Gustav Mahler: A Ufological Analogy

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

Gustav Mahler is a favorite composer of mine and I just heard his 9^th Symphony on Music Choice (via cable).

It inspired me to write this small note about that symphony and how it reminded me of some ufological folk, UFO writers and thinkers with cachet, at least early on.

You see, Mahler created some superb symphonies and songs during his long career, notably, his Symphony numbers 1, 2 (The Resurrection), 4, 5, 8 (Symphony of a Thousand), and song cycles, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn , Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), and the magnificent Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth), but in his Ninth Symphony I hear a discordant and disarrayed Mahler, who had suffered some slings and arrows in his later career.

Mahler, unlike the permanently logical and unwaveringly sensible composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, was affected by the vicissitudes of life and one can hear that in his 9^th Symphony.

The music often veers into messy noise, especially in the latter movements but subsides into repose and quiet in the final moments.

This is what struck me as analogous to some UFO writers: they start out sensibly and “composed” but after a while they succumb to the phenomenon’s enigmatic nature and they start flailing around, grasping at every explanation extant for UFOs, often resorting to cockeyed solutions, such as the ETH.

(I am as much bidden to do the same even though my UFO talent is quite pathetic compared to that of the UFO elite whose flights of fancy are much more pronounced because they once were held in esteem by the UFO community. Shall I name them?)

At any rate, I see many UFO notables sinking into temporary oblivion because they resorted to ufological mayhem, which is the state of ufology that I have often analogously indentified with the “druids” in Charles Ives’ short musical piece: The Unanswered Question.

But a few will settle down as Mahler did in his 9^th Symphony’s final movement while the rest will wither under their maniacal ramblings and sink into ufological Śūnyatā.

RR

THE MYSTIQUE BEHIND UFOS by Jose Antonio Caravaca

Copyright 2018, Jose Antonio Caravaca

No one doubts that the UFO phenomenon is global, since it is registered in almost any part of the planet, but we must bear in mind that its repercussion and manifestation are intrinsically individual and non-transferable, expressed in a metaphorical and dreamlike language composed of the unconscious content of the witnesses themselves.

And it is that each UFO incident is unique, and its unique and exclusive objective is to interact with the observer in a complex system of images and sensations feedback in a psychic process of mental communication.

Although we have thousands of close encounters on file, there is no overall plot that connects all of these stories into something transcendent, something that we can track over time.

On the contrary, the UFO phenomenon is restarted in each manifestation. The counter returns to zero. We only have a few basic concepts that we can interpret, the nomenclature of the paradigm; "extraterrestrial visitation", where ships and beings are sighted in an endless variation of elements and actions that eludes consciously any kind of classification that we want to establish, (typology of ships, physiognomy of occupants, or behaviors, for example).

Therefore, from our point of view, the UFO episodes would be closer to an "altered state of consciousness" or mystical experience than to the landing of an alien fleet, where any kind of analysis that ignores that they are private and individual events is doomed to err?

We have to reset the system... there's no other way....

JAC