A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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that would provide a wide variety of services to those who wavered in the “struggle for existence.” With his call for an end to poverty, his condemnation of the ostentatiously wealthy and his secular vision of “Comrade Christ,” the young Pelley brought to mind the social gospel so often espoused by spiritualist circles. The call for a non-denominational Christianity and a scientific examination of matters of faith further recalled the sustained attack on orthodoxy carried out by Spiritualism in the preceding century and suggested a dynamic of disintegration— heterodoxy. His rhetoric would remain consistently heterodox, summoning forth a world in which “old worlds disintegrate, old fetishes wobble; out of the womb of Time and Change is born the fresh majesty of wisdom ennobled.” 147 Yet his calls for mutual aid and a constant recourse to mother love both enacted a more centripetal dynamic. Over the course of his life, he would occupy both poles of the tension that so beset the political life of his age—communism versus fascism—often simultaneously. Like most avatars of modern communication between the human and the Other, Pelley’s vision was in many ways defined by sustained internal contradictions. As he continued to think through his philosophy over the course of his adult life, Pelley showed evidence of the confusions and prejudices that beset his age. While crowing about “Why I Am Glad I Married A Suffragist” for American Magazine and generally championing the independence of women, Pelley maintained standards straight out of the Victorian cult of true womanhood. As Leo Ribuffo points out in his study of Pelley, this alleged feminist approved of his wife’s “public activities only as long as she remained a true woman who cooked suppers, nurtured children, and acknowledged his status as ‘boss’.” 148 Much of Pelley’s written output 147 William Dudley Pelley, Soulcraft 78 th Discourse: Redemption: How the Early States of Man worked for Spirit’s Concept of Society (Noblesville IN: Soulcraft Chapels Press). Undated material recovered from Noblesville, Indiana Public Library’s vertical file archive on William Dudley Pelley in July of 2005. 148 Ribuffo, 37. 87
featured female characters who were adventurous and traditional in equal measure, all of whom pointed to a central lesson—woman’s role at bottom is providing comfort and sustenance to men. His vision of women was one that positioned the feminine as the necessary and divinely ordained counterpart to the masculine. As he would later write, in a typically turgid text Woman gained to her present status of bodily pulchritude, her gentleness, docility, poise, endurance, tact, and disposition to preserve and nurture and mend and conserve, purely from the exercise of those talents that had been subtracted “out of the side of Man” and given an organism for contrasting expression although in constant and continuing association with those contrasting attributes. She is the “missing half” of Man in his spiritual totality. 149 Pelley was a critic of “feminized” Christianity yet prone to grossly sentimental professions of faith. He supported many of the goals of socialism yet called for a firm response to the dangers of Bolshevism. All of the contradictions inherent in his philosophy placed him squarely in the context of the debates of his day. More generally, his apparently contradictory positions placed him in the nexus or circuitry so prevalent in the discourses of the Other we have thus far discussed. Pelley’s rejection of orthodoxy and his calls for dramatic reform were coupled with a strong desire to maintain standards of femininity and an abhorrence of Bolshevism. At the same time that he wanted to challenge the sacred cows of his day, he bowed down before them. Placing a high value on social decorum and standards of gentility, his rhetoric operated both in the register of integration and the register of disintegration, enacting both a centripetal and centrifugal dynamic. In the midst of a checkered career as small town newspaper owner, novelist, journalist and screenwriter, Pelley underwent a conversion experience that brought an end to the internal turmoil wrought by the many contradictions besetting him, placing them in a cosmic context that 149 William Dudley Pelley, Soulcraft Eighth Discourse: The Enigma of Sex and why woman was identified as issuing from the Side of Man (Noblesville IN: Soulcraft Chapels Press). Undated material recovered from Noblesville, Indiana Public Library’s vertical file archive on William Dudley Pelley in July of 2005. 88
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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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and belonging that are native to th
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modernity, Weber stressed over and
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While positivism would emerge as th
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figure that serves as a medium betw
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sources of Spiritualism, Swedenborg
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The series of moments and discourse
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estful comprehension. It straddles
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The second chapter examines the eme
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Ch.1 The Dead INTRODUCTION Since th
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sense this dream of perfected commu
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political registers as well. This c
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In the late eighteenth century, Mes
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inverted form) along which the unde
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consciousness that is highly mobile
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up the process of thinking”. 38 S
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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 57 and 58: which God has revealed to them and
Page 59 and 60: assessed the Fox sisters as the “
Page 61 and 62: each in turn Lockwood elaborated hi
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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: magazine, the latter edited by icon
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Page 99 and 100: world were still struggling to asce
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Page 123 and 124: Ch. 3 The Saucer INTRODUCTION The t
Page 125 and 126: The arrival of the saucer promised
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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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