ABSTRACT
While scholars have analyzed the language of the contactee–abductee dialectic in terms of its persuasive potential, this chapter examines the blurring of boundaries between contactee and abductee in accounts of sexual encounters (or interspecies sex) by artist David Huggins and writer Whitley Strieber. Rhetorically situating this experience within the context of both spiritual autobiography and the Christian conversion narrative, the author explores how issues of consent, subjectivity, and bodily autonomy shape their remarkable tales of these two men. Like the more classic accounts of religious conversion, Huggins’s and Strieber’s encounters with an eroticized Other undermine clear-cut distinctions between agency and passivity in reports of transcendent experience, mixing together desire and fear.
