The UFO Symptom
The psychoanalyst must treat the UFO as real. But what does real mean? I’ve never seen a UFO—what’s wrong with me?—but I know many people who have; I believe them. There can be no denial of the phenomena: there are too many sightings. The UFO rises out of the desert like a giant manta ray, shimmering over the sage and the sand; it heralds a new history: we are not alone. Strange lights, impossible speed and trajectory; the UFO outmaneuvers U.S. Navy fighter jets. The government, concerned, begins an investigation and generates a top secret report: they are real and they are here—no physical evidence is presented. The NYT breaks the story; no one cares. The UFO is in decline. While humans have no doubt seen weird things flying around since time immemorial, the UFO hysteria begins only after the bomb. Once we are threatened by total annihilation at our own hand does the obsession with extraterrestrials become viral; alien bodies and alien technology consume certain minds to the point of paranoid conspiracy and breakdown; some lucky few are even abducted. But if the UFO is a symptom, then these entities are not extraterrestrial, but rather superterrestrial: of the earth. But what is the symptom? Sheer incredulity to the point of denial. In strict psychoanalytic terms, what is foreclosed in the symbolic returns in the real. In other words: UFOs—among other cryptids, such as demons, fairies, angels, werewolves, and sasquatch—are a projection released from our own psyche; in that sense they are very real. What are we denying that would produce such entities? The extrapsychic shape of the unconscious is denied. Our own uncanny predicament is denied by all means. We are denying that we are the alien; that the planet remains alien to anything we can think about it.
