Picturing extraterrestrials : alien images in modern culture / John F. Moffitt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Moffitt, John F. (John Francis), 1940-2008.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human-alien encounters.

Life on other planets in art.

Popular culture.

Physical Description:

595 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Amherst, N.Y. : Prometheus Press, 2003.

Contents:

1 A Preamble to Modernist Apocryphal Portraiture

Overture to an Autopsy of the Extraterrestrial New Age 23

Identifying an Audience Culture for ETs 26

Portraiture and Television: How We Picture Earthlings and Extraterrestrials 41

Documentation: How We Prove the Existence of Extraterrestrials 50

2 Eyewitness Accounts of Close Encounters with Postmodernist ETs

More Documentation, the Kind "Proving" the Fact of Extraterrestrial Visitations 59

Even More Documentation, with Even Closer Encounters with the ETs 67

More of the Same: The Hopkins and Mack Transcripts 74

Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy; UFO Historian and ET Archivist David Jacobs 84

3 Betty Crocker: An Art-Historical Inquest

The Invention of Betty Crocker 89

The Invention and Evolution of Betty Crocker's Visage 92

Marketing Betty: The Modern Mechanical Image and the Turn to "Style" 97

Betty Crocker's Invention as a Historical Artifact of Corporate Culture and "Styling" 104

Betty's Status as a Modernist Celebrity and Pseudoevent 107

Betty Crocker's 1936 State Portrait as an Art-Historical Topos 112

An Unlikely Pairing: Betty Crocker and Jesus Christ 116

4 Extraterrestrial Portraiture: An Art-Historical Inquest

An Extraordinary Popular Phenomenon: The ETs among Us 123

The Historical Significance of Alien Visitations 128

The Historical Precedents for Alien Visitations 130

Some Extraterrestrial Visitations in Fifteenth-Century Spain 133

Chronology and Context for Postmodernist Alien Iconography 139

5 It All Began with Betty and Barney Hill

The Mass Media and the Alien Time Line 147

Barney and Betty's Close Encounter in a Derivative Context 149

The UFO Incident and the Fabulously Faked "Abduction" of Travis Walton 157

The Awfully Close Encounters of Betty Andreasson 164

Whitley Strieber's Best-Selling "Communion" with the ETs 170

Coral Lorenzen: A Literary Matriarch for Alien Encounters 176

The Case for Extraterrestrial Nonintelligence 179

6 Premodernist Religious Transports, Possession, and Poetic Inspiration

Precedents for Betty Andreasson's Visions in the Traditional Literature of Mysticism 187

The Case for "Possession" 191

How Visionary "Inspiration" Was Described in Classical Culture 195

Ancient Evaluations of "Enthusiastic Inspiration" and Poetic Creativity 200

A Depiction of Classical "Inspiration" in Medieval Art 204

The Complementary Conditions of "Inspiration" and "Hysteria" 210

The Complementary Conditions of "Inspiration" and "Dreams" 212

7 The Incubus as Proto-ET: The Case of Henry Fuseli's Nightmare

The Sensational Motif of the Sexual Close Encounter 219

Henry Fuseli's Nightmare 223

The Incubus in Erasmus Darwin's "Night-Mare" 225

Eroticized Incubi in the Traditional Literature of Witchcraft 229

British Accounts of Eroticized Incubi and Succubi 237

Hypnopompic Hallucination: The Modern Diagnosis of Fuseli's Nightmare 242

8 Here Come the Flying Saucers!

Flying Saucers and Frisbees: A Psychopathology of Everyday Paranormal Effects 249

The UFO Sightings of 1896-1897 254

A Contemporaneous Reinvention of Hysteria by French Scientists 258

Attack! The Martian Invasion of 1938 262

UFOs and Close Encounters Reinvented for the Cold War 268

A Very Close Encounter with a UFO in 1952 278

ETs and the Millennium on Our Mind 286

Roswell and the Extraterrestrial Pseudoevent of the Millennium 293

Why We Love Hoaxes 302

9 The Faltering History of UFOlogy

Introduction to a Historiography of the UFO Experience 311

Enter the Conspiracy Theories: Prefiguring The X-Files 316

Rashomon Revisited: The Killian and Woodbridge Incidents 320

UFOlogy Finds Itself Perplexed and Bewildered 324

UFOlogy Switches Channels in the Swinging 1960s 331

UFOlogy Rises to the Challenge of the Me Decade 337

Alien Abductions, American Xenophobia, and Corporate Culture 342

10 Nothing New in Outer Space

Swedenborg and the Extraterrestrials 349

Other Earthbound Space Tourists 351

Christ as a UFO Star 355

A Desperate Need for Angels, Demons, Charisma, and Heaven Above 360

Updating Swedenborg with Erich von Daniken and John Mack 370

Labeling and Mislabeling: An Eyewitness Report of a Close Encounter with "Kolfr" 375

11 Some Mundane Contexts for Outlandish Beliefs

Grounding the Extraterrestrials in American Legend and Archetypal Myth 383

Grounding the Extraterrestrials in Reincarnation Legends: The Bridey Murphy Case 390

The Precedent of Ekphrastic Practice and the Phantasmatic Factor 394

Etiology and Demographics of Extraterrestrial Receptivity 404

An Etiology of the Modernist True Believers 415

The UFO Experience as a Postmodernist Alternative Religion 420

12 Picturing and the Modern Reinvention of Occultism

"New Age" Occultism and Credulity in Postmodernist Culture 429

Symbolist Culture: Modern Occultism Historically Defined 434

Modern Occultism and Art as Defined by Eliphas Levi 441

Occultism and the Modern Artist (Even Those Who Draw ETs) 445

Swedenborg Revisited by the Moderns 455

Welcome to the Age of the Irrational! 460

Mysticism and Modern Art Theory 466

13 An Etiology of the Modernist Experience

The Power of Images and the Modernist Mass Spectacle 475

Mysticism and the Power of Modernist Music 487

Modernist Simultaneity in Time and Space 496

14 More Strictly Mundane Contexts for ETs, and Some Conclusions

Reported Truth and the Legal Interpretation of Credibility 507

"Retrieved Memories" and a Baloney Kit 516

The Televisioned Postmodernist Audience Culture for Extraterrestrial Esoterica 519

The Modernist Cinematic Consciousness 529

The Mass-Hysteria Hypothesis: A Postmodernist Mental Meltdown? 540

Some Conclusions, Mostly Dreary 551.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 561-578) and index.

ISBN:

1573929905

OCLC:

48920225