Between the Space Age and the New Age: The Adamski Phenomenon and Its Impact on American Astroculture (original) (raw)
Related papers
Extraterrestrial Encounters: UFOs, Science and the Quest for Transcendence, 1947–1972
History and Technology, 2012
Beginning in 1947, with the first waves of UFO sightings, and continuing in the subsequent decades, debates on the existence and gestalt of extraterrestrial life gained unprecedented prominence. Initially an American phenomenon, flying saucer reports quickly became global in scope. Contemporaneous with efforts to legitimize the possibility of spaceflight in the years before Sputnik, the UFO phenomenon generated as much sensation in Europe as in the USA. In the public imagination, UFOs were frequently conflated with technoscientific approaches to space exploration. As innumerable reports of sightings led to a transnational movement driven by both proponents and critics, controversial protagonists such as ‘contactee’ George Adamski became prominent media celebrities. Incipient space experts including Willy Ley, Arthur C. Clarke, and Wernher von Braun sought to debunk what they considered a great swindle, or, following C.G. Jung, a modern myth evolving in real-time. Yet they failed to develop a response to the epistemic-ontological challenge posed by one wave of UFO sightings after another. Studying a phenomenon whose very existence has been non-consensual since its genesis presents a particular challenge for historians. Posing complex questions of fact and fiction, knowing and believing, and science and religion, this article analyzes the postwar UFO phenomenon as part of a broader astroculture and identifies transcendental and occult traditions within imagined encounters with extraterrestrial beings.
11th Conference of the European Society for the Study of English, Istanbul, 2012
The paper aims to investigate the popular culture of space travel and extraterrestrial “non-places” (Augé 1995) where I inquire into the American mindset viewed as a cultural construct and compare it with its Russian counterpart. My semiotic and cultural studies analysis is based on varied cosmic impressions contained in selected space representations published in the 20th century mass media, including space art, photography, zero-g space art, astronomical scientific illustrations or popular culture artifacts such as stamps, postcards or magazine covers. Particularly, the genre of a space art, so far hardly explored in more interdisciplinary and scholarly terms, serves as a valuable popular culture text representing an array of encoded meanings. The undertaken research of selected scientists, artists or space travelers, embracing Georgi Kurnin, Aleksei Leonov, Andrei Sokolov, Chesley Bonestell, David Hardy or William Hartman, is aimed to reveal certain cross-cultural differences between the two space age rivals, particularly those considering their cognitive view of the world. The core of my analysis lies in cultural studies, conceptual art, cognition and philosophy of culture whose mutual premise is that culture shapes one’s mindset and that the spiritual, i.e. common patterns of human thought and behaviour, is reflected in the material (see, e.g. Donald 1997). Founded on such an assumption, my study seeks to determine whether a commonly proposed distinction between the American pragmatism and the Russian mysticism exists in the realm of both nations’ popular culture of space representations, functioning here as cultural-cognitive constructs. Also, the paper attempts to establish which national heritage domains certain dissimilarities might have derived from, examining, e.g. the movement of the Russian Cosmism, the Russian Orthodox Church philosophy, the American tradition of frontier experience as well as religious and pragmatic thought, the rise of the U.S. observational cosmology or the global village phenomenon (see, e.g. Gavin-Blakeley 1976).
Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century
2018
Imagining Outer Space makes a captivating advance into the cultural history of outer space and extraterrestrial life in the European imagination. How was outer space conceived and communicated? What promises of interplanetary expansion and cosmic colonization propelled the project of human spaceflight to the forefront of twentieth-century modernity? In what way has West-European astroculture been affected by the continuous exploration of outer space? Tracing the current thriving interest in spatiality to early attempts at exploring imaginary worlds beyond our own, the book analyzes contact points between science and fiction from a transdisciplinary perspective and examines sites and situations where utopian images and futuristic technologies contributed to the omnipresence of fantasmatic thought. Bringing together state-of-the-art work in this emerging field of historical research, Imagining Outer Space breaks new ground in the historicization of the Space Age.
