A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

other by the popular television program, X-Files. But that trajectory does not emerge ex nihilo,
nor is it inaugurated by the cessation of hostilities in the Second World War—rather, it is part of
a broader arc that has much to tell us about shifting discourses of race, gender, science, technè,
religion and the utopian imagination. The extraterrestrial native to the past half century in
America is one in a series of figures of alterity that inhabit the displaced utopian imaginary.
Intersecting the more traditionally political utopian impulse, the displaced utopian imaginary
envisions a world transformed not by revolution or direct political action but rather through the
agency of otherworldly beings—beings that always already reside in the “no-place” denoted by
“utopia.” The imagined location of that “no-place” of origin shifts over time. The aliens of the
late twentieth century hail from the far-flung reaches of star systems like zeta-reticuli. Earlier
visitors were ostensibly native to the less exotic climes of Venus and Mars. Those aliens native
to the previous century, the point of our imminent departure, emerged from more traditional
realms of alterity such as heaven, the astral plane and the Far East (home to the “celestial” vs. the
terrestrial). It is in these latter spheres that we will find the home of two key figures of alterity—
the dead and the ascended master—figures that serve as the key interlocutors for modern
Spiritualism and Theosophy respectively. These two figures both serve as the extraterrestrials of
their day and provide some of the basic attributes that come to define the e.t. of the late twentieth
century. The movements of which these figures are emblematic are, in turn, nineteenth century
exemplars of the displaced utopian imaginary.
One central theme that runs throughout these iterations of the displaced utopian
imaginary is communication. Throughout modernity, the dream of utopia consistently depends
upon the perfection of communication; between individuals and groups, across space and time,
between humans and their environment, and between humans and the cosmos. In the modern
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