"From Outer Space To You"

Image from 1950s Contactees

Recently on my morning train, I became engrossed by this Wired interview with anthropologist Kathryn Denning, in which she talks about her findings on the "very human way" we think about space exploration and alien life. Many of her statements described the popular fantasy of us, namely Americans, being greeted by extraterrestrials who will help us solve our massive world problems. This reminded me think of the Contactees.

After WWII and into the 50s, pop culture and pulp fiction trended on heavily on UFO and ET encounters. Enjoyed by those entertained and inspired by it, shunned by the unimaginative and the unwilling to speculate, this subgenre of sci fi developed at an apt time, after WWII. To put it in modern slang, that's when "shit got real." 

Imagine having been born sometime between the late 19th century to the 1930s. You would have witnessed the introduction of cars, radio and/or television, maybe even the introduction of 20th century technology into the 19th century tactics of WWI. Perhaps you came of age during the Depression, passing the Kraft macaroni and cheese powder packet around the table like it's $10 Fleur de Gris. Then the explosion of nuclear science just in time for WWII. 

Shit got real. Image: First News

You might be a little depressed with the outcome of things so far. I feel that way sometimes about the last few years (state of Arizona I'm looking at you). Last few years? Maybe since I've been a legal voter. Maybe since my dad first explained prejudice to me while in the drive-thru line at Wendy's after a grade school play. Personally, I turn to things like yoga, art, and Hello Kitty to make sense of existence. 

Hello Kitty wasn't born until 1974, though. In the late 1940s and 1950s, some people turned to the stars seeking wisdom on how to live in a world—namely America—that created destruction out of the fundamental bits of all matter. And, by stars I mean things like "the planet Jupiter or one of the moons," as stated by George King in the documentary Farewell Good Brothers. You can watch the full film below, lucky you. I recommend you do!


This film features King, founder of the Aetherius Society, and other names and faces in the Contactee movement. While King comes off as an insincere self-appointed leader who puffs himself up by regularly speaking to Shakespeare with his powers of telepathic communication with the dead, some of the other individuals seem "for real." I personally enjoy the segment where a gentlemen being interviewed says that the aliens come every so often and pick him up in a car. He seems dead serious. Howard Menger,  author of From Outer Space To You, is very passionate about his experiences flying with Venusians around the moon before the 1960 NASA moon landing. He seems sincere. 


I like to be open to strange stories and unbelievable possibilities because I don't think I have an ego that tethers me from that openness. I don't really want to say I don't believe these Contactees (psst, I'm thinking it). It's not really what they're saying. They can wax poetic about their seat on the intergalactic version of the UN all day, but it's never less outrageous to me than a board of religious men attempting to put a value and claim ownership on my body and every other woman's body.  

This is more outrageous than extraterrestrial visitation no matter what you believe.

It's not what the Contactees say at all. It's how the really sincere, passionate ones say it. You really, really think that you have flown to Jupiter in a spaceship? It's no use asking how that is even possible. They believe it. And, whether or not it's true, I'm assuming it got them through the rest of the nifty fifties and beyond. 


Is believing that you take regular trips through the solar system with non-human beings harmful to the public? I'm not qualified to answer that, but I'm going to anyway and say, "Yes. No! Maybe?" 


Going back to the Wired piece, interviewer Adam Mann asks anthropologist Denning to expand on the  alien contact story arc—we meet, we fall in love, we get married and live happily ever after. (In case my smart ass is getting in the way, the story is more like: We make contact with aliens, humanity freaks out and forgets its differences. Poverty, abuse, power, and all the baddest of the bad things are gone from then on.) Contactees almost always thrive on this idea, adding that the aliens themselves tell them that humans must to forget their differences or else they will destroy themselves. It's curious that aliens are telling us this, because, well, isn't it obvious? If that's all the aliens have to offer, then so what?


Denning's explanation for the alien encounter narrative is this: 

"One way to read that, in the most general sense, is that it’s a narrative that makes us feel better.One of the things that astronomy and space exploration in the 20th century has done is force us to confront the universe in a way that we never did before. We had to start understanding that, yeah, asteroids impact the earth and can wipe out a vast proportion of life, and our planet is a fragile spaceship Earth.I think this has given us this sort of kind of cosmic anxiety. And it would make us feel a whole lot better if we had neighbors and they were friendly and they could enlighten us."

Making ourselves feel better may not only be the MO of the Contactee. Do we only make ourselves feel better by buying what I like to call "Al Gore brand" light bulbs? Is it the least or the most we can do when polar bears starve and drown? For those of us like me, who have a nice bed to type away our thoughts, is it really that easy to sit and poke fun and speculate? I don't really know what to say to that, even though I brought it up. 

Denning's reaction to the encounter narrative here is elegant. To me it means that it's not what people like the Contactees are saying, or even how they're saying it. It's the fact they they are saying it at all. They are not speaking for an esoteric community off the lunatic fringe. The Contactees' outspoken desire to receive and share (mundane) answers from the aliens with the general public's focus on and shunning of the "science fiction" aspect of the Contactees exposes a mokita—that humanity knows it has "effed" up and that shit has gotten real and that we don't really know what to do about it. 

What do you think?