Aliens and Archetypes

Thinking Allowed

Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery

with Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove

Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove.

Throughout recorded history, human society has been haunted by reports of unidentified flying objects in our skies,

many of which have defied all attempts at scientific explanation or understanding.

What are these phenomena and how can they be explained?

With me today is Terence McKenna, a philosopher and thinker of note

in the area of altered states of consciousness and alternative realities.

Terence is the co-author with his brother Dennis of The Invisible Landscape

and also Psilocybin, The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide.

He is a founding member of Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit organization

devoted to preserving and studying psychoactive plants used by native cultures throughout the world,

and he is also the co-author of the book,

and also the developer of a computer software package called Time Wave Zero,

designed to augment interpretation of the ancient Chinese book of prophecy, the I Ching.

Welcome, Terence.

It's a pleasure to be here with you.

It's a pleasure to have you here with me also.

You know, the UFO phenomenon is striking because it's so bizarre.

It seems as if the reports that come in about UFOs defy any attempt whatsoever

to categorize them.

I guess from my point of view, I can only assume that there are probably many different interpretations of this event.

I think given your background as a student of shamanism and altered states of consciousness

and alternative realities, you have some unique perspectives on the UFO phenomenon.

I wonder if we could get into that material.

Yes.

Well, the ordinary approach to the UFOs has been to view them

as visitors or intruders from a nearby star system

that have come in metal ships for reasons of trade or scientific investigation or military conquest.

Or missionary activity.

Or missionary activity to the vicinity of our planet.

And this was a myth that sprang up concomitant with the modern wave of sightings

that began shortly after World War II.

As time has passed and the number of sightings have gone from hundreds to thousands

to hundreds of thousands of instances,

as the myth has fleshed itself out with sub-themes,

the theme of abduction, the theme of telepathic contact,

it's become much more difficult to fit all the known facts

into the simple model of space.

The space faring visitors from another world.

So what we are left with then are a number of more exotic competing theories

in the so-called postmodern phase of thinking about the UFO.

Probably the best known of these alternative explanations

was the one pioneered by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung,

who in 1953 wrote a book called Flying Saucers,

a modern myth of things seen in the sky.

And Jung was at great pains to, without passing judgment on the reality

of the saucers, of the things seen,

to interpret them psychologically,

to interpret them as one would interpret a dream.

And he saw in their circular form,

in their scintillating, shining, alchemical brilliance,

a symbol of human wholeness,

and felt that they were a symbol of our collective yearning

for a kind of totality and individuation.

Now, in a way, this kind of explanation is very satisfying.

However, it is not satisfying to the person

who has immediately undergone a very strange

and a very real-seeming experience.

Unless such a person were told great messages

of hope for the planet.

Well, and this is a persistent part of the flying saucer phenomenon,

that people who have close contact with the saucers

return with messages of universal brotherhood

and benevolence with stories of a beneficent hegemony

of organized intelligence,

where wiser, older worlds and civilizations

help younger and less mature people

tour worlds toward a kind of galactic citizenship.

However...

That is just one thread of the evidence.

It is one thread of the evidence,

and it is not really well supported by the evidence.

Jacques Vallée, who is one of the foremost commentators

on the phenomenon, has been at great pains to point out

that with the flying saucer phenomenon,

we are dealing with thousands and thousands of incidents per year

throughout the world.

It is very hard, even at our own primitive level

of scientific sophistication,

we can learn a great deal about a planet

by sending a single probe to that planet.

What kind of scientific program of investigation

requires thousands and thousands of appearances?

And if we make the assumption

that not all appearances are observed,

but that in fact only a small number are observed,

then the number of appearances that must actually be going on

soars toward an astronomical number.

It suggests we are dealing with an interpenetration

by an alien dimension on an almost industrial scale.

Of course, a single probe could cause thousands of appearances.

If it were of a sophisticated enough nature, that is right.

The approach that I have taken

that has characterized my work with this phenomenon

was first of all to say

we have not carried out a sufficiently in-depth survey

of the life already on this planet

to be able to say that at some time in the past

life did not arrive here and thrive here,

that is not part of the general heritage of life on this planet,

but that has somehow come in from the outside.

My candidate for that kind of an intrusive extraterrestrial

would be probably a mushroom of some sort

or a spore-bearing life form,

because spores are very impervious

to low temperatures and high radiation,

the kind of environment met with in outer space.

