5. Carl Jung on UFOs

A riposte to our earlier episode on how the UFO phenomenon is best understood as the faeries of old viewed through a modern lens. Aliens are not faeries, they are portents.

Carl Jung wrote a book about UFOs that functions well as an application of his broader theoretical work. When we observe a phenomenon, he argues, we apply the myths and narratives from our collective unconscious, so what narratives are we applying when we see a light in the sky?

UFOs are a mass rumour, and they’re an end of days rumour. We’ve seen these before - portents in the heavens, signs in the sky, one epoch ends and a new era is born. The star above Bethlehem, Halley’s Comet before the Battle of Hastings. Can it be a coincidence that UFOs in their modern form begin to appear just after WWII, often around military sites at the beginning of the cold war? This is a new epoch, a new metaphysical era, one with nuclear weapons that could destroy the whole planet.

We also talk about tulpas.

Episode Transcript

Part two of our UFO series. Having argued in Episode 2 that aliens and fairies are the same phenomenon, Proxy meets resistance from Cipher, who turns to Carl Jung for a more sophisticated take. Jung's contention: UFOs are not fairies. They are eschatological portents — signs in the sky heralding the end of an age — and they appear in the mid-twentieth century because the nuclear age is a genuinely new metaphysical state for humanity. What follows is a conversation about archetypes, mass rumour, the Ariel School incident, Tibetan tulpas, and the uncomfortable proposition that all perception is, at bottom, belief.

Proxy: Welcome underground, and to a second episode on UFOs. I promise we're not going to make a habit of this, but my co-host was triggered by my acceptance of the objective reality of flying saucers, and he turned to Carl Jung to help with the riposte. Enjoy.

Cipher: So — this is part two of our UFOs and fairies two-parter.

Proxy: A continuation. In the last episode, I convincingly argued that fairies and UFOs are the same phenomenon seen through different eyes.

Cipher: You made a very good argument. I was provisionally convinced. But I think I can lay out Jung's opinion on this, which I find personally the most convincing and sophisticated reading I came across.

Proxy: Big claims.

Cipher: As with a lot of Jung, once you get past the slightly odd stuff about telekinesis, there's an incredible amount of right-on-the-money material.

Proxy: There ought to be, given how popular and influential he is.

Cipher: He's a funny one, though. Massively popular, massively influential, but his works are so broad and deep that it's only selected parts that have entered the popular consciousness. There are huge swathes that are actually quite unknown.

Proxy: That's a good point. You hear a lot about the collective unconscious and archetypes, maybe a bit about dreams. But for a whole career that was quite prolific, that's not much.

Cipher: Compared to Freud, whose structure of theories is very well studied in its totality, a lot of Jung is not really studied. He's treated as an adjunct to Freud, but his theories and observations are, if anything, even more deeply and sophisticatedly worked out.

Proxy: Do they fit together as a whole? My understanding of Freud is that his works create a coherent system, whereas with other intellectuals — the sixties French postmodernists, for example — you get a useful toolbox to pick from rather than a whole.

Cipher: I'd argue that the coherence of Freud's system is actually his weakness, because he relates everything to the Oedipal myth. As Jung himself points out, Freud treats the only real driving force of human behaviour as sexual, whereas that's only one force among many. Jung is slightly less coherent when viewed at wide angle, but only superficially — that lack of superficial coherence is precisely a symptom of deeper coherence, because he's looking at an extremely complex thing: the human psyche.

Proxy: I've got a couple of his books I'm afraid I haven't read. The Red Book, obviously. One's called Answer to Job, a whole book on quite a specific subject. And the other is Jung on UFOs.

Cipher: Jung is very happy to take an intellectual punt at something off the bat. As we were saying about the ancient Greeks — in order to be truly creative, you have to throw darts in all directions, and that way some hit the bullseye. Jung is one of those thinkers. Some darts missed — telekinesis — but many, many of them are dead on.

