A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

of conscious design. It was seen by a wide variety of persons in broadly varying locales, both
day and night. If it was a vision, it was one that manifested in an unprecedentedly public fashion
and in the form of an apparently solid object. The saucer increased the strangeness factor both
by its very public visibility and via the fact that it refused to stay still for any sustained
examination and was ultimately resistant to any final interpretation. Whereas the space brothers
and spirits before them were endlessly voluble, the UFO was characterized by silence both in its
passage and its refusal to offer up an explanation for itself. It was highly visible yet wholly
mysterious—the very epitome of the uncanny. The UFO, like the space brothers, allowed for the
co-presence of the human and the Other—the fully conscious witness and the saucer both in the
presence of each other. It was apparently the apparatus of empirical verification that could not
be co-present with the saucer. As a figure that disallowed empirical verification, the UFO
established itself as rationality’s Other and as such dictated a zero-sum relationship with the
latter. The presence of the UFO dictated rationality’s absence and vice-versa.
With the advent of abduction, the encounter between human and Other became fully
embodied and the level of strangeness reached a point whereby the experience of contact came to
be defined by terror. Abductees are removed bodily from their cars and/or beds, taken aboard
waiting saucers and subjected to decidedly body-centered ordeals. The figure of the alien in this
scenario is most often what has come to be known as the gray, a figure defined as much by what
is absent as by what is present. Bipedal with roughly humanoid facial features, the gray is
similar enough to the human to set off its strangeness. The gray seems utterly lacking in a
variety of ways. It seems to have no true joints, resembling the bendable toy figures equipped
with a wire core rather than bones. Its mouth, nose and ears all seem merely cosmetic. With the
exception of the leader or “doctor” figure, the gray is wholly lacking in affect. The grays are
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