AGAINST the backdrop of the UFO’s epic mid-1950s adventures, it’s time to take a closer look at the dramatic structure of these events. Aristotle wrote that the essential element of drama and epic is “the arrangement of the elements” as narrative. What is it about the narrative structure of UFO events that generates such a powerful response in the collective human psyche?
According to Angus Fletcher in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, “allegory says one thing and means another. It destroys the expectation we have about language, that our words ‘mean what they say.’” An allegorical work goes along saying one thing so as to mean something beyond that one thing, in order to imply something or many things not stated in the primary or surface story. In the sixteenth century, the literary scholar Henry Peacham described allegory as a kind of “aenigma … which for the darknesse, the sense may hardly be gathered.” Fletcher makes a similar point when he describes allegory as “a fundamental process of encoding our speech.”
The UFO phenomenon has seldom been considered a “literary problem,” but suppose that, 200 years from now, for whatever reason, UFOs have ceased to appear. Suppose that all that is left of the phenomenon is its literature: the body of witness reports and the myriad books and magazine analyses of these. I suspect that literary scholars of the twenty-second century, unburdened by the passions associated with UFOs today, would study this vast written record as a late-twentieth century allegory. While they would no doubt share our fascination with the physical nature of UFOs, they would probably be even more interested in how UFOs appeared to us as a form of “encoded speech” that invited — and to some extent compelled — an ongoing effort to decode the enigmatic “grammar” of this speech.
Scholars might be especially impressed with how the UFO phenomenon held together numerous levels of meaning by implication, even as it — most of the time — kept the focus of observers on its surface events: flyovers, landings, encounters with occupants. One of the defining characteristics of pure allegory, says Angus Fletcher, is that its formal, or literal, surface level does not explicitly demand to be interpreted for hidden meanings, for it often makes “good enough” sense by itself. “But somehow this literal surface suggests a peculiar doubleness of intention, and while it can, as it were, get along without interpretation, it becomes richer and more compelling if given interpretation” (emphasis added).
The Nash-Fortenberry sighting of 1952 offers a persuasive example of allegory in action. Two professional pilots see “six bright objects streaking towards us at tremendous speed.” In formal story terms, this makes good enough sense by itself, even though of course they could not identify what they saw. But even that is comprehensible: they saw what they saw, and they were astonished. At the same time, the public’s impulse to interpret, to scratch the surface of the literal sighting report, was unavoidable. The psyche — collective and personal — could not help but ask: “What were those things with the ‘fiery aspect of hot coals, but of much greater glow’?”
A similar tension between surface and depth, text and subtext, is evident in the controversy about events that occurred the following weekend over Washington, D.C. Numerous competent observers made both visual and radar sightings of apparently unconventional aerial objects. The air force responded by scrambling jets to chase down the objects. Once again, here were events whose formal logic is clear: something unusual seen and chased.
It was only after these events that matters grew murkier. Why did the jets not manage to catch one of them? How could the UFOs simply “disappear” as the planes approached? Maybe it wasn’t what it seemed to be, the psyche considers. The air force moved in to confirm this suspicion with word that the culprit was a “temperature inversion.” Good, the psyche responds, as consistency returns to the surface story and all is once again well.
But not quite.
The air traffic controller who supervised the radar observations called the air force account nonsense: “There were at least ten unidentified flying objects … [performing] gyrations which no known aircraft could perform.” Renewed public doubts skyrocketed when debunker Donald Menzel went “too far” by announcing that pilots Nash and Fortenberry, two weekends earlier, mistook “fireflies” for unconventional aerial objects.
Thus Fletcher’s peculiar quality of doubleness reappeared in the narrative, with a vengeance. There was now a parallel plot: not only was something seen but, by implication, the authorities wanted to explain it away. The public at large was unavoidably moved to wonder: Why should this be so? Even when Donald Menzel later dropped his luminous-insect hypothesis, even with air force assurance that temperature inversion was “indisputably” the correct explanation, still, the three most famous cases of 1952 landed in an ambiguous middle realm where, as with most well-known UFO cases, they were neither definitively confirmed as “good” UFO cases nor definitively shown to have mundane origins.
Both sides could claim “victory,” but, more important, the collective psyche absorbed the provocative idea that something extraordinary had occurred. This is also what happens in formal allegory, where a tension is held between literal events at the surface, on the one hand, and evocative, suggestive, implicative associations below, on the other. Resolution occurs at neither level; ambivalence is guaranteed. The better known works of Franz Kafka illustrate these dynamics quite well.
