A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

projected consciousness—his “astral” body. The denial of bodily needs used by Swedenborg—
the dramatic slowing of respiration-- has traditionally been a key method in the induction of the
trance state. A broad range of traditions have long utilized fasting, sleep deprivation and
exhaustion induced via ecstatic dancing or other means to achieve a visionary state. There is an
implicit tension present in this set of methods, a tension between body and spirit. In order to
access the spirit realm, one must deny or abjure the body in some fashion. This sense of body
and spirit as irreconcilable would run throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century iterations
of the displaced utopian imaginary. The general sense operative in the moments preceding the
arrival of the saucer after World War Two, and ultimately the advent of alien abduction, was that
the body in utopia would be somehow more ethereal and less visceral than on Earth.
Trance was also central to the communication between human and Other in the
spiritualist tradition. In the case of the spiritualist medium, trance was generally either
spontaneous—often as a function of age and gender—young girls being especially prone—or
induced by a third party, the mesmeric controller. The encounter between medium and spirit was
in a fundamental way embodied. Media were more or less possessed. They became embodied
representatives of spiritual entities—a conduit for those entities’ expression. In another sense,
the encounter was fundamentally disembodied—the medium was necessarily absent while the
spirit was present. The self had to be erased to allow the Other to present itself. Much of the
trappings of Spiritualism were primarily focused on establishing the physicality of the spirit
presence. The floating instruments, sounded by otherwise invisible presences, the percussion of
coded raps, the modulation of gravity both in its abeyance and amplification and the visible
energetic fields of ectoplasm all spoke to the difficulty of closing on the basic selling point of
Spiritualism—the physical reality of spiritual phenomena.
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