Belgian UFO wave – 1989-1992 – Part 5

This post is the last of this series on the Belgian UFO wave of 1989-1992. As announced before, the Model of Pragmatic Information (MPI) developed by the parapsychologist Walter von Lucadou will be used again to assess if the general unfolding of the UFO wave occurred in ways similar to a RSPK (Recurrent Spontaneous PsychoKinesis) event (aka poltergeist).

As discussed several times on this blog, a number of UFO researchers, like John Keel, who went beyond the simplistic “nuts-and-bolts” approach to the phenomenon, compared it to some sort of large scale poltergeist, or grand scale haunting of the skies. The case for studying the UFO phenomenon as a paranormal event is substantive, and has also been presented extensively on this blog.

The Model of Pragmatic Information

The MPI is based on the modern physics concept of non-locality, where at the quantum level particles seem to share common information without any observable mechanism to explain how such sharing occur. This is particularly notable through a photon splitter experiment. Out of this general notion of information that can be shared non-locally (i.e. without direct and observable cause and effect), Walter von Lucadou (who is also a physicist) proposed that the central notion of “psi” in parapsychology can be explained by non-locality (von Lucadou, 1995).

This applies not only to the acquisition of information through non-normal means (usually referred to as Extra-Sensorial Perception, or ESP), but also to “mind-over-matter” (usually referred to as Psycho-Kinesis, or PK). For modern physicists, matter is more than mass and energy, it is also information (such as speed, direction, relative position, internal organization, etc.). Seen from this angle, psi is therefore information in the mind of someone that is becoming shared non-locally about knowledge (ESP), or about matter (PK). Yet, this non-local sharing of information can only occur if there is enough indeterminacy in the system at hand for a psi event to occur (von Lucadou & Zahradnik, 2004).

This would explain why most psi events seem to be linked to deep unconscious processes where there is a lot of symbolic flux and possibilities, if compared to the conscious mind. More a system is consciously observe, the less indeterminacy it has, and therefore the less likelihood that a psi effect would occur. This would explain two well-known issues in parapsychology. First, spontaneous psi events tend to be much more ostensible (or big) than the one planned and strictly observed through parapsychology lab testing. The second is the well-known declining effect seen is parapsychology lab testing, where the first few attempts tend to vary more from statistical probabilities (as the experimenter does not know what to expect), but the more testing there is the more it becomes closer to statistical averages because what is expected is know and actively looked for (von Lucadou, Römer, & Walach, 2007).

 

It is in this context that von Lucadou developed a psycho-social model of RSPK, as other people around the event are also influencing it as they observe it. The model to study RSPKs has four phases:

(a)    Surprise. Typically, there is an individual who is living significant emotional turmoil (oftentimes a teenager, but not always), but because of some social dynamics cannot express it. The use psi, by banging walls, moving objects, etc., becomes an alternate way to communicate about their psychological turmoil. That person is called the “focus person” because the psi events are focussed around him or her. Yet, the people surrounding the focus person are also playing a role by their surprise, and by starting to think that the explanation is to be attributed to some sort of malevolent non-human entity (demon, evil spirit, ghost, etc.), rather than to the focus person. In doing so, these people called the “environment” maintain indeterminacy in the system by avoiding to observe the real system at play.

(b)   Displacement. After sometime, the events become known and other people join in. They are typically believers in the existence of non-human entities, such as psychics, self-declared parapsychologists, etc. These newcomers are called the “naive observers,” because of their belief that non-human entities are responsible for the phenomenon. The naïve observers redirect the search for the problem source away from the actual source (the focus person and his/her distress) hence there is a displacement of attention. This allows the indeterminacy to be maintained, so that the psi phenomenon can continue but usually in a different manner, as the message from the focus person seeks to be understood by the environment.

(c)    Decline. After more time elapsing, other people join in, but with a much more critical view of the events. They start to assess more carefully what is going on, asking more thorough questions about what is going on, introduce even measuring instruments, and at times can make a connection between the events (which usually have a symbolic meaning) and the unhappiness of the focus person. These people are called the “critical observers”. Given that they pay a much closer look to the systems at hand, they reduce the indeterminacy and by doing so the intensity of the phenomenon drops sharply.

