In the Air: Problems with Jung, Archetypes, and Flying Saucers

June 20, 2020June 20, 2020 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 11 Comments

Jung’s Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky is rightly famous for being probably the first book by a well-respected cultural figure to address the UFO mystery. Not unsurprisingly, Jung fit the phenomenon into his ideas of the Collective Unconscious, the Archetypes, and synchronicity to propose that the saucers’ circularity was a timely symbol of unity, one that compensated for the existential anxieties of a war-weary and war-fearing populace in the early days of the Cold War, which had split the globe in half.

As David Halperin reminds us in his recent book Intimate Alien: the Hidden History of the UFO (pp. 42 ff.), Jung’s insight was later developed by Eric Ouellet to interpret the Belgian UFO Wave of 1989-90. The Belgian UFOs were characteristically large, silent, black triangles with white lights at the points and a red one in the centre. It is suggested, following Jung’s thoughts on flying saucers, that the pattern of three white lights and a fourth red were a manifestation of the archetype of the quaternity: the three white lights symbolizing NATO, at the time headquartered in Brussels, and the one red star, symbolizing the then-collapsing Soviet Union (the Berlin Wall fell 9 November 1989). Just as the conditions of the Cold War inspired people to see archetypal images symbolic of the then-absent unity, the surprise over this unforeseen resolution of the Cold War and resultant profound relief and euphoria evoked visions of a western Europe ascending in victory over its Communist rival.

As valuable as Jung’s proposal is, especially for a mythopoeic rendition of the UFO myth (such as that one underway here in various guises at Skunkworks), I have increasing reservations about its explanatory power. I’ve already voiced some of these in my notes on a recent podcast with Micah Hanks and Thomas E. Bullard. There, I observed that Jung’s kind of “thinking dissolves what is uniquely modern about the phenomenon as we experience and communicate it now into some vastly more general distillation of species-wide experience, occluding what light the present version of these stories might throw upon our present predicaments.”

Kenneth Arnold’s sketch of his “flying saucers”

If we return to the early days of the Cold War and Arnold’s inaugural sighting, we’re reminded that Arnold witnessed crescent, not disc, shaped craft, however prevalent the disc becomes in the following years. The manner in which Arnold’s story was modified by a journalist, the expression “flying saucer” coined and disseminated, and how those words seemed to guide and govern what people claim to have seen subsequently is a rich case history for sociology and communications studies, imaginably subject to an analytical psychological treatment as well: the journalist’s pen (or typing fingers) were merely taking dictation from the Collective Unconscious, which was answering the psychic needs of the American population of the time, including those of the journalist.

Setting aside this famous, intriguing metamorphosis of what Arnold claims to have seen, what did witnesses describe? In his disputed memo of September 1947, General Nathan Twining summarized the discs’ appearance as follows:

(1) Metallic or light reflecting surface.
(2) Absence of trail, except in a few instances where the object apparently was operating under high performance conditions.
(3) Circular or elliptical in shape, flat on bottom and domed on top.
(4) Several reports of well kept formation flights varying from three to nine objects.
(5) Normally no associated sound, except in three instances a substantial rumbling roar was noted.
(6) Level flight speeds normally above 300 knots are estimated.

At least four explanations were offered at the time (if not in Twining’s memo) to make sense of these mystifying reports: misidentifications due to “war nerves”; domestic or foreign inventions, friendly or hostile; or extraterrestrial space ships. I contend that these hypotheses are sociopsychologically suggestive in their own right, capable of revealing a deeper meaning of the appearance of the saucers without needing recourse to concepts problematic as they are grand, such as the Collective Unconscious or its archetypes.

The immediate aeronautical context informs the proposal that the sighting of what will come to be known as Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) could be accounted for as paranoid misperceptions. In 2020, it is perhaps difficult to imagine how novel the skies were in 1947. The recent war had seen the first, large-scale deployment of air forces and conflict between them, perhaps most famously in the Battle of Britain. Radar itself had been deployed only in the early days of that chapter of the war and was still a very new, unfamiliar technology. Air travel itself, taken for granted today (at least before the Covid-19 outbreak), was, as it were, first taking off. The skies were under constant, anxious scrutiny, by both professional military personnel and civilians. All in all, the skies and flight were new and fraught with threat. Little wonder both qualified and unqualified observers should file unnerved and unnerving reports of aerial anomalies. Indeed, this insight might well be applied to sightings of “foo fighters” in the war-torn skies of World War Two, as well. At any rate, the psychological implications of UFOs appearing to vigilant, anxious observers are two fold. On the one hand, this explanation eases the fear that gives rise to sightings: the novelty of aerial phenomena and the heightened, wary awareness of the observer understandably lead to misidentifications; in this case, there is, in fact, no threat. On the other, that the skies are under such intense scrutiny is reassuring, as well, since, should an enemy attack, the threat will be quickly detected and answered; the nation’s skies are, in a sense, air tight.

