Jung and UFOs: A Psychiatrist Debunker of UFOs

Flying Saucers : A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (Paperback)

The first English edition was in print, published in 1959.

"Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, is controversial psychoanalyst C.G. Jung's floundering attempt to somehow embrace the UFO phenomenon with a logic that simply does not exist in the UFO realm.

Like some who have actually seen UFOs and who have had bizarre alien encounters with non-human intelligences, Jung cannot wrap his mind around this widely reported worldwide experienced singularity of reality.

Reading this book, seeing his thoughts emerge on paper, one can see the real struggle that he had intellectually with indigestible experiences of high strangeness with aliens; his explanations seem stranger and weirder than some of the actual phenomenon itself!

Jung holds that alien UFO technological craft which morph into different shapes, wink out and reappear and transport human abductees are a mere projection of mankind's "collective unconscious".

He states that although secularized Western Civilization's Every Man has lost belief in any paranormal God of Christianity/ Judaism that, nonetheless, the human psyche has a religious, myth-making function which is unconscious in nature and which cannot be turned off.

Jung's seems clearly baffled when he postulates that at our core, even in especially "rational" or especially atheistic modern thinking human beings, is a deep, secret religious longing.

A "conflict occurs", he claims, because the conscious mind has rejected God; the "collective unconscious" 'compensates' for this by projecting illusions, hallucinations of UFOs as well as hallucinations of the alien beings who pilot them.

To Jung, the global phenomenon of reported UFOs and their alien beings is a mere 'projection' of our unconscious desire; we 'create' an ersatz psychological substitute for God.

We are still looking 'up'......

Jung further also goes on to connect people who see UFOs and the abduction phenomenon with the universal anxieties they have that were created by World War II and the Cold War.

Somehow, human fears are transformed, become reduced into projections of flying saucers, in his words, "a modern myth of things seen in the sky".

Had Jung meant all this on a sheer symbolic level, he would have made more innate horse sense.

UFO observations, though non-religious by nature, DO encompass a similarity to the "spiritual" or semi-religious dimension, in many tangential ways:

Part of the phenomenon does involve astral abductions; one's body is left behind in a car, or in bed, and one's spiritual essences are extracted, 'vibrated' out of one's body..

One reports seeing one's body receding below as one is ascending into an overhead craft..

One's astral essences do maintain all of one's personality traits and idiosyncratic fine judgmental qualities.

As well, some power seeking abductees do surely assume the role of purported prophets who bring messages of occult truth and shaman like salvation from the aliens, who in effect become like new gods.

There IS a strong connection between the ideas of abductees and those native to the ideas of Theosophy.

And there ARE strong similarities between the predatory spiritual treatment of abductees by aliens and the too easily dismissed ancient notions of demonic possession.

However, Jung goes much further than such symbolic associations by connecting UFOs to his personal more contentious idea about a LITERAL collective unconscious, its "projections" and its "archetypes".

To his mind, a flying saucer is an archetype, compared to the mandala, its round shape a universal symbol of' wholeness'.

Jung is always however sufficiently unclear as to whether he regards these psychic projections in some sense real, or whether they are to his thinking sheer internal, subjective illusions.

He does not elucidate whether he sees UFOs as hallucinations, or if they may then exist as physical entities

Jung leads one to believe that he sees the supernatural in a literal sense, but that he would never say this explicitly, because of his trained "scientific" pretenses.

He may have in some way seen himself as a psychological prophet of the occult's salvation or seen himself as its apologist.

The rest of the book is even more far-fetched; Jung makes more highly subjective and idiosyncratic analysis of some dreams and paintings that do in some way deal with UFOs.

Jung painfully squeezes all kinds of "mythological" symbolism from them and finally in this book goes on to

review the quasi-religious musings of an abductee, Orfeo Angelucci, whom he calls "naive".

The similarities between the messages received by Orfeo from aliens, to certain religious notions, are indeed somewhat striking.

But, The Collective Unconscious? !

A better explanation is that "naive" Orfeo had been reading Theosophical literature...

I can't say I was convinced by any of the contents.

"Flying Saucers", gives one a glimpse of how Jung approached UFO paranormal experiences as quasi-religious phenomena, as he painfully could not accept or understand these experiences at face value.