(d)   Suppression. At the end, society through the authorities (police, social services, municipal works, etc.) get involved because of the disturbances. They usually declare the phenomenon a hoax though the media, often by accusing the focus person and his/her environment of being responsible for all this. By having the authorities focussing intensely on the phenomenon, no indeterminacy is left, and there is no more psi effect occurring.

The Belgian UFO wave as a large scale RSPK

Surprise

Like for most RSPKs studied by von Lucadou, the Belgian UFO wave started gently leading to surprising event. As discussed in the previous post, late September 1989 would probably be a meaningful start date for the wave. The SOBEPS, when the wave became public, were at first a bit worried that the September public announcement of a UFO landing in the USSR would create a climate of ridicule affecting them. What is clear, however, is that the symbolism of triangular objects in the sky of Belgium was slowly rising from September. There is little doubt that the first night of massive observations (29 November 1989) came as a surprise to everyone. The SOPBEPS only realized that something was going after receiving many calls from witnesses. Those calls, however, came a few days after the events, and were sustained in part by the televised interview of the two Eupen police officers, and especially the wide press coverage of 1 December 1989. In other words, many witnesses realized that what they saw was a much bigger “event” than they thought, and it was at that point that they decided to report their experience to the SOBEPS. Hence, the surprise period could be defined as being from late September to about 1 December 1989.

The surprise was not only a matter of witnessing a large event, but also according to SOBEPS, most witnesses of the night of 29 November did not know what to make of all this. Some speculated that it could be extra-terrestrial visitations, but without pursuing this interpretation further. All those witnesses, from the point of view of the MPI, constituted the environment of the event, the ones who were surprised; the ones who started to think about the extra-terrestrial explanation (i.e. non-human entities being responsible for the disturbance). Like in other UFO wave cases analyzed through the lenses of the MPI, who is the focus person remains unclear at this time.

Displacement

Starting on 2 December 1989, the SOBEPS becomes actively involved in the events. From the point of view of the MPI, they collectively constitute the naïve observers because, in spite of their rigor and sober approach, they remained committed to prove the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis (ETH), i.e. ultimately assigning the origin of the phenomenon to non-human entities. New observations are recorded but at a much lower rate from none to half a dozen per day, until the next large observation day of 11 December 1989 with 24 observations. There are intense discussions in the press, especially during the period of 12 to 18 December 1989 (Bougard & Clerebaut, 1991: 118-122). On 18 December, the SOBEPS gives a first press conference, well attended by journalist (Bougard & Clerebaut, 1991: 123). It is really at this point that the notion of a wave of triangular UFOs is shaped in social representations.

The SOBEPS gave a description of the more common elements emerging from the witnesses report. However, as discussed before the triangular shape was common to just about half of the observations. By doing so, the SOBEPS, consciously or not, gave the impression that there were stronger commonalities between the observations that there actually were. In turn, this creates a notion that a “nuts-and-bolts” ET spaceship visitation could be more plausible. The notion of ET visitations is present also in the public realm but the press remains for the most part relatively objective. That press conference was in many ways a form of displacement as the ET visitation hypothesis becomes more prevalent.

What is particularly interesting with the Belgian UFO wave was that another social dynamics emerged during the displacement phase. Also on 2 December 1989, the Authorities (both the police and the military) started their own investigation, away from the public spotlight (Bougard & Clerebaut, 1991: 73). On 6 December, the police approached the SOBEPS in order to collaborate with them on the UFO sightings (Bougard & Clerebaut, 1991: 79). If one reads carefully the SOBEPS book, however, it became apparent that the main objective of the police was to “get ride” of all the UFO-related work, as they were submerged with calls and reports. This attitude is certainly comprehensible, as the police have limited resources, and dealing with crime remains its institutional priority, not UFOs. On 9 December 1989, the press reports that the Belgian military investigates the UFO wave (Bougard & Clerebaut, 1991: 78). On 15 December, the military gives an interview in the press confirming what was reported about their investigation a week before (Bougard & Clerebaut, 1991: 122). On the 18 December SOBEPS press conference, the Belgian military has representatives in support of the SOBEPS and 21 December, the Minister of Defense confirms that they cannot explain what is going on (Bougard & Clerebaut, 1991: 125-126). Then in January 1990, the SOBEPS is invited to visit the Glons radar station (Bougard & Clerebaut, 1991: 143); by the end of February 1990 an official letter of collaboration the SOBEPS is drafted by the military (Bougard & Clerebaut, 1991: 144-145).

