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To the reader unacquainted with the development of Professor Jung's work, this book may easily itself appear to be something of an Unidentified Flying Object. Written for the general reader, it is partly a tract for the times and partly an application of Professor Jung's ideas to the problems raised by the reports of flying saucers, which have been made
recently from all over the world. His essay starts from the position that, whether flying saucers exist or not, they certainly appear; that is, they have a psychic reality which can be properly studied quite apart from the question of their physical existence. It is therefore legitimate to ask, 'Why should flying saucers have been appearing recently?' and 'What is the significance or meaning in psychological terms of these appearances?'
Since UFOs have been seen by many people with no previous or subsequent history of delusional vision, an explanation solely in terms of individual psychopathology seems inadequate. Professor Jung suggests that the appearances should be understood as a collective phenomenon, as something happening in individuals in response to pressures experienced by society as a whole. The actual phenomenon that appears he sees as a symbol, which is projected into visual space and is there misunderstood as an object in space-time. Such an appearance, when misunderstood as a material object, stimulates investigation by the ordinary methods of physical science; it should instead, he suggests, be interpreted according to the principles of analytical psychology, whereupon it would be correctly seen as an archetype of the collective unconscious.
As Professor Jung notes, the human psyche has perennially experienced difficulty in distinguishing psychic from material reality. The medieval alchemists, of whom he has made a close study, provide an excellent paradigm of this. Their reports of their opus have an intrinsic ambiguity, which makes it difficult to be sure whether their alembics contained dist