If I were able to write him an angry letter, it would say:

"Dear Carl,

You're so completely "all wet" that you may as well be a fish and not at all a thinking human being; I have for years, personally had contact, seen these entities and their craft mentioned by so many other abductees the world over, and seen them eyeball-to eyeball.

You're an educated P.H.D. trained to be simple minded, and one with gall to preach such reasonable logical nonsense and horseapples.

I know, for a certainty, having passed many psychiatric and neurological medical exams, that I am not schizophrenic, not mentally ill, hallucinating, paranoid or suffering brain lesions for having experienced these alien beings and seen their craft; without question, these encounters clearly contradict everything that you (and I )have ever learned or been told by clearly uninformed others.

You cannot see your UFO nose on your face and thus assert that it's UNIVERSALLY not there but a projected mental image from that conflict.

Others, who know better, assure you that your UFO nose, contrary to your opinion, is UNIVERSALLY, in fact, actually there.

To persist in such logical pseudo scientific assertions, to a person like me who has both seen UFOs and aliens, is an inane attempt to contradict / explain away my direct experiences of such things.

Such persistence is a waste of time and energy and one surely of disinformation; it reveals some crippled faculties of understanding for other's experiences far different from and beyond your own clearly limited experiences .

A formally trained shrink, in this realm, is as useless as teats on a bull....

Convince others who may argue whether their own UFO nose IS or ISN'T really there; I and others who are abductees, hold ourselves up as a mirror to you.

Our written accounts of our experiences demonstate how useless your pseudo logical analysis IS, in the face of these, our contrary experiences.

We hold our UFO noses high up in the air, in indignation at your clever notion that we imagined it all.

You're not a singularity of cynicism; there are also many others. According to one abductee:

" A leap in consciousness will require a dissolution and restructuring of your beliefs about the nature of reality; to live unburdened by an insatiable curiosity to comprehend the mysteries of the universe is quite an amazing thing, in itself.

The history of mankind has been punctuated by personalities who refused to be bound by the grand illusion of space and time, seekers who penetrated the limitations of space and form."

Knowing the aliens reside in a different reality explains why this whole UFO phenomenon is so slippery; "we exist within a matrix of other realities all merging in one spot: the mind."

Aliens and their craft exist.

My expanded consciousness and mental abilities are merely the outcome of my contacts with them. To quote this same author-abductee:

"Their world coexists with our own intimately intertwined and separated by the thinnest veil- our arrogant assumption that we are the sole proprietors of the only reality."

Alien technology, recovered from downed discs and other craft, has already inspired Skunkworks to give us the ability to recreate and reverse engineer: lasers, fiber optics, nuclear power, cold fusion anti gravity, microwaves, stealth technology,

nanotechnology,

microchips,

specialized surgical tools,

cloning-genetic engineering-

and most recently we scramble to deduce 'smart skins' of craft which like chameleons, alter shape and color according to environments.

All of these magical technologies were successfully studied, reverse engineered and imitated.

We have a lot to be thankful for because of Klaatu, even though he is the complete opposite of the charming, handsome gracious, elevated spirit in film and in book.

He, in reptilian form and in grey form instead sees us in much the same perfunctory way, that we see chickens, a crop to be harvested and a not a species elevated to equanimity.

Affection,

Paul Schroeder"

Director of CIA, Admiral R.H. Hillenkoetter: "It is time for the truth to be brought out in open Congressional hearings. Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense. To hide the facts, the Air Force has silenced its personnel." p. 58, quoted from New York Times, February 28, 1960, p. L30

Abductions and their remnant elusive memories have opened all this for Paul, a confirmed atheist, UNTIL Paul saw aliens float him out of his body, in his bed, at night.

Then, he knew that they were interested in an essence that he never suspected that he had, a nonphysical soul.

Our spiritual powers that interest and addict interdimensionals are the very powers that can be used to thwart further attacks.

They infect auras with attachments to themselves and ride the reincarnation roller coaster with human beings, as a sanctuary, to avoid the death that they fear and to steal the spiritual recycling that we have.

Souls are garnered, detoured from our natural spiritual evolution in Heaven.

