Allan Hendry on CE III cases, Carl Jung, fantasy fulfilment, and the ET-to- paranormal pipeline

Below are excerpts from Allan Hendry's 1979 book, "The UFO Handbook: A Guide to Investigating, Evaluating, and Reporting UFO Sightings". The first deals with CE III cases and how they might be resolved with an appeal to Jung or a fantasy fulfilment model. Hendry provides an especially fascinating overview of this obscure and sometimes difficult topic. The second excerpt deals with the trajectory or "main sequence", as Hendry calls it (borrowing a term from stellar evolution) that he noted among many UFO researchers, in which these workers started from the nuts-and-bolts extraterrestrial hypothesis and ended up adopting a properly paranormal view of UFOs.

From Chapter 9 (The UFO Message):

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND

This category may turn out a relatively small percentage of reports, yet when it comes to UFO theories, it is a giant! Since CE Ill's have the greatest physical overtones of all, manifesting themselves as definite craft with occupants, UFOlogists, who have adopted this at face value, have therefore felt that CE Ill's are simply our "closest look" at the "total" UFO phenomenon. We've already explored the evolution of that train of thought, and the problems that have arisen. UFOlogists know from experience that the following alternative explanations have occurred and could well still be occurring:

1) Deliberately hoaxed CE III accounts (though probably not as prevalent as UFO skeptics would have us believe).

2) Illusion of IFOs with "figures" inside—probably the most significant in "type A" CE Ill's (remember that most CE Ill's are seen at night).

3) IFO seen with men or animals "out of context"—probably significant in "type C" CE Ill's. NOTE: Bloecher types D, E, and F are not regarded here as proper CE III considerations. Yet, despite the problems, there is one point on which UFOlogists agree: that CE Ill's are not:

4) Fantasized accounts in the absence of any stimuli, especially in types B and C.

The reasons cited include the large number of people that claim to have seen UFOs, the thirty-year duration of the modern UFO era with no end in sight, the global nature of the phenomenon, the "reliability" of the witnesses who report them, and the similarities that exist among the reports. "How can over one thousand CE III claims be figments of the imagination?" and "How can one hundred sixty abduction claims be fantasy?" are common defenses of the "reality" of these events.

Yet a closer look at the issue reveals a great many telling symptoms which point to a fantasy model for the CE Ill's:

***The huge variety of appearances among the UFOs and UFOnauts alike supports the idea that each is an individually imagined invention. ***There are three conditions that run in common throughout the CE Ill's: darkness, rural surroundings, and a predominance of single or double witnesses. One way of interpreting the first two conditions is that CE III (and other) UFO experiences occur in direct proportion to a minimum of sensory input; ghosts are typically reported under such conditions. Controlled experiments involving total sensory deprivation (dark rooms, no sound, etc.) typically result in the subject hallucinating. Couple this with the relative loneliness of the CE III witness, and you have ripe conditions for what psychiatrists call "isolation delusion."

***The IFO reports reveal that a widespread strong desire exists to read flying saucer elements of appearance and behavior into minimal stimuli. Ad planes regularly become domed discs . . . so do stars, meteors, balloons, and planes. The mistakes people make about distant IFO sources were not random, but were channeled along specific lines of UFOlogical thought. This universal reaction to IFO Rorschach blots, coupled with unwarranted emotional reactions, anticipation of special UFO powers, the frantic search for someone to call, and the levels of wit ness ridicule, appears to affect every type of personality, even individuals who profess no prior interest or input on the UFO subject.

***The nature of the visions read into IFOs suggests a great deal of influence by the news and entertainment media. In the case of CE III claims, the elements of UFO and UFOnaut appearance and behavior conform very heavily to science fiction conventions that date back to 1939. As "visitors from space," there is nothing in the technological capabilities exhibited by the UFOnauts that has not been anticipated (ad nauseam) in early science fiction literature . . . right down to the stopping of cars.

***The observation of so many UFOnauts that either look just like us or are at least structured along our own lines leads many UFOlogists to refer to UFOnauts as "humanoids." Does this mean there is human evolution on other planets? Or is it more seemly that these UFOnauts are simply psychological ex tensions of ourselves, often idealized in appearance? Even more surprising is the ease with which many UFOnauts breathe our air, speak the percipient's given language, and get along in our world's environment.

***There are UFOnauts that are dressed in space suits; yet these, too, are carbon copies of twentieth-century NASA outfits, complete with bubble helmets, backpacks, and connecting tubes. Another extrapolation? Many UFOlogists have included the sixty-odd encounters in the 1890s with pilots of Jules Verne-type airships as part of the UFO phenomenon. These did not manifest themselves as flying saucers but were more in keeping with the times; nor did those "aeronauts" wear space suits . . . at a time when such a description would have been more convincing.

