A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

extraterrestrial teachers via trance states or voluntary journeys aboard the latter’s vessels,
abductees are taken from their cars and bedrooms, against their will and subjected to terrifying
ordeals. Chapter four focuses on the case of Betty and Barney Hill (the first widely known and
discussed case of abduction) and the basic abduction scenario and examines the question of how
such a horrific scenario can possibly be read as utopian. Given the nightmarish nature of alien
abduction as described by its ostensible victims it is hard to imagine it as a process that leads
toward the transcendence of need. The interpretive work that links horror and utopia comprises
the latter portion of this closing chapter.
Genealogy tells the history of the present. But given that ruminations on the Other are
simultaneously workings through of contemporary social fears and desires, my account attends
to the situatedness of each iteration of alien-human communication as well as to its implications
for the current case of alien abduction. This project is concerned centrally with analyzing
different cultural moments in an ongoing history of communication between the human and the
radically Other, from Mesmerism and Spiritualism, through Space Brother religions and alien
abductions. The stories that recount and surround these instances of communication constitute
the basic object of analysis for this project—an analysis I hope will yield insight into our own
shifting understandings of the self, the utopian and the Other. There are many stories and many
moments that might begin such a project. Let us begin with one.
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