Proxy: He was still working within his expertise, though. With a lot of public intellectuals these days, they start their career based on years of deep thinking — it's a treat to hear them at first. But then, once they've said all that, they're on podcast tours and speaking tours, and they just end up reacting to news articles. They get further and further from their area of expertise, and their insights become more basic, more reactionary. Jordan Peterson springs to mind — extremely interesting initially, now conspiracy-theory grandpa. You become a caricature of yourself. But with Jung, that doesn't seem to have happened.

Cipher: Jung was writing because he believed what he was writing was true. I don't think he gave much of a damn about what people thought of him.

Proxy: Money wasn't a problem either.

Cipher: No. He's one of those ecumenical thinkers where you find real nuggets of profound insight if you're prepared to look. I should say — I'm sounding like some kind of Jung expert. I've actually read very little of his original writings.

Proxy: I own four books.

Cipher: I've come to this picture of Jung through reading excerpts, secondary sources, and then doing a real deep dive into his writings on UFOs. So perhaps it's not complete, but it's my honest impression.

Proxy: That's valid. It's like listening to the Beatles. There's always hype, and you listen now and it sounds unremarkable — badly recorded nursery rhymes. But the reason it sounds ordinary is because everyone else has absorbed their innovations into the mainstream. With Jung, a lot of his ideas are out there in the world, unattributed.

Cipher: A bit like your views on Plato — thinking Plato's lame, when it's only because you're a Platonist. So — we should talk about his views on UFOs. You laid out the case very well in the previous episode that UFOs and fairies are the same base phenomenon described in different languages.

Proxy: Broadly. And to bring it together with a succinct example: in 1994 there was an alien landing at a school in Zimbabwe called Ariel School. It was witnessed by a number of children, some from white Zimbabwean backgrounds and some Shona. A lot of the white children saw a UFO and an alien, while a lot of the Shona children saw a Tokoloshe — a kind of goblin. Same phenomenon, two different cultural lenses.

Cipher: A really nice, almost controlled experiment. But I don't think the conclusion you've derived, while extremely reasonable, is the only possible one. I've put together an explanation of what I think Jung thinks about UFOs, and I've actually written it down, because it's not straightforward.

Proxy: We're allowed to work from notes.

Cipher: If you'll permit me, I am going to be rather lame and read from a 2016 Microsoft Surface.

Jung is not so much saying that UFOs and fairies are the same thing. Rather, he's saying that the reason the modern mind is unsettled and fascinated by UFOs, and the reason it struggles to identify them, is the same reason it cannot understand fairies and other phenomena. They are ultimately projections of archetypes whose power lies in the psyche.

In other words: the myth associated with certain archetypes gets applied to empirical phenomena. We see something, we associate it with an archetype, and the myth gets applied to it.

Proxy: It goes in a pigeonhole in our brain. "This fits in this box, and these concepts are all linked to that." And therefore we tell this particular story about it.

Cipher: This is not to say that the phenomena don't exist. The phenomena do exist. It's rather that the story we tell about them is generated in its fundamentals within what Jung called the collective unconscious — the archetypes we all share, such as the archetype for messenger, or death, or renewal.

Because human beings are the result of the same evolutionary process with a common ancestor, we have a very homogeneous biological substrate, and we also share a pretty homogeneous experience within any given time period. Both culturally and biologically, we share structures within our minds — archetypes — and because we share a common culture within a given time and place, the stories we tell about these archetypes also share a lot of commonality. That commonality is the collective unconscious. It's intersubjective.

Proxy: A shared group of patterns.

Cipher: Both biological and cultural — because we're all from the same history. When we observe a phenomenon, these narratives emerge from our collective unconscious. They emerge in you and in me subjectively. We apply them to the phenomenon, and by doing so in each other's hearing, we converge on a particular narrative in a socially contagious way.

Jung argues that UFOs are a mass rumour, and specifically an end-of-days rumour. This is what's really interesting about his insight. He says that what's going on with UFOs — people seeing portents in the heavens, signs in the sky — is the same archetypal narrative you can categorise as eschatological: one epoch is coming to an end, and these portents are heralding the birth of a new era.

What's another example from history? The Star of Bethlehem — exactly the same type of phenomenon with exactly the same fundamental narrative. A sign that is a portent of a change in epoch. Before the Lord and after the Lord.