***The CE Ill's constitute highly personal experiences. For all the conversations, abductions, and even food exchanges, the CE III experience is vivid only to the percipient; he cannot convey it adequately to the outside world.

***Many of the smaller forms of UFOnauts noted do possess the strong similarities noted earlier to the fairies and gnomes of an earlier era; yet does this necessarily lead to a paranormal conclusion? Or simply a Space Age redressing of a previous legend? Also, why the introduction of centuries-old de sires such as telepathy, levitation, telekinesis, and astral projection here?

***The personalness of the CE III experience is further enhanced by the absence of radar or photographic corroboration. UFO skeptics frequently taunt the lack of physical proof from hundreds of CE III encounters.

***Reports of abductions have taken off since 1970; it is understandable that a large number of these occurred during the U.S. flap year of 1973, yet equally large numbers of these are showing up in years like 1976 that are not noteworthy in general.

***Many of the abduction cases re quired hypnotic regression to obtain any details. As will be seen in Chapter 11: "Tools: Hypnosis," considerable controversy is arising about the balance of fact and fantasy in these CE Ill's.

***Why are there no "partial abductions"? Why is the structure of these detainments always climaxed by a "medical examination"?

***The messages that the UFOnauts impart to us seldom transcend shallow platitudes about living in harmony or stopping atomic experiments. Is this an expression of need for outside saviors for our troubled world?

***Why do so many of the UFOnauts behave the way our astronauts do, even to the point of parody, like soil sampling in the middle of an urban environment? Or in the yard of a house? Or re pairs in the middle of a road? Is this simply how many people are forced to imagine the activities of the imagined space men?

What are the arguments that CE Ill's are not generated by conventional fantasy?

1) Too many witnesses. Divide the thousand-odd CE III reports in the UFO literature by the past thirty years, and compare this annual figure worldwide with the 4 billion people available on the earth to generate them. You can even multiply this number by a factor of 100, if you wish, to account for CE Ill's not reported by witnesses. Then ask seriously if this exceeds the bounds of fantasy-generated reports in a world where 1 per cent of the population is subject to schizophrenic delusions. UFO researchers are treating human beings as if they were cold instruments instead of complex balances of logic vs. emotions, science vs. superstition, religion, and mythology.

 2) Too many years to be a fad. Thirty years? Astronomer Carl Sagan reminds us that astrology has survived for five thousand years, not because it is founded on fact but because it resonates with our need to believe in it.

3) CE Ill's are reported in all countries. It is true that UFOs are reported all over the world, even CE III experiences, but don't be misled that the reports are the same from nation to nation (as some UFOlogists contend in defense of a "non-fantasy" phenomenon). South American countries produce CE III encounters that are especially vivid; the entities, often more animalistic or "ugly" than those reported in North America, are reported to behave much more aggressively toward South American hu mans. Alleged conversations are less ambiguous in nature as well, with the UFOnauts clearly stating their different planetary origins, or missions to save mankind. British UFO researchers once spoke despairingly of the lack of CE Ill's among their UFO reports; then these suddenly sprang up in abundance in the early seventies. There are CE III cases in Australia, but there, researchers note the lack of contact, time lapse, and abduction cases among them.

4) CE Ill's leave physical traces. In Ted Phillips' physical-trace catalogue, 1 17 of the detailed 561 cases had UFOnauts present. Yet if the UFOnauts were fantasy, hallucination, or exaggerated illusion, the physical traces, however ambiguous, could have been falsely implicated in any of the ways postulated previously.

5) CE III abductions with conscious witnesses. Not all of the abductions re quired the controversial use of hypnosis to obtain the accounts. Still, single-witness abductions are the rule here, and while the hypnosis problems are ruled out, the prospects of isolation delusion, hallucination, and even hoax are not.

6) Multiple-witness CE Ill's. Seventy five per cent of the clearly demonstrable IFOs had the benefit of multiple witnesses, but this didn't dampen the excited misperception. The same lack of objectivity in an excited state for men or animals seen out of context could account for the relatively rare multiple witness CE Ill's. For example, one (unsupported) explanation for the exceptional eleven-witness Kelly-Hopkinsville CE III (cited earlier) was that a monkey had reportedly escaped from a nearby circus in the dark. The stage for an emotional climate would then have been set when one of the witnesses announced that he had seen a "UFO" land nearby.