These joyriding grays can be sinister, discorporate alien souls, stuck to our energies, who bring a new meaning to the concept of a silent invasion.

Why I’m not giving up on the search for extraterrestrial life

When you’ve spent your career chasing the ultimate, change-everything cosmic brass ring, how do you retire without feeling disappointed? I’ve been asked that question, or some variation, dozens of times in the past month, and I’ve answered it the same way I have over my many decades as a research scientist searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.

I’m not disappointed. I understand how little searching we’ve done so far, and I’m excited about how much we will do in the future. Now it is time for me to shift from looking for extraterrestrial intelligence to looking for intelligent benefactors to help support that quest. I’ve done this before, but now I have to do it with gusto. Now I’m retired.

The existence of life beyond Earth is an ancient human concern. Over the years, however, attempts to understand humanity’s place in the cosmos through science often got hijacked by wishful thinking or fabricated tales. Of particular note, the New York Sun hoaxed its eager readers in 1835 with stories about a splendid civilization of moon-men that had supposedly been revealed by observations made with a 20-foot optical telescope in South Africa. Percival Lowell opened the 20th century with a popular, but false, interpretation of canals built by thirsty Martians to save their planet.

But things got more serious in 1959, with the publication of a paper in the journal Nature marking the beginning of the modern era of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. The paper’s authors, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, recognized that the new science of radio astronomy offered tools — radio telescopes developed from World War II-era radars — with which these old human questions could be explored.

This is what hooked me on SETI.

As I was leaving graduate school in 1974, I was recruited to join a fledgling SETI project at the Hat Creek Observatory in California, mainly because I knew how to program an ancient PDP8/S computer that had been donated to the project. I was alive at just the right time, with just the right skills.

In 1960, the pioneering astronomer Frank Drake, working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va., pointed the Tatel telescope at two nearby, sun-like stars, seeking to detect any radio signals that extraterrestrials might be transmitting, whether for their own purposes or to attract our attention. Drake’s Project Ozma failed to find any engineered signals coming from the vicinity of those stars, but it did detect unanticipated emissions coming from our own technology. To this day, telling the difference between signals that might be “theirs” and those that are ours remains a major challenge.

In his book “Is Anyone Out There?,” written with Dava Sobel, Drake describes an adrenaline-charged episode when he thought he might have found what he was looking for. The SETI research community is small, but almost all of us have shared that incredible experience. As our hardware and software have evolved in sophistication, we’ve built in safeguards that filter out most human-engineered sources of interference. Most, but not all.

This happened to me in the 1990s, in the midst of a decade-long search called Project Phoenix. (It was named to commemorate rising from the ashes of congressional termination of NASA’s SETI program.) With the help of private donations, we transported a shipping container jammed with electronic gear to major observatories around the world.

We would observe simultaneously with a second, smaller telescope located hundreds of miles away. This was our main defense against confusing our signals with theirs. For any signal to be considered a valid candidate for extraterrestrial intelligence, it had to be detected at both sites and had to exhibit behavior consistent with a signal being transmitted from somewhere near the star we were targeting.

In 1997, a lightning storm in Woodbury, Ga., where our second dish was located, fried a disk drive in one of our computers and left us with only the 140-foot telescope at Green Bank for a few days. And that is when things got interesting.

Early one morning, I was preparing to end my shift babysitting the automated detection systems and pack up to head back to California when a clearly artificial signal was detected. The Phoenix system automatically did what it could without the second dish. It pointed away from the target star, and the signal disappeared, then it pointed back at the star, and there was the signal again.

I stopped thinking about packing.

I had an idea and wrote a small program to search our recent data to see if we had detected this signal before. The results revealed that we had indeed, when the telescope was pointed in other directions, and that it was our technology being picked up by the telescope’s peripheral vision. But I was so excited that I misread the numbers. My quick bit of programming, sloppy formatting and rising excitement all conspired to craft a different script.