A similar emotional logic is at work in the idea that the flying discs represented breakthrough aeronautical technology, whether ours or theirs. If they’re ours, then our technical and, by extension, military superiority is affirmed and our anxieties about a potential “hot” war with the Soviet Union are, to a degree, assuaged. If, on the other hand, the discs are evidence of an enemy nation’s technological leap, the heightened anxiety drives the fearful populace of the Free World that much more eagerly into the protective arms of the Military-Industrial Complex, steeling the public’s resolve and patriotism in the face of such a wily adversary. The same logic might have been at work in the Phantom Air Ship sightings of 1896-7, on the eve of the Spanish America War. Either the airships are examples of Yankee ingenuity, affirming American industrial and military superiority in the face of a looming conflict with a world power, or the airships are Spanish, with the same patriotic effect noted above.

Finally, the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis plays into a similar, if more complex, pattern of reassurance and fear. That an extraterrestrial race is visiting earth with technology far in advance of our own suggests that they, too, at one time, faced the threat of nuclear self-annihilation (they must have at some time discovered nuclear energy in the course of their technological development) but came through; if they can, we can, and, maybe, they have come to show us the way, having witnessed, from their planets or distant stars, our detonating A-bombs. Little surprise, then, the earliest stories of landed saucers reported their pilots were peaceful, enlightened humanoid beings, come to warn us of the danger we found ourselves in. Or maybe, seeing our science and technology had split the atom, we were being observed as a preparatory step in being contacted and invited to join a larger, interplanetary if not interstellar community. Again, all would be well, better than we could have imagined. Alternatively, if the discs proved to be an extraterrestrial enemy’s scouts and probes, then, again, who better to defend us than the Cold War status quo of an America recently ascended to the status of a global power, allied with the Free World? Or, as Ronald Reagan so famously imagined, perhaps a threat to earth would unite her otherwise divided nations (again, mollifying the tensions underwriting the sightings in the first place). More cynically, one might suggest that being carried away by the mystery of the flying saucers served as an escape from more urgent, earthbound concerns.

In all these cases, the appearance of mysterious flying discs set in motion a process of thought and feeling that leads to either a relief of anxiety or a redoubled resolve in the face of it. In this light, one wonders how rational at base the three or four hypotheses cited above are, how much they are inspired or motivated by the anxieties of the time. Framing the advent of flying saucers and, later, UFOs, in the moment of their appearance in this way enables an understanding that does not stand in need of more general, and by extension more questionable, psychological theories. Indeed, the UFO becomes all the more revealing being related to its more specific spatiotemporal (historical) locality than if it is spun off to hover over all times and places, emerging from a region beyond space and time, the Collective Unconscious.

However tempting, it would be disingenuous to leave the matter here. In its own terms, the approach I venture here demands, too, that the phenomenon be examined with an eye to the local culture and what is “in the air” at the time, much the way Halperin and Ouellet reconfigure their account when they move it from the mainland United States to Belgium. This is to say, the phenomenon will always reveal something about the culture over which it appears, an insight not lost on those who mark the local inflections that differentiate North and South American ufology. The reflections, above, are, therefore, pertinent, strictly, to postwar North America. More interestingly, the canny reader will be quick to point out how the hypotheses offered above hover between three or four, a classic quaternity….

Revelation in Reverse, or Myth, Synchronicity, and the Collective Unconscious

February 18, 2019June 3, 2020 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 1 Comment

Two meaningful coincidences dovetail together to prompt the following thoughts.

First, in a post at Mysterious Universe, Micah Hanks speculates that unidentified delta wing aircraft, such as those witnessed by two Air Force colonels 24 July 1952 and perhaps those seen by Kenneth Arnold 24 June 1947, might have been early prototypes of what was to become aircraft like Northrop Grumman’s B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber. Hanks bases his inference on the description of the UFOs seen in 1952—”three bright silver, delta wing craft with no tails and no pilot’s canopies. The only thing that broke the sharply defined, clean upper surface of the triangular wing was a definite ridge that ran from the nose to the tail”—which, he notes, bears a remarkable similarity to various stealth aircraft today, a flying wing aeroform originally that of the German Horton IX Go 229 that made its first powered flight in February 1945, prototypes of which were captured by American forces at the end of the World War II.