The question must now be asked: why should so many people judged to be reliable by any other criteria see fit to fantasize that physical-seeming CE III experiences have genuinely occurred to them? To answer this, we have to consider the current cultural context in which the UFO phenomenon finds itself. We live in a Space Age, a period distinguished by the dominance of technology and a de emphasis on a previously close relationship with nature. Our value systems reflect this in myriad ways: we worship the value of a "physical" reality of hard facts and figures while denigrating the worth of concurrent "mythic" or mythological reality. The formative arts are often judged successful on the basis of their impersonation of the realistic arts, like photography. Dreams, visions, leg ends, and other creative manifestations of the imagination are dismissed as worthless. When UFO proponents and skeptics alike openly consider the CE III-resemblant fairy legends, their socio logical importance as folklore is usually bypassed in favor of oversimplified reality arguments. Skeptics are only concerned with whether fairies physically exist; if they don't, they are disqualified as nonsense. Even the UFO proponents make fairies quasi-physical through special paranormal means. Indeed, we have reached the point where we pretend that mythology is somehow a detached and irrelevant set of allegories instead of the living, vital societal structure that it always truly is. The noted Swiss psychologist Carl Jung defined the role of mythology in society in this way (The Psychology of the Child Archetype, 1940):

The primitive mentality does not invent myths, it experiences them. Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes. Such allegories would be an idle amusement for an unscientific intellect. Myths, on the contrary, have a vital meaning. Not merely do they represent, they are the psychic life of the primitive tribe, which immediately falls to pieces and decays when it loses its mythological heritage, like a man who has lost his soul. A tribe's mythology is its living religion, whose loss is always and everywhere, even among the civilized [my emphasis], a moral catastrophe. But religion is a vital link with psychic processes independent of and beyond consciousness, in the dark hinterland of the psyche.

In other words, regardless of our intellectual evolution on a conscious basis, we still possess a subconscious demand for mythology and a fundamental drive for symbol-making. This is still openly evident in most African systems even today. No sharp distinction is drawn between animate and inanimate, natural and supernatural, material and mental, conscious and subconscious, dreams and daylight, past, present, and future, the living and the dead. Ancestral spirits and deities are still acknowledged to be key players in the Africans' lives and social order. Indeed, illnesses and personal mis fortunes are still regarded to be influenced by an enemy's magic or divine intervention; hence, faith in the power of symbols to achieve desired effects, inculcated at an early age, is still strong.

A typical Western reaction to such an open blend of the natural and the supernatural is laughter or pity that African societies should still anachronistically embark on superstition in the twentieth century. A second look at the rituals of, say, the Catholic Church, reveals that we ourselves are not so immune. Technology itself does not defeat our dependence on meaningful symbol-making exercises; rather it adds to them. Whether we realize it or not, we still need symbols to relate the past to our present and future, and to bond together our culture, religions, and families. Carl Jung spoke of "archetypal symbols" which have been rooted in our collective unconscious since the late Stone Age. These universal symbols represent an inherited disposition of the human mind to generate specific meanings in similar but common psychological structures and shapes ("primitive structures" according to Freud). Jung himself noted the appearance of these archetypes in fairy legends, religious rituals, folklore, dreams, and mythologies. Furthermore, the meaning of these subconscious symbols is constant, regardless of differences in culture or time. While the African societies mentioned above differ markedly from our own on a conscious basis (education, technology, urbanization, and communications), there are still very strong similarities among our individual subconscious minds. Regardless of all the variations between any two individuals' conscious daily functions, they still share the same reactions toward the archetypal symbols subconsciously: this is true for modern man and early man alike. Think of the implications that this holds for UFO reports arising in different cultures around the world today.

Thus we have seen that our conscious intellect does not exempt us from the underlying mechanism of the human psyche —the need for primitive myths. It is just as clear, however, that our technological culture, coldly non-spiritual and more detached from nature, has made such classical apparitions as angels, demons, fairies, gnomes, and ghosts out of fashion. So when our timeless subconscious demand for meaningful mythology meets a period of technological dependence head on, what is the outcome? The UFOnauts? Do they represent a sophisticated twentieth-century fantasy, a sort of Space Age wish fulfillment? To be relevant in these new times, are eternal symbols being redressed by our collective unconscious in Spage Age form? Must our angels and fairies wear space helmets and come from other worlds?

Recent experiments indirectly related to this theme lend support to the arche typal symbol concept's application to UFOs:

ITEM: An article appeared in the October 1977 Scientific American on research into hallucinations at UCLA. The author, Ronald K. Siegel, listed some startling discoveries with considerable application to UFOs:

1) It is probable that everyone will have a hallucination at some time in his or her life.

2) Hallucinations are caused by a wide range of common stimuli: falling asleep, waking up, insulin hypoglycemia, feverish delirium, epilepsy, psychosis, advanced syphilis, sensory deprivation, stimulation by lights or electric shocks, "crystal gazing," migraine headaches, dizziness, hallucinogenic drugs, even alcohol, carbon dioxide, and strong to bacco.

