If the UFO is a mandala (as Jung proposed) then by synchronicity (again) I’ve come full circle.
Though I’d been fascinated by the ufological as a boy, that interest faded sometime before high school. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that, like Saul on the road to Damascus, I was struck by my own private revelation of the phenomenon’s meaningfulness. At the time, alien abductions were in the air, or at least on the airwaves. Many if not most of the abductees were women, and their stories were retrieved for the most part by means of hypnotic regression. By that time, I’d read enough Freud to guess that what these women recalled was as much a kind of manifest dream material as memory, and, as a dream, their stories must be expressions of certain desires or fears. This insight dovetailed into other matters being mulled by the zeitgeist at the time, the Human Genome Project, cloning, and developments in reproductive technology, such as In Vitro Fertilization. It seemed clear at that moment that alien abductee narratives were surreal expressions whose latent content was the understandable concern women might suffer whose bodies were the subject of such probing investigations and manipulations. What struck me in a flash with this understanding was how the infinite stories about UFOs and their ET pilots were a kind of collective dream expressing the anxieties and aspirations of technological civilization in general, an idea I articulated a few years later just before one of the last End Times dates, the turn of the Millennium, in the following way:
The present stands within the horizon of the death of God, understood as the domination of the assumption of the immanence of the world and the consequent disappearance of the meta-physical, the super-natural, and the supersensuous (at least overtly) or their fall into the merely paranormal. The paranormal or paraphysical is that realm of nature yet to be understood (and so ultimately controlled) by science. This assumption that science will continue along the path of discovery, knowledge, and power naturalizes or reifies science and technology. When our science and technology poison the biosphere, split the atom to release potentially species-suicidal energies and manipulate the genetic code of living organisms, humanity has taken upon itself powers and potentialities hitherto exclusively the domain of superhuman deities. That science and technology, whose worldview determines how things are, brings us to an unprecedented impasse demands they must in some way be transcended (i.e., survived). The flying saucer appears within this horizon as a symbol of just such transcendence, promising that precisely the causes of our quandary will be our means of salvation.
By chance, meaningful or otherwise, following up on the reading around conspiracy theories I did for my conversation with M. J. Banias and the post clarifying and expanding on its ideas, I came to the following passage in Peter Knight’s Conspiracy Culture: from Kennedy to the X-Files (2000) uncannily setting forth those same ideas that had caught me up in that blinding vision of what the UFO mythology illuminates:
…the prevalence of alien abduction stories which feature invasive gynecological procedures speaks to concerns about rapidly changing reproductive technologies, in a decade whose political terrain has been scarred by battles over abortion, and fertility treatments such as surrogacy and cloning….alien abduction narratives in the 1990s express fears about medical science’s invasion of the body as the source of danger. It comes as little surprise, moreover, that the most frequent visitor, the so-called small gray alien, is typically represented in both personal accounts and Hollywood film as a creature with a disproportionately large head, huge enigmatic eyes, a tiny body and delicate hands. It forms an icon which recalls pictures of fetuses in the womb, a striking and uncanny image of the “alien within” that has only become available through new imaging technology in the last quarter century. The conspiracy-inflected dramas of alien experimentation thus say less about the particular makeup of the individuals telling the stories than they do about a society in which people’s (and especially women’s) relationships to their own body is so often mediated through technical expertise, be it medical, judicial, or ethical. (171-2)
Skunkworks 