Freudian or Jungian UFOs?

Matthew J. Graeber’s “article” from Magonia 52, May 1995 about UFO mother-ships or airships posits the idea that the cylindrical ships spotted since early times right up into the modern era may have a sexual psychical component.

You can access Mr. Graeber’s thesis by clicking HERE

As readers here know, or should, we do not think UFOs are psychical projections or quantum creations, although we have conjectured that quantum mechanics seem to have a bearing on the ‘tangible” objects we designate as “flying saucers” and quantum theory may help explain UFOs, as they appear today.

(Triangular UFO craft, for us, are military prototypes, and don’t factor into our conjectural observations here and elsewhere.)

As for Mr. Graeber’s sexual symbolism for airships, the idea is not anathema to us, but it is a psychological stretch, just as Carl Jung’s hypothesis was in his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of things Seen in the Skies [Princeton University Press, 1978].



And even though the current thrust in many UFO circles is toward the concept that UFOs are projections of the human psyche or mental impressions coming into the minds of select individuals (from extraterrestrials supposedly), for purposes as yet unknown, we think that persons who imagine UFOs or see them mentally when they don’t exist in any tangible, real form are in need therapy of a serious psychological kind.

However Mr. Graeber would disagree:

Although we might expect to make little headway towards resolving today’s UFO enigma by comparing it to past mysteries, we may, nevertheless, examine both present and past UFO events as being comprised of optically perceived images or imagery that occasionally have an extraordinary effect upon the individual(s) who either observe or come into close proximity with them.

Mr. Graeber’s views are both Freudian and Jungian.

But if UFOs or mother-ships resonate as a sublimated sexual symbol with someone, as Mr. Graeber delinates in his piece, we think that that person should hie themselves off to a psychiatrist immediately. They have serious terrestrial problems.

Nonetheless, Mr. Graeber’s views should have a hearing or reading; they are pondered sensibly and unsensationally.

He closes with this:

Perhaps we have discovered enough about the mythical, sexual, and marked psychic background of the god-ships to determine that their origin is most likely the human unconscious, and not some alien planet situated at the edge of the cosmos. For it seems highly unlikely that a visiting alien intelligence would be so human-like as to possess similar intrapsychical processes regarding the development of their technology, their exploratory aspirations, and their myth-making tendencies.

Not a view we espouse necessarily, but a cogent suggestion by Mr. Graeber.

RR