Essays in Idleness

C. G. Jung is an acquired taste, but only for those who have not yet acquired it. For everyone else, it is a natural condition. You don’t have to hate Sigmund Freud to begin to entertain Jungian insights, but it helps. The chief obstacle is something like belief in flying saucers (or whatever the latest term the authorities have assigned). This exists at the intersection of scepticism and faith, where much of interest may be found. Jungian psychology is another example. The intersection includes scientism, and many other things that should be discouraged, but Jung is okay.

In his tract on Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, Jung is indeed too clever to give a judgement on if they are “extra-terrestrial.” Written in the late 1950s, during one of the recurring flying saucer crazes, he does not provide technological speculations about how fast they fly and how they turn corners. Were he alive today (he wasn’t, by 1961) he would be unsurprised and unperturbed by the reports of air force pilots. He would accept their reports as we will soon be accepting new information on the Kennedy assassination.

Both sky phenomena and shootings can be located in the “collective unconscious,” although assassinations merely pass through. Jung saw that the reality of flying saucers belongs in that realm which is both real (offering hard evidence), and unreal. When flying saucers crash, they leave dimples in the earth but no sign of what caused them. Similarly, they buzz in and out of radar, but do not collide with other aircraft. Perhaps they might cause accidents, as hallucinations do. They thus, in themselves, are examples of things that both are and are not.

That they are “demonic,” would follow. People who become obsessed with them, and insist that they are real, or claim kidnappings, or take rides in the saucers, quickly become mentally diseased, even if they were not already. But it is a condition that can be cured. One must transfer one’s faith instead to something substantial, such as Jesus Christ. The flying saucers will then leave you alone.

For whether or not they are “real,” flying saucers are not substantial.