In other words, a mushroom spore could conceivably

even waft itself up through the atmosphere of our planet

and enter into empty space.

Oh, there is no question but what this is happening,

that through what is called Brownian motion,

which is sort of random percolation,

spores do reach the outer edge of our atmosphere

and there in the presence of cosmic rays and meteors

and rare highly energetic events,

occasionally a very small percentage

of these biological objects are wafted into space.

We even possess meteorites that are believed to be

pieces of the Martian soil.

The Martian surface thrown out by impacts

on the Martian surface of asteroidal material.

In fact, I think part of the grappling with the UFO mystery

is going to lead to the conclusion

that space is not an impermeable

and insurmountable barrier to biology.

That in fact, planets are islands

and life does occasionally wash in from distant places

and if conditions are correct,

can take hold.

However, let me say in the UFO phenomenon,

we are dealing or we presuppose that we are dealing

not simply with the phenomenon of extraterrestrial biology,

but with the phenomenon of extraterrestrial intelligence.

And this is a hackle-raising notion.

We are dealing with more than mushroom spores.

We are dealing with more than mushroom spores,

at least as ordinarily conceived.

I think the thing that has been overlooked

in almost all discussions of extraterrestrial contact

is how strange the extraterrestrial is likely to be.

It isn't going to be a friendly elfin little feller

with a beating heart of gold.

It isn't even going to be some of the more extravagantly

grotesque creations out of Hollywood.

Conditions and time spans in the universe,

are long enough and varied enough

that I would bet that the real task

with extraterrestrial intelligence

will be to recognize it, you see.

We have no conception of how species-bound

our images of life and biology are.

This is a place where we have never been asked

to confront to what degree the monkey within us

is channeled our energy.

We are not aware of the effects

of our expectations and perceptions.

Well, it is the case that on this planet

virtually all known life forms

are based on the same DNA molecule.

Well, except that have all life forms been examined

to see to what degree they deviate percentage-wise

from let's say a standard DNA molecule?

The answer is no.

The sequencing of DNA is a very expensive process

and is only carried out

in laboratory organisms with an extensive history

of involvement in medical research

like E. coli or the ordinary laboratory rat.

No, there's a great deal we don't know

about life on Earth.

We don't know when the fungi

entered into the evolutionary chain.

We don't know what kind of intelligence

is really possessed by the cephalopods,

the shell-less mollusks that include

the octopi.

The intelligence of dolphins has been studied

by Lilly and others.

The intelligence of the large primates

other than man.

One way of looking at nature

is that it is entirely linguistic intent.

That DNA is in fact a way of uttering

protein syntactical structures into matter.

In other words, all of nature is like a poem.

Yes, nature is a communicating system

of some sort and the problem that we have

is to transcend cultural languages,

historically created languages

with very limited applications

and instead fall into phase

with the communication systems

that nature has placed all around us.

One possible view of the flying saucer

is that it is a kind of projection

from the consciousness of the planet.

That it is Gaia.

That it is in fact a kind of alchemical object

haunting human historical time

with a symbol of totality.

The kind of totality that our religions

and our mystical yearnings

are so at pains to concretize for us.

But unless we as egocentric beings

clarify our relationship to the unconscious

then I think the flying saucer

is going to remain quintessentially mysterious.

This was Jung's view.

One of the things that Jung pointed out in this book

is that we must pay attention to the research

which Dr. J.B. Rhine was doing at that time

at Duke University in ESP and psychokinesis

and that even if UFOs had a physical reality

could be photographed or could be weighed

and measured that they still might

in some manner be projections of the human mind.

Oh yes, this is an important point to make

which the flying saucer people

are forever misunderstanding

and that is saying that the flying saucer

is a psychic object

does not mean that it is not a physical object.

Jung in Mysterium Conjunctionis

is at great pains to say

that the realm of the psychic

and the realm of the physical

meet in a strange kind of never-never land

that we have yet to create

the intellectual tools to explore.

This is where the mystery of synchronicity

is going to come to rest,

the mystery of all kinds of paranormal activity

on the part of human beings

and the mystery of the flying saucer.

It's interesting you see that

if you take the broad world

of the so-called mystery

parapsychological, shamanic,

extraterrestrial, so forth

and hypothesize another spatial dimension,

one more spatial dimension,

then suddenly all these mysteries

become trivial.

