A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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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). 93
world were still struggling to ascend the ladder of spiritual ascension, moving toward the goal of the seventh heaven, home to the Great Souls or Ascended Masters and site of Pelley’s “Great Release” of May 1928. The message of Liberation largely consisted of various consoling messages from the Masters on “sex, success, and the meaning of life” conveyed in articles with titles such as “ ‘Why You Are Opposed by Invisible Persons,’ ‘Take Your Daily Cues From the Great Pyramid’ and ‘You Can Remember Before You Were Born!’” 160 Along with these banal, utilitarian communiqués, however, its pages spoke increasingly of a “Great Time of Troubles” in which cosmic forces in the form of “demon” souls would scourge humanity of its weakness and greed, conjuring visions of an impending apocalypse. Those in harmony with the universe could look on with assurance, knowing that the Masters and the great souls currently incarnated on earth, among which Pelley counted himself, guided the proceedings. The worst of the demons with whom the great souls were bound to enter into conflict inhabited Jewish bodies. In the spiritualist context, race functioned primarily as a marker of exoticism, with the exoticized Other—the Native American being a frequent exemplar— operating as a source of wisdom. Theosophy offered exotics from the East—sages of Oriental wisdom—but also deployed race in a negative register. Theosophy offered a vision—one that would be a key element in both Pelley’s philosophy and that of National Socialism—in which some races were in ascendancy and others were in decline. Pelley articulated this philosophy of race throughout his career. In one instance he wrote that the jungle black man—not necessarily the Negro living shoulder to shoulder with the white man in a high degree of civilization—is operating mundanely at the lowest rate of vibration distinguishing the strictly human, below which he would be animalistic. The Nordic Aryan white man is operating at the highest demonstrable rate of vibration also 160 Ribuffo, 55; Elliston. 94
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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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Spiritualist movement, whose medium
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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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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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