A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

valorized rational progress and empirical proofs, of a widely shared set of beliefs and practices
that center on communication with the dead? The obvious response is to class the movement as
an atavistic response to the increasingly dominant tenets of positivism. Daniel Pick addresses a
parallel interpretation in his study of mesmerism. "Mesmerism has long raised an interpretive
dilemma for historians: is it best seen as a late-flourishing example from a vanishing world of
'folk' credulity? Is it convincing to argue that, in so far as mesmerism endured into the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it has been as a 'survival' of some primitive or at least premodern
'mentality'?" 25 In this chapter I will argue that far from constituting a merely atavistic
reaction to the scientific ethos, Spiritualism was in many ways in communication with that ethos.
As a movement and discourse, it took the mission of rational progress to its utopian limits. 26
In terms of the linkages between the alpha and omega of this dissertation, Spiritualism
and alien abduction, the varied grotesques of the abduction mythos do not emerge from a
vacuum. The narrative structures and group dynamics that encode the extraterrestrial as a figure
of utopian potential often stem from nineteenth century precedent. As we shall see in later
chapters, nineteenth century American religious movements play a central role in structuring the
ethos and mythos of twentieth century saucer culture. Spiritualism and Theosophy, in particular,
provide both structure and content for contactee culture (the subject of the ensuing chapter) and
the latter's later elaboration in the form of alien abduction. An examination of these movements
not only provides a cultural and semiotic context for the rise of the extraterrestrial in America but
also is of interest in its own right. The movements in question function as loci of the displaced
utopian imaginary — loci that draw upon the cosmos as a source of utopian potential. In short,
such movements function as illustrations of the utopian imaginary in the mythic register. As we
shall see, said moments shade over, in ways both direct and indirect, into more traditional
25 Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)
51.
26 See John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999). Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
25