They are easily done.

Locked boxes are opened,

future events are discerned,

lost objects are found.

This sort of thing becomes

quite the ordinary run of things.

If we hypothesize dimensions

hidden from ordinary experience.

And of course there's serious work

at this point in the field of

unified field theory and physics

to postulate other dimensions of space

than we normally think of.

That's right.

The current physical models

of the universe require 11 dimensions,

11 integrated variables to describe,

and that's physical models of the universe.

If we then turn our attention

to mind and realize that

having no definition of what mind is,

why then is there any mystery

in the fact that we have no definition

of what the UFO is?

The mind is present at hand

in every conscious moment.

It has been our constant companion

for 50,000 years.

And we haven't a clue

as to what it is.

So therefore a manifestation

of the other, the superego,

or the extraterrestrial other,

like the UFO,

it is not surprising that it is a mystery.

I always hark back to the words

of J.B.S. Haldane,

the great British enzymologist,

who said,

reality is not only stranger

than we suppose,

it may be stranger than we can suppose.

Well that suggests to me that

if we look at some of the most bizarre,

anomalous cases that we have,

such as UFOs,

and we begin to ask ourselves,

not so much what are they,

because that's a mystery,

but what is their function?

How are they affecting us?

That's like holding up a mirror to ourselves

and it tells us a great deal

about the basic mystery of our mind

and our reality.

Yes, this is the so-called postmodern approach

to ask the question,

not what is the UFO,

but what is it doing to us?

And Jacques Vallée pioneered

this approach,

and the answer is fascinating.

What the UFOs are doing to us,

to global society,

is they are eroding faith in science

by casting directly in the path of science

a kind of gauntlet,

a challenge,

crack this,

almost as though the cosmic giggle

had shown up at the bachelor party of science

to spoil the bag

in the same way

that the resurrection of Christ

posed a tremendous problem

for the intellectuals

of late Roman antiquity,

because they had no place

in their worldview

for someone rising from the dead.

They were Greek materialists,

atomists, essentially.

In that same way,

the UFO challenges

the assumptions of science,

and I think in that way,

in that sense,

Jung was really on to something

when he saw it as coming

from the unconscious.

It is like an object

coming from the unconscious

with a compensatory function

to turn us away from the rational

and toward the intuitive,

to turn us away from

the paternalistic,

Apollonian,

solar masculine view of things

and toward a kind of watery,

lunar,

mysterious,

intuitively felt feminine force,

almost as though the UFO

is a manifestation of Gaia

as mother goddess.

Science as the proudest,

pardon the word,

erection of the rational mind

then is challenged by something

from an entirely other dimension,

an entirely other realm

that concretizes,

for us,

the culture crisis.

And that is why

I have gotten into UFOs.

I think they are important

for a resolution

of the culture crisis.

They concretize the struggle

between the paternalistic masculine

and the lunar feminine

between a dominator society

and the kind of partnership society

that we require to survive.

And yet,

it seems as if that challenge

is not a direct confrontation.

As Vallée points out,

UFOs are operating almost

at the mythological level

of our culture.

They are not landing

in the White House.

They are not really challenging

the military or NASA.

No, they are very mercurial,

very watery.

When you reach out toward them,

there is nothing there.

What they chiefly have become

is an intellectual force

in human thinking about the future.

But when you reach out

to grasp the hardware,

to read the message,

to meet the alien,

there is nothing there.

I've come to the conclusion,

both from talking to contactees

and having had

a contactee experience,

that whatever lies behind

the UFO mystery,

it is a force

which can literally do anything.

So it is fruitless

to talk about the size

of the objects

or their composition or color

or the size of the entities

and their dress and weapons

or their accoutrements,

because it can appear,

literally,

any way it wants to.

It can appear

as the Virgin Mary.

It can appear

as galactarian overlords.

It can appear

as gnomes, elves, sprites,

this sort of thing.

It is not to be caught

in the rational net.

Your description

is strikingly actually parallel

with one exception

to the view

of many fundamentalist Christians

who say,

well, UFO stuff

is all the work of the devil.

Well, I don't know

about the work of the devil.

Jung's criticism of Christianity

was that it had not made a place

for what he called the shadow,

and he said the productions

of Christian culture

will always be neurotic

because the shadow

has not been included,

so there is a lack

of psychic balance.