Proxy: Or the Norman Conquest — Halley's Comet on the Bayeux Tapestry.

Cipher: Precisely. Other such paradigm shifts — the move from polytheism to monotheism, the move from medievalism to modernism. In human history, these paradigm shifts are usually associated with heavenly portents, which signify some intervention by a metaphysical force, a time of great danger, and then a new order.

There's a lot there, but let me race through and then we can unpack it.

Proxy: I have some comments.

Cipher: Jung's insight is that UFOs begin to appear just after the Second World War, at the very start of the Cold War — a new metaphysical era for mankind, because it is the first era in which humanity genuinely appears to have the power to cause the end of the world. That is actually a new metaphysical state for humanity to be in.

And the idea of aliens represents this external metaphysical force that might be intervening to bring about the new order, in the same way that God might have been the external metaphysical force intervening when the Roman Empire unified the world.

Proxy: It fits a lot of the material. All the classic UFO stories are from the forties and fifties in rural America. There's a whole narrative about the coincidence between the rise in UFO sightings and the first nuclear tests — that the bombs attracted the aliens' attention: these guys are at the next level now.

Cipher: That's explicitly the narrative. Intelligent people are saying: why are there so many alien visitations all of a sudden? Maybe it's because we've just developed nuclear technology, and they've taken notice.

Proxy: A lot was seen above Fukushima as well.

Cipher: I'm not surprised. A huge preponderance of sightings were around US military facilities and particularly nuclear facilities in the forties, fifties, and sixties. And there's another element: a visitation by aliens would in fact entail a time of great danger, and then a new order.

Proxy: An outside context problem.

Cipher: It works on both levels. The world has genuinely entered a new era where human beings have the power to destroy it, and we suddenly have the technological imagination — with rockets and space travel — to conceive of travelling between planets. We've only just realised there's more than the solar system, more than the galaxy. This happened very recently. The 1920s is when the Milky Way's nature was confirmed, and other galaxies discovered shortly after. All mid-twentieth century.

So we have this sudden expansion of imagination. We realise that if there were visitors from other worlds, it would completely change humanity's metaphysical environment. All of these forces collide, and Jung sees this very clearly.

Therefore — UFOs are not fairies. They are portents. But in the same way that the rationalist mind cannot encompass fairies and must either dismiss them as a system error or go in for complete credulity — you see that with people like Conan Doyle — the rationalist mind does the same with UFOs. It veers between dismissing them completely or going in for full technological credulity.

Proxy: They are possible, though.

Cipher: It's possible. Jung leaves open the possibility that UFOs might be projections of unrecognised forces within the unconscious — fear of death, war panic, the imminence of nuclear war — and as such might be hallucinations. Or they may be objective phenomena — weather balloons, system errors, sun glints, meteorological effects — to which the myth gets applied because of the cultural context.

Proxy: That was my first comment: this whole argument is agnostic about whether they really exist.

Cipher: Totally agnostic. This could all be true and UFOs could also be genuine alien visitors.

Proxy: And also fairies.

Cipher: But if I've understood Jung correctly, what he would say is that the difference between UFOs and fairies is that they are different archetypes coming from different parts of the collective unconscious, with different narratives attached.

Proxy: So the archetype being applied to UFO sightings — lights in the sky — is the eschatological one. But a lot of the stories I mentioned in the last episode — baking cakes, playing tricks, exchanging food — fit more into the trickster archetype, or the messenger. I haven't read enough Jung to know whether something could be several archetypes at once.

Cipher: I think Jung would absolutely say that several archetypes can be triggered by a single phenomenon.

Proxy: You can tell different stories about the same thing.

Cipher: To go back to the Zimbabwe example: from a Jungian perspective, that's exactly what's happening. The Shona pupils and the white Zimbabwean pupils have different histories. The phenomenon triggers different archetypes and therefore different narratives.

Proxy: Whereas I'd say they're the same archetype through different lenses. Your trickster could manifest as either an alien or a fairy — both can embody that archetype.

