Apr 29, 2025 03:46 PM
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/american...nd-saucer/#
EXCERPTS: In Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, David J. Halperin, a distinguished historian of religion who has published studies of the prophet Ezekiel, Merkavah mysticism, and other Jewish visionary experiences, seeks to explain the long-smoldering American fascination with aliens through the lenses of religious studies and Jungian psychology. In doing so, he aims to build what he calls a bridge between “reported existence and postulated cause” for a series of famous UFO cases and motifs, including Roswell.
Although Halperin is not the first scholar of religious studies to tackle UFOs, the subject is more personal for him than most...
[...] In Intimate Alien, Halperin argues reasonably enough that UFOs emerge from the gap between “stimulus and perception.” Real physical phenomena—stars, planes, weather balloons, drones—trigger transcendent visions as they are filtered through a complex interplay of cultural archetypes and personal psychology. The witnesses really do see something, and the contents of the individual and collective unconscious are real too, but we are not visited by extraterrestrial spacecraft, and no earthlings were actually kidnapped or harmed in the making of these experiences.
In 1958, Carl Jung himself took something like this approach. In Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, Jung argued forcefully for the significance of UFOs to the modern psyche. Flying saucers were mandala-shaped myths, hovering projections of our cosmic anxieties (according to Jung, the circular mandala was a universal symbol of the self). This tack is at the core of Halperin’s psychosocial approach. “I don’t believe, nor do I debunk,” he writes, proposing a “third way” that treats UFO encounters with the same gravity one would accord other myths that emerge from the collective unconscious.
As one would expect, given his personal biography and academic method, Halperin approaches UFO narratives with great respect. And yet he ends up debunking every UFO encounter he writes about. “Did it really happen?” is the least interesting question about a UFO account for Halperin, but he invariably concludes that it didn’t.
In this Halperin differs from the famous French ufologist Jacques Vallée and others influenced by him, including Halperin’s more sensationalist colleague in religious studies Diana Pasulka, who have pointed to the many mystical experiences and premodern legends that are strikingly similar to alien encounters. Where Halperin sees this as evidence of a long-existent psychological phenomenon, these scholars tend to suggest that visitations from another realm are a perennial feature of human experience, whose origins only came to be represented (or recognized) as extraterrestrial in the latter half of the twentieth century... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: In Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, David J. Halperin, a distinguished historian of religion who has published studies of the prophet Ezekiel, Merkavah mysticism, and other Jewish visionary experiences, seeks to explain the long-smoldering American fascination with aliens through the lenses of religious studies and Jungian psychology. In doing so, he aims to build what he calls a bridge between “reported existence and postulated cause” for a series of famous UFO cases and motifs, including Roswell.
Although Halperin is not the first scholar of religious studies to tackle UFOs, the subject is more personal for him than most...
[...] In Intimate Alien, Halperin argues reasonably enough that UFOs emerge from the gap between “stimulus and perception.” Real physical phenomena—stars, planes, weather balloons, drones—trigger transcendent visions as they are filtered through a complex interplay of cultural archetypes and personal psychology. The witnesses really do see something, and the contents of the individual and collective unconscious are real too, but we are not visited by extraterrestrial spacecraft, and no earthlings were actually kidnapped or harmed in the making of these experiences.
In 1958, Carl Jung himself took something like this approach. In Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, Jung argued forcefully for the significance of UFOs to the modern psyche. Flying saucers were mandala-shaped myths, hovering projections of our cosmic anxieties (according to Jung, the circular mandala was a universal symbol of the self). This tack is at the core of Halperin’s psychosocial approach. “I don’t believe, nor do I debunk,” he writes, proposing a “third way” that treats UFO encounters with the same gravity one would accord other myths that emerge from the collective unconscious.
As one would expect, given his personal biography and academic method, Halperin approaches UFO narratives with great respect. And yet he ends up debunking every UFO encounter he writes about. “Did it really happen?” is the least interesting question about a UFO account for Halperin, but he invariably concludes that it didn’t.
In this Halperin differs from the famous French ufologist Jacques Vallée and others influenced by him, including Halperin’s more sensationalist colleague in religious studies Diana Pasulka, who have pointed to the many mystical experiences and premodern legends that are strikingly similar to alien encounters. Where Halperin sees this as evidence of a long-existent psychological phenomenon, these scholars tend to suggest that visitations from another realm are a perennial feature of human experience, whose origins only came to be represented (or recognized) as extraterrestrial in the latter half of the twentieth century... (MORE - missing details)