Prima facie, Hanks’ conjecture appears persuasive, given the shared features of the Horton, the UFOs witnessed, and variations on the Stealth design. However, one need answer several objections to make the case more compelling, the most serious of which was raised in the earliest days of the phenomenon: if the UFOs were experimental aircraft, then why were they seen indiscriminately over land and sea globally, threatening both civilian populations in the event of a crash or capture by foreign powers? By 1952, for example, the American Air Force had already experimented with several flying wing designs, some of which had crashed during test flights, and had secured proving grounds since the earliest days of rocket research where experimental aircraft could be tested both securely in and in secrecy.

Regardless of how this or other objections might be answered in more sophisticated versions of Hanks’ argument (and there are more sophisticated versions), in the context of his post, the 1952 sighting appears explainable “in hindsight“, and it’s two features of this inference that caught my attention: on the one hand, a later event (in this case, an aeronautical development) is said to reveal the hitherto veiled truth of an earlier one (the 1952 sighting) “in hindsight”, and, on the other, this revelation is based on a visual (or morphological) similarity that prompts the comparison of the two events.

Anyone familiar with the discourse around Ancient Astronauts or Aliens will likely recognize this way of thinking. Ancient Alien enthusiasts pick out a helicopter among the hieroglyphs reproduced above: a modern aeronautical development reveals the truth of an ancient artifact because of how the two resemble each other. The same eye would likely see two flying saucers in this post’s featured image, a piece of rock art from Tanzania. In both cases, now is projected onto then because of a perceived resemblance.

One is likely more persuaded by Hanks than the Ancient Alien theorist. The Horton flying wing, the description of what was witnessed in 1952, and the variations on the Stealth Bomber are all modern, regardless of their relative places on the historical timeline, and the aeroform in question is unequivocally real and functional, whereas, in the case of the ancient Egyptian “helicopter” and the modern-day one, or the cave painting UFOs and UFO photos since the 1940s, we are dealing with historically distant artifacts and, more importantly, different conventions of representation (as I have explained before) that render the comparison questionable in the first place.

But these visual coincidences share something in an uncanny way with the second synchronicity that prompts this post. Anthropologist Christopher F. Roth in his chapter in E.T. Cultures: Anthropology in Outerspaces (ed. Battaglia) “Ufology as Anthropology: Races, Extraterrestrials, and the Occult” remarks the hypnotically-recovered testimony of two abductees. “Joe” tells John Mack that the alien-human hybridization program of which he is a part is “necessary” to preserve the human “race and their seed and their knowledge,” because “human beings are in trouble” due to an impending “electromagnetic” catastrophe caused by the “negative” technology humankind has developed. Concerns about electromagnetic pollution have been around for decades, but have ramped up considerably with the impending introduction of 5G technologies and their perceived and imagined threats. In a similar vein, Roth relates, famous abductee Betty Andreasson tells Raymond Fowler that the hybridization program is needed because of “escalating infertility,” a striking statement in view of recent declining sperm counts in the developed world and the even more recently discovered effects of global warming on insect fertility. Reading the words of “Joe” and Betty Andreasson, the UFO believer is likely to nod and believe their testimony possesses prophetic import. It seems to me, however, that these “prophecies” become so only “in hindsight.” Again, present circumstances are projected, in this case, onto words uttered decades ago, words whose generality is skewed and focussed to make them harmonize with contemporary developments.

But my purpose here is not to debunk a kind of fallacious reasoning at work among the ufophilic or ufomaniacal. If, as Jung words it, the practically countless stories about UFOs and their pilots constitute a “modern myth of things seen in the skies”, then the logic I sketch at work here is more interestingly understood as mythological rather than merely fallacious. One could turn to Claude Lévi-Strauss, who, in his monumental four-volume Mythologies, sets out to demonstrate that the logic underwriting myth is as rigorous and functionally valuable as modern-day science; whether stone or steel, an axe is an axe. Jung, too, posits a ground for the kind of connections made by Hanks, the Ancient Astronaut/Alien enthusiast, or the devotee of revelations of Experiencers, namely that source of dreams, visions, and myth, the Collective Unconscious. Jung’s Collective Unconscious is “exalted above all temporal change”, i.e., in it, everything happens at once; it is eternal (timeless). Correspondences between its elements therefore cannot be causal (since cause and effect are temporally related) but synchronicitious, meaningfully coincident, just like the correspondences remarked above. Because these synchronicities are essentially atemporal, revelation can operate in reverse, with the present illuminating hitherto occulted truths in the recent or distant past.

