Copyright 2012, InterAmerica, Inc.
Do UFO sightings spring forth from the mind, something along
the lines that Carl Jung postulated in his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth
of Things Seen in the Skies?
At a time (1948) when flying saucer-shaped UFOs were
inundating the skies (or minds) of Earthlings, pilots Clarence Chiles and John
Whitted spotted, not a saucer shaped craft but, a cylindrical-shaped craft like
this one from a publication antedating 1948:
Carl Jung suggested, in his book, that flying saucers were
unconscious projections of the mind, images of the archetypal mandala symbol:
That Jungian proposal flies in the face of the flying
saucer/UFO sightings of the era (1950s and 1960s) and skews psychical and
psychological projections.
But the germination of the idea offers an hypothesis that
flying saucers and now UFOs are generated by mental images embedded in the
human psyche – some human psyches.
Of course not all UFO sightings then (1947-1948 onward) or
now (2012) are psychically created,
(That’s why we keep insisting UFOs are phenomena rather than
a phenomenon.)
Spanish UFO researcher Jose Caravaca’s formulating
Distortion Theory touches on the psychical ramifications of UFO sightings,
mostly those that involve landings and interactions with “beings” or images of
beings and their craft.
But what if sightings, like the Chiles-Whitted sighting and
others, that don’t involved “interaction” but merely the visual of a strange
craft “seen” in the sky, are remnants of an image picked up along the way,
visually, by certain individuals who are predilected to project that image
during times of stress or during conditions amenable to force the image from
the unconscious?
That a companion or fellow-traveler also sees the image can
be accounted for by the psychological condition labeled folie à deux (et alii).
Such projections account for present-day UFO sightings more
than those of the earlier flying saucer era when objects sighted had a kind of
tangibility.
Today’s “flying saucers” -- UFOs – are amorphous rather than
material in nature. Thus the projections are easily manifested whereas the
early flying saucers needed a more imaginative or severely warped creative
mind-set.
That mind-set developed during a time of the Cold War and
the open-ended, less sophisticated restrictions on what one might conjure up
mentally, imaginatively.
George Adamski and his fellow contactees exploited that
early mind-set, which they surely couldn’t do today with the cynicism of most
human beings.
The wonder of flying saucers has given way to a cynical
outlook of most people today.
Yet, a few bona fide UFOs still prevail, but they are not
the projections that provoked what Chiles-Whitted saw, or what created the
Betty/Barney Hill episode, and dozens of other “classic” UFO events and
sightings.
(They are remnants of another category of UFOs, which I’m
not dealing with in this posting.)
That UFO researchers were and are unable to cope with the
psychological (or psychiatric) elements of past and present sightings goes without
saying; UFO researchers are untrained in the disciplines necessary to address
UFO manifestations, whether neurological, psychological, or technical.
This is why UFOs remain unexplained.
And it’s too late to go back and study the mental conditions
of a Chiles or a Whitted or anyone else who provided a UFO report that we keep
mulling over.
But an effort might be made to do a psychological evaluation
of current UFO witnesses, if the field of UFO study can muster competent
investigators.
(Chiles-Whitted-like space craft image, above, provided by Jose Antonio Caravaca)
RR
