A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

have an ongoing interest in our collective fate.
In the beginning, the leaders of the Occult Hierarchy on this earth are said to have been
mighty beings whose evolution had been completed upon some other globe, who came
here to guide and lead infant humanity. Later, as some earth humans became competent
to take their place, these early “God-Kings” withdrew… As the centuries passed, and
ritualism and materialism accumulated side by side…the wisdom was kept in its purity
only in hidden, sheltered places—in the deserts or in hidden mountain valleys. 135
This is a theme we see carried through and developed in the trope of the ancient astronaut. The
sense that humans have been offered the guidance of, and were perhaps even created by, some
off-world intelligence was most popularly elaborated by the writings of Erik von Daniken.
Daniken’s books, starting with “Chariots of the Gods?,” were immensely popular in the 1970’s,
selling over twenty-five million copies worldwide. Less popular, but considerably more
elaborate, is Zechariah Sitchin’s multi-volume “Earth Chronicles.” Sitchin, a scholar of early
near-eastern texts, provides a reading of biblical and pre-biblical texts to make the case for the
extraterrestrial origins of Homo sapiens. The sense of paternal intelligence guiding us from afar
that animated these texts is central to the contactee mythos.
With the inclusion of these so-called western gurus along with the earlier spiritualist
tradition, one arrives at a fuller understanding of the cultural precedents that precede the
contactee “movement.” Varying from case to case, and vacillating between the purely
mediumistic model and the model of the western guru, contactees were both mere passive
conduits open to the will and communiqués of the space brothers, and active interpreters and
exegetes of the word from above. The communion between contactee and space-brother was a
sometimes somnambulant proceeding and sometimes a conscious (or “super-conscious”, to
borrow from the vernacular) and mutual exchange between extraterrestrial intelligences and
chosen human interlocutor. The space brothers of UFO lore bore a striking resemblance to the
Great White Brotherhood of theosophical origin. This is no surprise in that the first recognized
135 Anna Kennedy Winner, The Basic Ideas of Occult Wisdom (Wheaton, Illinois: Theosophical Publishing House,
1970) 93-94.
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