At this point, however, I am taking up Jung’s ideas not as explanations for that modern myth but as elements of it themselves. For that modern myth is not so modern, rising as it must from the Collective Unconscious (present in its own way in the radically different thinking of Lévi-Strauss), meaningfully coincident as it is with Alchemy (as Jung shows at great lengths) but also with archetypal symbols from philosophy and poetry, as well. As James Olney writes in his chapter “The Esoteric Flower: Yeats and Jung” (in Yeats and the Occult, ed. George Mills Harper, MacMillan, 1975)

There is one symbol…or a unified complex of symbols figured in a variety of related images, which tantalizes and frustrates (and has done for twenty-five centuries) more than any other, yielding many meanings to the seeker yet seeming at the same time to withhold at least as many meanings as it give up. That image or symbol—and it occurs as the central symbol as all esoteric studies from Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Plato down to W. B. Yeats and C. J. Jung—is the gyre, the cycle, the circle, the sphere. There are hundreds of ways it can appear (a winding staircase, a snake eating its own tail, a round tower, a cycle of history, the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists, the flight of a falcon, an Unidentified Flying Object…

What’s at work here is not faulty logic but the mythopoetic imagination, whether Jung’s Collective Unconscious; Lévi-Strauss’ myth, not spoken by human beings but speaking them; or the Magical Universe (MU) of William Burroughs’ own Mythology for the Space Age wherein, like in the Hermeticist’s Universe, everything is related to everything else, like in the vision of the ‘Pataphysician for whom the universal solvent, a version of the Philosopher’s Stone, that dissolves all things in their infinite relatedness is language.

And I see by way of a further “meaningful coincidence” that while I worked on this post UFO Conjectures posted thoughts on UFOs (and “alien encounters”) in the Qur’an!

Science Fiction, Folklore, Myth, the UFO, and Ufology: a note

January 25, 2019 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 3 Comments

Commenting on my review of Gerald Heard’s The Riddle of the Saucers: Is Another World Watching? (1950), part of an on-going series “Jung’s Ufological Bookshelf”, Martin S. Kottmeyer generously provides extensive cultural context to Heard’s speculation that the flying saucers were piloted by super bees from Mars. Kottmeyer concludes: “Heard may seem prescient, but he was part of a tradition of science and science fiction speculations that was quite orthodox within the genre he was part of” (my emphasis). This sentence is curious: what genre does Heard’s book belong to?

The beginnings of a rigorous answer would evoke genre theory and reception theory; a prima facie materialist answer would trace the way Heard’s book was marketed and how librarians catalogued it over the nearly seven decades since it was published.

Kottmeyer seems to group Heard’s book, one of the first on flying saucers, with a “tradition of science and science fiction speculations,” which seems paradoxical. Science writing, even when it is popular or speculative, makes a claim to being true, while science fiction, as a kind of fiction, does not (or, more accurately, it makes a claim to an artistic truth…). However much A Brief History of Time and The Time Machine might have the same word in their titles and be science writing and science fiction, respectively, they surely belong to two different genres.

Today, and surely for some decades before, ufology is a liminal, paradoxical genre. On the one hand, it makes claims to being true, but in a way that is difficult to pin down. Some ufological volumes, e.g. Jacques Vallée’s Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965) would make a claim to being true, in a provisional sense, in the same way any other sufficiently speculative science book might. Others, such as Desmond Leslie’s Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953) stake a different truth claim, one more akin to that of a religious work.

However much the truth claim of that paraliterature ufology is oscillates between the natural and spiritual, it can’t quite claim to belong to the same genre as, e.g., Carlo Rovelli’s Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (2017) regardless of how speculative the later chapters of Rovelli’s book might be. As many have pointed out, ufology is a pseudoscience (perhaps a genre all its own), though, as Vallée has cogently remarked, no problem is scientific in itself, only the approach to the problem can be properly called scientific.

For these reasons, perhaps, the literature about the UFO that is not explicitly fictional has been read as a kind of folklore in the making or mythology, not that either term in its generality gets us much further. But this middle way has the advantage that it can make its truth claim and bracket it, too. However much folk wisdom might possess a merely heuristic truth, that truth is still practical and uncannily modern: however much depression might be ultimately a result of brain chemistry, the folk psychology that underwrites meditative practice prescribes an effective therapy, and stories of faeries are as age old as they are contemporary (just ask highway builders in Iceland). A mythology, likewise, following Levi-Strauss, can claim an effective truth, just of a different kind than that of the natural sciences: regardless of whether an axe is made of stone or steel, it’s still an axe. Myth, like folklore, in the case of the ufological literature, is possessed of a weird reality, as daemonic as those entities and situations it deals with.