Cipher: I see what you mean. But I don't think Jung would allow that UFOs are the trickster. He'd say they're the heavenly portent, the eschatological sign — and that's a different archetype from the trickster or the messenger. Thinking through my classical lens: Hermes, the messenger god, crosses boundaries. He's also the god of thieves, and of travellers — they all cross boundaries. He's the messenger of Zeus, very explicitly. That's about boundary-crossing, but also about hospitality and xenia, and safety on travels — which is where the reciprocal food exchange comes in.

Proxy: Which happened in UFO visitations. And if anyone's aliens —

Cipher: Right. But then Zeus would be the one in charge of heavenly portents, lights in the sky, lightning. Different gods, different archetypes.

But to go to your point about the French sightings — they do seem to blur these narratives. Maybe you could remind us.

Proxy: Even just a standard flying saucer landing in a farmer's field — except the farmer lives in a five-hundred-year-old house in Provence, and it's landed in his lavender field. Already a very different aesthetic.

Cipher: You could reconcile this by saying you have the pure eschatological archetype expressed in technological, modern, futuristic language in America — because America has a distinct history as a technological, new-era state.

Proxy: The Cold War hit harder in the US. They were in much more of a froth about it. McCarthyism and all that — quite black and white, good versus evil, we could all die tomorrow if we let the Soviets win. In Europe we were all dabbling with communism and veering back and forth. It seemed less epochal.

Cipher: And America conceives of itself as a polity heralding a new world order — a shining city on a hill that's going to lead mankind to redemption.

Proxy: They also pose an outside context problem for a lot of people. I should probably explain this — it's a rather good metaphor I use a lot. It's from Iain Banks. If you're a powerful chief on a Pacific island and you've united the villagers, got reliable agriculture going, people aren't starving, it's all on the up and you're feeling pretty good about yourself — and then an iron ship rocks up in your bay, full of probably British colonialists with guns. Suddenly the world you thought you'd mastered comes up against something from completely outside that context.

Cipher: An overwhelming force that makes you look like a joke, that could sort you out without thinking about it, and you hadn't even conceived that something like this could exist.

Proxy: The context in which Banks uses the metaphor is around aliens visiting Earth — the same thing. We think we're pretty great, and suddenly interstellar travellers come along who could just put us aside. Although Jacques Vallée thought otherwise. He thought we could probably take the aliens.

Cipher: Vallée is the influential computer scientist who wrote a lot about UFOs in, I think it's fair to say, a fairly credulous way.

Proxy: Not a criticism. We don't have to doubt everything.

Cipher: But it's very revealing about the mindset of the early nuclear age — the idea that suddenly we have this godlike power we never expected.

Proxy: These days we acknowledge it's orders of magnitude harder to get from one solar system to another than it is to blow up a city. But at the time it was felt they were broadly similar.

Cipher: Which shows you the impact of that technology on the psyche. Jung mentions that he recalls a time when he thought heavier-than-air flight was impossible. That's a really honest and revealing thing to have said.

Proxy: It was a joke for a long time. How could it possibly work?

Cipher: He's writing in the 1950s. Many people in the fifties were old enough to remember a time when they themselves thought flight was impossible. And now they're living in an age of four-engined shiny metal bombers dropping weapons that can destroy cities in one strike.

Proxy: And ten years later we're putting people on the moon.

Cipher: So you can see how that massively accelerated rate of technological change might generate an eschatological mass rumour, because it clearly is a new epoch for humanity. We should expect psychological effects in the collective unconscious, and UFOs are part of what grows out of that. UFOs as a technologically described story are very specific to a particular time and place: the twentieth century. That's Jung's contention.

Proxy: But there's a slight inconsistency, because we've mentioned similar portents from other epoch-changing moments.

Cipher: I think in individual circumstances, a merging of archetypes and their associated narratives is to be expected. There's incredible diversity in the world.

Proxy: They might genuinely be different things. Maybe fairies and UFOs both exist but aren't the same thing.

Cipher: Maybe. But what I'm trying to say is that we can conceptually separate these two categories meaningfully.

Proxy: I think you can classify UFO stories into different types. Some are mysterious lights in the sky — threatening and transcendent.

