making
love was strange in my bed
“Roomful of Mirrors,” Jimi Hendrix
Untitled
Ink on Vellum
1981
By all reports Jimi Hendrix devoured the works of the1952 Hugo Award
winning sci-fi-ist Phillip Jose Farmer. Farmer’s
noted for being, among other things, an explorer of human/alien sexuality.
Keith Haring’s UFO drawing Untitled directly addresses the sexual
abuse and molestation often associated with abduction.
It depicts in the top background two classically shaped saucers hovering
over a pile of conquered, inert bodies and a third saucer in the lower right
background. One of the top ships is
sending down its tractor beam, zapping one of two Haring figures as they climb
out of some sort of escape hatch which is attached to a generalized edifice that
to the right contains a set of stairs down which runs another figure burdened
with holding in his right hand his terribly oversized vibrating erection while
pointing with his left hand at a fellow figure who is bound and hung from
somewhere above the picture’s frame and whose lower torso is nearly entirely
disintegrated. The lower right
saucer is also head-zapping one of the bodies in the pile.
This drawing comes from that particular New York gay New-Wave early 80s
time whose circle included fellow alien Kenny Scharf—who with his UFO Show
piece “Chiki” even sees a flying saucer in his customized vacuum
cleaner—and self-proclaimed alien, rock star Klaus Nomi.
Haring’s sex-apocalyptic vision here can proleptically be read as an
AIDS nightmare. The alien abduction
nightmare narrative consistently contains anal probing as well as sperm and egg
extractions for the purpose of developing a human/alien hybrid.
Jimi’s alien arrives looking for one of our barnyard animals—perhaps
with which to breed. The persistent
way of figuring the extra-terrestrial Other—when not as African—is as insect.
Invaders
From Mars (1951) poster
One hundred years ago H.G. Wells depicted
one of the first extra-terrestrial dystopias to feature the insect-as-alien with
his novel’s great colony of humanoid ants inhabiting the lunar surface and
underground in The
First Men in the Moon (1901).
Leon Stover, editor of the new annotated edition of the
“scientific romance,” argues Wells’ anxiety toward the international
scientific management movement, specifically the Saint-Simonian school of
socialism, is made manifest in this loony lunar nightmare.
What may be even more frightening of course is the attendant proposition
of a genuine (unlike his England’s only titular Queen Mother) and genetically
entrenched matriarchy—crucial to the Mothership connection.
Insects, Communism, Matriarchy—Oh My!
Invaders from Mars presents
a similar scenario and fear as the Queen head-in-the-jar Martian Leader
“Intelligence” rules over her zombie drones.
Each actor curiously mispronounces the name “mutant” that they assign
the drones, insisting on calling them “mute-ants.” The anxiety operating in these alien-insect bad dreams
is the (particularly American) free market-capital fear that democracy’s core
belief in individualism in under attack by communism’s ant colony/bee hive
mentality. In his analysis of a patient’s alien spider dream, my authority on
UFO and alien anxiety writes of the commonly held “hypothesis that Ufos are a
species of insect coming from another planet and possessing a shell or carapace
that shines like metal.” Jung remarks that he was “struck” how “the
peculiar behaviour of the UFOs was reminiscent of certain insects.”
He continues in a footnote: “Sievers, Flying
Saucers uber Sudafrika, mentions Gerald Heard’s hypothesis that they are a
species of bees from Mars (Is Another
World Watching? The Riddle of the Flying Saucers).
Harold T. Wilkins, in Flying
Saucers on the Attack, mentions a report of a `rain of threads,’ supposed
to come from unknown spiders.” Jung
provides the key to this nervous insect projection: “Spiders, like all animals
that are not warm-blooded or have no cerebrospinal nervous system, function in
dreams as symbols of a profoundly alien psychic world.”20 The Angry Red
Planet (1959) connects as well with this Mothership fear by presenting us
with a curiously ugly Martian bat-lobster-spider hybrid.
The film also assigns comeuppance to a wimpy, peace-loving and
alien-loving professor (Les Tremayne) donned in beatnik-commie goatee.
Artist and experiencer John Velez, when pushed by Nova On-Line to come out with his theory regarding these abductions,
finally goes on record with the following alien/human hybrid hypothesis:
VELEZ: All right, this is pure speculation on my
part. Because I don't think anybody knows for sure. With the exception of the
aliens and maybe Uncle Sam—and they're not talking. What I think is going on
is, I believe these creatures have always been here. I believe their role is
basically a caretaker role. I believe that their race is incapable of
reproducing itself. And that these beings have lived in a symbiotic relationship
with mankind throughout the ages. They need us in order to reproduce themselves.
I believe that that's what the hybrids are. I believe the hybrids are just
simply more of them. I honestly can't say, with any authority, that they're from
another world—although, they may be originally—or what their ultimate
purposes are here. I mean all of this could very well be a preamble to invasion,
for all I know. 21