Posted: Sep 23, 2015 1:20 pm
crank wrote:That read a lot like something out of Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, by Alan Sokal, or maybe just overblown litspeak, but too dense for me to care to slog through.
Alan Sokal was satirizing litspeak with his famous quantum-gravity hoax. Here's the abstract of the OP's paper:
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.
I'm not very familiar with spiritualists' ideas of the spirit world, so I can't say how utopian any of them are. There were a few spiritualists who channeled extraterrestrials, like Hélène Smith, who claimed around 1900 that she channeled Martians. More recently, many UFO contactees do many or all of their contacts in that fashion.
Utopianism is rather obvious in many "Space Brother" UFO contactees' reports. Many of them feature societies much like Star Trek's United Federation of Planets, with its spacefaring techno-utopianism. That's rather obvious in George Adamski's "Inside the Spaceships", and some of Billy Meier's numerous contact reports also have that quality.
However, it's hard to see much utopianism in the extraterrestrial-spacecraft hypothesis of UFO's in general, other than much more advanced technology. The same is true of UFO abductions -- most abductees don't get much of a look at their abductors' broader society. It has to be in good enough shape to support exploration of distant planets, but that's about it.
In fact, UFO abductions may represent the opposite of utopianism. More specifically, some dystopian nightmare with the abductors treating humanity much like how wildlife biologists treat the animals that they study.