Fire in the Sky — UFOs and the Real Threat of Technology
From the 2021 archives
Originally published in Parabola magazine - Fall 2021
UFO encounters signal our transition into a technetronic era. These metallic orbs and their humanoid pilots are heralds of a spiritless future, sold to the public as inevitable, in which mechanism supplants the sublime. As such, these “flying saucers” provide a compelling symbol, be they psychological projections, extraterrestrial beings, or interdimensional entities—or, as some suggest, a liminal intersection of all three.
The most important question is whether this alien mythos portends a higher plane of existence or crushing dehumanization. The latter seems far more likely.
Late in his life, Carl Jung noted that unexplained spacecraft bear a close resemblance to what the ancients saw as “signs in the heavens.” In his slim 1957 tract Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, the psychologist wrote:
In the threatening situation of the world today, when people are beginning to see that everything is at stake, the projection-creating fantasy soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets. … Under these circumstances it would not be at all surprising if those [irreligious] sections of the community who ask themselves nothing were visited by “visions,” by a widespread myth seriously believed in by some and rejected as absurd by others.
One of the book’s striking aspects is the familiarity of its subject matter. The UFOs of Jung’s day were described as being shaped like a convex lens or a cigar, much like today. They hovered as if weightless. They moved effortlessly in any direction at impossible speeds. Jung collected every government and media report he could find. Comparing them, he noticed many sightings involved military installations, particularly nuclear sites. Given the scant but puzzling material evidence, including radar detection, he couldn’t rule out the physical existence of flying saucers.
Even so, the psychologist focused on the phenomena’s psychic import. The central thrust of Flying Saucers is a Jungian analysis of dreams and visions involving alien visitors. In these recurring motifs, we see that insectoid machines, harrowing abductions, immanent technological catastrophe, and the possibility of salvation—either through peace on earth or an escape to distant worlds—were already present in the modern psyche at the Cold War’s inception.
Jung thought these otherworldly visions reflected widespread anxiety over the possibility of nuclear holocaust, in addition to overpopulation and the resulting friction between disparate tribes. Reading his work, it’s obvious that more recent tales of unexplainable aircraft and disturbing close encounters are elaborations on a well-established concept. As such stories accumulate, we’re left with little more than unanswered questions and a frustrated sense of urgency.
Today, as the prevailing world order crumbles under various pressures, our attention is once again directed to the sky. The current fixation began in 2017, when the New York Times dedicated a front-page story to the American government’s open investigation of UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena). In a surprise move, the Pentagon broke with its longstanding policy of denial, admitting these events are real, unexplained, and definitely not produced by U.S. technology.
This resulted in tremendous political pressure for full disclosure. The upcoming UAP Task Force report, to be delivered to Congress by the Director of National Intelligence on June 25, promises fresh insight into the continuous military sightings that began after the first atomic bombs exploded in 1945. In a recent Washington Post interview with Luis Elizondo, the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program confessed: “[W]e are quite convinced that we’re dealing with a technology that is multigenerational, several generations ahead of what we consider next generation technology...something that could be anywhere between 50 to 1,000 years ahead of us.”
The implication is that the human race is on a path to becoming like these mysterious beings, either through our own efforts, or perhaps through direct contact. Many UFO enthusiasts hope alien beings have come to save us from our own destructive tendencies. Others fear they’re here to establish interplanetary dominance. In either case, the resulting techno revolution will change everything.
Of course, one doesn’t need top secret clearance to find evidence of civilizational transformation. Science fiction is rapidly moving from the old pulp pages to digital news sites. Traditional paranormal powers—telepathy, clairvoyance, conjuring, telekinesis, even prophecy—are easily accessed via the touchscreens held in most Americans’ hands. What was once magic, won by spiritual discipline or grace, has become a mundane reality.
Day after day, we’re promised (or warned) that artificial intelligence and robotics will surpass us in every capacity, from data analysis to artistic expression. In the near future, we’re told, our deities will manifest in digital form. Various influential transhumanists, from Ray Kurzweil to Elon Musk, argue that we need to augment our feeble human bodies with advanced technologies—brain implants, gene-editing, intravenous nanobots, etc.—if only to keep pace with unstoppable AI gods. In essence, we are to become a new species, utterly alien to our ape-like ancestors.
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Whether real or imagined, UFOs represent godhood in material form. As with other heavenly or infernal powers, their pilots are thought to possess supreme intelligence, superior power, and access to higher worlds—except that their miracles are accomplished by way of technology. As Jung saw clearly, this imagery indicates the birth of a modern myth.
Perhaps the most articulate development of this idea is The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained by religious studies scholar Jeffrey Kripal and novelist Whitley Strieber. In alternating chapters, Strieber describes his various anomalous experiences, including an alien abduction, subterranean kobolds, and apparitions of the dead. Kripal then applies academic methodologies—such as comparative religion, phenomenology, historical context, hermeneutics, and erotics—to analyze these accounts.
From different directions, the authors converge on an intriguing framework for understanding UFO phenomena. They argue that these otherworldly entities are simply extraordinary elements of the natural world, along with ghosts, gods, and goblins. Hence the term “super natural.” According to Kripal and Strieber’s interpretation of quantum physics and string theory, human beings inhabit a cosmos with many parallel dimensions. In this light, paranormal manifestations are actually part of the natural order, albeit more subtle and mysterious.
