Shamanic Approaches to the UFO

Well I ‘m aware of how late in the day it is and I know some of you must be double parked so I’ll make this as succinct as possible. This morning’s discussion caused me to wonder how much we would understood about electricity if our method of studying it was to stand of the tops of high hills and wait to be struck by lightning. It seems to me that’s sort of position that we’re in vis-à-vis the UFOs. We have no real theory. We have conjectures. We have fiercely defended hypotheses but we have very little that is concrete to go on. It’s almost as though the issue of the UFO were an onion, and as we peel the layers of the onion we discover that when we get to the center there is nothing there whatsoever left. It reminds me that if you cross an onion with a UFO what you get is a flying saucer that brings tears to your eyes, and so what I would like to do is, just based on the notes I took today, to review what the options available to us are in terms of trying to get some kind of intellectual handle on this phenomenon, and I’ll move through them rather quickly.
One possibility that I suppose is now out of fashion because it wasn’t mentioned here today, other than what Jacques said about ball lightning and plasmas, is that the UFOs are somehow natural phenomena, perhaps piezoelectric forces that have an ability to interact with the delicate electro chemical machinery of the human nervous system to create an impression of hallucination or visitation or abduction. That’s one possibility.
The more serious contender, as explanation I think fall into three categories. Is it us? Are we being visited or is there another tenate in the building that we are unaware of, and my own feeling about this tends to vacillate. I have had contact experiences. I have seen a UFO very close. I have met with entities from other dimensions, and it has not impelled me to take a strong position. I’ve paid very close attention when these experiences were happening to me, and there always seems to be loose ends that argue against whatever hypotheses seems currently most attractive, and though Jacques didn’t mention it today I recall in his book The Invisible College he stressed the absurdity that seems to attend the contact experience. That if the contactee will truly tell the unvarnished truth then there will be elements in the story which will make the contactee look like a moron, in other words, the invalidation of the experience is an inimical part of its structure, almost as though the entities were saying, well you may tell this story if you wish, but if you’ll tell it truthfully you’ll be taken for a fool. Well there’s nothing wrong with being taken for a fool except that it does peal the phenomenon rather nicely away from the very sober ladies and gentleman who are making there careers in some branch of science. They are not interested in investigating the kinky, the anecdotal, the possibly pathological.
In preparation for this conference I reread Carl Jung’s book published in 1954 called Flying Saucers A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, and to my mind no one has really gone beyond Jung. He understood very clearly that saying that something is a denizen of the psychic realm no way precludes its also having efficacious force in the physical realm through the phenomenon which he called synchronicity. Some of the points which Jacques made today about the nature of the medical examinations are reported they are absurd, they are unnecessary to be performed at our level of technology, let alone any future more advanced levels that we might be asked to believe in. So if the UFO phenomenon is something that is coming from us then what is it and what is it for?
I’ve given a good deal of thought to this question over the years because I tend to lean toward the notion that the UFO problem like many subtle problems is haunted by our own naiveté concerning language. If I were to randomly choose, and don’t worry I shant, five of you to come up here and each one of you would have forty seconds to explain to the rest of us what an atom is it would be preposterous. None of us know. I doubt that there’s a person in this room who can give an account of the atom that tallies with the "orthodox" description of the atom. So there is a curious fuzziness about the most mundane parts of reality when we really attempt to magnify and understand them in the clear light of consciousness. How much more ambiguity there is than naturally attended upon examination of any kind of phenomena which are rare or tend to be fringy. So it isn’t a matter of achieving consensus over the UFO. We can’t even achieve consensus about what constitutes a decent soufflé. So this passionate desire to drag us all under the umbrella of a single explanation is I think missing the point.

To my mind if the UFO phenomena is something arising out of the superego of the human psychic organization then we should ask why, what is it doing, and I don’t want to sound like a public relations agent for Jacques Vallee, but to my mind with the exception of Jung, Jacques is the only commentator on the phenomenon who has really pushed the frontier back. To my mind in The Invisible College when Vallee says, “In looking at the effect, not asking the question what is it, but what does it do, you very quickly see what the flying saucers are doing. What they are doing is eroding faith in science. They are an antidote to the scientific paradigm that has evolved over the past 400 years and which has led us to the brink of global catastrophe.” So the notion being developed here is that within the structure within the human psyche there is something like a governor, something like a monitoring circuit, which when a society begins to evolve in a pathological or lethal direction phenomena can be induced, not by the egos of men and women, not by there institutions, but by the overmind, the collectivity of the human species phenomena can be induced which are so corrosive to the ideology currently in place that there underpinnings are cutaway, there validity is called into question, and there programs for social development and control are invalidated and destroyed.