137 - Arthur I. Miller [122]
Taking up Pauli’s quip on the violation of symmetry—that “God is a weak left-hander, after all,” Jung declared that “the statements from the unconscious (represented by UFO legends, dreams, and images) point to…a statistical predominance of the left—i.e., to a prevalence of the unconscious, expressed through ‘God’s eyes,’ ‘creatures of a higher intelligence,’ intentions of deliverance or redemption on the part of ‘higher worlds’ and the like.”
Jung was convinced that at this moment in history the unconscious was in a stronger position in relation to the conscious—a dangerous situation. The way to resolve this imbalance was through the redeeming Third—an archetype of some sort or other, a latent symbol. The UFO legend was perhaps this latent symbol. It was lurking somewhere in the psyche where it was trying to elevate the collective unconscious to a higher level. This would ultimately resolve the conflict of the unconscious and the conscious by paving the way for a dialogue between them, finally permitting the Self to emerge in the process Jung called individuation. The Third provides asymmetry and tips the balance toward the conscious. Putting it in physics terms, Jung thought that certain key elementary particles in the weak interactions played the part of the Third, while the law of parity of an object and its reflection paralleled the opposition between conscious and unconscious and right-wing and left-wing in the political sense.
Jung saw “an almost comic parallel” in the tumult in physics caused by the weak interactions. It was precisely the same as when tiny psychological factors “shake the foundations of our world.” “Your anima, the Chinese woman,” he wrote to Pauli, “already had a scent of asymmetry.”
For Jung the UFO legend indicated that the Self was ultimately Spiegler, “The Reflector,” representing both a mathematical point and the circle, universality, “God and mankind, eternal and transient, being and nonbeing, disappearance and rising again, etc.” “There is absolutely no doubt,” he concluded, “that it is the individuation symbolism that is at the psychological base of the UFO phenomenon.”
All the same, as far as Jung was concerned, UFOs were not merely symbols but very real, as evidenced by the many historical sightings recorded in the books, magazines, and newspapers piled high in his study.
After one of their lengthy late evening conversations on the subject of UFOs, Pauli had a sighting, though not of a UFO:
As I was walking up the hill from Zollikon station after leaving your house, I did not actually see any “flying saucers,” but I did see a particularly beautiful large meteor. It was moving relatively slowly (this can be explained by factors of perspective) from east to west and then finally exploded, producing an impressively fine firework display. I took it as a spiritual “omen” that our general attitude toward the spiritual problems of our age is in the sense of , in other words is more a “meaningful” one.
(In ancient Greek, is the window of opportunity in which something meaningful can be achieved.)
Pauli went so far as to consult with his scientific colleagues as to whether UFOs really existed. Among others, he corresponded with the eminent German electrical engineer, Max Knoll, who was also an adept of Jungian psychology. Knoll was willing to believe that UFOs resulted from the individuation process but he was adamant that they did not physically exist. He replied at length to queries from Pauli on the nature of radar systems and dismissed every known sighting of UFOs, whether on radar or with the naked eye: “Jung must be made to understand that the UFOs seen on radar screens are no more ‘real’ than those sighted directly,” he wrote tetchily. “[There] are no reliable sightings.”
Pauli forwarded Knoll’s letter to Jung. Jung’s personal secretary, Aniela Jaffé, responded on his behalf: “Professor Jung was much interested in Knoll’s letter. But that did not stop him from saying, in a tone of resignation: People think