This blurring of distinctions, centered on our conditioned perspective, cuts both ways. Although he accepts Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum—“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”—Kripal then flips the notion on its head: “Any sufficiently profound magical event is indistinguishable from technology. … Contemporary extraterrestrials show every appearance of being gods misperceived by spiritually naive moderns.”
Kripal and Strieber see the UFO experience as both real and imagined. These aerial phenomena are quasi-material reflections of some underlying psycho-spiritual structure. In the end, the authors claim, what we are seeing is the early phase of an entirely new religious paradigm—one that blends the transcendent realms of ancient religion with current paranormal phenomena and the detailed cosmic maps of modern astronomy, ecology, and biology. In their view, these alien entities are teaching us how to become our true selves.
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As an intellectual exercise, the synthetic “super natural” paradigm has undeniable appeal. Yet as I contemplate the basis of the authors’ conclusion—which originates in Strieber’s disgusting abduction experience—their seductive idea looks less like the Transfiguration of Christ and more like the Rape of Persephone. It’s a metanarrative for technocrats penetrating the natural human form by force.
In his best-selling book Communion, published in 1987, Whitley Strieber describes an experience he had around Christmas two years before. A troop of small, gray, human-like beings with “mesmerizing black slanted eyes” invaded his cabin in Upstate New York. They dragged the horror novelist out of bed and carried him onboard what appears to be a spacecraft. Inside, these beings inserted a needle into his temple and implanted a chip behind his ear. They then sodomized him with a strange mechanical device.
“The next thing I knew,” Strieber writes, “I was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object, gray and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end. … They inserted this thing into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own.” This caused Strieber to ejaculate. The gray aliens kept his semen, he explains, as well as some fecal matter. Only afterward did these sadistic creatures put him to sleep and place him back into his bed.
“People who face the visitors,” he wrote after reading similar stories, “report fierce little figures with eyes that seem to stare into the deepest core of being. And those eyes are asking for something, perhaps even demanding it. … The goal does not seem to be the sort of clear and open exchange we might expect. … It seems to me that it seeks the very depth of the soul; it seeks communion.”
As the years passed, Strieber's account became more and more detailed, by way of hypnotic regression and subsequent book deals. So of course, he reveals the full story in The Super Natural. Following his traumatic “rectal probe,” Strieber was twice visited by a faceless gray succubus who forced him into various sexual acts. He says it was the best sex he’s ever had, despite the guilt of betraying his wife. Surprisingly, this ephemeral “goddess” doesn’t seem to have had an orgasm herself.
Kripal notes the resonance of Strieber’s encounter with erotic practices involving the goddess Kali. “The project of ‘comparing communions,’” Kripal writes, “might eventually lead to the development of a new mystical practice, a western ‘contact yoga’ in deep conversation with our religious pasts (all of them), our evolutionary biology...and our new understandings of human sexuality. Certainly, such a future practice will require a much richer and more generous imagining of the divine presence. He must also become She.”
For his own part, Strieber expresses gratitude for his repeated sexual humiliation. Citing countless similar reports by other abductees, he theorizes that these cosmic bronco-busters are actually taming human beings, much like he broke horses on his family ranch as a young man. If we are willing to submit, he writes, perhaps an expanded consciousness awaits.
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Call me closed-minded, but the authors provide a much better argument for installing a nuclear iron dome over the Earth’s atmosphere than for opening ourselves to this new “super natural” paradigm. That isn’t to say that their theory is incorrect. Not entirely.
While there’s every reason to doubt Strieber’s stories, on a factual level, it’s quite possible that his lived experience is exactly as he has described. It may also reflect an underlying spiritual dimension, however dark and chaotic. And honestly, if we bracket Kripal’s perplexing naivete, his scholarly analysis is superb.
Both men readily acknowledge that mystical experiences throughout history contain elements of light and darkness, from Job’s torment at the hands of Yahweh to Arjuna’s theophany in the Bhagavad Gita. What their theory of the unknown fails to account for, however, is the distinction between redemption and needless suffering. In the final analysis, it conflates submission to a higher power with sexual cruelty.
Kripal and Strieber urge us to let down our defenses, but when faced with alien rapists and their kobold minions, I’d say traditional barriers are entirely reasonable. What bothers me the most is that the authors ignore the resonance of the UFO archetype with the ultimate goal of technocratic elites. Enticing the public with dazzling gadgets, these futurists offer spiritual transcendence by material means.
Returning to Jung’s theory of flying saucers as psychic projection, it seems that UFOs symbolize a possible future in which technologically advanced entities impose their will on hapless human beings. Down here on earth, Silicon Valley and the Chinese Communist Party insist this transition is for our own good. Let’s just say I have my doubts. There are sound reasons to believe that what we face is dehumanization under the wheels of the machine.
Whatever its ontological status, fire in the sky should serve as a warning. But this is no cause for despair. Higher worlds are beckoning just beyond.
Originally published in Parabola magazine - Fall 2021
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