A Visionary Rumour

Some time ago (1954) I wrote a short article in which I considered the nature of Flying Saucers. I came to the same conclusion as the book that appeared shortly afterwards, the semi-official report by Edward J. Ruppelt (1956), one-time chief of the American Bureau for observing Ufos. The conclusion is: something is seen, but one doesn't know what. It is difficult, if not impossible, to form any correct idea of these objects, because they behave not like bodies but like weightless thoughts. Yet there do seem to be authenticated cases where the visual observation was confirmed by a simultaneous radar echo.

For a decade the physical existence of Ufos remained a very problematical matter, and there arose a situation in which, with the best will in the world, one often did not know and could not discover whether a primary perception was followed by a phantasm or whether, conversely, a primary fantasy budding in the unconscious invaded the conscious mind with illusions and visions. The material which has become known to me during the past ten years lends support to both hypotheses. In the first case an objectively real, physical process forms the basis for an accompanying myth; in the second case an archetype created the corresponding vision. To these two causal relationships we must add a third possibility, namely, that of a “synchronistic”, i.e. acausal, meaningful coincidence which has occupied man's mind ever since the time of Geulincx, Leibniz, and Schopenhauer (cf. Jung, 1952). It is an hypothesis that has special bearing on phenomena connected with archetypal psychic processes.

Ufos as Rumours

The Ufo reports may seem to the sceptical mind to be rather like a story, told all over the world, which, however, differs from an ordinary rumour in that it is expressed in the form of visions, or perhaps owed its existence to them in the first place and is now kept alive by them. I would call this comparatively rare variation a visionary rumour.