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The Body As Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction Patricia Felisa Barbeito 201 ‘‘He’s Making Me Feel Things in My Body That I Don’t Feel’’: The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction Patricia Felisa Barbeito In September 1961, Betty and Barney Hill, a forget what had happened to them, the Hills New Hampshire couple under heavy pressure for were allowed out of the UFO and watched it their interracial marriage, decided to visit Mon- depart. treal, Canada, for a short holiday. On their return, Published in 1966 as Interrupted Journey, the they found themselves suffering from unexplained Hill narrative is one of the earliest published ac- physical pain, anxiety, and nightmares. They were counts of alien abduction and a blueprint for the particularly disturbed because they could not ac- veritable avalanche of narratives that has been count for two hours of their return drive, so they published since. Indeed, the outpouring of books consulted a psychiatrist, Benjamin Simon. After and articles about alien abduction and UFO undergoing repeated sessions of hypnosis with sightings reached a peak during the 1990s, when Simon, they recalled a truly incredible experience: they seemed to literally saturate the literary mar- they claimed that while driving south on US ketplace. They ranged from highbrow (Time, Highway 3 through the White Mountains of New Yorker) and scholarly works (historian New Hampshire, just south of Indian Point, they David M. Jacobs’s Secret Life: Firsthand Docu- were taken from their car by a group of small, mented Accounts of UFO Abductions [1992] and gray, large-eyed aliens, led into an UFO, and Harvard professor John E. Mack’s Abduction: subjected to a series of physical examinations Human Encounters with Aliens [1994]) to tabloid and medical procedures, including the taking of shockers. Almost daily radio and television pro- skin, nail, and hair samples. The aliens gave Betty grams, as well as made-for-television movies and what they called a pregnancy test by inserting a Hollywood blockbusters—for example, Inde- long needle into her abdomen, and they took pendence Day (1996), the seventh highest gross- a sperm sample from Barney by attaching a cir- ing film of all time (Handy 65)—also identified cular device to his groin. The Hills also reported the alien and the UFO as particularly popular and that the aliens, who communicated telepathi- profitable sites in contemporary culture. cally with them, seemed fascinated by the differ- Even more striking than the ubiquity of the ences between the couple, especially by Barney’s alien image during this period, however, was dark skin. After being told by the aliens to the uniformity of the experiences recounted in Patricia Felisa Barbeito is an associate professor of American ethnic literatures at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently working on a book that examines the role of diverse forms of captivity narrative—from Indian captivity narratives to contemporary prison narratives and accounts of alien abduction—in the shaping of concepts of race in the United States. 202 The Journal of American Culture Volume 28, Number 2 June 2005 accounts of alien abduction. As in the Hills’ case, choanalytic formulation of trauma as a pathology most abductees recalled traumatic alien investiga- whose main symptoms are a disruption in one’s tions of their bodies—and in particular, their sense of time and an inability to create a coherent body’s reproductive processes, from the taking of narrative of the traumatic event. These discussions sperm samples, to the harvesting of eggs, and allow us to examine how the investigation of the even, at times, embryos—all conducted, ostensi- body conducted by the aliens serves only to un- bly, for the purposes of advancing what the aliens derscore a realization of the fictional and incom- consistently present as an intergalactic interbreed- plete nature of conventional narratives of identity, ing program. In fact, these narratives are abso- time, and history. lutely seething with anxieties about the body, The second section focuses on the way that reproduction, and even more specifically, misce- the aliens’ technological disruption of the natural genation. Moreover, the central role of the body female body becomes the prevalent way of signa- in these accounts is also evident in the heated de- ling the traumatic disruption of hegemonic nar- bates about their reality status, which often hinge ratives of identity and history. Not only does the on the availability (or lack thereof) of physical aliens’ interference with the natural reproductive evidence, and more generally, draw on the truth- process destroy biologically grounded notions of value of the abductee’s sensory and emotional ex- identity, but in so doing, it also complicates the perience. role of the maternal body as symbol of the nat- What, then, is the significance of this literal uralness of the origin and identity of the nation. outpouring, at the end of the twentieth century, of By drawing on seminal essays in film theory, this narratives detailing the traumas of procreation section analyzes the way that the repeated refer- and miscegenation? And why does this anxiety ences to film and the cinematic experience in these manifest itself in such a literally outlandish—yet accounts emblematize the alienating effects of at the same time strangely familiar—form, one the alien. that had, by the end of the 1990s, achieved the The third and final section analyzes how the status of a highly stylized and predicable genre? aliens’ destabilization of the body as a source of This article analyzes the significance of the over- meaning is linked to the way that these narratives whelming anxieties about the body as a source of problematize the politics of the telling and dis- meaning, identity, and truth evidenced in accounts semination of stories. The authority of the body of alien abduction by first considering the way as a source of meaning relies on the idea that the these accounts, for all their outlandishness, are body produces an unmediated, personal, and su- actually shaped by extremely potent and enduring premely authentic ‘‘experience.’’ These narratives, conventions regulating the conceptualization and however, consistently undercut the notion of ex- articulation of racial difference in the United perience as something self-evident, natural, and States. The article is then divided into three sub- authoritative. The body and its experience are sequent sections that, through a dialogue with consistently depicted as products of the power these historical conventions, investigate the ways dynamics pertaining to specific contexts. This in which contemporary accounts of alien abduc- article is based on readings of alien abduction tion dwell on an anxiety that results from the accounts collected in two of the most compre- revelation that the body is unable to ground hensive collections of the 1990s: Jacobs’s Secret meaning and identity. Life and Mack’s Abduction. These texts are also The first section examines how the physical important for my purposes because in using the and emotional traumas experienced by abductees credentials of academia and an academic method are directly linked to a destruction of a coherent to legitimize a much-ridiculed phenomenon, both notion of time that leads, in turn, to a destruction Jacobs and Mack directly engage with issues of a clear conception of identity. This section of reality, legitimacy, and identity as centered on draws on contemporary discussions of the psy- the body. The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction Patricia Felisa Barbeito 203 A Story of Origins: of the new nation by figuratively imposing the The Indian Captivity Narrative boundaries between races, cultures, and territo- ries: white vs. Indian, civilized vs. savage, com- munity vs. wilderness. Indian captivity narratives, During the 1990s, the image of a long-limbed, then, are dramas of national survival that are es- gray-skinned alien with huge, slanted black eyes, tablished through the successful triumph over the a tiny nose, and a thin line of a mouth in a large, various threats (including, most obviously, sexual triangular head had become as ubiquitous an im- contamination) posed to a white woman’s body, age of the Other as had been that of the savage, and they describe a dynamic of national identifi- tomahawk-wielding Indian all the way up to the cation through the writing, and an empathetic mid-twentieth century. Both, after all, are power- reading, of her narrative. ful images in American popular culture that em- Typically, Indian captivity narratives articulat- phasize the conceptual ‘‘otherworldliness’’ of the ed, in a particularly graphic and popularized form, Other in remarkably similar ways.1 These rather evolving conceptions of race and national identity general similarities, however, are powered by a during periods of transition in American history. much deeper and more meaningful history of ar- For example, during the nineteenth century, the ticulating racial difference in the United States: rapid US expansion to the south and the west, the use of a captivity/abduction scenario institu- powered by the ideology of manifest destiny, was tionalized by the Indian captivity narrative. enabled in part by the way these narratives had Accounts of alien abduction are clearly relat- already reinforced the idea that the American ed—formally, thematically, conceptually—to this continent was destined to be conquered by the equally popular and more
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