A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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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. 91
harmony with the universe (“if you will endeavor to open yourselves more completely to our touch”) then all good things flowed toward you. It was the cultivation of sensitivity and occult knowledge (which is provided by some privileged medium, in this case, Pelley) along with the practice of openness that placed one in harmony. The message further echoed both earlier and later spiritual and extraterrestrial communication in that it singled out its recipient: “you are of that company whose bodies are yet of earth but whose eyes are opened to perception of the Truth.” This recurring harmonial sensibility placed the politics that emerged from the nexus of human-Other communication in clear tension with traditional utopian politics. Making oneself “open” was a fundamentally passive, read feminine, practice, especially when compared to the emphasis on organizing and seizure of power associated with traditionally understood political action. The politics of the displaced utopian imaginary were thoroughly feminized. The vectors of communication along which its texts were conveyed were watery in the extreme—entranced, in-between, utterly passive. The sense that a better world was coming was tied either to lifeafter-death or to some anticipated apocalypse in which the world as a whole is ushered into a new era by the actions of some vast Other. Here we see the implied complement to the materialization of the spiritual. By rendering terrestrial political concerns as matters of spirit, the politics that emerged from the nexus of human-Other communication spiritualized the material. As we shall see, Pelley straddled the line between the overtly feminized politics of the displaced utopian imaginary and the more masculine approaches of traditional political organizing and action. This tension between masculine ends (a scientifically based faith, a dramatically altered socio-political landscape) and feminine means (acting as a passive conduit for spectral communiqués, the cultivation of “openness”) was reflected in Pelley’s own ambivalence toward the feminine. 92
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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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umor - and irony - would have it, w
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sense that Swedenborg’s researche
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Page 61 and 62: each in turn Lockwood elaborated hi
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Page 87 and 88: Ch.2 Contact INTRODUCTION Contact w
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Page 123 and 124: Ch. 3 The Saucer INTRODUCTION The t
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Page 145 and 146: 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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