“SOMEBODY must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he is one morning arrested.” Thus begins Kafka’s dark novel The Trial. K.’s most determined efforts to learn why he has been arrested, to learn of the charges against him, consistently meet with failure; he is supposed to know. Through the course of this enigmatic novel it becomes clear that K. is neither incarcerated nor free. Indeed, he never meets the Court, only its agents, messengers, and henchmen. His trial never takes place, yet its invisible presence pervades his entire life.
It isn’t necessary for Kafka to announce to readers that Joseph K. is Everyman, that we are all under an unspecified sentence, all in effect waiting on death row; in fact, the rules of allegory forbid such an overt disclosure. “By having a surrealistic surface texture allegory immediately elicits an interpretive response from the reader,” Fletcher notes, adding: “The silences in allegory mean as much as the filled-in spaces, because by bridging these silent gaps between oddly unrelated images we reach the sunken understructure of thought.”
Thus The Trial stands as masterful art because Kafka maintains a surrealistic surface story that consistently points, rather than forces, the reader’s attention to implicit, more global meanings. If Kafka had literally announced that it is Everyman who is on trial, then the surface story would probably have gone the route of much classical allegory, becoming little more than a mechanistic, ritualized vehicle for an abstract truth. The essential tension between the life of one man, Joseph K., and the implications of this life for the rest of us would have been lost.
In a similar sense, because the events of UFO encounters are typically surrealistic — dreamlike, fantastical, at once less than and more than real — the psyche reaches for interpretations in order to bridge the gaps. Some UFO researchers seek exhaustive answers by focusing entirely on the surface events, trying to prove that it’s all happening just as it appears to be happening. These are ufology’s “surface literalists.” Others look beneath the surfaces for the exhaustive truth, trying to prove that nothing is as it seems in UFO encounters, that truth lies never in the events themselves but only “elsewhere.” These are ufology’s “depth literalists.”
Both sides appear equally committed to a single definitive solution. To that extent, both positions are mechanical and ritualistic, although in different ways. (Literal materialists reduce downward, literal symbolists upward. The result is effectively the same: a flattened worldview.) The continuity of the UFO mythology is maintained through a curious dialectic between these extremes. Just when those who favor a purely symbolic approach seem to carry the day, the phenomenon appears in the form of new sightings with a strong physical-reality component, thus supporting the position of those who say UFOs require no “secondary interpretation” whatever. But just as this side is most confident that it has finally uncovered hard and final patterns, the phenomenon renews itself with striking new developments: the emergence of the alien abduction motif in 1957, for instance.
It is as if, each time the collective mind approaches boredom with redundancy, the UFO retires to its thematic greenhouse to sprout new forms and faces, tactics and temperaments, motives and motifs. These in their own turn become standardized, ritualized, and overelaborated, which tips the allegorical scale once again in favor of the idea that none of it is as it seems, therefore the UFO phenomenon’s most significant meanings must reside below the surface.
Thus in an overall sense the UFO phenomenon keeps its face pointed in two directions at once: toward events in time and space defy conventional explanations, and toward the symbolic/mythic milieu arising in and around these events — just as Kafka’s The Trial reads like a surrealistic documentary of one man’s nightmarish encounter with living hell and as a parable about the more general nightmare of human existence.
Jacques Vallée, who formally enters our story in chapter nine as a leading analyst of UFO patterns, has speculated about the symbolic meaning of the contradictions within the larger body of witness reports. “If you strive to convey a truth that lies beyond the semantic level made possible by your audience’s language,” Vallée observes, “you must construct apparent contradictions in terms of ordinary meanings.” This, Vallée suggests, is what the UFO phenomenon accomplishes by speaking a “double language.”
By projecting images just beyond the belief structure of the target society, the phenomenon “manages to disturb and reassure at the same time, exploiting both the gullibility of the zealots and the narrowmindedness of the debunkers,” says Vallée. A constant factor of absurdity “leads to a rejection of the story by the upper layers of the target society and an absorption at a deep unconscious level of the symbols conveyed” by UFO encounters, he adds.
Back in the domain of literary criticism, Angus Fletcher concluded that because allegory manifestly has two or more levels of meaning, “the apprehension of these must require at least two attitudes of mind.” The doubleness of intention in an allegory requires a double attention to the narrative events at the surface and to their psychic effects and hidden depths — this to preserve the tension, and to honor the intention, of the allegorical form.