For these reasons, I tend to take the pseudoscientific ufological paraliterature as belonging to a genre neither scientific nor science fictional, as its truth is neither one that is subject to experiment nor calculation nor one that invites us to only imagine the world as other than it is or was. Its truth, like the flying saucer, hovers between the two; like the UFO, it is both/neither material and/nor immaterial; nevertheless, like its namesake, it leaves traces, in the culture and its imaginary.

Gerald Heard’s Super-Bees from Mars

January 9, 2019September 30, 2021 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ Leave a comment

Some readers of my review of Gerald Heard’s The Riddle of the Saucers might wonder why I bothered, given my obvious distaste for the book, and why they should bother, given that, considered ufologically, the book’s value is strictly historical, really adding nothing new to solving that riddle of the book’s title.

In the first place, the review is part of one of the projects underway here at the Skunkworks: to read and review all the Ufo books mentioned in Jung’s Flying Saucers, reviews that will be collated under the category “Jung’s Ufological Bookshelf”. Aside from being an interesting task in itself, the project will contribute to better understanding Jung’s reflections on the subject, and, more importantly, begin the process of concretely articulating the material that Jung develops, connecting it, for instance, to his alchemical studies.

As should be obvious to anyone reading this blog with any attention, my central concern is to reveal the ways the UFO illuminates or takes up in its vortex (considered both poetically and para-scientifically) galaxies of other concerns, including our most pressing, social, ecological, and “spiritual” (Geistig), all in the hopes of someday presenting the work as a book or, ideally, a poem. (Though, I fear, the project will more likely end up a textual version of Jonathan E. Caldwell‘s…).

I observed already in my review the prescience of Heard’s imagining the ufonauts to be insects. In the Alien Abduction literature, the ETs are often described as being insectoid in various ways, and the figure of the Mantis is prevalent. So, in the context of the development of the myth (if not the hard core of the mystery), Heard’s book is, intentionally or not, significant.

But consider Heard’s description (150) of how the Martian Super-Bees might appear:

A creature with eyes like brilliant cut-diamonds, with a head of sapphire, a thorax of emerald, an abdomen of ruby, wings like opal, legs like topaz.

From a strictly literary critical, stylistic or philological, perspective, this description is tired, but from a poeticreative one, much more suggestive.

Within the context of the myth as a whole, the insectoid form of the Super-Bee will rime with a more general insectoid theme that reappears, at least, in the context of Alien Abduction stories, as noted. Moreover, the red of the ruby, green of the emerald, and pure white light of the diamonds rimes with the colours of lights reported, for example, on the Phantom Airships of 1896/7. That UFOs are often described as flashing or strobing multicoloured lights or to be scintillating (like gems might be said to) winds another thread into the aesthetic texture.

However doubtful it is that Ezekiel’s Chariot is analogous to a modern-day UFO, that Ezekiel’s vision is read as a premodern sighting report makes it, too, part of the myth. (Parties, skeptical and curious, are encouraged to consult (Milton scholar!) Michael Lieb’s Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race, and the Advent of the End Time that unfolds the developing meaning of Ezekiel’s Chariot from the prophet’s own times to the present). In this context, it becomes not insignificant that “the appearance of the wheels [of the chariot] and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl” (Ezekiel I.16) and the throne on the chariot has “the appearance of a sapphire stone” (Ezekiel I.26). This happenstance rime is more suggestive than it might seem offhand.

Jung’s Ufo study is artistically compelling by its associating aspects of the Ufo visionary rumour not only to the concrete historical horizon within which flying saucers first appear but to Alchemy, that vast literature that functions as a subliminal inspiration in the works of Shakespeare, Blake, Yeats, Pound, H.D., Robert Duncan, and others. A few minutes of paging through the indices of Jung’s Alchemical Studies and Mysterium Coniunctionis turn up allusions to a description of

the sapphire stone, [which] takes on divers colours from the highest powers, and works in created things now in one wise, now in the contrary, administering at times good, at others evil, now life, now death, now sickness, now healing, now poverty, now riches (Mysterium Coniunctionis, 447)

taken, unsurprisingly from the Kabbala denudata. One of the goals of Chinese Alchemy was the creation of “the diamond body” (Alchemical Studies, 21). And, if one, understandably, were to associate the Latin lapis (as in the Alchemical expression Lapis Philosophorum, Philosopher’s Stone) with the constellation of associations generated by just some of the precious stones that go to make up Heard’s Martian Super-Bee, one might be forgiven to call to mind the Alchemical “Visita Interiora Terra Rectificanto Inveniens Occultum Lapidem“: Visit the interior of the earth and rectifying [purifying] you will find the hidden stone.

