UFOs, Aliens, and the Unknown Other

Back in my early days of blogging for Psychology Today, I posted an article (2010) on the UFO (now UAP) phenomenon which, more than a decade-and-a-half later, I want to revisit and further amplify.

It is a subject that has grown increasingly compelling and fascinating for some over the years, including myself, particularly following the recent release of military verified videos of so-called UAPs by the U.S. government (see The New York Times article), and one I believe worthy of further analysis. What is the psychological significance of this strange phenomenon?

As Stanford psychiatrist Irvin Yalom (1980) asserts, one of the "ultimate concerns" of humankind is our existential state of alienation and isolation often expressed in the question: Are we alone in the universe? Traditionally, religion (i.e., the belief in god or gods or some superhuman being) has been helpful for some, both individually and collectively, in assuaging the sense of being all alone in a cold and uncaring cosmos. However, for many today, traditional religion no longer fulfills this function.

Yet, despite this secular turn away from religion toward a more scientific worldview, for a growing number of people the answer to this age old query is nevertheless a resounding NO. Why? Because they fervently believe in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. (See, for example, my prior piece on the wildly popular television program, Ancient Aliens.) It is as if faith in some divine deity has been replaced by belief in alien life forms visiting Earth in extraordinary vehicles beyond our current technological comprehension. This quasi-religious conviction regarding the objective reality of extraterrestrial visitation begs several big questions, not the least of which are: Who are they? Why are they here? What do they want?

In 1958, C.G. Jung published a very controversial work about UFO's, at that time popularly referred to as "flying saucers." Later posthumously titled Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (Princeton University Press, 1979), Jung's main concern at that time was less whether or not these UFO's objectively, physically or materially exist than with their subjective, phenomenological inner reality, psychological meaning, and spiritual significance. (See my prior posts on subjective and objective reality.)

Jung's existential emphasis on our fundamental human need for meaning in the face of a seemingly random and meaningless universe is something he shared with psychotherapists like Otto Rank, Viktor Frankl and Rollo May (see my prior post). Indeed, meaning and the problem of meaninglessness is, as Yalom (1980) posits, another ultimate concern of existential psychotherapy.

Existential analyst Viktor Frankl (1946/1984) felt that we all possess an innate, instinctual "will to meaning": i.e., an intrinsic need to make sense of life, to find some significance and purpose.(See my prior post.) When this basic need is chronically unmet or frustrated, when we find ourselves living in a seemingly absurd, meaningless world, a state of mind he termed an "existential vacuum" frequently resulting in feelings of despair, rage, depression, and embitterment. As Jung pithily put it, "Man cannot stand a meaningless life."

Existential psychoanalyst Rollo May, in his final major work, The Cry for Myth (1991), clearly illustrates the vital psychological importance of myths (or personal or archetypal narratives) that help give meaning to human existence and suffering. Soren Kierkegaard, a philosophical forerunner of existential therapy, held that life is fundamentally meaningful, and that it is our task to discover that enigmatic meaning.

At the same time, like Jean-Paul Sartre, existential therapy recognizes the possibility that life may be essentially meaningless or absurd except to the extent we courageously and creatively imbue it with meaning. That life holds no inherent hidden meaning other than that which we choose to give it. And that without the capacity to tolerate life's partial or total meaninglessness, we become perilously susceptible to believing almost anything, no matter how fantastic, in order to allay our existential anxiety or Angst about the unknown and satisfy our insatiable psychological and spiritual need for meaning.

This could partially explain the underlying psychology of the UFO phenomenon. The unknown can, for most if not all creatures, be a frightening and dreadful experience. As with primitive peoples witnessing natural phenomena such as solar or lunar eclipses, fire, floods, thunder, lightning, volcanoes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or tornadoes, we tend to fear the unknown and create elaborate stories or myths to try to explain it, rendering it less scary. Religion can be generally understood as one such myth. Science is another. They both serve the psychological purpose of mitigating our existential anxiety in the face of these enigmatic, mysterious, and terrifying phenomena.

This is part 1 of a two-part series.

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