Moreover, [artist and ufologist Budd] Hopkins discovers an intricate “cosmic micro-management” that brings Linda together with two other people, people that she didn’t realize she knew, people with whom she had been abducted all her life. Hopkins concludes that the aliens are so intertwined in human lives that they arrange some human relationships. […] Each abduction is connected to another; they are all part of something larger, something that connects humans and aliens, earth and outerspace.
John Mack, the most prominent of the positive interpreters of abduction, presents the most extensive vision of interconnection. He reports that his work with abductees reveals the aliens’ preoccupation with the fate of the earth, especially with human destruction of the environment. […]
For Mack, the fact of interconnection at the heart of abduction provides a critical standpoint from which to assess the problematic conception of truth in Western scientific paradigms. Dream and waking states, spirit and material worlds, religious and physical phenomena merge, intersect, connect. Abduction, he thinks, is part of an experience designed to help or enable humans to reconnect a world, a truth, a reality, fragmented by Western rationality and science. This means that abductees in particular undergo a process through which they shed their feelings of separateness and move toward wholeness and unity. […]
Nigel Clark argues that a vision of ultimate interconnection, of “unimpeded message flow,” links radical ecology with cyberculture. He explains that a “tenet of unity or wholeness” forms the basis for depth ecology’s critique of Western society’s separateness from nature. The Gaia hypothesis is but one version of a general emphasis on interconnection that runs through much of contemporary ecoculture. Clark notices a similar ideal in the writings of Douglas Rushkoff and other self-proclaimed voices of cyberculture […]. Abduction runs both theses. Whereas specific narratives within the ufological community stress one theme or the other, the overall program employs both versions of the ideal of ultimate interconnection. Abduction extends the idea of interconnectedness that is so prominent in contemporary society.
Of course, notions of interconnection, wholeness, and unity are not new. Non-Western cultures have offered various understandings of universal connection. Western theory has, from time to time, embraced ideals of wholeness, as in, for example, cyclical notions of history or medieval Christian conceptions of the oneness of reason, creation, and the revealed will of God. Some forms of mysticism, spiritualism, Rosicrucianism, and witchcraft continue to embrace a belief in the ultimate unity of all things. What makes the current emphasis on interconnection different, however, is that it is coupled with a scientific understanding of the world. That is to say, it is not primarily religious or mystical (although there are mystical strands and communities in cyberculture as well as in ecoculture). Instead, the supposition of interconnection is grounded in scientific notions of experiment, testing, reason, and proof. It is part of what Max Weber understood as a disenchanted or rationalized and intellectualized vision of the world. For Weber, disenchantment did not mean that everything about the world was already known. Rather, the world was in principle knowable, not subject to mysterious forces. For the most part, this is the notion of interconnection at work in abduction as well. Abductees and abduction researchers are committed to the reassuring view that answers, interpretations, explanations for the phenomena are out there; all they have to do is find them.
If abduction is, as I’ve suggested, a symptomatic expression of the supposition of interconnection running through some contemporary currents of American culture, what is it symptomatic of? Put somewhat differently, what does it tell us about the presumption of interconnection? At the very least, it tells us that the problems of anomie and atomism that occupied sociologists in the 1950s and 1960s may have given way to a new set of issues around the ways people are connected to one another and to their environments. This, I think, is evidenced by current preoccupations with privacy. On the Net these preoccupations stress personal information and tracking technologies that monitor the sites we visit, products we buy, and messages we send. In the home, these preoccupations often center on sexual activities and the limits of state interference.
More specifically, however, there is something troubling about a presumption of interconnection: namely, it covers over how connections are created and maintained. This has been a key problem with some conspiracy theory as it elides the transition from fact to fact, failing to make clear just how a link is established. […]
If we take interconnections between people as given, we displace attention from the variety of ways connections are produced. This mind-set explains, in part, some of the derision heaped on conspiracy theory, but also, I think, some of the problems in political theory as well: the failure to keep in play the myriad links constituting the networks of information, capital, opportunity, desire, and DNA. Our connections may be products of a system, integrating us like so many PCs. They may be as insignificant or potentially significant as Internet links. We may be interconnected through proximity, inhabiting contiguous spaces in apartment buildings, shelters, or neighborhoods. We may be connected face-to-face. Traditions may link us. So may MTV or our choice of footwear. Although available to be filled in by notions of community, interconnections between people in no way presuppose or bring with them connotations of mutuality, responsibility, or support. If we presume that we are all already connected, do we rely on systems instead of one another? Do we forgo opportunities of mutual reliance or system interrogation?
Some people wonder how abductees can go on about their everyday lives if they really believe that aliens are abducting them, taking their eggs and sperm, and creating a hybrid race. In today’s America, what other choices do they have? Abductees have to keep going; they have to continue relying on a system they don’t trust, a system they fear, if they are to work, survive, and care for their families in whatever limited terrestrial way they can. The helplessness, the feeling of overwhelming entrapment and resulting passivity is part of abduction. An overarching mentality of interconnection might very well bring with it paranoid fears. For we may be connected in ways we don’t understand, in hidden ways that don’t work to our advantage. The challenge, then, is not just to assume the connection but to make the link, to uncover the secrets, to discover the unknown dimensions of the networks not only linking us but fabricating us together.
A crucial dimension of the presumption of interconnection is that everything is interconnected — everything, not just people. […] If we are accustomed to embracing the not-real as precisely that terrain upon which we can release what is often constrained in interactions with others, in relationships whose claim to reality is important, then how are we to govern ourselves once the boundaries between the two collapse?
In its current setting in a techno-global information society, the presumption of interconnection relies on a certain excess in the technologies of truth. It is a product of the sense that the world is a knowable place and of the rise in the various means available to know the world. The abductees employ all sorts of surveillance devices, all manner of lights and buzzers and recorders and transmitters, knowing that when something is triggered, a series of effects signifies an alien presence. These devices are so reliable that even their failures signify an alien presence. Interconnection is also the product of simultaneity; the collapse of space is also a collapse of time. As Vivian Sobchak observes, this has led many of us to feel as if we have “no time.” One sign of abduction is missing time. Interconnection is a dimension of the overall excess characteristic of contemporary consumption-oriented entertainment culture. Anything we have is connected to something we lack. Anything we see is connected to something we haven’t yet seen. What we haven’t seen is connected to what we don’t have, and we know this. We are driven to see, to know, and to have more, to trace out those connections, to find the links to the hidden surprises that await. As with the capitalist mode of production, the information society relies on the link between excess and lack, on our inability to find satisfaction even when we have more than we can imagine.
– Aliens in America (1998), pp. 147-52