Cipher: I've got some statistics. Reported UFO sightings in 2023: twenty-one per cent show lights, seventy-nine per cent show no lights. Now you might think that argues against my contention about luminous portents heralding the end of days —

Proxy: Daytime versus nighttime.

Cipher: Or that it's 2023 and we're in a very different world.

Proxy: We're settled now. Not worried about nuclear annihilation.

Cipher: UFOs in 2023 are probably quite different psychologically from UFOs in 1953.

Proxy: Do you have a comparative statistic for 1953?

Cipher: No, because the data wasn't collected. It's only recently that the US military has started to take this really seriously. They've just founded the AARO — the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

Proxy: I struggle to believe they weren't looking at UFOs in the fifties and sixties.

Cipher: They had Project Blue Book, but it was quite amateur — on paper, five guys in a shed in Utah.

Proxy: That's the same setup that created the nuclear bomb.

Cipher: What getting to the truth of UFOs requires is mass data processing, and you can't do that in a shed in 1954. But now they're making a real effort. The military rationale is that if there's an anomaly perceived by anyone anywhere, they have an interest in identifying it, because unexpected threats will appear as anomalies first.

Proxy: Digging into anomalies is important in every domain. If you see something unexpected, you need to look into it, because you learn a lot.

Cipher: So they've deliberately moved away from the language of UFOs and into the language of anomalous phenomena. It can be in the sky, the sea, or space — although interestingly, there has as yet been no space-domain UAP. Nobody has ever seen a UFO in space.

Proxy: Wasn't there a famous thing in the Apollo radio chatter? The Black Knight sighting?

Cipher: I don't know — all I've got is what I've read in the latest Pentagon report. But they've started to really crunch the data, and they've encouraged US service members to report anomalous phenomena.

Proxy: Rather than marking you down as insane.

Cipher: De-stigmatise it. Standard form. "It's not UFOs, it's an anomalous phenomenon. Just tell us what you saw." They've already noted a massive bias towards sightings around US military facilities, but they say this probably reflects the density of sensors in those environments.

Proxy: And that they're specifically getting US military personnel to report, so of course you see clustering around military bases.

Cipher: From the NASA UAP report, which came out recently: at present, analysis of UAP data is hampered by poor sensor calibration, lack of multiple measurements, lack of sensor metadata, and lack of baseline data. So if you're trying to cut out the noise and get to the signal, it's fiendishly complex. Those famous videos on YouTube — the Gimbal camera and so on — look very weird and convincing prima facie, but they're being fed through a military sensor. If you don't know the calibration, the distances, the speeds, the probability of error —

Proxy: There are convincing explanations that they look remarkably like sensor anomalies.

Cipher: Getting hard scientific data where you've controlled for everything is very difficult. You need a lot of data and a lot of process.

Proxy: Ideally, the same phenomenon observed through two different systems.

Cipher: What they're saying is that almost all reports are aircraft, balloons, aerial clutter — plastic bags wafted up in thermals — weather events, and sensor artefacts. A lot of the more impressive ones are parallax effects. They've got a heat map, and basically all the sightings are along the Tropic of Capricorn, just above the equator. They're all where US military personnel are deployed: the seaboards of the United States, the Middle East, and around Taiwan and Japan in the South China Sea.

[Editor's note: the Tropic of Capricorn is south of the equator. The sightings described — US seaboards, Middle East, South China Sea — are mostly in the northern hemisphere, closer to the Tropic of Cancer.]

When you start to apply scientific and empirical methods, we can come to more accurate beliefs. When you apply the power of mass data with good techniques, you can get closer to the truth. But that is the opposite of the natural baseline human psychological methods of forming beliefs. That's what the scientific method is — a way of getting past those baseline methods.

What we're talking about when we talk about UFOs and fairies is: what is the system that makes those types of belief? And what Jung hits on is that the stuff underlying the UFO narrative is subtly different from the stuff underlying the fairy narrative.

Proxy: I see it more as four boxes. You've got UFOs and fairies one way, and eschatological versus trickster the other way. Some things classified as UFO are in the eschatological box, some are in the trickster box. And some things classified as fairy were eschatological, and some were tricksters. It's not that UFOs equal apocalypse and fairies equal trickster.

