A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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oth by the Spiritualist medium and the new medium of telegraphy. While the potential for an electrical system had been demonstrated by a variety of scientists as early as 1753, it was 1844 when Samuel B. Morse sent the first message on the trial telegraphy line he had persuaded the U.S. congress to fund. 82 While this was not, strictly speaking, the first telegraphic message, it has come to symbolize the birth of practical telegraphy. The content of the message further indicates the link between matters spiritual and technological - “What hath God wrought?” Spiritualists went so far as to refer to the method of communication used by the dead as the “spiritual telegraph” (which was also the name of one of the main Spiritualist journals), suggesting that the latter was “an actual technology of the afterlife, one invented by scientific geniuses in the world of the dead for the explicit purpose of instructing the land of the living in the principles of utopian reform.” 83 Aside from the ostensibly technical aspects of Lockwood’s “molecular hypothesis” the parallels drawn between the then emergent generation of technology and the phenomena of Spiritualism have a number of implications for our current discussion. One is the suggestion offered by technological advances to the popular imagination that humankind was in an age in which knowledge, technology and progress were poised to extend themselves to the very limits of the universe. Spiritualism understood itself as one element of progress’ march to total knowledge. Progress, in turn, was understood as “man’s conscious ego” moving onward to a comprehension of “more and more of infinitude.” 84 In a world where “a whisper may be heard across the continent,” why should communication across the boundary of life and death be seen 60 For a concise and cogent discussion of the technical development of telegraphy, see Steven Lubar, InfoCulture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993). 61 Sconce, 12. 84 Lockwood, 12. 57
as miraculous or supernatural? 85 The process of the séance was understood as technical. By touching their feet the circle of sitters formed a “battery.” This notion of the battery was suggested by Spiritualist literature not as metaphor but as a literal reality. Physical manifestations of spirits were understood as being comprised of chemical and energetic components derived from the bodies of the medium and the sitters. These components were gathered and assembled by a “spirit chemist.” Spiritualism was viewed as rationally explicable in the same terms as electronic and chemical media. A second implication of the consistent parallels drawn between Spiritualism and communication technologies revolves around the issue of communication itself. In Lockwood’s hypothesis, all things were linked via molecular affinities. This linkage was a (pseudo) scientific way of invoking the hermetic (as well as Judeo-Christian) truism that the world of spirit and the world of matter were inextricably linked, “as above, so below.” In the context of Spiritualism and a culture gripped by a vision of boundless progress, this truism took on a new resonance. Communication technologies made explicit and operationalized the sense that everything was linked, was in communication, with everything else. They were explicit applications of an implicit truth. With this understanding in mind, that individual communication technologies were piece-meal embodiments of the living web that connected everything in the universe, a certain sense of telos emerged. Each new communication technology moved humankind closer to a state of perfect communication, a state in which the implicit links that bind all become manifest. And as John Peters points out so effectively in Speaking Into the Air, perfect communication is equated with perfect harmony. Given the anti-dogmatic bent of Spiritualism and its parallels to emergent communication technologies, one can see why Spiritualism 85 Lockwood, 19. 58
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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III. Chapter 2: Contact…………
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oth in their rich and bizarre detai
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Fukuyama also describes the histori
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Page 15 and 16: While positivism would emerge as th
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Page 27 and 28: Ch.1 The Dead INTRODUCTION Since th
Page 29 and 30: sense this dream of perfected commu
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Page 33 and 34: In the late eighteenth century, Mes
Page 35 and 36: inverted form) along which the unde
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Page 43 and 44: sense that Swedenborg’s researche
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Page 49 and 50: etween humans and God as unthinkabl
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Page 55 and 56: simultaneously in the world of the
Page 57 and 58: which God has revealed to them and
Page 59 and 60: assessed the Fox sisters as the “
Page 61: each in turn Lockwood elaborated hi
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Page 69 and 70: All manner of proscribed activities
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Page 81 and 82: The first was that all world religi
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Page 85 and 86: and the menopauses.” 141 A genera
Page 87 and 88: Ch.2 Contact INTRODUCTION Contact w
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Page 91 and 92: magazine, the latter edited by icon
Page 93 and 94: featured female characters who were
Page 95 and 96: keeping with the recurring integrat
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Page 99 and 100: world were still struggling to asce
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Page 107 and 108: Pelley exhibited a variety of trait
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Ballard was told during his initial
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Masters. Members of the I Am Ascend
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operative in most later “space-br
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promises of evolutionary progress h
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such as St. Germain could make thei
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Ch. 3 The Saucer INTRODUCTION The t
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The arrival of the saucer promised
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salvation through the union of oppo
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potential public responses to the f
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as rationally comprehensible and a
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attached to cultivating a following
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percentage of unidentifieds to the
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extraterrestrial communicant suppli
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perpetrators of willful deception i
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signing.” 210 Gill’s amused res
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practicing theoretical astrophysici
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DOROTHY MARTIN While ufology began
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attention. Without knowing why, I p
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One message from an assistant of Sa
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Dr. Laughead first encountered Doro
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In the case of Dorothy Martin and h
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II space brother religions to large
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he could think of to obtain permiss
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other myth. You will recall that in
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and a Saturnian named “Ramu.” 2
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ecome small, self-sufficient commun
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paranoia in another context but in
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the space brother narrative further
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Adamski—the UFO was effortlessly
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communism. The connection between t
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The shift from contact to abduction
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science. 256 The Hill case was the
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abduction scenario in a variety of
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In September of 1963, some two year
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car and gone into a field with bino
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The cadences of Barney’s recollec
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And he said it was a pregnancy test
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motif also speaks to a relationship
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on a human is smooth and rounded. S
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seems to have suggested that humans
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The mesmerist and hypnotherapist bo
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communiqués emerge not from the la
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David E. Mack, a Harvard trained an
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dystopian, or in the language of No
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In the space brother scenario, the
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Everything is now. The past is now;
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effectively cut off from that possi
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eaching our innate potential. The h
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It is in this desire for dissolutio
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abductees feeling like guinea pigs.
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attack. Nietzsche writes of the blo
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Hill. Barney recalled his first gli
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The Gaze as philosophical and psych
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constituted modes of visuality. To
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traum or dream further indicates th
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educed not in the relatively benign
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will of the abductee—all speak to
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esultant exposure to the Real. The
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understood moorings, left to drift
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desired utopian state. The Others c
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were, more or less, ascended master
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Reports back from the spirit realm
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generally silent, but when they do
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to narrative structural positionali
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sensibilities, though one that woul
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of full transparency between interl
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aber, W.W. “A Guide
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_____. “Adamski, George (1891-196
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_____. Discipline and Punish: the B
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_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
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_____. Something about Soulcraft. N
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Streiber, Whitley and Anne, ed. The
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