My colleagues from the day shift arrived to join the action. I sent a quick e-mail to our administrative assistant in California asking her to help change my travel plans and to let my husband know that I would be delayed. Then the doors of the observing room at the base of the telescope swung open to admit a documentary TV crew; months earlier, we had agreed to let them film our work. Now here they were. For hours we ignored the cameras and nodded the venerable old telescope on and off the target star. The signal disappeared and reappeared as expected. We looked up the star and debated what might make it a successful host for another technological civilization.

By mid-afternoon, although the signal had never failed to show up at the right time, we reluctantly concluded that it was not, after all, evidence of a distant civilization. The way the signal’s frequency components were changing because of the Earth’s rotation was wrong. We didn’t know what it was, but we knew what it wasn’t. As I headed off to dinner, again and again I assured the TV crew that this wasn’t it after all; they were more disappointed than we were.

Remember that e-mail I sent about changing my travel plans? It turns out that innocent bit of trivial logistics was indirectly responsible for a call from the New York Times to our tired California colleagues, seeking comments on the detection. Contrary to what the screenwriters in Hollywood think, secrecy will probably not be part of any actual detection — this secret would be just too hard to keep. Conspiracy cover-up theories find no supporters among those of us who do this work.

How likely is it that someday, the signal will truly come from someone else? Nobody can answer that question. However, the original paper outlining SETI in Nature in 1959 did say something very wise in its last sentence: “The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search, the chance of success is zero.”

Our 50 years of searching is equivalent to scooping a single glass of water from the Earth’s oceans to examine it for fish. It is an experiment that could work — but if it fails, the correct conclusion is that there was inadequate sampling, not that the oceans are devoid of fish.

Today, our searches are getting exponentially better. If we are looking for the right thing, it will take only a few decades to conduct a search that is comprehensive enough to be successful or to yield conclusive negative results.

Is there actually someone or something out there for us to find? This is another question without an answer, yet. In the last two decades of my career, what we’ve learned about exoplanets and extremophiles — organisms that inhabit environments once thought to be incapable of supporting life — has made the cosmos appear more friendly to living creatures.

The census of potentially habitable cosmic real estate has continued to expand. This is not the same as knowing that the real estate is inhabited, of course, though that conclusion could be part of our near future. After all, things do look good.

When I was a student, additional planets were just a good theory. Today, it’s beginning to look like almost every star hosts planets — some seem tantalizingly familiar, but some of them are unlike any in our solar system. We used to think that the limits on life were between the boiling and freezing points of water, at neutral pH values, at pressures not too different from those on the Earth’s surface. The detailed study of life in extreme environments has pushed those limits aside.

Life has evolved to thrive in environments that are extreme only by our limited human standards: in the boiling battery acid of Yellowstone hot springs, in the cracks of permanent ice sheets, in the cooling waters of nuclear reactors, miles beneath the Earth’s crust, in pure salt crystals, and inside the rocks of the dry valleys of Antarctica.

What will my granddaughter know about the limits of life before her student days are over? It’s possible that she may learn about a second genesis of life on Mars or within the ice-covered oceans of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn; possible, that is, if we continue our exploration of the bodies of our solar system. As for intelligent life — for that we need SETI.

And what SETI needs is stable funding for the long haul. For our impatient species, even a few decades is a long time, and if we haven’t yet invented the right way to search, the endeavor could take much longer. A successful retirement for me will consist of making sure that my successor, his successor and SETI researchers elsewhere do not have to ride the funding roller coaster that has characterized the first half-century of this scientific exploration.

With no guarantee of success, it is difficult to attract the best minds to a career in SETI. While many, like me, are hooked on the importance and the potential payoff of this research, few are willing to bet their family’s livelihood on it. Some university professors have been able to develop SETI programs, but only after they achieve tenure. This isn’t conducive to determined exploration. And that is precisely what the search needs right now.

After decades of confusion with UFOs and other pseudo-science, Golden Fleece awards and congressional boasts about ending funding for the “great Martian chase,” the surprising exoplanet discoveries today legitimize this scientific exploration. We haven’t yet found Earth 2.0, but most of my planet-hunting colleagues say that it’s imminent. When we do, the next question is going to be: Does anybody live there?

Jill Tarter, an astronomer, retired in May as the director of the Center for SETI research at the SETI institute. She is Bernard M. Oliver chair for SETI at the institute.
Jill Tarter – delaware online