Dr Carl Jung…a mere mortal after all?

If you haven’t read Carl Jung’s book by now then you should because, ‘Flying Saucers – A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies’ is a classic. Jung’s primary question throughout this book was whether UFOs are real or if they are mere products of fantasy psychically projected? Although he claimed to explore the question with an open mind, it becomes obvious to the reader that the dear doctor pushes his view that UFOs are a projection of the subconscious human mind only, and do not exist in our reality. One can only wonder if he would have the same view today given the Disclosure Project complete with it’s whistleblower testimony.

However, Dr Jung was only a mere mortal after all, and like many scientists and researchers today found the UFO phenomenon challenged him at his deepest level to go beyond his training and conditioning. One question stood out for Jung, baffling him to understand, how UFOs as psychic projections could throw back radar echo, confounding him immensely no doubt.

Based on the works of Ruppelt, Keyhoe and Menzel at the time, Jung eventually decided that even if UFOs are physically real they are so bizarre that they tax our understanding and credulity to the limit. This is very reminiscent of T.S. Eliots’ words, “human kind cannot bear very much reality” and reveals that even great minds, like Carl Jung, can only tolerate so much.

It also reminds readers of the rift that exists between science and the mystical and that as Jung himself stated, “the interest of many scientists is too easily restricted to the common, the probable, the average, for that is after all the basis of every empirical science.” Fortunately, and eventually, the good doctor became willing to go where few had been before, especially in his lifetime, and was willing to admit that any scientific basis “has little meaning unless something can be erected upon it that also leaves room for the exceptional and the extraordinary.”

We can only wonder what Dr Jung might think of the modern research of Dr Rick Strassman with his subjects using DMT (N-dimethyltryptamine) or the investigations of Graham Hancock into shamanic experiences using ahyuasca, to further our current understanding of alternate realities as well as the possibility of them being stomping grounds for some extraterrestrials. Would Jung approve of psychedelic use and ancient ritual to make contact with ETs? Maybe…maybe not.

However looking back on Jung’s thoughts 44 years later, his work acts as a beacon as well as a warning for researchers, revealing the lack of psychological research into the UFO subject which remains undone but by now should have far surpassed his initial work. Jung himself admits that he found no clear answers to an ET reality and had to be content with having sketched out a few lines for future research. He also stated that the “psychic aspects of the UFO subject play so great a role that it cannot be omitted from any future studies”. He considered that “if military authorities felt compelled to set up bureaus for collecting and evaluating UFO reports, then psychology too, had not only the right but also the duty to do what it could to shed light on this dark problem.” Yes good doctor, we couldn’t agree more.

Don’t drive over .05

A recent image of a UFO careening drunkenly across the London skies has got us thinking. Do UFOnauts have a licensing bureau? And do they have blood alcohol limit restrictions?

The photo in question at http://tinyurl.com/2sl79k touted as ‘genuine’, seems to us to be not quite so. There are reasons why we think it may be a fake, but there are also a number of reasons why we need to doubt our own reasoning whenever we look at an image of a UFO. In fact why all of us on this planet need to rethink and reconsider our thought patterns whenever we are confronted by things ‘alien’ to our dull Earthly milieu.

Why we think it’s a fake:

Well, just look at it. The pilot is flying too low to the ground, he’s too close to large ground-based structures for safety. Like, doesn’t the pilot care that he might knock over that great big Ferris wheel thingy and kill hundreds of terranian holiday makers? No, no respectable pilot (no matter which planet he trained on) would fly that low or that close to a building, would he? Unless he’s drunk. And from the angle of that spaceship, he just might be.

Also, the UFO in question looks too nice, too clean, too ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’… too good to be true in fact. It looks too human to be extraterrestrial, so it just couldn’t be. Could it?

Further, and more realistically, there is too much rain – it causes pixel interference so nobody can judge accurately if the UFO has been pasted into the image at a later date. You just gotta be suspicious of that, right? Nice big shiny UFO flying too close to an internationally-known landmark on a busy evening. In the rain. It screams hoax. It really does.

However!

Reasons not to judge too quickly and too harshly:

What do we, puny little Earthlings with our puny little Earthling educations and our puny little Earthling imaginations, know of extraterrestrial vehicles? Are we adequately equipped to know one when we see one? Are we adequately equipped to look a photograph of a UFO and judge?

As a society we are unbelievably judgmental, and Ufologists in particular are even more so. Pop a photo of a UFO in front of us and first thing we’ll say will be ‘fake.’ Why, when we are clamouring for evidence, are we the first to discard it when it comes our way? Does the reality confront even we, who are so desperately longing for it?

And who are we to say that an alien vehicle shouldn’t look too clean, or too dirty? Are we allowed to dictate if one is too round or too square, too amorphous or too bright, or not bright enough? What do we know, really know, about how alien civilisations construct their spaceships, their cities, their babies’ bassinets? They’re ALIEN – and that’s the whole point. We wouldn’t know the first thing about an extraterrestrial culture, and we could not ever place our psyches into theirs, so how could we ever predict what their artefacts might look like? They have different psyches, the result of millennia of social and cultural evolution on a different planet. Just as we are the result of millennia of social and cultural evolution on ours.

Too much evidence has been buried beneath good intentions by people who think they know what a UFO should, would or could look like. It behoves us to re-examine all the evidence we have, this time with a non-judgemental eye.

The moral of the story:

Perhaps we need to be less hasty in our urge to dismiss UFO evidence and discourage researchers. Because perhaps the truth has been out there all along, and we’ve just been too self-assuredly smug to see it.

Spielberg to launch UFO and paranormal social network?

http://tinyurl.com/2hyv7t

Hollywood mega-director Steven Spielberg is reportedly setting up a social network for people interested in paranormal and extra-terrestrial activity, inspired by his own personal experiences with the unknown.

The focus of the network will be on people who have an interest in, or have experienced paranormal phenomena, and the network may feature multimedia content of UFO sightings, paranormal activity and user-based content. Stories of Speilberg's own personal experiences with ghosts are widely known; his stay in the Excelsior House led him to become so frightened by alleged ghosts that he fled the room and moved 20 miles away, forming the inspiration for the movie 'Poltergiest'.

The network may have been originally in development with Yahoo, but the project was abandoned before it was launched. But reports suggest that the idea lives on, and a team of developers are aiming for a mid-year launch.