As of the mid-1950s, the notion that it might be fruitful to hold two or more attitudes of mind toward the UFO phenomenon had not even entered the dialogue as a possibility. Given the polarized tenor of the controversy, the idea that UFOs could be mythic and real at the same time was unintelligible. So was the idea that someone from outside the UFO debate might suddenly arrive, as if from nowhere, make a few poignant comments, refocus the entire dialogue, and retire to his home in the Swiss Alps.
That was before Carl Gustav Jung appeared on the scene.
WHEN Jung published a short book entitled Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky in 1959, UFO partisans had little idea what to make of it. Proponents, ever in search of elusive extraterrestrial hardware, were suspicious of psychological and mythological perspectives toward UFOs. Debunkers, on the other hand, were interested in psychological explanations only to the extent that they facilitated the dismissal of UFO sightings as hallucinations and misidentifications of planets and airplanes.
Even so, Jung’s influence on the imagination of UFOs easily rivals that of any other serious thinker on the subject. This is not because he provided an account of origins — he didn’t even try — but rather because he opened up an entirely new horizon on the subject, one that fostered vast creativity in the decades to come.
The debate that Jung entered was widely perceived to be populated by monomaniacal true believers who differed only in the content of their dogmatism. Thus the very willingness of an eminent philosopher-psychologist to consider UFOs as a problem with depth had the effect of uplifting the ongoing dialogue. An early protege of Sigmund Freud, Jung had gone on to study religion, philosophy, mythology, and mysticism in a dozen languages, and had traveled in Asia, Europe, India, and North America. Although he viewed himself as a medical doctor and scientific empiricist, he considered this no reason to preclude turning his prolific pen to subjects including the workings of the unconscious mind, the work of James Joyce and Pablo Picasso, spiritualism and seances, fairy tales and astrology, alchemy, and the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary. There is simply no doubting that Jung was one of the great minds — and spirits — of his age.
As early as 1946, a year before the Kenneth Arnold sighting in the United States, a seventy-one-year-old Jung turned his attention to reports of unidentified flying objects in Europe. Over a period of several years, he collected and studied newspaper clippings; statements from scientific, military, and governmental establishments; and the reports of civilian UFO research groups. In early February 1951, Jung wrote to a friend that he had not been able to determine whether UFOs were best considered rumors related to mass hallucination or “a downright fact.” Either case would be interesting, he said.
If it’s a rumor, then the apparition of discs must be a symbol produced by the unconscious. We know what such a thing would mean seen from the psychological standpoint. If on the other hand it is a hard and concrete fact, we are surely confronted with something thoroughly out of the way. … The phenomenon of the saucers might even be both, rumor as well as fact. … It’s just too bad that we don’t know enough about it.
“Something is seen, but one doesn’t know what,” Jung stated. “It is difficult, if not impossible, to form any correct idea of these objects, because they behave not like bodies but like weightless thoughts.” At the very least, it appeared to Jung, “this obviously complicated phenomenon had an extremely important psychic component as well as a possible physical basis.” What remained unclear in his mind was “whether a primary perception was followed by a phantasm or whether, conversely, a primary fantasy originating in the unconscious invaded the conscious mind with illusions and visions.”
In the first case, a physical process provided the basis for an accompanying myth; in the second case, a psychic process created a corresponding vision. Jung also considered a third possibility: UFOs could involve synchronicities: meaningful coincidences of events separated by time and/or space; happenings that suggest unseen links between consciousness and matter. This hypothesis reflected Jung’s lifelong interest in paranormal phenomena and unusual states of consciousness. Yet, as much as such speculation interested Jung, he felt himself qualified as a psychologist only to comment on the psychic component, or the UFOs as “rumors.”
Perhaps the rumors of UFOs were not mundane but rather “visionary rumors” of the same order as religious visions. Such visions are experienced in times of personal and collective distress or danger, or in response to “vital psychic need,” Jung noted. Perhaps the collective unconscious was sending forth such visions, just as individuals experience abnormal convictions, visions, and illusions at times of dissociation between conscious and unconscious attitudes.
With a certain somberness, Jung noted that he was not pleased to conclude that the appearance of UFOs clearly indicated “coming events which are in accord with the end of an era.” Such large-scale anomalies typically arise when wholesale changes are under way in the balance of forces in the collective unconscious — that vast repository of images and motifs common to the myths and dreams of peoples throughout the world, all connected as a complex matrix transcending time and space. Jung had no doubt that humanity was entering a time of profound transition from one set of ruling images — those of the Piscean Age coinciding with the rise of Christianity — to a new collective disposition of psychic elements related to the era of Aquarius.
