A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

The publication of Pelley’s experience in the March 1929 issue of American Magazine
found a ready audience. Spiritualism, while greatly diminished as a movement since the end of
the previous century, still held a fascination for a great number of people—with its gospel
broadcast most notably by Sir Oliver Lodge. Christian Scientists (Pelley was later to become an
automatic scribe for the departed Mary Baker Eddy), spiritualists and theosophists made up the
bulk of the respondents to Seven Minutes in Eternity, and it was largely from these three
movements, most prominently the latter, that Pelley drew the materials for his own emergent
theology.
In 1930, via his Galahad Press, Pelley began publication of Liberation. In 1932, after
receiving a welcome cash infusion via donation, Pelley moved to Asheville, North Carolina,
incorporated the Foundation for Christian Economics and opened Galahad College. Both college
and Liberation were committed to espousing Pelley’s developing philosophy, much of which he
culled from ongoing “hyper-dimensional instruction” received via “mental radio.” 158
While the
nineteenth century spiritualists depended upon the spiritual telegraph, the entities in contact with
Pelley had progressed to a paranormal variant of a more current communications technology.
Both telegraphy and radio were technologies haunted by the specter of disembodiedness. 159
Descriptions of the afterlife found within the journal’s pages recalled the accounts offered by the
spiritualists of the previous century and Swedenborg before them. Heaven was a “sphere of
beauty and poise,” yet strangely familiar in that the spirits therein wore clothes and lived in
houses. Further hewing to the Swedenborgian/spiritualist tradition, the inhabitants of the other
158 Jon Elliston, “New Age Nazi: The Rise and Fall of Asheville’s Flaky Fascist,” Mountain Express, Asheville, NC,
Jan 28, 2004. http://www.mountainx.com/news/2004/0128pelley.php (Accessed July 2, 2005).
159 See Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003); John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to
Television. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
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