I had heard about Jung’s writings on Flying Saucers as when he went completely off the deep end, so when I read it, I was of course to find it surprisingly basic. Jung is merely taking the cultural relevance around encounters with UFOs seriously and noticing that people seemed to be having greater amounts of these experiences during periods of collective dissociation.
The objects behave in the same ways angels or other religious visions (such as shining or burning orbs) functioned in past historical moments. There are other spiritual dimensions as well: often sightings occur with various prophecies or revelations, and involves believing in this higher power. He’s actually not really arguing that aliens are here or that there is definitely something happening, nor is he arguing that people are experiencing psychosis. He’s taking a third path.
The UFO, he says, is an orb or a mandala in the sky which symbolizes humanities desire for wholeness. Much like how a synchronicity appears to one when they are on their own path of integration, observing seemingly uncanny coincidences that points one in the “right” direction (see ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER for paralogical explanations), the UFO appears to an individual as a representative of a human-wide desire. In this sense, it’s a very real object of a psychosis happening at a much broader scale.
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