The frequently reported round shape of the objects suggested to Jung the mandala, a recurring image of psychic totality found in mythologies throughout the world, with names such as the “sun wheel” or “magic circle.” UFOs might represent a mythological concept of the soul, which was said in ancient times to assume the form of a sphere. Jung found it interesting that an image expressing order, wholeness, and salvation should “now take the form of an object, a technological construction,” to bypass the disadvantages of mythological associations in an age where magic had been supplanted by machines (but only apparently so, Jung added, for humanity’s hunger for “salvation from above” had found a new focus in UFOs).
Jung was the first reputable scholar to observe parallels between the motifs of UFO events and a variety of religious and mythological motifs throughout recorded history. As a primordial image of the Self, the round form of the UFO is “an Elijah who calls down fire from heaven, rises up in a fiery chariot, and is a forerunner of the Messiah.” Religious experience brings human beings “face to face with a psychically overpowering Other,” Jung said, adding that on the antique level, UFOs “could easily be conceived as ‘gods’.”
While Jung offered no solution to the mystery of origins, he went into considerable discussion of the relation between UFOs and parapsychology and psychokinesis — mental influence on inanimate objects. Jung considered the possibility that UFOs might be “materialized psychisms,” that is, actual physical or paraphysical materializations formed out of the collective unconscious. His statement that this very idea “opens a bottomless void under our feet” indicated he appreciated the challenges that such thinking posed to ordinary views of reality.
Yet the idea of a shifting rather than absolute dividing line between mind and matter, spirit and nature, was not new to Carl Jung, originator of a provocatively wide-ranging doctrine about the fundamental structures of existence. Based on his intellectual and cultural journey through the social and political histories, religions, mythologies, folk and fairy tales, and dreams and fantasies of myriad cultures, Jung turned his attention to the underlying patterns of the human psyche. He called these patterns archetypal, from the Greek word for “original pattern or stamp.” Archetypes are the invisible collective patterns underlying form: the primordial images that perform and continually influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Although archetypes cannot be known in themselves, Jung said, we recognize archetypal experience whenever we are in the presence of that which speaks to us as deep, necessary, universal, basic, fundamental. Biological archetypes include Woman, Man, Mother, Father, Brother, Sister; psychological archetypes include Good or Terrible Mother; Tyrant Father; professional archetypes include Scientist, Healer, Dictator, and Capitalist. Archetypes “hold whole worlds together and yet can never be pointed to, accounted for, or even adequately circumscribed,” writes psychologist James Hillman, who trained in the Jungian tradition.
Jung originally conceived of archetypes as the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the root patterns of instinctive behavior. As his thinking developed over time, however, he came to see archetypes as the immaterial potentials inherent in all structure, as fundamental to the existence of all living organisms. Eventually the archetype became, in his own words, “the bridge to matter in general:” In volume nine of his Collected Works, Jung wrote:
The deeper “layers” of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into the darkness. “Lower down” … they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence, “at bottom” the psyche is simply “world.”
With this thinking it was clear that, for Carl Jung, the distinction between organic and inorganic matter — and the distinction between mind and body — is not static or absolute but dynamic and protean. Thus we begin to grasp why a new generation of researchers, not wedded to the nuts-and-bolts school of ufology, came to value the richness of Jung’s thinking about archetypal reality as they wrestled with the fundamental nature of the events called UFOs.
If the relation between mental and material reality is in some sense reciprocal, then perhaps there are intermediate states of reality — subtle matter, perhaps many different grades of it. Perhaps some UFOs are temporary formations of psychic or quasi-physical material independent of individual psyches, originating from corridors beyond our time-space coordinates yet in effect “right here.”
Such a hypothesis is not inconsistent with characteristic UFO behaviors: apparent craft executing remarkable changes of direction, coming to a complete stop, hovering, changing color and shape, disappearing and reappearing on the spot, then accelerating at extraordinary speeds within seconds, typically without a sonic boom; accompanying electromagnetic effects, including the failure of nearby automobile engines and farm machinery (such as Villas-Boas’s tractor); and the ability to be unambiguously recorded on radar while remaining peculiarly localized and selective in their appearances.
