It is an age of aliens, an alien age when alien images and alien copies and copies of aliens appear unpredictably and unannounced in places they shouldn't, in places we can't understand, in multiple, contradictory, alien places. In her multi-media presentation, Dean pointed to the 1987 Challenger space shuttle crash and same year publication of books by Whitley Strieber and Budd Hopkins as catapulting popular belief in alien abductions. Dean recognized that alien abduction claims had existed for years, but claimed that with the Challenger crash, Americans no longer looked to space as a vast frontier for exploration. Instead, they looked inward. Alien tales grew to be group therapy, providing a release of cultural tension over distrust of government, science and rapidly developing technology.
Aliens are a safe outlet for a lot of anger and fear.
Abduction stories went from the guy out in the truck to the woman sexually molested and examined in the bedroom. Dean, who holds degrees from Princeton and Columbia University, first came to be interested in popular culture and alien abductions through her pursuit of feminist studies. She was a token skeptic at conferences where colleagues claimed that if a woman merely said she was sexually assaulted, it had to be accepted as true. Despite her skepticism of feminist dogma, in questioning following her presentation, Dean refused to weigh-in on the veracity of abduction claims. Past lecturers have included UFO investigator Phil Klass, anthropologist Eugenie Scott, philosopher Antony Flew and psychologist James Alcock.