Sacred Skies: UFOs and the Religious Function of the Psyche

Abstract

With his publication of “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky,” the psychologist C. G. Jung boldly went where no psychologist had gone before, postulating that enchantment with UFOs was indicative of a collective disturbance in the psyche. Like Jung’s, this essay likewise avoids any stance as to the factual nature of UFOs and chooses instead to view ufology through the lens of a fledgling mythology. It seems little has changed in the 60-plus years since Jung’s essay. This essay therefore attempts to modernize and update Jung’s approach through the work of past and present scholars such as William James, Lionel Corbett, and Jeffrey Kripal. By focusing specifically upon the paradoxical nature of the sacred—found within Jungian psychology, Christianity, and ufology—this essay suggests the archetypal current most at work here is the Trickster, who resides at the borders, transgresses norms, and embraces contradiction. Attention is paid to those areas of ufology in which materialism is championed—and how even those areas reveal a kind of Freudian return of the repressed; in this case the repressed being the sacred itself. My intention with this thesis is to show how mystical experiences, whether the result of religion or science fiction, might point us toward a new paradigm in which paradox, contradiction, and even irreverence can be seen as manifestations of a newly-dominant archetype in the collective Western psyche.