Esoteric thinkerCarl Jung (1875–1961)
aka Carl Jung (1875–1961) · Jung · Carl Jung · C. G. Jung · Carl Gustav Jung
Swiss psychiatrist; founder of analytical psychology. *Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky* (Rascher Verlag, 1958; English trans. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959) was the first serious attempt by a major academic psychologist to interpret the post-1947 UFO wave as a phenomenon of the collective unconscious — the disk as a contemporary mandala, projected into the sky by a nuclear-anxious civilization.
Swiss psychiatrist, founder of analytical psychology, originator of the concepts of the collective unconscious, archetype, individuation, synchronicity, and the psychological types (introversion/extraversion). The longtime professional collaborator and eventual rival of Sigmund Freud. By the early 1950s Jung was nearly eighty and the dominant living figure in depth psychology.
Ein moderner Mythus von Dingen, die am Himmel gesehen werden was published in 1958 (Rascher Verlag, Zürich) and in English as Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959). Jung’s thesis: the saucer reports cannot be evaluated as physical claims by a psychologist, but the morphology of the reports — circular, luminous, descending from the sky, often four-fold in arrangement — is the morphology of the mandala, the archetypal symbol of psychic wholeness that Jung had documented across cultures for forty years. He proposed that in a civilization newly threatened with self-extinction (the book was written in the early Cold War, post-Hiroshima, in the shadow of the H-bomb tests), the collective unconscious would compensate with symbols of unification and transcendence — and that whether the disks were also physical objects was a separate empirical question on which he took no position.
The book is often misquoted as a debunking; it is the opposite of a debunking. Jung’s letter of 16 August 1958 to Maj. Donald Keyhoe, which appeared in NICAP’s U.F.O. Investigator, explicitly stated: “I can only say for certain these things [UFOs] are not a mere rumour, something seen has taken place… It is therefore very difficult to determine the real nature of these things.” Jung’s framing — UFOs as simultaneously psychological and possibly physical, with the symbolic content carrying its own data — became foundational for Jacques Vallée’s later folkloric interpretation, for John Mack’s clinical work on abductees, and for Diana Pasulka’s American Cosmic reframing of the phenomenon as contemporary religion. He is the discipline-founding ancestor of the “experiential” branch of serious UFO study.