, Swedenborg claimed he was able to respire “inwardly”) self-induced a trance state, via which he was able to astrally travel throughout the cosmos. In this instance contact played out in a fully disembodied fashion—with Swedenborg acting via his 228
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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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ecome small, self-sufficient commun
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paranoia in another context but in
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the space brother narrative further
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Adamski—the UFO was effortlessly
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communism. The connection between t
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The shift from contact to abduction
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science. 256 The Hill case was the
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abduction scenario in a variety of
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In September of 1963, some two year
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Page 191 and 192: seems to have suggested that humans
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Page 217 and 218: The Gaze as philosophical and psych
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Page 231: desired utopian state. The Others c
Page 235 and 236: Reports back from the spirit realm
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Page 245 and 246: BIBLIOGRAPHY Aber, W.W. “A Guide
Page 247 and 248: _____. “Adamski, George (1891-196
Page 249 and 250: _____. Discipline and Punish: the B
Page 251 and 252: _____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
Page 253 and 254: _____. Something about Soulcraft. N
Page 255: Streiber, Whitley and Anne, ed. The
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A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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