A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

Ch.1 The Dead
INTRODUCTION
Since the end of World War II, creatures and craft from outer space have intermittently
fascinated America. Space Brothers, flying saucers and alien abductions have all occupied the
public imagination—manifesting simultaneously as lived experience, popular culture and “mass
hysteria.” In examining this fascination in the light of the socio-historical moments to which it
belonged one can readily find various worldly fears and desires subtending the phantasmagorie
of little green men and fleetingly glimpsed interstellar craft. Flying saucers as harbingers of the
communist menace, as displaced fears of the atom’s power unleashed—visions of alien
abduction and the engineering of a human-alien hybrid race as indicative of misgivings
concerning emergent bio-technologies and the specter of the post-human—the fantasy of the
alien has clear, contemporary, social referents. Even so, the apparently topical nature of the
“extraterrestrial” potentially masks its more perennial character. It is only in a broader historical
and cultural context that the full resonance of the contemporary extraterrestrial emerges. That
broader context is the primary concern of this chapter. In terms of genealogy, this chapter
concerns itself with earlier appearances of the tropes that later coalesce around abduction and the
gray.
The familiar alien of the second half of the twentieth century arrived via the “flying
saucer” of the immediate post-war period and its attendant science fiction analogue, ending its
passage across the intervening 50 years in the form of the “gray,” that stalwart of alien abduction
lore, whose popular presence is marked at one end by Spielberg’s Close Encounters and at the
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