A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

physical human form as temporary and illusory was repeated across Pelley’s oeuvre. He wrote
later, in the “Soulcraft Scripts,” that “Man has become lost in an hypnotic dream of the physical
life,” recalling both gnosticism and the Hindu concept of Maya, both of which hold that
embodied existence is fundamentally illusory. 156
Awareness of this illusion is ostensibly a
correlate of advanced spiritual states.
Pelley, in his vision, was told he was to be subject to further spiritual communiqués as
needed. He was reborn and would continue to receive clairaudient messages and begin to
transcribe automatic writings received from the dead and other sundry celestial beings. Over
time, he would come to refer to himself as the “recorder”—a passive title in marked contrast to
his other organizational designation—“the chief.” His first successful transcription occurred in a
Manhattan apartment some two years after his initial experience. The message, recalled in Star
Guests: Design for Mortality, recalls the messages of previous spectral interlocutors both in its
portentousness and opacity.
Memory is not memory if we make new thought bodies when we give up our material
bodies. Man will some day know the truth and then we will make real bodies in the image
of God.
Make no mistake, we are those who are now in the light and we have much to tell
you. ‘Music of the Spheres’ is no idle phrase, but the very center of the mystery of the
creation of this, your universe!
Where there is Harmony, there is Life, and all discord is Death. We of the more
harmonious plane which is next above the plane of earth, make this statement to you
because you are of that company whose bodies are yet of earth but whose eyes are
opened to perception of the Truth. Many of us are with you, not alone at this moment but
in many moments when you are unaware of our presence. We will endeavor to make
more power for you in all that you undertake if you will endeavor to open yourselves
more completely to our touch.” 157
The language of the communiqué clearly drew upon the harmonial tradition of which
Spiritualism was part and which informs most present-day New Age practices. If you were in
157 William Dudley Pelley, Star Guests: Design for Mortality (Noblesville IN: Soulcraft Chapels Press, 1950) 10.
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