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The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny

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Lepselter, Susan·2016·University of Michigan Press eBooks
DOI 10.3998/mpub.7172850
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Abstract

The Resonance of Unseen Things offers an ethnographic meditation on the "uncanny" persistence and cultural freight of conspiracy theory. The project is a reading of conspiracy theory as an index of a certain strain of late 20th-century American despondency and malaise, especially as understood by people experiencing downward social mobility. Written by a cultural anthropologist with a literary background, this deeply interdisciplinary book focuses on the enduring American preoccupation with captivity in a rapidly transforming world. Captivity is a trope that appears in both ordinary and fantastic iterations here, and Susan Lepselter shows how multiple troubled histories—of race, class, gender, and power—become compressed into stories of uncanny memory. "We really don't have anything like this in terms of a focused, sympathetic, open-minded ethnographic study of UFO experiencers. . . . The author's semiotic approach to the paranormal is immensely productive, positive, and, above all, resonant with what actually happens in history." —Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion, Rice University "Lepselter relates a weave of intimate alien sensibilities in out-off-the-way places which are surprisingly, profoundly, close to home. Readers can expect to share her experience of contact with complex logics of feeling, and to do so in a contemporary America they may have thought they understood." —Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College "An original and beautifully written study of contemporary American cultural poetics. . . . The book convincingly brings into relief the anxieties of those at the margins of American economic and civic life, their perceptions of state power, and the narrative continuities that bond them to histories of violence and expansion in the American West." —Deirdre de la Cruz, University of Michigan

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  • The Hills case served as a kind of blueprint for future UFO abduction narratives and became the origin story of the genre.

    “The case—which was widely reported by the press, narrated by John Fuller in his bestseller The Interrupted Journey (1966), and made into a TV movie (1975)—served as a kind of blueprint for future UFO abduction narratives. It became the “origin story of the genre” (Lepselter, 2016, p. 65).”

    From Race and (the Study of) Esotericism (2020) · cites this paper as Lepselter, 2016

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  75. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.7172850. Downloaded on behalf of Unknown Institution narratives: and disbelief, 122-23; of Hillview Experiencers, 111-20, 122-24; of MUFON participants, 120-22; overlap in, 54; parallels between, 4, 19; and the real, 54; and speaking styles, 120-22; as theories, 18; as verbal art, 17 national identity, American, 7 nationalism, 137 Native Americans: and ancestry, 76, 78; artifacts of, 75, 108; and boarding schools, 46-47, 50, 58- 60; cave drawings and petroglyphs of, 78, 97; and colonization, 52, 54, 83; idealization of, 75-76; and modern residents, 108; parallels between alien abductions and Indian captivity, 54-55, 165n3; and place-names, 66; and "power animals," 76; reservations, 103; of South America, 77; treatment of, in colonial era, 78; and UFO discourse, 75-76; and Walton's abduction narrative, 62; white captives of, 48-50, 53-54, 68-70, 71-75; as whites' captives, 48-49; and YouTube rap video, 58-60, 78 nature, crisis in, 127-28 Nazi-influenced imagery, 62 Nellis Air Force Bombing and Gun- nery Range, 80 neoliberalism, 163n1 Nevada: air space of residents, 92- 94; land seizures in, 103, 106-8 Nevada Test Site, 11, 51, 80 New Age discourses, 75, 78 New World Order: anticipation of, 136-37, 141; catalysts of, 14; EPA/ BLM as tools of, 106; and land seizures, 107; and slavery, 136-37, 141 North American Free Trade Agree- ment (NAFTA), 138 nostalgia, 157 nuclear uncanny, 19, 41, 164n11 nuclear weapons, 50-51 numbers, repetition in, 27-28 occult and occult cosmology, 3, 12 omniscience, 24, 163n4 origin story of the genre, 64-68

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Authors
Lepselter, S.
Affiliations
University of Michigan Press (US)
Corresponding author
Lepselter, Susan
ORCID
Lepselter, Susan
Venue
University of Michigan Press eBooks
Publisher
University of Michigan Press
Published
2016
DOI
10.3998/mpub.7172850
OpenAlex
W2487878757
Cited by
87
References
25
Citations by year
2026: 38 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 21 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 1
FWCI
2.59
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • University of Michigan Press eBooks (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • Directory of Open access Books (OAPEN Foundation) (submittedVersion, public-domain)
  • OAPEN (The OAPEN Foundation) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • Directory of Open access Books (OAPEN Foundation) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Anthropological Studies and Insights
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices
Keywords
conspiracy theories, the uncanny, captivity, downward mobility, paranormal phenomena, class, gender, state power, American West

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