A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

The Extraterrestrial in US Culture by Mark Harrison BA Indiana University 1989 MA University of Pittsburgh 1997 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2006 UNIVERSITY 0F PITTSBURGH Arts and Sciences This dissertation was presented by Mark Harrison It was defended on April 3, 2006 and approved by Jonathan Arac Bill Fusfield Jonathan Sterne Dissertation Director: Carol Stabile ii The Extraterrestrial in US Culture Mark Harrison, PhD University of Pittsburgh This dissertation provides a cultural analysis of the figure of the extraterrestrial in US culture. The sites through which the extraterrestrial appears -- spiritualism, so-called “space brother” religions, unidentified flying objects, and alien abduction -- are understood as elements of an ongoing displaced utopian imaginary. This mode of utopian thought is characterized by recourse to figures of radical alterity (spirits of the dead, “ascended masters,” and the gray) as agents of radical social change; by its homologies with contemporaneous political currents; and through its invocation of trance states for counsel from the various others imagined as primary agents of change. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that the extraterrestrial functions as the locus both for the resolution of tensions between the spiritual and the material and for the projection of a perfected subject into a utopian future. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction …………………………………………… 1 A. A Study in Gray………………………..……. ………...1 B. Material/Ethereal…………..………………………….. 7 C. The Inappropriate/d Other……..……………………... 10 D. Dream, Myth, Utopia……………… …..………….. 14 E. Chapters…………………………..……… ………... 18 II. Chapter 1: The Dead…………………………………. 21 A. Introduction………………………………………….. 21 B. Vital Force and the Somnambule……………………. 26 C. Swedenborg and the Sweet Hereafter……………….. 31 D. The Shaking Quakers and Mesmerism in America…. 37 E. The John the Baptist of Spiritualism………………… 43 F. Spiritualism, Superstition and Molecular Truths… .. 47 G. Spiritualist Utopia and the New Woman………… ... 56 H. The Nature of Spiritual Interlocutors……………… . 64 I. From Spiritualism to Theosophy: The Rise of the Ascended Master………………………………… …… 67 J. Conclusion……………… ………………… ………. 74 iv III. Chapter 2: Contact……………………… ………………. 78 A. Introduction………………………………………….. …. 78 B. William Dudley Pelley……………………………….…... 81 C. The Great I AM……………………………….. ……….. 99 D. Conclusion………………………………… ………….. 110 IV. Chapter 3: The Saucer…………………………… ……. 114 A. Introduction……………………………………………. 114 B. Ufology and the Cult of Material Verification………… 120 C. Dorothy Martin………………………………………… 134 D. George Adamski……………………………………….. 144 E. Conclusion……………………………………………… 154 V. Chapter 4: Abduction………………………………… . 158 A. Introduction……………………………… ……………158 B. Betty and Barney Hill……………………… …… … 161 C. Mesmer Returns………………………………………. 178 D. Abduction as Paranoia…………………………… ……184 E. The Return of the Real…………………………………198 F. Conclusion…………………………………………….. 211 VI. Conclusion……………………………………… ….. 214 v Introduction A STUDY IN GRAY The commanding cultural presence of the outer-space alien and the UFO is attested to both by the number of individuals claiming to have been abducted by aliens (estimates based on a 1992 Roper poll ranging from 4 to 33 million) and the proliferation of books, articles, films, television programs and ephemera treating the phenomena.1 Public fascination with the UFO and the alien has cycled on and off since the 1950’s. Books in Print currently lists 73 titles under the heading “Alien Abduction” and 754 under the heading “Unidentified Flying Object.” Compare this to the 200 titles in print under the heading “Richard Nixon.” Jodi Dean points out that by the mid-nineties the abduction narrative is established enough for The New York Times Magazine to satirize abductee meetings and put “World leader in alien abductions” at number four on a list of “What’s Right With America.” The New Yorker can publish alien abduction cartoons, secure that readers will get the joke.2 The primary goal of this dissertation is to assay a history of the contemporary phenomenon of alien abduction and the figure of the gray (the alien type most frequently cited as abductor). In doing so I will be telling not only the story of the alien presence in American culture but also the stories caught up and carried in the nexus of those tales. Close examination of communication between human and Other reveals much about the shifting relations between rationality and irrationality, science and religion, self and other. The narratives that spin out the details of contact between humans and extraterrestrials speak to more personal questions as well—the stability of self, the vagaries of mortality, the nature of the links between self and cosmos. Stories of contact with otherworldly beings are vastly interesting in and of themselves, 1 The Roper Organization, Unusual Personal Experiences, (New York: Roper, 1992). 