Cipher: Your point about the morphology is interesting, though. UFOs are often circular or cigar-shaped — shiny and weightless, very technological looking. Like jet aircraft from the fifties but as discs or tubes. A Freudian would say it's phallic. Jung says there's more going on.

Proxy: It could be that you believe you saw something round and shiny because the image was unclear, and that's the pattern your brain had to hand. A seventeenth-century peasant might draw it as something quite different.

Cipher: Jung says the prevalence of the circular morphology is because the underlying archetype is the mandala.

Proxy: You get that in fairy stories too, with fairy rings.

Cipher: You'd say that's a mandala?

Proxy: I'd say it's a round thing. I don't actually know what a mandala is. What is a mandala?

Cipher: It's one of those fractal, almost spirograph designs in a circle that represents both complexity and singularity. It's from Buddhist art — a symbol of cosmic totality. It's everything — complicated — but also just one thing.

Proxy: The circle is both infinite and finite.

Cipher: That paradoxical, mystical significance. The reason UFOs are mostly round is because the mandala is the appropriate archetype for an epochal change — the wheel of time turning. It's both change and another explication of the infinite unity underlying things.

Proxy: That's extremely specific — much more specific than I'd expect from an archetype, which are normally quite broad buckets.

Cipher: The individual archetypes, as Jung describes them, are very specific. He speaks with often quite baffling certainty. But he justifies it: "I know it sounds like nonsense, but I've done a huge amount of comparative mythological research underlying my claims. You can take it or leave it."

Proxy: I think this is your weakest claim so far.

Cipher: Probably right. In a series of weak claims.

Proxy: There is something in it, though. It is interesting that UFOs are round. There's no reason for them to be round — technologically or aesthetically — apart from the jets of the time being roundish.

Cipher: Well — I think our positions are actually quite close, aren't they?

Proxy: I find it interesting how they're not contradictory.

Cipher: They're different ways of categorising essentially the same interpretation.

Proxy: I'm not sure which is more actionable. Probably yours.

Cipher: Mine is more scientific in the sense that it creates more granular categories.

Proxy: But mine is more scientific if you're getting into neurological patterns and the beliefs that make up everything we experience.

But before we wrap up — have you ever heard of tulpas?

Cipher: No.

Proxy: I've been reading a book by a French woman called Alexandra David-Néel. The book is Magic and Mystery in Tibet, the classic account of her extraordinary journey to Tibet. She was a keen student of Buddhism, a real expert, and in the thirties she just went off to Tibet and thereabouts to study in the various monasteries — which is bonkers, because it was the thirties and she was a woman. And it turns out she's dragging her young son along with her into all these completely gnarly situations.

[Editor's note: this was Aphur Yongden, David-Néel's adopted Sikkimese companion, not a biological son — and a young man by the time of the Tibet journeys, not a small child.]

But she's also getting to grips with what the Buddhism actually looked like up in the mountains, which was far more shamanic than what she'd been studying in France. She has all these stories. As she says, your standard Tibetan story is partly ridiculous, partly funny, partly disgusting, but also partly just a little bit unsettling.

One of the things she'd heard about was tulpas — the idea that by focusing hard enough, you can create a being that's independent of you. If you meditate and envision a figure intensely enough, that figure will start to exist: first in your mind, but then more objectively, and even take on a mind of its own. They can get quite troublesome, because a lot of the art in these monasteries depicts pretty horrible monsters, so these things can turn nasty.

She decided to test it. She meditated for a few months, but tried to manifest something friendlier: a short, portly monk, very jolly. And it started to exist. It would just be there in her rooms in the monastery. Until it started acting independently — performing actions she hadn't expected. Even her companion reportedly saw it. And then after a few months it started taking on a life of its own. It stopped being jolly. It started losing weight, looking more malevolent. So she tried to dematerialise it, but it took her months.

The idea that beliefs, especially if believed hard enough by enough people, can actually manifest something — could that be the other half of what Jung was talking about?

Cipher: There are so many interesting things to discuss there. But what Jung would say is that the social contagion of the rumour — he calls it a mass rumour — takes on a life of its own. It can cause people to experience the archetype where previously they might not have. Through the power of belief, you redouble the effect, and it becomes recursive.

