Our beliefs about UAP’s (UFO’s) may tell us more about ourselves than they do about extraterrestrials, just as our beliefs about God may reveal more about us than about God. I’m not saying that EBE’s (Extraterrestrial Biological Entities) or NHI’s (Nonhuman Intelligences) aren’t concretely real. I’m just saying that they may reveal, as physicist Fred Alan Wolf writes, a greater truth as metaphors in what he termed the imaginal realm. In this regard, his ideas overlap with those of the psychiatrist, C.G. Jung.
Jung didn’t conclude that UAP’s were fantasies of the mind. But in general, he regarded dreams and myths as archetypal, as arising from the subliminal depths of a collective unconscious which tended to reveal itself to us and to show us to ourselves through repeating forms. In this regard, both Wolf and Jung described to us a realm where metaphor and parable carry symbolic truths which far outweigh their literal natures and storylines.
Freud informed us that dreams had both a manifest and latent content. Manifest content refers to the patent, overt narrative of a dream. Latent content is what the dream represents symbolically. While UAP’s, EBE’s and NHI’s may be concretely real, they may also afford us a glimpse into our own individual psyches, and perhaps into our collective psyche. Without denying or discounting the physical evidence of UAP’s and their operators, maybe what we’re experiencing up in the skies or in the world’s oceans has as much to do with what we’re undergoing as a nation, and in a larger sense, as a world.
America is riven by internal conflict which threatens to implode into a civil war. At the same time, peer adversaries around the world wage battles against us and our allies below the level of overt, hot hostilities in what are termed hybrid wars or grey zone conflict. These campaigns often threaten to break out into a total war which could quickly escalate into nuclear exchanges. We’re threatened by overpopulation, unsustainable agricultural practices, and ecological collapse, all brought about by runaway technologies of which we’re deeply suspicious. Enter artificial intelligence as a further threat to our existence, at least in our minds.
In prior eras of collective anxiety, we experienced similar outbreaks of UAP phenomenon. Although reports of unidentified objects and events in the sky have been reported throughout history, the UFO ‘era’ exploded into mass consciousness two years after the first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, just when the Red Scare and the communist menace threatened us from within, at least according to our own perceptions.
At the same time, the space age was about to dawn. Science fiction had entered into mainstream consciousness and its authors were modern day prophets and they often portrayed the survival of humanity as threatened by extraterrestrial invaders. These collective anxieties may have broken open in 1947 when Kenneth Arnold, a businessman and pilot, saw what he described as flying saucers, which quickly became the focus of national attention through national media exposure. Roswell became the archetypal alien visitation a few weeks later, and has remained indelibly etched onto the American psyche ever since.
These anxieties – about nuclear annihilation, about the Soviet threat, about a space race involving Sputnik in which America saw itself as falling behind – were perhaps projected from the inside-out as a collective belief in the extraterrestrial, which not only had the power to invade and destroy, but also the power to heal and save. This extraterrestrial Big Brother was, as the case may be, a savior come to avert a nuclear apocalypse in The Day the Earth Stood Still or, more often, a predator swooping in to rape and pillage our precious planet in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And the extraterrestrial in its UAP is often still regarded the same way.
Yet these may be projections of a split mind which sees civilization as an out-of-control blight on the planet. We see in the invading extraterrestrial other a projection of our conquering selves, inflicting upon the biome and its nonhuman inhabitants an overzealous exploitation of ‘inferior’ beings: factory farms, overfishing, monoculture, and global warming as we invade every last unspoiled frontier on earth. And in the extraterrestrial savior, perhaps we look to a superior being to save us from our own excesses since we don’t seem able to stop ourselves from ruining what remains of the last great places on earth.
So it’s worth considering whether what we’re experiencing now with drones in New Jersey, with submarine ships the size of football fields powering through the water at hundreds of miles per hour, in Congressional testimony, in tell-all books, and in skies everywhere is simply a mass projection of our own anxieties. These anxieties are amplified by the internet and smartphones, by emails and texts, just like the initial UFO craze was intensified by television and the likes of The Outer Limits. Regarding the latter, it’s worth nothing that grey aliens came into the stream of the collective conscious not too long after a similar ET was portrayed in an episode entitled The Bellero Shield. And long before TV, sci-fi author H.G. Wells suggested a similar alien in an article entitled The Man of the Year Million. All of this supports what’s been termed the Psychosocial Hypothesis of UAP sightings.
Like other manifestations of the imaginal realm (psychic phenomenon, ghosts, demons, cryptids, and Marian visions to name a few) a symbolic, mythological, collective psychological meaning may explain what we see up there, apart from its potential concrete reality, which could proceed an independently-verifiable track.
As I’ve mentioned, Freud viewed dreams as possessing manifest level. This is what the dream is about literally. In religious texts, which of course are collective, the manifest level of the myth is its literal level, which sometimes has a historic analogue, but sometimes does not. I’m not trying to take away anyone’s right to believe that the opening story of Genesis really happened. I’m only saying that on a symbolic level, the story of the Expulsion from Paradise has a much more powerful meaning for me about the hazards which result when humans try to judge good and evil and think they have the right answers. This would be, on the level of dreams, my latent interpretation of the Genesis story.
I think it may be the same with UAP’s, and that Wolf and Jung had it right. Neither of them tried to disprove the concrete reality of extraterrestrial visitations. They might, however, both be more inclined to look beneath and beyond the literal nature of such phenomenon into what these accounts and experiences tell us about ourselves. I think what these events might reveal to us is that we’re afraid – we’re very afraid – of what’s happening to us now on earth. To use another metaphor, it seems that our technological civilization is a runaway car in which we’re all backseat passengers, and there’s no one driving (or else everybody’s trying to drive the damn thing). The car is careening down a mountain road. We’re all terrified. We can’t agree on who should drive or how to drive or which road to take or even on whether we should slow down. The only thing which we seem to have in common, on which we all could probably agree, is that we’re scared and we’re looking for a way out. That’s what all those UFO’s may be about.
© 2025 by Michael C. Just