Perhaps the UFO carries

compensatory psychic energy

from the realm of the shadow.

Some people are very frightened of it.

Some people see it

as an almost millenarian

salvational hope,

the savior of mankind.

I think that it is very powerful,

that it haunts time like a ghost,

that the messianic anticipations

of fundamentalist Christianity

and Islam

are, in fact,

a picking up

on the shock wave

that the image

of the flying saucer

casts backward through time,

that this image

of the new Jerusalem,

the four-gated city

descending from the sky

to whisk the elect away

to a better place

is a kind of prophecy

yearning toward a fact

in the act of becoming.

You know,

Christianity and Islam

are the most history-obsessed

of all the world's major religions.

Along with Judaism.

And all three of them

have this notion

of the transcendental object

at the end of time.

And alchemy in the 16th century

was an outbreak

of an expectation

of a transcendental object

in the nearby here and now

that would cure...

The omega point of history,

so to speak.

Yes, that would cure all ills,

confer longevity, fertility,

virility, and mortality.

And I think that the flying saucer

is an airborne philosopher's stone,

the sophic hydrolith of Paracelsus

haunting the skies of modern America

with a promise

of mandalic cohesion

for the future

that science has not given us.

Science has been

a very sadly disappointing religion

in the realm of the heart.

The flying saucer

comes from the heart,

but it bears the very strange energy

of the other

in its manifestation

as planetary goddess.

I'm often struck

by the psychic powers

that seem to be associated

with people who have had

intensive encounters with UFOs.

That's right.

The thing is...

I've researched

many of these cases myself.

It's both material

and psychological.

It anticipates the future.

It seems as the memories

of the contactees

are transparent to this force.

It seems as if

it can reach deep into their lives

and confront them with information

taken from forgotten incidents

in their lives.

It is an awesome kind of force

that transcends space and time

for the individual.

Now, it may be that

we will never have

a general theory

of flying saucers.

It may be that this is something

that addresses the individual

in the same way

that I don't think

we will ever have

a general theory

of falling in love.

That, too, is something

which addresses the individual.

We have been mistaken

to expect Time magazine

or the New York Times

to explain the flying saucers to us.

They will not explain

the flying saucers to us

any more than they will explain

ourselves to us.

This is something that haunts

the membrane of experience

very close in

to the experiencing ego.

And therefore, it is threatening.

This is one of the reasons

that I think it relates

to the psychedelic experience,

because the psychedelic experience

is like a UFO encounter

on demand,

where the will of the person

having the experience enters in.

They decide to have

this curious, symmetry-breaking

kind of experience.

What I have tried

to say to the UFO community

is that we will not really have

a deep understanding

of what the contact experience is

until we include data

from the psychedelic experience

as a legitimate data

to be included

when looking at the problem.

Well, you have talked earlier

about our need

to make an extensive survey

of all of the biological

manifestations on our planet.

It almost seems that

in order to really get a handle

on UFO phenomenon,

we would need to make

a comparable survey

of all of the psychological

manifestations of which

we are aware.

And it seems to me

that at some level,

you would agree with me

that the UFO phenomenon

is one of our psychological

manifestations.

Yes, I agree.

We have got about

two minutes left,

so I wonder if we can

sort of summarize your view

in that regard.

Yes, I think that

the UFO phenomenon

is a modern manifestation

of a phenomenon

which has been with us

for thousands of years.

That is,

the partial penetration

of our own cultural space

by others,

pixies, elves, fairies,

sprites, demons,

whatever you wish

to call them.

Angels.

In the past,

we had a professional class

for dealing with these

go-betweens.

We called the professional class

shamans,

and they mitigate

the effects

of these go-betweens.

We have created

these comings and goings

and had a lore

and a mythology about them.

As we have lost contact

with our shamanic roots,

the things which go on

at a low frequency

out in the wilderness

and deserts of this planet

have become to seem like us

either like invasions

from another world

or virtual impossibilities.

I think that the flying saucer

is knocking on our door

to remind us

of the depth

and strangeness

and animate intelligence

that is resident with us

in nature

on this planet.

Terence McKenna,

it's been a very eloquent presentation

and extremely thought-provoking.

Thank you very much

for being with me.

It's always a pleasure

to talk with you.

And thank you very much

for being with us.