A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

salvation through the union of opposites. 196
Yet the saucer, promising a union at the broader
level imagined by Jung and the more specific union of two opposing world views, was
unreachable, evanescent.
Jung described the situation of the post World War II arrival of the saucer in terms that
resonate strongly with the dynamics that inform the displaced utopian imaginary. He surmised
that the presence of UFOs could be described in two potential ways. One was that the saucers
were a rumor that, broadly circulated, created the ground for visions. The second was that the
UFOs were objectively real and the repeated sightings of these objects created the ground for the
emergence of a myth. The first, where rumor leads to visions, sounds like nothing so much as
the materialization of the spiritual or ethereal—imagination made manifest. The second, where
sightings of actual objects lead to the formulation of myth recalls the spiritualization of the
material—material reality rendered sublime via the agency of myth. Both dynamics speak to the
desire so central to the displaced utopian imaginary, the desired integration of the materialist and
idealist world views, a positivist world that allowed for the presence of spirit and mystery. Jung,
in suggesting that the saucers were both myth and in some sense objectively real, captured the
logic of the phenomenon—one that hewed to the form of both/and rather than either/or. Yet the
fundamental question of organized research into UFOs in the years following World War II was
whether or not UFOs even existed—either yes or no.
The flying saucer, or UFO, appeared as an embodiment of the aspired to rapprochement
between the worlds of spirit and material. Its presence in the skies of the modern world recalled
the signs and portents of the bible. Its evanescence—UFO’s appeared and disappeared
196
Carl Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (New York: MJF Books, 1978).
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