Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (47 page)

Finally, it is worth pointing out that there is an unmistakable lineage of thought from C. G. Jung to both Jacques Vallee and Bertrand Méheust. Both Vallee's and Méheust's writings on UFOs often come very close indeed to Jung's famous notion of an archetype, that is, a permanently unconscious (“unidentified”) universal psychical pattern that can break into our physical world and express itself through local myths and symbols, even, in the case of synchronicities, through physical events. For Jung, flying saucers were what I would call “physical meanings.” Essentially, they were planetary poltergeists that appeared in the heart of the twentieth century in order to correct and balance Western culture's gross materialism and statistical leveling of the real.

A bit of historical background is necessary here. Jung finally published his little book on flying saucers in 1958, not to publish yet another book, but to clear up the misunderstandings sparked by an interview that he had given to
Weltwoche
in Zurich (published on July 9, 1954). News of what Jung had said (and often of what he had not said) spread like wildfire around the world. Whereas he had been very careful to qualify his conclusion and remained agnostic about the ultimate ontological status of the flying saucers, what was reported often boiled down to the simplistic idea that “flying saucers are real.” Over the next few years, different versions of this interview appeared in all the major UFO research publications, including
Flying Saucer Review
(May–June 1955), the
APRO Bulletin
(July
1958), and NICAP's
UFO Investigator
(August–September 1958). In August of 1958, Jung felt it necessary to issue a statement to the United Press International in order to clarify his position, which was really quite subtle. That same month he also wrote a personal letter to Major Donald E. Keyhoe, a retired military official who was heading up the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and who is widely considered to be one of the founders of modern ufology. All of this was no doubt designed to appear in conjunction with the book.

In his 1954
Weltwoche
interview, Jung expresses his central thesis that the UFO phenomenon may be an attempt by the collective psyche to balance itself, to dream itself aright after a long night of materialism, that the real lesson here is not little green men but our own hopelessly inadequate understanding of our own psychic worlds. His language is much more abstract, but he is essentially arguing what Charles Fort had argued, namely, that by damning the anomalous, modern science “flattens” reality into a bleak and shallow surface “average,” whereas, deep down, it is much more wild and ambiguous.
⁵³
This Jungian hermeneutic, which would come to have an immense influence on the later ufological literature, is captured succinctly by Bullard:

Picking up Jung's implications that UFOs are too important to be just spaceships, these interpreters recast all paranormal phenomena as a glimpse of some larger reality. It may be the juncture where psychic and physical worlds join, a parallel universe, or an imaginal realm, but it is now slipping through the cracks in our everyday continuum, breaking into awareness through altered states of consciousness or gradual weakening of a rational, materialistic worldview. In these speculations UFOs fast-change from physical to mental or spiritual roles and back again. They are deceivers and shape-shifters, tricksters on a mission to violate boundaries and sow confusion. They are agents to rearrange human consciousness.
⁵⁴

When Jung finally published his book on flying saucers in 1958, he was still attempting to clarify himself, still struggling with the glowing trickster in the sky. He certainly began humbly enough: “The conclusion is:
something is seen, but one doesn't know what
.”
⁵⁵
What followed was a series of speculations and dream interpretations, much of it engaged with parapsychology, all of which Jung presented as highly tentative. One can almost feel his bewilderment—and his desire not to be misunderstood again.

Although Méheust is critical of Jung's desire to overread the circle-shaped objects as mandalas, that is, as balancing archetypes of psycho-spiritual
wholeness, the Jungian influences and even conclusions of Méheust's first book are both obvious and conscious ones. These include the framing of the phenomenon within a certain dream-logic (SF 117, 200, 215, 229, 289, 296), or even
as
a “super-dream” (
sur-reve
) projected into the sky (SF 289), and a serious and sympathetic discussion of Jung's own model for relating consciousness and culture, his archetypal and collective unconscious theories (SF 184). Finally, Méheust even documents how literal “
mandala
-machines” appeared in the early pulp science-fiction stories, often controlled by Hindu, Buddhist, or vaguely Oriental wizards and sages (SF 99–100, 215–20). Such moments, complete with pictures, hardly work to undermine Jung's speculations.

