The UFO Archetypes

Psychological archetypes unconsciously predispose us to organize our personal experiences in certain ways.We are, for instance, predisposed to perceive someone in our early environment as a father because of the Father archetype. If our biological father is absent during our early years, someone else (e.g., one’s older brother) is assimilated into this archetype.

A common mistake is to imagine the archetypes as being specific images or symbols. Archetypes are, however, more like invisible magnetic fields that cause iron filings to arrange themselves according to certain patterns. To take an example relevant to our concerns in these pages, Jung postulated the existence of a Self archetype that constitutes the unconscious basis for our ego-our conscious self-image or self-concept. This Self can be represented in a variety of ways, often in the form of four of almost anything (according to Jung, four is the number of wholeness and hence a symbol of the Self), a pattern Jung referred to as a “quaternity.” The Self can, however, also be represented by alternate symbols, such as a circle or mandala.

These concrete manifestations of elusive archetypes are known as archetypal images or, when they appear in dreams, as archetypal dream images. Dreams are not the only arena in which archetypes can emerge. Jung also asserted that much of world mythology and folklore represented manifestations of the collective unconscious (the archetypal level of the human mind). He based this assertion on his discovery that the dreams of his clients frequently contained images with which they were completely unfamiliar but that seemed to reflect symbols that could be found somewhere in the mythological systems of world culture. Because much popular UFO literature can (and has) been characterized as modern folklore, we would expect it to embody archetypal images-implying that the circular pattern of the classic flying saucer embodies the Self archetype in its mandala expression.