Nor is the “paraphysical hypothesis” inconsistent with reports of mysterious Men in Black (MIB). Beginning in the late 1950s, reports surfaced of strange men arriving, unannounced, sometimes alone, sometimes in twos or in threes, at the homes of particular UFO witnesses usually before they had reported their sightings to anyone. Often seeming to know more than a stranger should know about the witnesses, MIB caution against reporting their sightings or close encounters. MIB typically walk with a strange limp, speak in mechanical monotones or annoying sing-song tones, wear black suits and black shoes, often arrive driving black cars, and convey an overall eerie “otherworldly” aura.
Pure fantasy? If so, a strangely coherent, collective fantasy. Social contagion? UFO researchers independently came across many such consistent reports from a wide variety of credible witnesses prior to their public dissemination. Professor Peter M. Rojcewicz, a folklorist well versed in the literature of UFOs and cross-cultural accounts of non-ordinary experiences, found impressive parallels between reports of MIBs in ufology and reports from various traditions of ominous “dark men” in contexts having nothing to do with UFOs. Rojcewicz takes the parallels as evidence of the protean adaptability and real-world vitality of the archetype of the Devil.
Veteran ufologist John Keel reported disturbing personal encounters with MIB within a year of beginning full-time UFO investigation. Keel reported keeping rendezvous with black Cadillacs that disappeared on back roads, checking into motels at random and finding reservations made in his name and accompanying nonsense messages, awakening in the middle of the night with a dark apparition standing over him, and nonstop telephone calls featuring strange clicking and humming sounds, with disembodied voices delivering messages from “the space people.” It was as if he had fallen into a demonic fantasyland nestled within the ordinary and sharing common boundaries with UFO phenomena.
On discovering that many UFO witnesses reported similar experiences, Keel subsequently lost faith in the extraterrestrial visitation hypothesis and concluded that the flying saucer legend is but one thread in a larger thematic quilt:
The real UFO story must encompass all of the many manifestations being observed. It is a story of ghosts and phantoms and strange mental aberrations; of an invisible world which surrounds us and occasionally engulfs us; of prophets and prophecies, and gods and demons. It is a world of illusion and hallucination where the unreal seems very real, and where reality itself is distorted by strange forces which can seemingly manipulate space, time, and physical matter — forces which are almost entirely beyond our powers of comprehension.
Jung came to believe that archetypes are not purely psychic but rather possess an inherent impulse to transgress their psychic frames and materialize in visible forms. The archetypes of the collective unconscious tend toward manifestation. He did not develop this idea with respect to UFOs, but a new generation of investigators did, many of whom, like Keel, recognized what they considered severe limitations in the extraterrestrial visitation hypothesis in addressing the full range of UFO data. The new school looked to parapsychology, religious studies, folklore, and mythology for new kinds of insights into a phenomenon whose effects called into question where mind leaves off and matter begins.
By and large, mainstream ufology saw such associations as unrelated to the truly important UFO-related questions facing the modern world: from which galaxy do the saucers come, and what do they want with us? Although the organizational behavior of 1950s ufology was more masonic than scientific, its practitioners nevertheless saw themselves as “scientists” and insisted that evidence of apparitions taking on convincing physical forms be left to university folklore departments. The new school of researchers, perceiving the fallacy in this perspective, correctly argued that science is a method of observation and evaluation, not (at least officially) a religion that places whole areas off limits for study.
Thus began a whole new chapter in UFO research, focused around the question of the true scope of the phenomenon. In essence, the old school was interested only in aliens; the new school saw parallels between angels and aliens, and wanted to follow these leads toward larger psychological, mythological, and religious conclusions. Whether such parallels were substantive or simply coincidental was to become a point of enormous contention within the cosmos of ufology.
Proteus, for his part, saw no need to make such fine distinctions. He was as amenable to being linked to origins in outer space as to origins in parallel dimensions beyond our formulations of time and space (neighboring “twilight zones”). He was equally at home with aliens in a decidedly modern mythos involving saucers and abductions, and with angels in a continually expanding mythos involving the full spectrum of human encounters with anomalous phenomena.
Who could blame ufologists for trying to cure Proteus of his apparent multiple personality disorder? Joseph Campbell had already presented the news that “the life-voyager wishing to be taught by Proteus must ‘grasp him steadfastly and press him all the more,’ and at length he will appear in his proper shape.” Proper shape — this phrase echoed in the minds of mainstream ufologists, who took it to mean they had only to keep asking their determined questions to secure the simple, hard-edged answers to which their dreams had already given shape.
Proteus would keep providing answers — many different answers to many different questions. The word allegory was not in his vocabulary, but he knew its meanings well. This polyphonous (poly = many, phonous = voiced) divinity had as many songs as voices, and he had just begun to sing.