Agent
X: Projection Theory Turned Back on Itself

Méheust points out that Jung's
Flying Saucers
book was not the only thing, and perhaps not even the most significant thing, that the depth psychologist published about the subject. He also published an account of a dream involving a UFO he had in October of 1958 (SF 269). It is certainly not surprising that Jung would have such a dream at that point in time. This was the same year, after all, that he published his
Flying Saucers
book. The interpreted meaning of the dream is another matter, however, another matter that takes us straight into Charles Fort land and, through that strange land, back to Bertrand Méheust.

Jung's dream came fourteen years after he had a heart attack (in 1944) and an attendant series of visions and dramatic out-of-body experiences, some of which he recounted in chapters 10 and 11 of his oral autobiography under the titles “Visions” and “On Life after Death.” It is in the latter chapter and in this general context of relating personal visions as he ended his career and approached death that Jung finally relates his UFO dream. The dream involved a number of lens-shaped metallic disks flying around his house and above the lake that spread out nearby. One such flying lens, he explains, possessed “a metallic extension which led to a box—a magic lantern.” At sixty or seventy yards out, the flying disc pointed the thing straight at him. Jung awoke astonished and, still half-asleep, thought to himself: “We always think that the UFOs are projections of ours. Now it turns out that we are their projections. I am projected by the magic lantern as C. G. Jung. But who manipulates the apparatus?”
⁵⁶

This is the most basic question behind the books of Bertrand Méheust.

It was also the most basic question behind the books of Charles Fort.

Fort
used the letter X to express this dramatic reversal of projection, this sudden sense that we are the projections of someone else's dream, movie, or novel. Fort used it to express the extraterrestrial force that he believed was projecting the fiction of our world. He also toyed, tongue in cheek, with different possibilities here, never really settling on an answer. Humor or no, however, it is difficult to read him and not come away with the sense that Charles Fort was fairly certain that X is out there, that it is real, and that we are not.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there are many Fortean scenes in Méheust. Méheust, for example, like Fort, seriously treats the colonial-invasion reading of UFOs by comparing science fiction's apparent pop-prediction of the 1947 Arnold sighting and its aftermath to the divinatory practices of the Aztec prophets under Montezuma's reign. As the story goes, the Aztec prophets had predicted the coming of some new gods, who then showed up on cue, as well-armored Spaniards, it turned out, to sack the Aztec kingdom. The moral of the story is clear enough, and rather disconcerting, to say the least. Méheust softens the blow, however, when he suggests that the Aztec “predictions” were likely based on more or less accurate information, a kind of visionary rumor that was traveling through the New World at the same time as the Spaniards made a number of early landings and forays into the continent (SF 54–56).

Then there is Méheust's recounting of a stunning case of seeming teleportation involving an Argentinian couple. The couple got in a car in Buenos Aires, drove into a cloud, lost consciousness, and awoke to find themselves, car and all (now with scorched paint), in an unknown alley in Mexico. Since they were on their way to a party back in Argentina, their friends reported them missing when they did not show up. The Mexican authorities were not amused. Since there was no record of them crossing the border, they accused the couple of entering the country illegally. So, if we are going to believe such an account, we have a whole bevy of “witnesses” (really antiwitnesses), some scorched paint, and the Mexican government to account for here—a typically Fortean scene, for sure (SF 161–62).