2 Jodi Dean, “The Familiarity of Strangeness: Aliens, Citizens, and Abduction” in Theory and Event V.1#2 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v001/1.2dean.html, 2 (accessed November 3, 2005). 1 both in their rich and bizarre detail and the shifts they exhibit over time. Their reverberations along multiple lines of association make them even more arresting. By way of introduction to the extended discussion of these tales that comprises the heart of this dissertation, I will discuss a series of interrelated matters: the nature of genealogy as historical enterprise; the driving dialectic of the peculiar history traced by this dissertation; and the links between the figure of the extraterrestrial and utopian thought. As to the historical enterprise—I look to Foucault, and particularly to his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” as a cautionary influence.3 My understanding of genealogy dictates that one write a history of the present rather than a history of the past. This operative distinction captures something essential of the approach. A history of the past imagines the present as somehow predestined. It is “a history whose perspective on all that precedes it implies the end of time, a completed development.”4 One recent and much ballyhooed example of such a history is Frances Fukuyama’s 1992 The End of History and the Last Man. In his book, Fukuyama argues that liberal democracy is the end of the line—the end result toward which all “history,” “understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process” has led.5 It is this sense, of history as singular, coherent and evolutionary, that genealogy as a practice seeks to challenge. Genealogy opposes this tidy vision by viewing the passage of events as characterized by multiplicity, division and uneven change. The first of these terms, multiplicity, opposes the sense of singularity espoused by traditional historiography, and addresses, among other historical matters, the question of origin. While Foucault does deploy the term “singularity” in the aforementioned essay, he does so not to describe the overall process of history, but rather the 3 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984) 76-100. 4 Foucault, 86-87. 5 Frances Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 2 events that make up that process. The focus on the singularity of the event troubles the coherence of history understood as linear and progressive and gestures instead at the messiness of history as lived experience. Foucault points to Paul Ree, famously the stepping off point for Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, as exemplifying the tendency to imagine historical origins as singular, as Ursprungen. “[I]t is obvious that Paul Ree was wrong to follow the English tendency in describing the history of morality in terms of linear development—in reducing its entire history and genesis to an exclusive concern for utility.”6 Here we see both the tendency toward singularity and the tendency toward reading effect as cause. In terms of singularity, Ree’s hypothesis imagines moral structures as emerging from a single cause—that of a concern and desire for utility. Nietzsche, and Foucault after him, sees morality as emerging from a multiplicity of forces in contention. Morality emerges not out of conscious decisions in aid of some concrete goal but rather out of protracted struggle, shifts in power, mistakes and misunderstandings. As to the conflation of cause and effect—this is a recurring tendency in traditional historiography. Nietzsche launches his polemic in Genealogy of Morals by revisiting a critique of his friend Paul Ree’s The Origin of Moral Emotion. Ree puts forward the argument—shared by the Utilitarian tradition of Mill and Spencer—that “good” actions engender favorable consequences, and thus morals are useful or utilitarian. This contemporary understanding of morals is then in turn read back onto the past. If morals are currently understood as utilitarian then their origins must lie in utility. Thus utility, an effect of interpretation and a long uneven historical process, is read as cause. This fundamental anachronism, current understandings read onto past events, is what underwrites traditional historiography’s search for a singular cause. 6 Foucault, 76. 3 Fukuyama also describes the historical process as “coherent.” While singularity speaks to traditional historiographies’ desire for tidy and recognizable origins, coherence speaks more to a desire

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