European Astrofuturism, Cosmic Provincialism: Historicizing the Space Age
Alexander C.T. Geppert (ed.): Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century, 2012
Ubiquitous, limitless and ever-expanding as it may be, outer space has a history too. Although it is virtually impossible to experience outer space in a direct, unmediated manner, historians can study how it was represented, communicated and perceived. In addition to presenting the core questions that drive the Imagining Outer Space volume this chapter introduces the umbrella concept of ‘astroculture,’ discusses the necessity to ‘Europeanize’ space history and suggests to regard ‘science fiction’ and ‘science fact’ as complementary rather than contradictory. The article also draws attention to two further characteristics of twentieth-century astroculture, that is its futuristic, often explicitly utopian strand as well as a strong transcendental, if not outspokenly religious undercurrent.
For decades, social scientists have explained the emergence of flying saucers in 1947 as a by-product of the cold war context. They claimed that people were influenced by cold war and "saw" Russian flying disks while the rest of the population, scared by the context, believed in the reality of these saucers. In this paper, I show that the explanation in terms of cold war influence does not explain the situation. For several reason. First because people in 1947 were not afraid of saucers, they spent their time making jokes about them. Only 1% of the people interrogated for a Gallup poll on the subjects mentioned the Russians as an explanation. This fact can be clearly understood when we compare the flying disks wave of 1947 and the ghost rockets wave on 1946 in Europe. We see that the reactions to the two events were very different. While Europeans took very seriously the existence of ghost rockets on 1946, the American public didn't take seriously the disks in 1947. We may therefore think that the cold war explanation works for the ghost rockets and not for the disks, but the situation is a little more complex. This cold war explanation should be discussed for a second reason: sociology and social history cannot use explanation in terms of influence because social actors are not sponges that absorb the context: they define it, they discuss it, they chose among the elements from that context that they will take seriously and that they will reject. Social studies of subjects like UFOs as a lot to learn from the tools developed by social students of science. [note: this paper is a corrected version of a paper previously published in 2012 in the firs hardcover edition of the book in which it is included.]
42nd Annual PCA/ACA National Conference, Boston, MA, April 2012
The aim of the paper is to inquire into the Russian concept of the universe viewed as the Cold War cultural construct and contrast it with its American counterpart. My cultural studies analysis is based on the selected cosmonauts’ and astronauts’ cosmic impressions published in their space memoirs between the 1960s and the 1980s as well as the interviews with some of these space travelers conducted in the 1980s and 1990s by Frank White (1998). Interestingly, the genre of a space memoir, which might seem to serve merely as a propagandistic medium, turns out to be a valuable popular culture text representing a variety of encoded meanings. Their core lies in a psychological-cultural notion of the “overview effect” coined by Frank White (1998), depicting a multidimensional nature of the experience of space travel. Founded on such a premise, my study argues that there is a clear distinction between the Russian Cosmos (High Frontier) and the American Space (Final Frontier), functioning both as mental and cultural constructs in the two nations’ cognitive view of the universe. It also suggests that these distinct patterns might stem from an unquestionable disparateness of the American and the Russian cultures. Particularly, they may have derived from specific philosophical systems, namely the Russian cosmism and the American tradition of pragmatic and religious thought as well as the nations’ long term development of space research and exploration such as the emergence of the US observational cosmology at the turn of the 20th century.
• „Waiting for the ‘Big Beam’: UFO Religions and ‘Ufological’ Themes in New Re-ligious Movements“, in: J.Lewis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements. Oxford 2004, 419–444., 2004
For the most part, UFO religions were not taken seriously until after the Heavens Gate suicides in early 1997. Since that time, more and more scholarly attention has been given to UFO religions as well as to the religious motifs found in the more general ufological subculture. This article discusses the historical emergence of this strain of spirituality out of modern esotericism, the millenarian aspect of ufological spirituality, the quest for a both a new science and a religious technology in UFO religions, and the religious significance of the "ancient astronaut" hypothesis which informs groups such as the Raelian movement.