A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

allowed for the logic of both/and. It was this experience that fully shot him into the orbit
traversed by our tale. Demoralized by his time in Hollywood, whose culture he viewed as fully
debauched, Pelley withdrew to a bungalow in Altadena. Ensconced in the Sierra Madre
(especially appropriate given his fixation on the sanctity of motherhood) Pelley commenced a
half-year “accounting with my soul.” 150 Pelley’s quest culminated during the night of 28-29
May of 1928, during which he was subject to visions profound. Near 2:00 A.M., feeling that he
was dying, Pelley “whirled through space and landed in a strong pair of arms. Two men dressed
in white placed him on a white marble pallet surrounded by alabaster walls and Corinthian
columns.” 151
The place that he found himself was “A sort of marble-tiled-and-furnished
portico…lighted by that soft, unseen, opal illumination, with a clear as crystal Roman pool.” 152
The mis-en-scene described here recalls nothing so much as the sort of bastardized classicism
that recurs throughout much American mysticism. In placing the receipt of occult knowledge in
a Greco-Roman setting, such knowledge is suggestively linked to the taproot of the Western
humanities. Claiming classical precedent is a kind of secular humanist version of “Well it says
so right here in the Bible.” The Greco-Roman ambience communicated a sense of worldly
perfection and true civilization achieved. It also captured something of the fundamentally
anachronistic circuitry of communication between human and Other. Pelley’s vision was
situated in the past via the faux classical mis-en-scene. It held the promise of future perfection.
There was, in addition, as in all cases of trance, a sense that the experience took place outside of
time. His later account of the experience was entitled “Seven Minutes in Eternity.” Lastly, in
150 Ribuffo, 49.
151 Ribuffo, 49.
152 William Dudley Pelley, “Seven Minutes in Eternity: the Amazing Experience that Made Me Over” in The
American Magazine (March, 1929) 8.
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