To my mind, if the UFO phenomenon 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 Vallée, but to my mind, with the exception of Jung, Jacques is the only commentator on the phenomenon who has really pushed the frontier back.  In The Invisible College, when Vallée 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 four hundred years, and which has led us to the brink of global catastrophe.

          So the notion being developed here is that within the structure of 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, [can induce] phenomena: not by the egos of men and women, not by their institutions, but by the Overmind, the collectivity of the human species.  Phenomena can be induced which are so corrosive to the ideologies currently in place that their underpinnings are cut away, their validity is called into question, and their programs for social development and control are invalidated and destroyed.

          Now a perfect example of this is the rise of infant Christianity. Cast your mind back to the situation in the early years of the Christian era and imagine the mentality of a Roman aristocrat, a person of power in Roman society: their physics is drawn from Democretean atomism - in other words, they are thoroughgoing materialists;  their social theory is drawn from Epictetus and Plato;  they are in fact extremely modern people,  by our own standards.

          However, among the gardeners and kitchen help and stable boys, there is news of a momentous event in the Middle East.  A Jewish rabbi has triumphed over death and risen after three days in the tomb.  Should the master of a Roman household have caught wind of this kind of superstitious talk among the help, he would have just dismissed it with a sneer:  what a preposterous idea!

          And it is a preposterous idea!  Nevertheless, the fact that an idea is preposterous has never held it back from making zealous converts,  and within a hundred and twenty years after the enunciation of the birth of Christianity,  its missionaries were beating on the gates of Rome, attempting to convert the emperor. 

          Now, I see a similar situation in the modern context: that rationalism, scientific technology, which began and came out of the scholasticism of the Middle Ages and the quite legitimate wish to glorify God through an appreciation of His natural world, turned into a kind of demonic pact, a kind of descent into the underworld, a nekyia if you will, leading to the present cultural and political impasse that involves massive stockpiles of atomic weapons  –  huge, propagandized populations cut off from any knowledge of their real histories  –  male-dominated organizations plying their message of lethal destruction and inevitable historical advance.

          And into this situation comes suddenly an anomaly, something which cannot be explained. I believe that that is the purpose of the UFO:  to inject uncertainty into the male-dominated, paternalistic, rational, solar myth, under which we are suffering.

          I suppose if you had to categorize this point of view, you would say I am taking a depth-psychological, psychoanalytic point of view. What I’m saying is that the UFO is nothing [less] than an assertion of Herself by the Goddess into history, saying to science and paternalistically governed and driven organizations:

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You have gone far enough. We are going to turn the world upside down. Your science is going to be shown up for what it is: nothing more than a pleasant metaphor usefully extrapolated into the production of toys for healthy children. That’s what science is good for! It is not some meta-theory at whose feet every point of view, from astrology to acupressure to channeling, need be laid to have the hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down.

 

          Now there is another possibility, which can be dovetailed into the first. It is that, it is not so much the Oversoul or the superego of the human species which is responsible for stopping scientific masculine paternalism in its tracks, but rather that, unbeknownst to self-absorbed and myopic human beings, we have always shared, or at least for a very long period of time have shared, this planet with an Other: another intelligent species, another entity, which may have been perfectly content to allow us to abide in our ignorance of its presence, until the point where it came to its awareness that our style was toxifying, ruining, raping and perverting the planet. And at that point this thing springs into action, with similar end results as the previous scenario, the invocation of the superego.

          It’s astonishing to me that in the forty-five years that the UFO, are-we-being-visited? question has been kicked around, I have never seen, in any UFO book or publication, the suggestion made that if we believe we are being visited by organic intelligent life-forms from some other dimension or place in the galaxy, then we should very very thoroughly examine the ecology of this planet for traces of its presence. What assurance do we have that the several million life-forms that we know to exist on this planet all evolved here?  Do we have any assurance?  There are ways to gain that assurance: by doing comparative DNA sequencing and this sort of thing. 
          Some of you may know my own position, or one of my positions, which is that plants and fungi containing psychoactive compounds are extremely viable candidates for extraterrestrial intruders into the environment of this planet.  And this is not to put down Whitley [Strieber’s] story, which is a very interesting story, but had he prefaced his story with the comment that, before it all happened, he took five grams of mushrooms, I doubt he could have sold it to his mother. Because in the world where mushrooms and other psychedelic plants are imbibed, such stories are commonplace - it’s no big deal!