ETs vs. Faeries: 2b What Do UFOs/ETs Mean?

Carl Jung the psychologist saw in flying saucers a sky-borne mandala; that is, an archetypal image of the integrated Self, meaning unity, wholeness of the psyche. Seen by some as carrying a message to Earthlings from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, to Jung, whatever in reality flying saucers might be, in human terms they were a projection from the human collective unconscious to the conscious ego-self, which in modern times, especially, is closed-off from the unconscious and so perhaps can only be reached by an illusion, vision, of a symbolic physical phenomenon, or perhaps even an actual materialization of some sort, so that it appears to the ego-self to be 'real', and so, hard to dismiss-- seeing is believing.

Jung had started collecting newspaper clippings of UFO sightings as early as 1946. He thought he might be on to the formation of a modern myth in the mass mind. But in 1951 he admitted to a friend that he couldn't determine whether UFOs were were physical or hallucinatory, or perhaps both of these at once. But his psychological theories led him to see them as to some degree, at least, an expression of the mass mind, whether they were real objects or not. And in this sense, they indicated a major shift in the collective unconscious of mankind, due to world-historical trauma from the horrific scale, destruction, and unprecedented atrocities of World War II and the ensuing threat of communist takeover or nuclear annihilation in the Cold War era. He also believed that we were experiencing the beginnings of a cosmic-astrological shift, due to the precession of the Earth's tilted axis, from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, in which a basic transformation of the human psyche was at hand, the transition causing great unconscious trauma which must express itself somehow to the conscious self. To me, the first theory seems fairly plausible, but astrology never made any sense to me. And since all the books I've read recently about UFOs/ETs generally concur in there not being enough hard evidence to support any one theory of the real nature of UFOs, making it possible to doubt that they are extraterrestrial craft, or physical objects as we understand them according to current knowledge of physics, it's then possible to see them, in accord with Jung, as psychic or 'paraphysical' manifestations. If so, what might be the meaning of them? Well, here a Pandora's Box of mythic speculation is opened, because what has been seen isn't just frisbee-shaped craft, but colored glowing plasma balls, huge dark triangular craft, cylinders, and strange crew-members appearing not only as the iconic ET, but as attractive blond 'Nordics', reptilians, insectoids, hairy trolls, robots, and people claim to be channeling beings from other planets or dimensions, or to have been taken aboard the craft and been told many things. It's a wild confusion.

Since I've read all these (eight of them?) UFO/ET books to get inspiration for advancing the Shaggy Mythos, I'll just be like Jung and present what they mean to ME, mythically, based on what UFOs/ETs seem to mean in the mass human psyche. And as I have said, I see them as a 'Sky-people' phenomenon, and so, wrong, counterproductive, despite their gradual replacement of warnings of nuclear holocaust by warnings of ecocatastrophe in recenter decades (according to John Mack, especially, in Passport to the Cosmos). I suppose that many 2012-related warnings have been reported, but I haven't read of them.

So, what is the mythic meaning of UFOs/ETs, basically? This I will answer in the next installment.