Jung, UFOs, and the Question of the Other

Archetype, Energy, and the Porous Boundary Between Psyche and Cosmos

by Dr. Aurora Roseline

How This Question Found Me

I did not come to the question of extraterrestrial intelligence through fascination with spacecraft or speculative science fiction. I came to it sideways, through psychology, symbol, and lived experience.

My academic training is in depth psychology, with a particular focus on symbolism, sound, and the relationship between psyche and reality. My personal work, however, has unfolded along a parallel path that has included intuitive perception, energy-based healing, and sustained contact with what I was taught to understand as Arcturian consciousness. These two paths have never felt separate to me, yet they do not resolve neatly into one another.This article emerges from that tension.

I have often found myself standing between worlds: between clinical language and symbolic knowing, between Jungian restraint and lived experience, between skepticism and wonder. What follows is not an attempt to resolve the mystery of UFOs or non-human intelligence, but to situate it properly, psychologically and symbolically, while remaining open to what Jung himself insisted we must not foreclose prematurely.

Jung and the UFO Phenomenon

When Carl Jung wrote Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies in 1958, he was already an elder thinker. He approached the UFO phenomenon not as a debunker, but as a psychologist deeply attuned to the symbolic life of the collective.

Jung observed that reports of flying saucers surged during periods of global anxiety, fragmentation, and existential threat. He noted the mandala-like structure of many UFO sightings, their circular forms echoing symbols of wholeness found throughout religious and alchemical traditions. For Jung, this suggested that the phenomenon carried archetypal weight.

Importantly, Jung never claimed that UFOs were merely hallucinations or fantasies. Instead, he held the question open. He proposed that even if the phenomenon were physically real, its meaning would still be psychological. And if it were psychological, that did not render it unreal. This distinction matters.

Jung wrote that psyche and matter may be two aspects of a single underlying reality, what he called the unus mundus. In this view, symbolic experiences are not confined to the mind, and material events are not stripped of meaning. They arise from the same deeper order.

Archetype, Projection, and the Figure of the Other

The figure of the alien occupies a unique position in the modern imagination. It represents the radical Other: intelligent yet non-human, familiar yet strange, advanced yet inscrutable. Psychologically, this makes it a perfect carrier for projection.

Archetypes do not appear directly. They appear clothed in images appropriate to the cultural moment. Medieval Europeans saw angels and demons. Early modern thinkers saw spirits and etheric intelligences. We see extraterrestrials, star beings, and interdimensional visitors. This does not reduce the phenomenon. It contextualizes it.

The alien image constellates questions about consciousness, origin, destiny, and intelligence beyond the human. It emerges at a moment when humanity has begun to look outward technologically while remaining inwardly fragmented. In Jungian terms, it arises when the psyche seeks a compensatory image of order, intelligence, or guidance.