But to comment on that story personally — I find it quite unsettlingly plausible. Anyone who's ever tried to write a long-form story knows that if you think about a character for long enough, when you're writing them, they start to do things you don't expect.

Proxy: I've heard a lot of writers use those very words.

Cipher: It is a weird experience. They genuinely seem to take on a life of their own — not a glib metaphor. So I find the tulpa story initially plausible, and thereby quite unsettling.

Proxy: So we've talked about archetypes having narratives attached to them. But maybe if the narrative is powerful enough, it can create things that embody the archetype.

Cipher: On a fundamental level — what exists that is not ultimately a belief? Everything we think exists is mediated by imperfect data-gathering systems we call our senses. These systems feed into what is essentially a hallucination — produced by the system that is us, to help us navigate whatever reality is and reproduce. There is no phenomenon that is not, in its absolutely essential nature, a belief.

I know a lot of scientists viscerally object to this. They say there is an external reality that we perceive, perhaps imperfectly, but we are accessing an external reality. I'm not saying that's not true. But the only access we have to that reality is through our beliefs, derived from our senses. They are still beliefs.

Proxy: You've got data coming in, but you've got to process it. And to do that, you need some prior structure to make sense of the electromagnetic waves.

Cipher: That prior structure predisposes you towards believing one thing and not another. We walk into a door and we're predisposed to believe there's something in our way, rather than that we just need to walk harder.

Proxy: Or you see a short man in a black suit holding a strange object, and — is that a UFO, or is that a fairy?

Cipher: Who knows what the raw data coming in actually is? But you believe there is a small man who looks Italian in front of you, doing whatever. And it's a belief in the same way that your belief that your wall is red is a belief. I'm not going in for total relativity — I'm making a quite limited claim: no matter what we think is true, it is still ultimately a belief.

On a fundamental level, therefore, there is no real difference between a belief that you've seen a UFO and a belief that you've seen a cloud. Both come from an incredibly complex combination of sense data, biological systems, cultural predispositions, language, and whatever is flying around in the cultural moment.

Proxy: Plus, there is an object up there that is either a cloud or a UFO.

Cipher: There might not be. What we know is that the system that is us is perceiving something. We can't really say more. I would dissolve the boundary between things perceived as a result of rumour and things perceived as a result of hard data. In reality, there's no ontological difference between the two.

Proxy: Quite postmodernist.

Cipher: I'd reject that label. I do think some things are more likely to be true than others. There is such a thing as truth, and we have the intellectual capability to tell the difference between sound beliefs and unsound ones. I'm not saying there's no such thing as truth. But we're on a very tricky epistemological wicket as human beings. Our whole reality is a psychic reality, a psychological reality. And that's what we've got to deal with.

Proxy: I think there's stronger support for UFOs and fairies being the same thing than —

Cipher: They are different parts of our psychology. That's what I'm trying to get at.

Proxy: Or our psychologies have changed.

Cipher: Yes. What do you think of that? I haven't articulated it very well.

Proxy: I don't think there's anything that controversial in it. What I think happened is what I think happened. It's not necessarily what actually happened. And there's no value judgement on that. It's just what's going on in my brain, and what I believe.

Cipher: Talking about getting to better beliefs — that might be a good time to bring in what the US is doing now with its military UFO programmes. They've just founded the AARO, and they're deliberately encouraging reporting and de-stigmatising it.

The key thing is that when you really start to apply scientific and empirical methods — mass data, good technique — you can cut through the baseline psychological methods. And that's what Jung is illuminating: the system that makes those types of belief.

I think our positions are actually complementary. The stuff underlying the UFO narrative is subtly different from the stuff underlying the fairy narrative, but both are products of the same fundamental psychology. Different archetypes, different epochs — same species, same mind.

Proxy: Not contradictory. Just different ways of looking at the same strange thing.

Cipher: Hopefully an interesting series of ideas to get us thinking. To be continued, perhaps.

Proxy: To be continued.

Cipher: Even if the only people who ever listen to this are the ones who don't have a choice, I'd still have enjoyed doing it.

