A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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events that make up that process. The focus on the singularity of the event troubles the coherence of history understood as linear and progressive and gestures instead at the messiness of history as lived experience. Foucault points to Paul Ree, famously the stepping off point for Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, as exemplifying the tendency to imagine historical origins as singular, as Ursprungen. “[I]t is obvious that Paul Ree was wrong to follow the English tendency in describing the history of morality in terms of linear development—in reducing its entire history and genesis to an exclusive concern for utility.” 6 Here we see both the tendency toward singularity and the tendency toward reading effect as cause. In terms of singularity, Ree’s hypothesis imagines moral structures as emerging from a single cause—that of a concern and desire for utility. Nietzsche, and Foucault after him, sees morality as emerging from a multiplicity of forces in contention. Morality emerges not out of conscious decisions in aid of some concrete goal but rather out of protracted struggle, shifts in power, mistakes and misunderstandings. As to the conflation of cause and effect—this is a recurring tendency in traditional historiography. Nietzsche launches his polemic in Genealogy of Morals by revisiting a critique of his friend Paul Ree’s The Origin of Moral Emotion. Ree puts forward the argument—shared by the Utilitarian tradition of Mill and Spencer—that “good” actions engender favorable consequences, and thus morals are useful or utilitarian. This contemporary understanding of morals is then in turn read back onto the past. If morals are currently understood as utilitarian then their origins must lie in utility. Thus utility, an effect of interpretation and a long uneven historical process, is read as cause. This fundamental anachronism, current understandings read onto past events, is what underwrites traditional historiography’s search for a singular cause. 6 Foucault, 76. 3
Fukuyama also describes the historical process as “coherent.” While singularity speaks to traditional historiographies’ desire for tidy and recognizable origins, coherence speaks more to a desire for tidiness in the unfolding of the historical process itself. Events unfolding over time draw a clear linear narrative. History à la Fukuyama moves in an orderly and linear fashion across time toward some pre-determined goal. History describes a solipsism wherein present understandings determine the understanding of past events and past events in turn determine the present. As Foucault argues, “[w]e want historians to confirm that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities.” 7 In the Nietzschean and Foucauldian sense of genealogy, history moves unevenly, in fits and starts. It draws not a linear narrative, but one characterized by a multiplicity of cul-de-sacs, detours and dead-ends—division versus coherence. The present is based not upon “profound intentions and immutable necessities,” but upon struggle, shifting meanings and allegiances, and accident. In genealogy the present is not evolutionary or predetermined but fundamentally contingent. Understood as a critical tool, genealogy functions to disrupt totalizing narratives. The implicit (and often explicit) telos of traditional historical narratives projects current imperatives onto past events and realities. Universalizing current understandings of the self, the human and the relation between the latter two and the cosmos—reproducing what Bataille would call the tyranny of the same. Genealogy, through its attendance to the multiplicity of origins and the incoherent and contingent nature of the historical process undermines and potentially destroys that sameness. As Foucault would have it, “where the soul pretends unification or the self fabricates a coherent identity, the genealogy sets out to study the beginning—numberless beginnings…” 8 Foucault suggests here that the practices of traditional history, as opposed to 7 Foucault, 89. 8 Foucault, 81. 4
Page 1 and 2: The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
Page 3 and 4: The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
Page 5 and 6: III. Chapter 2: Contact…………
Page 7: oth in their rich and bizarre detai
Page 11 and 12: and belonging that are native to th
Page 13 and 14: modernity, Weber stressed over and
Page 15 and 16: While positivism would emerge as th
Page 17 and 18: figure that serves as a medium betw
Page 19 and 20: sources of Spiritualism, Swedenborg
Page 21 and 22: The series of moments and discourse
Page 23 and 24: estful comprehension. It straddles
Page 25 and 26: The second chapter examines the eme
Page 27 and 28: Ch.1 The Dead INTRODUCTION Since th
Page 29 and 30: sense this dream of perfected commu
Page 31 and 32: political registers as well. This c
Page 33 and 34: In the late eighteenth century, Mes
Page 35 and 36: inverted form) along which the unde
Page 37 and 38: consciousness that is highly mobile
Page 39 and 40: up the process of thinking”. 38 S
Page 41 and 42: umor - and irony - would have it, w
Page 43 and 44: sense that Swedenborg’s researche
Page 45 and 46: Spiritualist movement, whose medium
Page 47 and 48: minded, loves to roam in the woods
Page 49 and 50: etween humans and God as unthinkabl
Page 51 and 52: esearches was a tailor by the name
Page 53 and 54: concerns and from the fact that the
Page 55 and 56: simultaneously in the world of the
Page 57 and 58: which God has revealed to them and
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assessed the Fox sisters as the “
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each in turn Lockwood elaborated hi
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as miraculous or supernatural? 85 T
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hearts of men to help their brother
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the corrupting influence of the wor
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All manner of proscribed activities
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dawn of a new era, and you must not
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qualities the coarser and heavier t
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full of mischief as any child in th
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keynote in public (and much of the
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masculine traits), the figure of th
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The first was that all world religi
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space brother religion, The Great I
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and the menopauses.” 141 A genera
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Ch.2 Contact INTRODUCTION Contact w
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as spiritual aspirations embodied.
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magazine, the latter edited by icon
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featured female characters who were
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keeping with the recurring integrat
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harmony with the universe (“if yo
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world were still struggling to asce
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hermetic credo as above, so below,
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insistence on the survival of the i
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evolutionary nomenclature of the co
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Pelley exhibited a variety of trait
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Chelas, which in the Hindu traditio
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the Theosophical Society along with
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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
Page 255:
Streiber, Whitley and Anne, ed. The
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A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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