The Psychiatric patina of (most?) UFO accounts

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

My academic pal Bryan Sentes (who teaches at Dawson College in Montreal) mentioned, in a comment to my “UFO lights” post (below), Jung’s accommodation of contactee Orfeo Angelucci in Jung’s book, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (which many of you have I’m sure.

Jung treats the Ofeo Angelucci tale(s) as related in Orfeo’s book The Secret of the Saucers, which I no longer have but find exploited rather well by Jung and Nick Redfern in his book, Contactees.

Bryan seems inebriated by Jung’s assessments of flying saucers, as am I, as I reread the book. (My previous highlights in it indicate that I have adopted much of what Jung has to say about the phenomenon from a psychological perspective.)

I don’t see the use of “Myth” in Jung’s title as academically legitimate but that for another time.

What I do take away from Jung’s assessment of Angelucci’s account is that he (Orfeo) presents a rather complete case study of hebephrenic schizophrenia (which I’ve outlined here and elsewhere earlier).

A site and paper about the Cardiff Anomalous Perception Scale that measures perceptual anomalies, categorizing degrees of behavior from normal to psychotic, is explained further via these links:

https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/32/2/366/1897642

http://www.actaspsiquiatria.es/repositorio/16/87/ENG/16-87-ENG-1-8-712089.pdf

The Cardiff Scale takes accounts of lights and color (et cetera) that intrude on those with psycho-neurotic (and more serious) mental afflictions.

Do colored lights witnessed by UFO observers indicate those witnesses are “crazy” or “near crazy”? Hardly.

But seeing colors and lights throws up a red flag about the witness testimony in some UFO observations. That is, investigators – those who usually are deficiently aware of such psychological and/or neurological maladies – need to take into account the possibility that what is deemed an actual UFO sighting is, rather, a perceptual anomaly that the witness thinks is a real event.

Persons who, like schizophrenics, have such incidents intrude upon them perceive their experience as a momentary reality when, in fact, it is figment of their imagination or, worse, a psychotic warning, which is what Jung thought was Angelucci’s psychic disposition.

Angelucci wasn’t hoaxing. He was immersed in a mentally contrived “fiction” that he didn’t instigate, his fevered mind creating the whole scenario(s) he perceived and wrote about.

This takes us back to UFO lights. Psychotics, like epileptics, mentally visualize bizarre lights and colors which, for them, are real, but, in actuality, do not exist for others, usually.

Jung allows several persons (or groups of persons) to share such experiences as he notes on page 131 of the Bollingen/Princeton University paperback of his book.

Yet, some UFOs (flying saucers), seen in the daytime, with no flashing, colored lights are either authentic UFOs (non-hallucinatory) artifacts or a different kind of psychotic or psychic manifestation.

The phenomenon remains open to questions.

RR