Hear, the most preliminary tracing of associations leads us to the Hollow Earth, another famous dimension of the myth, as one putative origin of the UFOs (which rimes, too, with other associations, underground bases, or Earth Lights and ELF waves (which pun, in turn, brings in the whole dimension of Faery lore…)). Along with the depths of the earth’s oceans, the deeps of space, or even the depths of past or future time, or equally infinitely distant and near other dimensions, all these homes of the Other, all Other places, rime with Jung’s Unconscious (the psychoanalytic Other)….

Nor should one eschew the phonemic near rime of lapis and ‘laugh’ or the interlinguistic rime with French lapin….As Whitman said, “the theme (or, in this case, a kind of rabbit hole (!)) has vista”….

Jung’s Ufological Bookshelf: Gerald Heard, The Riddle of the Saucers: Is Another World Watching?

January 9, 2019January 15, 2019 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 4 Comments

51hyugp-u1l Gerald Heard. The Riddle of the Saucers: Is Another World Watching? London: Winter and Worsfold, 1950. 157pp.

In the commentary to the third dream Jung analyzes in his Flying Saucers, he writes:

A round metallic object appears, described as a flying spider….we are reminded of the hypothesis that Ufos are a species of insect from another planet and possessing a shell or carapace that shines like metal. An analogy would be the metallic-looking chitinous covering of our beetles. Each Ufo is supposed to be a single insect, not a swarm. (46)

The idea that the Ufo might be an extraterrestrial insect, the footnote to this passage tells us, is found in Sievers’ Flying Saucers über Südafrika that “mentions Gerald Heard’s hypothesis that they are a species of bee from Mars”.

If UFO reports constitute a “visionary rumour” then Heard’s book reads like a link in the chain of gossip, what Jung called “sensation mongering” in the case of ordinary rumours, despite Heard’s calling his book a “report” several times in the Foreward. Loosely written both in presentation of the cases and in their documentation (e.g., Heard refers to what Arnold saw as discs or saucers (12)) Heard’s book might seem a hack’s attempt to cash in on the public interest in the new phenomenon (written between late 1947 and late 1950), until one discovers what a widely-published and highly-regarded figure he was, a graduate of Cambridge, the author of thirty-eight books, and a friend of Aldous Huxley.

Nevertheless, despite being one of the earliest books on the topic Jung consults, it sets out both the (to us) well-known and well-worn history of the earliest years of the modern phenomenon as well as the more general lineaments of the myth with which readers today will be well familiar.

In the opening chapters, Heard recounts Kenneth Arnold’s inaugural sighting of 24 June 1947; the UAL sighting of 4 July 1947; the Maury Island incident; the Muroc sighting of 8 July 1947; and Fred Johnson’s Cascade Mountain sighting 24 June 1947, famously before Arnold’s and including the first association of magnetic anomalies with the presence of the saucers, the hands on Johnson’s compass spinning wildly while the discs he witnessed were overhead. Heard continues with the Chiles/Whitted case of 23 July 1948; the death of Thomas Mantell, 7 January 1948; and the Gorman Dogfight, 1 October 1948. Heard concludes the first, historical half of his volume detailing the efforts of Project Saucer. Heard then, tediously, turns his attention to the mystery of the nature, origin, and intent of the discs, concluding, first, that their technology, because of its performance capabilities must be non-terrestrial. He is thereby moved to reflect on those characteristics, shape, size (including terming the largest “motherships”), velocity, silence, and apparent intelligent behaviour, remarking, in the process, on the earliest photographic evidence, in this case, the Trent/McMinville photo. He goes on to propose mcinville the discs’ pilots, like we would soon be, are space explorers. He then ranges over the possible origins of the discs and concludes with the hypothesis Jung notes, that the pilots are likely “super bees”—from Mars. Further evidence of Mars’ being the discs’ homebase is the peculiar size, appearance, and orbits of Mars’ moons, Demos and Phobos, whose oddness prompts Heard to propose they are artificial, orbital launch platforms. Heard then, in classic, ufological style, detours into a catalogue of premodern sightings, from the Eighteenth Century to Foo-fighters and Ghost Rockets, before speculating that the Martian bees’ purpose is likely to observe our industrial, technological, and military development, and to determine what threat the earth might pose to Mars, drawn in the first instance by their witnessing the detonation of atomic bombs. Heard concludes by summarizing the classic argument that, since the flying dics are neither hallucination nor terrestrial they must therefore be extraterrestrial.