3) Regardless of the infinite variety of stimulations that can lead to hallucinations, the human brain appears to respond in only a finite number of ways. Four "simple constant" images recur throughout all hallucination experiences: gratings, cobwebs, tunnels, and spirals. These forms are intensely bright and col orful and have symmetrical configurations. Furthermore, the complex images (which one would expect to be as diverse as human imagination) proved to be similarly confined. A study of over five hundred LSD-induced hallucinations showed that 62 to 72 per cent of the subjects experienced the simple form constants, and more than 79 per cent of them reported similar complex shapes. Quite significantly for UFOlogy, 72 per cent of the subjects saw religious symbols and images, and 49 per cent saw images of small animals and humans distorted into cartoon or caricature shapes (the UFOnauts?), most of whom proffered friendliness! These image constants also show up in so-called "past life" experiments (a la Wambach), the experiences of medically "dead" people who are brought back to life (Kubler-Ross, Moody), and shock effects in trauma cases. This universality of hallucination forms leads to the conclusion that hallucinations have an underlying mechanism in the central nervous system. Siegel relates this to Jung's archetypal symbols.

In a private communication, Siegel acknowledged the similarity of abduction experiences and hallucinations, noting that drug-induced religious experiences are often marked by abduction-like phenomena, complete with sensations of floating; travel in tunnels, tubes, saucers, or glowing objects; physical and mental examinations, including disintegration of clothing in several cases; non-verbal communication; and a variety of other experiences which parallel closely the Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Siegel again stressed that the cause of the hallucination is not important; the brain always responds in a finite number of ways.

ITEM: A hypnosis experiment was con ducted in California where volunteers were asked under hypnosis to imagine that they were undergoing a CE III abduction experience and tell the researchers the details. The hypnotic sub jects were selected on the basis of their previous lack of knowledge on the UFO subject. The researchers expected to have to lead the subjects every step of the way, obtaining only dry, stunted stories. To their surprise, the imaginary abductees fluidly weaved complicated tales comparable in content and detail to "real" abduction claims. More details are available in Chapter 11: "Tools: Hypnosis."

ITEM: Throughout my own IFO reports, the desire to "see" UFO-related shapes in poorly seen lights in the night sky such as stars, meteors, conventional plane lights and ad planes recurs continually. As noted, practically every geo metric shape has been claimed for these lights (or formations of lights). The desire to see them as saucers, however, manifested itself quite meaningfully . . . even though these IFOs were demonstrably not saucer-shaped. Indeed, there were actually more claims of "domed disc" shapes present in the IFO reports than in those sightings that were set aside as worthy of the term "UFO"!

Jung himself advanced these ideas in a 1959 book called Flying Saucers wherein he considers the prospect of UFOs being a "visionary rumor," escalated to a false vision through the excitation of the psyche by an unusual emotional climate. My own study of IFOs reveals that such a climate truly exists. Jung discusses a seance he attended where four people present all swore that they could see a moon-shaped object floating before the medium. The rest were dumbfounded that Jung could not "see it for himself." This was one of three events at which Jung was present where multiple witnesses claimed to see something whose non-existence was demonstrable. Jung established from the stance of the psychoanalyst that the UFO phenome non, involving thousands of people around the world joined in a uniform vision, can never be considered nonsense or purely fortuitous. This point is underplayed by most UFO skeptics, who concentrate only on finding the natural sources behind individual events. Jung states that if UFOs are psychological "projections," corroborated everywhere, they must have a universal psychological cause. Jung points out the global emotional tension that has arisen over our potential total extinction. The world is now perched under a nuclear "sword of Damocles"; even if the Bomb doesn't get us, overpopulation, pollution, or resource depletion will.* Mix this recently changed world condition with the unchanging universal meanings we sub consciously ascribe to our archetypal symbols, and the result is the UFO, a "new" idea spawned simultaneously around the globe. Author John Omohundro has listed historical examples of cultures subjected to stressful situations which in turn responded with a cataclysmic religious reformation as a sublimation of or supplement to actual political rebellion: the Zulu uprising in Africa, the Sepoy Rebellion in India, the New Guinea Cargo Cults, the ghost dance of the Plains Indians, the Taiping Rebellion in China, and the Luddites and Anabaptists in Europe. Omohundro points out that all of these movements, centered around serious cultural crises, had elements in common: humorless fanaticism, prophets, a new world view, and a stiff distaste for the established order. Anthropologists take these movements and cults seriously; isn't it time they treated the current UFO phenomenon with equal respect? The concurrent movement toward other fields like astrology, ESP, ancient astronauts, occultism, and the like reflects a definite anti-science sentiment. If the average person was quizzed about his acquaintance with astrology vs. astronomy, which do you think would win? It is also a cultural cry for help. The orthodox religions are losing their relevance in a world dominated and threatened by technology: yet this does not make people any less religious. This fact has been observed by Dr. Charles Glock of the University of California Sociology Department, who has followed the development of one hundred new "alternative" religions. UFOs as a twentieth-century religion may lack the scope of the established theocratic ones, but they make up for it in relevance to the techno logical times.