Alien invasions and teleportations aside, however, in the end Bertrand Méheust is not Charles Fort. (But who is?) To begin with, he is not nearly as paranoid. Yes, he takes Stanislas Lem's disturbing novel
Solaris
, about a planet whose life-forms are totally controlled by a surrounding unknowable plasma field, as a framing device to get at the epistemological dilemmas the student of UFOs encounters, as if the entire field is a mythology unconscious of itself (SF 295–96, 323). And, yes, he plays with the idea of “source X” possessing a kind of complete mental control over us (SF 135). This is
not
a new question. We saw the nineteenth-century psychical theorists asking the same question: If telepathy and mental control (
l'induction mentale
) are real possibilities, how
do
I know these are my thoughts and not someone else's? But, in the end, Méheust never really goes there. As for being embedded in a myth, this is not necessarily a bad thing for the author. Indeed, myth may be precisely the means through which we can best approach the unknowable (SF 295). It need not be a form of unconsciousness. Quite the contrary. It may be seen as “a divine incarnation as literature” (
un avatar littéraire
) (SF 185). The mystical as the hermeneutical again.

When Méheust, then, writes of “Agent X,” he is not writing about an alien being from Mars controlling us like puppets or projected movie-screen characters. He is much closer to Andrew Lang's psychofolklore and its anthropology of “region X” (SM 2:276, 293). He is speculatively postulating an irreducible form of mind or consciousness that may (or may not) lie behind the rich historical dossier of magnetic, psychical, and paranormal phenomena. He is being honest about the data and about what it suggests to him. He is certainly no true believer. He too is “reducing,” but to a form of collective Mind that is finally irreducible.
⁵⁷

With respect to the UFO phenomenon, he can write in 2007 that “that which interests me today is less the flying saucer (that is to say, the collective mythological dimension constructed and attested by the coincidence of science fiction and the flying saucers) than the UFO, that is to say, the X that it perhaps reveals” (SF 28). Put simply, Bertrand Méheust does not believe in flying saucers per se, but he accepts our own almost total ignorance of what lies behind the mythology of the flying saucer, and he labels this ignorance, like a buried treasure (or a dangerous ray that makes the invisible visible), with the sign of “X.”

The same ambiguous sign could be placed over the entire history of animal magnetism and psychical research, indeed over the entire history of religions. There is every reason to believe that something is indeed appearing there, but, much like Jung's flying saucers in the American sky, “
something is seen, but one doesn't know what
.” That, it must be said, is not a terribly satisfying conclusion. But it is an honest one. Obviously, we have not yet come into full consciousness. We are still evolving, to what or whom remains unidentified.

Conclusion

Back on the Page

For the mountain, the body of things, needs no key; it is only the nebulous wall of history, which hangs around it, that must be traversed. . . . True, history may at bottom be an illusion, but an illusion without which no perception of the essence is possible in time. The wondrous concave mirror of philological criticism makes it possible for the people of today first and most purely to receive a glimpse, in the legitimate orders of commentary, of that mystical totality of the system, whose existence, however, vanishes in the very act of being projected onto historical time.

—GERSHOM SCHOLEM
, letter to Zalman Schocken, October 29, 1937

Miracle is essentially “sign.”

—FRANZ ROSENZWEIG

We
have climbed up Scholem's mountain of revelation (or was it Spielberg's Devil's Tower?) through the mists and myths of history and ventured off the two-dimensional page of our Flatland materialisms into multidimensional realms and bizarre ideas that are impossible. Taking up Aimé Michel's advice to the aspiring savant or gnostic, we have “considered everything and believed nothing.” It is time now to come back and profess what we have seen in our four fantastic readings.

Or what we think we have seen.

In truth, I have already come back and professed what I think in the last chapter, where I sketched in the mirror of Bertrand Méheust's scholarship my own working position on the real around a metaphysical dialectic of consciousness and culture. That is indeed what I think, and that chapter should be read accordingly. Those are my conclusions. But I also recognize that all of this raises other important issues that are not directly addressed by such a model. Here at the end, I would like to address some of these, however briefly, toward a future form of thought whose precise contours I do not pretend to understand yet. What follows, then, should be approached not as a final conclusion or a statement of certainty, but as an open-ended thought experiment that approaches a kind of sci-fi “What if”? There are at least three dimensions of this future thought that I would like to explore here.