In the course of the above narration, he expresses ideas that will become commonplace. Already, in the forward, the flying saucers are “some sort of super flying-machine”. Reliable witness reports are debunked or suppressed by authorities, whether the press or “Air-authorities”. Evidence is murderously suppressed by the military or government, as evidenced by the B-52 crash and death of USAF officers Brown and Davidson August 1947 transporting samples of the Maury Island ejecta. Heard categorizes the dramatis personae of the mystery into three characters: the reliable, trained but mystified witness; the witness reluctant to report his experience; and the suppressing authorities. The haughty dismissal of the mystery of the saucers is compared to that of psychical research or Eighteenth century reports of meteorites. The UFO is described as possessing what are now the classic shapes of discs or torpedoes and of making impossibly tight turns. Heard posits the explanation that the Flying Saucers were said to be U.S. secret weapons or feared to be foreign, that the public revelation of their extraterrestrial origin would result in a “War of the Worlds” hysterical reaction, their being extraterrestrial borne out by the Saucer’s technology being ahead of ours, likely relying on magnetism or antigravity. Finally, as noted, it was the flash of A-bomb blasts that piqued the Martians’ curiosity.

For all its turgid near unreadability, Heard’s book possesses at least two (almost) saving graces. For such an early work, it presciently identifies and describes salient cases that will become “classics” and reflects on them in a manner that will be repeated over the coming decades. Remarkably, Heard’s imagining the ETs are insectoid uncannily foresees the various mantid species that will make their entrance most markedly with the advent of the Abduction phenomenon. Most importantly, though, Heard’s “hypothesis” that the pilots of the flying discs are Martian bees is developed from his ruminations about terrestrial bees, concluding they are possessed of an intelligence equal to that of humankind, being social, and capable of both calculation and communication. That he does not anthropomorphize the extraterrestrial as too many will and still do but discovers a nonhuman intelligence in our own backyard makes Heard a radical, ecological thinker avant le lettre, decentering the ontotheological primacy of human intelligence and of humankind in the process.

bee face

What’s so compelling about ET, Cover-up and Disclosure?

January 4, 2019January 18, 2019 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 1 Comment

A post of Robbie Graham‘s at Mysterious Universe coalesced with some of my recent, casual ufological reading (Jung’s Flying Saucers, Heard’s The Riddle of the Flying Saucers, Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers are Real, Vallee’s Revelations…) to prompt the question that titles this post.

Of the “10 Shocking Statements about UFOs by Scientists and Government Officials” Graham presents, eight have to do with official secrecy or dissimulation (that governments in fact know the nature of UFOs but suppress that knowledge), while four openly espouse the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH), that UFOs are spacecraft piloted by intelligent, unearthly beings. What’s as curious (if not shocking) is that this coupling of the ETH with accusations of an official suppression of its supposed truth has been part of the fabric of the UFO myth from the very beginning: Project Sign’s “Estimate of the Situation” proposed the ETH as a possible explanation for flying saucer sightings in late 1948, while Donald Keyhoe concludes the Author’s Note that begins his 1950 The Flying Saucers are Real

I believe that the Air Force statements, contradictory as they appear, are part of an intricate program to prepare America—and the world—for the secret of the discs[,]

namely, that they are extraterrestrial spaceships.

Given that flying saucers first appear as such within the horizon of the Cold War, it should come as little surprise that the USAF personnel tasked with identifying them had to come up with some positive answers. If the flying discs were in fact real objects (as observations seemed to imply) and that aeronautical technology, domestic or foreign, was incapable of manufacturing such aeroforms, some alternative explanation had to be supplied; the urgency of the times could not allow for a shrug of the shoulders and admission of ignorance. That the most persuasive alternative proposed was that the flying saucers were extraterrestrial artifacts produced by “civilizations far in advance of ours” is as curious as it proved to be fateful for the development of the myth….