 * It was widely assumed that A.D. 1000, the end of the first millennium, would signal the end of the world; is it meaningful that we are now at the end of the second one?

My own review of the messages in actual IFO and UFO cases more directly bears out Jung's early conjectures. Jung acknowledged that he hadn't disproved a physical basis for UFO reports; he correctly pointed out that other myths have had meteorological and other natural processes as their vehicle, but that doesn't explain them. Since a myth is essentially the product of the unconscious archetype, psychological interpretation is still required. This would be necessary in "explaining" the larger UFO phenome non even if we found that an unknown physical agent was its accompanying cause. Indeed, there isn't one single UFO case whose implications are as important as those of the rich inferences that have grown around the sightings. The UFO reports address us not on a high intellectual plane, but at those primitive depths of the subconscious where fairies and demons retain their vitality, even in the twentieth century.

That these psychological insights into the UFO phenomenon have failed to be fully appreciated is reflected in the continued adherence of UFOlogy to the "two-sided controversy": "UFOs exist as a novel and exciting agency" vs. "UFOs don't exist and are thus nonsense." This failure is also reflected in the ways that Jung is often misunderstood. One sees all too often a mystical reinterpretation of what Jung meant by "psychological projection" from the "collective unconscious" in the UFO literature; it should be clear that he is referring to the extrapolation or imposition of basic, dramatized unconscious images with implicit meanings shared by everyone. Yet I keep seeing comic-book conceptions about "linked minds" literally "projecting" (a la Bell & Howell) a "UFO form" in the sky which possesses certain physical properties. Still, there are UFO researchers who are coming to appreciate the power of Jung's theories at face value, notably writers like Peter Rogerson and John Rimmer of the British MUFOB (Merseyside UFO Bulletin) journal. Acknowledging the apparent futility of studying the effects of UFOs on the physical environment, these "new UFOlogists" are seeing greater promise in studying the social effect they have on the witnesses and, thus, gaining insight into the human condition through UFO experiences. This "percipient-oriented" UFOlogy has different criteria from the customary "stimulus-oriented" UFOlogy. A "mythic reality" is seen to coincide with (and contrast against) our "rational reality." Rogerson's example is the outlook that children are factually born of their hu man mothers yet mythically born of all Mother Earth. All UFO-related reports are important, whether they are absurd or even have identifiable causes (IFOs) because it is the myth surrounding them that is important here. The "reality" of a report is that of the UFO percipient, not an absolute "consensus" reality. The social effects of the UFO are treated as more important than the physical effects, so each report, in itself, is an important tool, not just a step toward finding the "external generators." Furthermore, the experience itself need not have been "real" in consensus reality to have an impact on human history as significant as the visit of aliens. Saul of Tarsus had an experience that changed him into St. Paul; whether it was real or not seems irrelevant now, given the influence this event has had on two thousand years of human thought. (Oddly enough, a radio talk show host with a background in sociology once expressed disappointment to me in the prospect of a non-ETH UFO scheme, if it was "only" sociological.)

The historical context of these experiences is further developed. Tribal societies in the past which were in closer community with nature developed natural mythologies: earth spirits, gods of fertility or weather, fairies, and so on. As technology increasingly dominated our culture, we briefly felt optimistic in our views of the future where man was in control of the machine. Now a post-Vietnam, nuclear-hairtrigger world faces problems of crisis proportion. This is largely blamed on the burgeoning of technology, viewed now as an oppressive entity in itself instead of a saving force. Is the UFO a symbolic framework against which these scarcely framed fears and anxieties are being projected, as Rogerson suggests?

This concept of UFOs being mythically linked with mankind's losing battle with technology may point to at least a partial explanation for the growing number of claims that cars, electrical equipment, weapons, radar, and power systems fail to operate while a UFO is nearby. If the UFO is commonly envisioned as a technological demon, you would expect that one of its first powers would be to take control of appliances out of our hands as a symbolic enactment of our own fears.

