This thoughtful and penetrating volume is the newest contribution to a suddenly fashionable exploration of the UFO subculture in academia, this time in a cultural studies vein, but with high potential interest for folklorists and other social scientists.
Beginning with the publication in 1966 of Betty and Barney Hill’s report of abduction, examination, and release by extraterrestrials, and accelerating madly after the publication of Whitley Strieber’s best-selling Communion in 1987, the idea of UFO abduction smells of nonsense and fantasy to many Americans. But it is the core narrative of a well-established subculture that perpetuates itself through interest and support groups, UFO investigation organisations, and print and electronic media, embracing hundreds or, quite probably, thousands of supposed “abductees” nationwide. Brown attempts a cultural analysis of this phenomenon, drawing on fieldwork and interviews with abductees in the New York City area.
This book offers no startling new theories, but takes on major themes in the abduction mythos in thought-provoking ways. Especially incisive is Brown’s analysis of the shady business of “recovered memory” hypnosis—the most prominent source of abduction narratives. She quite rightly casts doubt on the reliability of hypnotically retrieved memories and relates the phenomenon to more high-profile debates about recovered memories in (quite earthly) sexual-abuse cases. She draws parallels between the paralysis, mind control, and emotional scars inflicted by abducting aliens and the dynamic between the same (typically female) abductees and their (usually male) hypnotists. This parallel is curiously neglected in most of the academic and non-academic literature on the subject.
UFO investigators themselves have perhaps steered clear of this observation because of themes of sexual assault that characterise much of the narrative content in UFO abductions. Indeed, Brown refers to abductees as “terrestrial bottoms” (p. 51) acting out “sci fi porn” (p. 50), and what does that say if the aliens are really metaphorical therapists?
Some folkloristically inclined readers, however, will be frustrated that Brown maintains this discussion mostly on a hermeneutic level—rather than attempting to understand the mechanics of how these narratives are thus generated—while psychologists will lament that Brown misses the opportunity to connect this discussion to the vast and timely literature on the Freudian concept of transferrence and on the sexual politics of the psychotherapeutic encounter.
Brown is most provocative in her discussion of the themes of cross-breeding and technologically assisted reproduction in the UFO abduction mythos. She writes: By positing the alien as part medical technician, part bureaucrat, and part fetus, abduction narratives began during the 1960s to give shape to anxieties about the increasing power of a growing technical-professional class to control all spheres of human activity, no matter how intimate. (p. 82)
In this, she draws together themes other scholars have noted in a more piecemeal way and, although not presenting an airtight case—the stories and their tellers are too diverse for that—she nonetheless presents an argument other “ethno-ufologists” will have to build on or reject. In this, though, as in some other discussions, Brown relies more on her informants and on cultural studies colleagues such as Elaine Showalter and Jodi Dean than on scholarly and sceptical writers from within ufology, such as Peter Brookesmith, Martin Kottmeyer, Jacques Vallee, and the folklorist Eddie Bullard, some of whom long ago developed ideas on which Brown could be building directly. This is a tendency common to many mainstream academics who tackle this topic: a hesitancy to cite people in the UFO field as colleagues. I was also surprised by the omission of any reference to Jim Schnabel, who investigated the same milieu in the same geographical location as Brown a mere decade earlier and generated a fine book (Dark White, Penguin, 1994) teeming with insights.
Brown’s discussion of the relationship between the UFO and conspiracy subcultures contains useful insights, especially her analysis of The X Files, but it is marred by an idiosyncratic historical perspective. Brown situates the current “conspiracy theory” movement as a recent and largely liberal project, arising initially from reasonable outrage over the American government’s Cold War excesses. In so doing, she ignores the centuries-old anti-Semitic and otherwise racially inflected roots of conspiracy thinking and its right-wing and libertarian manifestations in the likes of the John Birch Society and, ultimately, in the 1990s militia movement, which, as Michael Barkun has demonstrated (A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, University of California Press, 2006), was a moment of convergence between UFO and extremist rightwing subcultures. (It is hard to know whether Brown consulted Barkun, since so many of the citations in her endnotes simply do not show up in her bibliography.) My reading and experience tell me that conspiracy theorists in the UFO world are less likely to be reading All the President’s Men and fuming over the Tuskegee experiments than they are to be reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and worrying that Hillary Clinton might herd “patriots” into concentration camps. Perhaps Brown’s take is partly an effect of doing fieldwork in and around New York City—compare the folklorist Susan Lepselter’s fieldwork among UFO folk in the rural west—but, even so, there are crucial themes and influences that Brown is missing here, ones that shed much light on the logic of UFO lore.
Lastly, I am sorry to have to warn readers about the very low editorial standards in this book. In addition to the incomplete bibliography mentioned above, the index is cursory and inadequate and there are pervasive punctuation and spelling errors, which are distracting—although occasionally funny: a reference to “grizzly Satanic sexual abuse” (p. 39) had me wondering if devil-worshippers were molesting bears. However, readers should overlook these shortcomings and appreciate the intensive fieldwork and deep thinking that went into this fine ethnographic study. It sets a new high watermark for fieldwork-based cultural analysis of a crucial body of turn-of-the-century American lore.