This work was painted in oil on canvas. I stretched the canvas over a modified futon frame. It stands over seven feet tall and lives in my entryway.
UFOs have been getting a lot of press lately. The US government is finally admitting that unidentified objects sometimes fly through our airspace. Now the subject has institutional legitimacy. This might mean that UFOs will be increasingly presented to the public as a threat to justify further expansion of the military industrial complex. But the official narrative is just a small part of the story.
Carl Jung explained flying saucers in terms of mass psychology. In this view, the physical details of the phenomenon were considered irrelevant to the experience of perceiving it. It didn't matter if a UFO was an alien spaceship or light reflecting on clouds. What was important was the phenomenon's mythic content. UFO experiences, particularly those with a social dimension, could even signal the emergence of a new religion.
It is for this reason notable that UFOs are gaining institutional legitimacy while religious institutions crumble. The Catholic Church, in North America at least, keeps making the news for abetting pedophilia and murdering thousands of indigenous kids in Canada's residential schools. The Church is on its way out. But people's religious impulses won't disappear as religious institutions fade. If anything, these impulses will grow in intensity in response to change and uncertainty.
Jane Roberts' book The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events claims that pandemics are often the result of a population's unconscious need to rebel against societal conditions, coupled with an inability to effectively articulate rebellion through accessible societal systems. From a materialist perspective, this makes little sense. But consider Covid. If millions of people wanted to unconsciously orchestrate a shock to the prevailing order, they couldn't do much better than covid. Society's response to this virus disrupted almost everything. In concrete terms, covid is a medical tragedy handled imperfectly. But it's up to us to tell the story of its meaning.
At the same time, there've been mass civil rights demonstrations and a feeble attempted insurrection at the Capitol. These things are strong signals that people are fed up with the status quo, even if they have no power to change it. Half a million dead. Riots and political violence. The rejection of the Church. While these dramas unfold, UFOs are gaining acceptance.
It's possible there are physical animals coming to Earth from other planets in ships. I kind of doubt it, but it's possible. What is certain is that a great many reliable people have reported observing unidentified aerial phenomena for several decades. That means something.
I think it means people are getting glimpses of the larger order we're a part of and interpreting these glimpses in mechanical terms, in accordance with our materialistic society. Whether or not this is the case, the meaning of UFOs seems like it should be generating more discussion. Will a new UFO religion spring up? Probably not. Yet the phenomena itself naturally expands our horizons.