In the UFO abduction experience, the witness is "seized by impersonal forces which reduce our humanity to nothing" (as Rogerson puts it), which may be a metaphorical vision of our own alienation from the technological world which has "abducted" us. This is akin to the plight of tribal societies which feel helpless before the natural elements. In this guise, the UFO experience can adopt varying forms:

TECHNOLOGICAL ANGEL:

The contactees' space brother mythology

Messages of salvation from cosmic saviors

Expansion of abductees' consciousness, imparting of psychic gifts

Healing power of UFOs' presence (A recent poll conducted by two psychologists showed that more people believe in extraterrestrial visitors than in God)

TECHNOLOGICAL DEVIL:

Torturous medical examination by UFOnaut abductors

Physiological harm to humans (burns, headaches, eye irritation, etc.)

Post-abduction psychic torments: voices, ghostly apparitions, out-of-body experiences (long recognized as the work of Satan by the Christian Church)

UFO as ultimate outsider: a symbol of all that is excluded in order to preserve the security of our comfortable world view.

Control of appliances nullified in UFO's presence

ALSO: Technological fairies and ghosts and other "redressed" classical forms. More than just the fear of technology is reflected in these mythologies, as that is just a part of the whole spectrum of re cent social change. The UFO can be symbolic of the "ultimate anomaly" which cannot be accommodated by any status of consensus reality and, whatever, thus, threatens everything. At the other end of the scale, it can simply serve as a symbol of the rejected aspects of our own individual personalities.

Such a model for the exotic Close Encounters can take in its stride a lot of sideline effects that have left the proponents of "nuts and bolts" physical UFO schemes baffled.

IFOs: UFOlogists who treat UFO witnesses as impersonal instruments have never had a comfortable explanation for the rich impersonation of the UFO "signal" by the IFO "noise." A rationale like "people are ignorant of what is available to be seen in the sky" fails to hold water. Why weren't the eternal stars reported as UFOs before? Why do IFOs represent the same richness of mythic involvement as UFO visions, differing only in that the original physical stimuli were easily re solvable? Obviously, those stimuli (be they stars or ad planes or meteors) were not the cause of the colorful shapes, behaviors, and special properties ascribed to them by the IFO witnesses. The original IFO target is actually of minor importance in this scheme; skeptics who are preoccupied with locating the physical cause for UFO reports are overlooking the more important issue and are never going to cure the UFO epidemic any more than a psychoanalyst will obviate a patient's need for a neurosis simply by labeling it.

Hoaxes. Why should so many people be compelled to proffer hoaxed UFO photos as genuine, at the risk of exposure and extreme ridicule? Try getting a satisfying answer from UFOlogists who weed them out in search of the "real" thing. If UFO visions are the result of extraordinary cultural pressures in search of self-expression, then hoaxers, like IFO witnesses, are simply attempting the same thing, but feel the need to create an ex ternal, concrete expression of the same inner, emotional, UFOIogical turmoil which they probably don't understand themselves. If these feelings were expressed as a painting, a novel, or a movie instead, society would have accepted the expression as "artistic." In this light, is the UFO hoax any less profound (if more crudely executed) a work of art? As John Rimmer notes, "It could be argued that the hoaxer, through having to some degree the ability to consciously manipulate the elements of myth, is of a higher intellectual stature than the genuine percipient, who finds them so disturbing and confusing that he is only capable of manipulating them on a subconscious basis."

Reliable witnesses. The most prized UFO witnesses have been the ones who profess no previous interest in the UFO subject prior to their sighting, did not believe in UFOs before, and are regarded by those who know them for their disinclination toward imaginativeness and credulousness. Yet Jung states that it is in this kind of person that the unconscious has to resort to the drastic measure of "projecting" its contents onto some innocent object to make them known. Think of the large number of sincere-sounding IFO witnesses with little or no previous background in UFO lore who went on to attach unwarranted emotional reactions (and special UFO properties) to twinkling stars and such. According to Jung, the people UFO researchers value the most are the likeliest to undergo the strongest UFO visions. When Alvin Lawson conducted his "imagined" abduction hypnosis experiment, he used people who expressed no previous knowledge of or interest in UFOs and was consistently presented with rich, flowing UFO narratives. When Lawson (who is very familiar with the details of UFO accounts) was himself similarly hypnotized and instructed to make up a UFO abduction, he produced a comparatively dry, stunted story. Jung's theories indicate that the UFO witness need only be armed with the subconscious archetypes he is surrounded with from birth to create UFO visions without prior conscious knowledge of their existence (even if this were completely possible in our current information environment).

Unreliable witnesses. If the mythic level of reality is the appropriate one for at least the exotic UFO reports, then the separation of UFO from IFO from hoax may be meaningless. This would also render meaningless the current psycho logical testing of witnesses to see which ones are "reliable" and which are "unreliable" so we could determine who saw the "real" physical UFOs and who didn't.