This concatenation of the ETH and an early instance of conspiracy theory will develop over the coming decades into a complex tale of crashed saucers and the retrieval of their pilots living and dead, reverse-engineering of alien technology and secret treaties between governmental or even more shadowy organizations and an ever-growing number of ET races, alien abductions and ET-human hybridization programs, secret ET bases, Secret Space Programs and Breakaway Civilizations, the suppression of free energy and other technologies, and, hanging over all this, the ever-imminent official Disclosure of these matters engineered by government insiders, ever-growing numbers of whistleblowers, and even benevolent ETs. (One should not ignore that alongside this more secular development is an equally lively and creative religious one rooted in Theosophy, that extends through the early Contactees to channelers and the New Age and various New Religious Movements). As Jacques Vallee relentlessly discloses in his Revelations (1991), the genesis and on-going production of this “powerful new myth, perhaps even the emergence of a new religion” (18) has more to do with human machination and manipulation than any suppressed science-fictional reality. Nevertheless, as Jung himself discovered in the 1950s “news affirming the existence of UFOs [and ETs] is welcome, but…scepticism seems to be undesirable” (3). Why should this be?

One might venture the following. Since the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, humankind, especially in the West but increasingly globally, has found itself displaced. In the Christian cosmos, Man was the crown of creation, made in the image of God. With Copernicus, the earth ceased to be the centre of the universe; further discoveries in the Eighteenth century revealed the earth to be vastly older than 6,000 years; Darwin disabused homo sapiens of pretensions to any uniqueness in the animal kingdom; and cosmological discoveries since have revealed a God-less universe, if not multiverse, as vast in time and space as the earth and humankind upon it have become correspondingly tiny and insignificant. Add to this story the existential threats of nuclear war and ecological collapse and one will be unsurprised at attempts to imagine ways to alleviate the anxieties such a precarious situation inspires.

Enter one or more ET civilizations “far in advance” of our own or Space Brother incarnations of Ascended Masters to lead us on to a higher plane of spiritual evolution. In the first case, the history of one society on earth, that of the technologically advanced “First World”, becomes an instance of a universal tendency of life in the universe, to evolve towards intelligence, a sentience like our own, and evergrowing technoscientific knowledge and mastery of nature. In the latter case, again, the human being is understood as a stage on life’s way, from matter to spirit, from ignorance to enlightenment. In both cases, that dethroned, decentred, disoriented species finds a new orientation in a universal scheme, as either one species among a galaxy of others ranked according to their place on a linear scale of intelligence and technoscientific development, or on an equally linear scheme of spiritual wisdom; humankind finds again a home in a cosmic order, a kind of Great Chain of Being, whether material or spiritual, except this time, humankind creates God in its own image. Even the paranoid and fearful version of the myth, that certain ET species and their human allies are evil, working toward conquest, colonization or domination, weaves itself on the loom that projects our kind of intelligence, the self-image of our present technoscientific culture, onto all forms of life, on and off the earth.

Michael Persinger R.I.P.

August 19, 2018 ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 1 Comment

The one post at Skunkworks that has sparked the most interest was that concerning the Electromagnetic Hypothesis (EMH), that some UFO/UAP sightings and perhaps even encounter experiences could be accounted for by observed but unexplained naturally-occurring EM and plasma phenomena.

One of the major researchers to develop this idea was Michael Persinger, who has died at 73. The Daily Grail has posted an obituary and summary of Persinger’s research and the controversy and criticisms it inspired. Interested parties will be pleased to find at least two videos and links to ten blog posts Persinger wrote in reply to his critics.

As a partial explanation for sightings and encounters, Persinger’s work strictly falls outside the purview of Skunkworks, exploring, as his research does, the being rather than the meaning of the UFO phenomenon. What is compelling, though, is the way his research suggests that the Earth herself might be imagined to communicate with human beings via EM phenomena.

That Flying Saucers arguably reveal more about how we think and feel about technoscience and the fate of society than about extraterrestrial visitors has been a mainstay since Jung’s pioneering speculations. That Contactees and Abductees both have received warnings concerning environmental catastrophe segues nicely with the notion that the Earth articulates her concerns via tectonic energies and an available image reservoir, whether a Collective Unconscious or not. That Earth itself transmits EM energies at 30-33 Hz (an instance of a numerological pattern that runs through the whole mythos) and that these transmissions are called Extra-low Frequency (ELF) waves is also poetically suggestive, especially in view of the links made to Faery lore and the UFO mythology by, among others, Jacques Vallee….

Having recently secured a copy of Persinger’s and Lafrenière’s Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977) I hope to share a review sometime in the future.