A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

generally silent, but when they do speak they do so without moving their vestigial, slit-like
mouths. All of these lacunae create an overwhelming sense of unreality on the part of the
abductee. While the previous iterations of the Other—the dead, the ascended master, the space
brother—flattered human preconceptions of beauty and nobility, the gray offers no such
concessions to human sensibilities. Here, alone, the line of communication between human and
Other traced in this dissertation offers a figure that is truly Other.
As to the co-presence of human and Other in the abduction scenario, both are present in
body, but the abductee enters into the engagement in a foreshortened manner. The fear
engendered by the experience and discussed by many abductees after the fact is so intense that
the powers of intellect are short-circuited. The abductee confronts his captor more so as an
animal than as a human. The animal self that is left after the harrowing effects of abduction is
also foreshortened in a way. The obvious animal response to a confrontation with a being
wholly Other would be to flee or fight. The abductee, while highly desirous of such options is
unable to act because paralyzed. It is unclear whether such paralysis is the result of a surfeit of
terror or the result of actions taken by the grays (or some combination of both). The net result of
the whole experience is an inability to think or act and a level of trauma that leads to memories
of the experience being repressed by the abductee. So while the abductee might be physically
and consciously present in the abduction scenario, she is rendered just as passive as the
spiritualist medium by the terror of the experience.
Some abductees have suggested that the point of the experience is, over the course of a
series of abductions, to conquer the fear endemic to the experience. The sense is that through
coming to grips with the reality of abduction and mustering the ability to enter into the presence
of the wholly Other in a fully conscious fashion, the abductee will enter into the higher state of
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