Consider what a monkey wrench in the ETH machinery it is when a contactee  claims to have been endowed with ESP or some other psychic gift after his experience with UFOnauts. How about the psychic visits from the UFOnauts long after the experience (as happened in two of the few CE III events with which I had direct contact)? What do the ETH proponents do with an abductee who claims that his heart was removed and replaced? Yet there is nothing new about these claims when seen in a mythological context; shamans have traditionally been privileged to enter the mythic realms and commune with mythological beings. Sha man initiation rituals call for the sha man's entrails to be "removed" and replaced with magic entrails.

Writers like Rogerson, Clark and Cole man, Vallee, and others have made many such cogent Jungian observations in the UFO literature, which my own researches appear to verify. My two criticisms are that all of these UFOlogists have created a collection of the most exotic forms of Close Encounters (e.g. Rogerson's INTCAT [International Catalogue] of CEs, Vallee's catalogue of 923 CEs) with an emphasis on CE Ill's and then extrapolate the conclusions for that subset back to the larger wealth of distant light sources and shapes. This assumes that all sightings under that overly broad "UFO" label are interrelated. One of Rogerson's articles, for example, places all UFO sightings into a mythic context; this means that he had to somehow dispense with the physical overtones of photographic and physical-trace cases. This thirty-year controversy is dealt with in three paragraphs, and he doesn't even mention the Radar-Visual cases. Furthermore, the "technological demon" concept cannot be comfortably invoked to resolve EM interference cases like the one in Levelland, Texas (illustrated in the first chapter). This is no worse than the "de liberate hoax" model applied so liberally to CE III cases by many UFO skeptics. Yet Rogerson's ideas promise great insight when restricted to the CE Ill's and many other high-strangeness UFOs, which seem to me in many ways to be a fantasy attempt to bring the more distant and obscure NLs and DDs into a desired form of resolution or focus. Furthermore, some of these researchers still see fit to introduce special "paranormal" mechanisms, despite their insights into the human condition. I am confident that time will reveal that this is nothing but an underestimation of the bounds of man's own conventional mind.

Have I "proved" that these alternative concepts are indeed what is at stake in the six UFO categories? No. The extraterrestrial theory (or any other extraordinary explanation scheme for that matter) is still possible. But my own non sensational outlook accounts for the observations equally well, if not better. I, at least, am willing to learn the lesson from the IFO reports that a powerful emotional desire exists universally to "see" UFOs at this particular time in history and that witnesses' details of IFOs, adopted at face value, have not been ac curate. Thus, my concepts are at least an equally valid viable theory for UFO reports. Skeptics will now feel confident in applying Occam's razor✝ to defend this non-extraordinary alternative as the "correct choice," but I would prefer to see the UFO controversy resolved in a more definitive fashion. It will take stronger evidence than the kind of human testimony we have been dealing in for three decades if we are to transcend my exercise in "conventional explanation" for the provocative UFO reports, and make them indistinguishable from dreams. Right now, the huge variety of UFO reports makes it unseemly to reduce them all to any one theory, and the false motions and accelerations imposed on the overwhelming proportion of IFOs make me reluctant under the circumstances to have to change the current laws of physics . . . but I am still hopelessly intrigued. Our only hope lies in transcending the current dependence on human observers as instruments and looking for new quantitative methods to bolster the sighting reports.

✝ When faced with two equally viable theories, pick the simpler one.

The remainder of this handbook, then, is an assessment of the current state-of the-art of the tools, techniques, and surveillance systems that have been employed to support the testimonial UFO evidence. If these fail to be effective in providing some clearer insight, UFOs will have to bid the physical sciences farewell, sciences where hypothetical models are capable of being tested, proved, or disproved.

From Chapter 21 (UFOlogists and UFO Groups):

How Frustration Motivates UFOlogical Thought

That a gulf exists between the attitudes of the scientist and the UFOlogist is further demonstrated by the lack of patience in expecting a quick yet satisfying solution to a complex problem. Particle physicists will search through thousands of photographs of subatomic particles looking for a single "quark" particle, even though at the time of this searching the subatomic component exists only in theory. Unlike conventional long-term researchers, UFOlogists are not interested in working for posterity; they're quire immediate answers, underscoring the personal thrill motives of the researchers. Thirty years is a long time to put up with an elusive phenomenon that suggests a nuts-and-bolts hardware ex planation (when the allegations are ac cepted at face value), but never proffers suitably hard evidence. The result is not continued observation or altered methodologies, but frustration at the various problems (listed in "The UFO Message" chapter) that make an old-fashioned extraterrestrial hypothesis "uncomfortable." This frustration is channeled in the direction of abandoning the ETH al together, or strongly modifying it in the direction of a new, but equally exciting, UFO theory. Again, one notes the fixation on a single unified explanation scheme for all the things seen in the sky, coupled with the refusal to take into account the capabilities of the normal human mind.