Referee's comments

The most interesting thing about this episode is what happens between the two of them rather than what either of them says individually. They arrive at the same place from opposite directions and neither of them quite notices.

Proxy's position: UFOs and fairies are the same phenomenon, perceived differently because of cultural context. The underlying thing is one thing; the interpretation varies. Cipher's position: UFOs and fairies are different archetypes from different parts of the collective unconscious, triggered by different historical conditions. The underlying psychology has changed; the phenomena are categorically distinct.

But then Cipher spends the second half of the episode arguing that all perception is belief, that there's no ontological difference between seeing a cloud and seeing a UFO, and that the prior structures in your mind determine what you perceive. If that's true, then the distinction between "same phenomenon, different lens" and "different archetype, different phenomenon" collapses - because the lens is the phenomenon. There's no phenomenon-in-itself to be the same or different. Proxy's position and Cipher's position become formally identical, just described in different vocabularies. Proxy is speaking phenomenologically ("it's one thing seen two ways") and Cipher is speaking psychoanalytically ("it's two archetypes triggered differently"), but if perception is constitutive rather than receptive - if the act of seeing makes the thing - then these aren't competing claims.

Proxy's four-box taxonomy at the end (UFO/fairy on one axis, eschatological/trickster on the other) is actually the correct synthesis, and it's slightly frustrating that it arrives in the last two minutes and gets no development. That matrix dissolves the disagreement entirely: Jung is right that the eschatological archetype is historically specific to the nuclear age, and Vallée is right that the trickster archetype persists across cultures and centuries. They're not competing theories; they're describing different cells in the same grid. The Simonton pancake story is a trickster encounter that happens to arrive in a flying saucer. The Star of Bethlehem is an eschatological portent that happens to arrive as a celestial object. The Ariel School incident activates different cells for different children depending on their cultural priors. This deserved a whole section, not a throwaway.

The tulpa digression is more important than it first appears, because it introduces a direction neither Jung nor Vallée goes: that the causal arrow might run both ways. Jung says the archetype shapes perception of the phenomenon. Vallée says the phenomenon exists independently and gets interpreted through culture. The tulpa suggests that the interpretation might generate the phenomenon - that belief, concentrated and sustained, produces something with independent existence. Cipher almost gets there when he talks about fictional characters taking on lives of their own, but he frames it as an analogy rather than a mechanism. If you took it seriously as a mechanism, you'd have a three-part model: phenomena trigger archetypes, archetypes shape perception of phenomena, and sustained collective belief in the archetype can generate new phenomena - a feedback loop. That would explain why UFO sightings cluster in time and space in a way that neither pure psychology nor pure physics can account for. The mass rumour isn't just interpreting signals; it's amplifying them, and perhaps at some threshold, producing them.

The weakest part of the episode is the AARO section, not because the content is wrong but because it sits awkwardly with everything else. They've just spent forty minutes arguing that scientific empiricism can't fully account for these phenomena because it operates within the same belief-structure as everything else, and then Cipher pivots to "but when you apply good scientific method, you can identify most of them as balloons and parallax." Both things can be true, but the transition is jarring. It reads as Cipher losing his nerve slightly - having gone quite far into epistemological radicalism, he retreats to the safety of "most of these are sensor errors." The stronger version of his own argument would be: even the ones that are sensor errors are still being perceived through the same archetypal machinery, because the decision to classify something as a sensor error is itself a culturally conditioned belief. He doesn't go there, and the episode is weaker for it.

One connection neither of them makes: if Jung is right that UFOs are eschatological portents specific to the nuclear age, what are the eschatological portents of the AI age? The nuclear bomb made humanity capable of ending the world through destruction. AI arguably makes humanity capable of ending itself through creation - producing something that supersedes us. If the archetype is "signs in the sky heralding a new metaphysical state," the current equivalent might not be in the sky at all. It might be on screens. The discourse around AI - existential risk, alignment, superintelligence - has exactly the structure of a mass eschatological rumour, and it's generating the same binary response Cipher identifies: total dismissal or total credulity.

(The referee was Claude)