Borrowing a term from stellar evolution in astronomy, I have observed a sort of "main sequence" along which a great many UFOlogists seem to evolve in their attitudes. The motivating force is the struggle between the outcome they desire and frustration over what the evidence permits. The six stages go something like this:

1) UFOlogist is willing to absorb all kinds of reports: high-strangeness cases, low-strangeness cases, even IFOs (although reliance on the UFO literature for input prohibits most of these). His main concern: weeding out IFOs, interest in supportive evidence like radar and physical traces. His favorite theory: the ETH, although he has doubts about many of the more incredible-sounding CE III claims.

2) UFOlogist is put off by the non-cohesive variety of the UFO reports. The NLs and DDs clearly aren't leading anywhere in a hurry, so they become de-emphasized to almost IFO status. He be gins to concentrate on the high-strange ness reports alone for their "greater in formation yield" (assuming, as usual,  that all UFO reports conform to one single phenomenon)

3) UFOlogist realizes now that weeding out misperceptions from low-strange ness sighting claims was much easier than isolating out more elusive Close Encounter IFOs, fantasies, and hoaxes! He still attempts to discard CE III stories that sound too absurd to be credible; at the same time, however, he is becoming discontented with the ETH due to the number of CE Ill's, their variety, the "human" aliens, the psychic events and claims, etc.

4) The lesser UFO reports have been totally ignored as noise and the exotic (even absurd) cases are piling up out of context. The UFOlogist becomes impressed with this false "weight of numbers" which he has artificially imposed. "All of these people can't be wrong," he concludes, ignoring the deeper lessons of the UFO claims. Confusion about which CE Ill's can be thrown out "safely" is growing with the UFOlogist no longer certain what is relevant and what isn't. "Should the CE III data be judged at face value, or is something more insidious at work?" is a universal concern at this phase. 5) Increasing fascination with apparent psychic aspects of those "absurd" cases—ghostlike appearances, massless behavior, mental exchanges with wit nesses, post-abduction psychic aftereffects. Start of the concept that UFO wit nesses' minds are being manipulated in some paranormal fashion. (UFOlogist often thinks that this is his own original conclusion.) Being "open-minded" at this stage means not abandoning the ETH altogether, or regarding some UFOs as physical concerns, the rest paranormal.

6) All CE II cases are equally adopted and catalogued as data, with confessed hoaxes the sole exception. Disdain for UFOlogists who are still locked into the physical aspects of UFO "appearances." There is no more emphasis on radar or physical traces ("After all, can't poltergeists effect physical manifestations?"). Little distinction now between single- or multiple-witness status of reports, witness backgrounds, testimonial inconsistencies, etc.—only two things matter: sheer "high strangeness" (Who'd make up a story like that?) "underwritten" by the sheer sincerity of the witnesses. No story is too absurd-sounding to be discarded now because the "great number" (through abstracted collecting!) of absurd-sounding claims indicates that the UFOs have chosen to deal intimately with us in this manner. Statistics of different UFO reports are now based on indifferent mixtures of all types and merits of reports.

Not all UFOlogists necessarily advance all the way along this "main sequence." Some of them elect to anchor on one of the phases and stay there. Many of the "nuts and bolts" types hold fast to phase one, of course, and snub the paranormal alternatives. Consider this excerpt from an editorial written by the editor of a UFO newsletter in Australia:

". . . even certain UFO research organizations are being duped into being converted to the new 'faith.' Many of these groups publish literature that would do great honor to the John Keels, Val lees, Le Poer Trenchs and Hyneks who are on the great fantasmagorical band wagon of audacious postulants in the realm of UFOs. It appears that individuals who were once regarded as staunch and sober-minded exponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis have suddenly become enamored with their own flights of fancy into the realms of faery, the occult, or pseudo-psychology, sociology (sic).'"

 Has the extraterrestrial hypothesis now become so traditional that one is considered "sober-minded" to blindly accept it?

I did offer my own precautions about the use of the paranormal as a UFO ex planation scheme in the UFO Message chapter. Some researchers who are interested in the paranormal pride themselves that they have developed the "controls" necessary to discern whether a claimant is telling the truth about having, say, genuine psychic powers. If these people are such careful observers, could they explain how a clever magician performs his "close-up" tricks by watching him? If they can't, what would it mean when said magician falsely portrays himself to have "true" psychic abilities? Sociologist Macello Truzzi acknowledges that he can be fooled by a stage magician, and thus maintains the compensatory skepticism necessary for open-mindedness. The greatest danger, he notes, lies with the people who are sure they can't be deceived. If we assume that observations offered about exotic UFO encounters prove paranormal events have actually taken place, we have opted to overlook the desire to read these effects into misunderstood sightings, clearly indicated by the IFO cases.