This set the context for the further involvement of both the military and the SOBEPS in the aftermath of the March 30-31 UFO. This led, ultimately to the public release in June 1990 of the report about the chase. By then, however, the military would continue to collaborate with the SOBEPS, but at a much lower level. In many instances, as a personal commitment of DeBrouwer who became a two-star Air Force general. The investigation of the March UFO chase led the Belgian military to come to the same conclusion that all other armed forces who investigated UFO before: there are things in the sky that we cannot explain, but they do not seem to be a threat and we do not have the resources or the mandate to investigate them further (De Brouwer, 1991: 490-491). Interestingly, by June the decline in observations becomes much more marked until the one-day spike of March 1991, and the one of July 1992.

The active involvement of the authorities, including providing public support to the SOBEPS by being present at their 18 December press conference, constitutes a change in pattern if compared with “traditional” RSPKs. In the MPI, the authorities usually try to quell any rumors of unexplainable phenomena. But in the case of the Belgian UFO wave, the response was the opposite. This is very much comparable to what was found in the MPI analysis of the Zeitoun Marian apparitions. When the authorities are supporting the naïve observers, then phenomenon does not decline sharply.

Decline (?)

The decline phase could be assessed as starting in June 1990, where there are few observations on average until the spike of March 1991. However, there were “critical observers” involved early on. The first sceptic attack in the Belgian press occurred on 8 December 1989 (Bougard & Clerebaut, 1991: 77), and the next day (Bougard & Clerebaut, 1991: 113).  On 11 December 1989, the hypothesis that a F-117 could be the culprit is discussed in the press, and other sceptical hypotheses about AWACS are presented over the following days (Bougard & Clerebaut, 1991: 114-115).

As a curious coincidence, on 19 December the US invaded Panama, and the F-117 is for the first time publically acknowledged as being part of a real military operation. This will provide a lot of fuel for the F-117 hypothesis, as the plane’s shape and stealth ability became much more present in social representations. The critical observers will use extensively the F-117 in their counter-analysis of the Belgian UFO wave. In January 1990, the French popular science magazine Science & Vie, started what the SOBEPS called a “crusade” against the Belgian UFO wave reports (Bougard & Clerebaut, 1991: 140). In May 1990, there are more sceptic attacks in the press (Bougard & Clerebaut, 1991: 219).

In spite of the somewhat active presence of critical observers, it appears clear that they could not match the legitimacy that the military authorities gave to the SOBEPS by collaborating with them. Hence, the decline phase occurred but not so much because of the action of the critical observers, as much as the loss of interest by the authorities in June.

As noted by von Lucadou in his research on RSPKs, during the Decline phase the phenomenon may try a last ditch effort to get the message across. From that point of view, the two last spikes of observations in March 1991 and possibly July 1992 could constitute such last effort.

Suppression (not)

The wave was “officially” considered finished after the March 1991 spike of observations in the first SOBEPS book (published in 1991). The spike of July 1992 was added as an important event in the second book (published in 1994). Where does it end is a matter of interpretation, but definitely the wave ended. There was no cover-up per say, in the sense that the authorities did not intervene to quell the rumors about UFOs. Once more, a parallel can be established with the Zeitoun case study, where with the support of the authorities, an anomaly tends to die out of a loss of interest rather than by closing the indeterminacy by using the prestige of the authorities to focus on a particular explanation that excludes the possibility of a paranormal event.

As in the case of the 1952 UFO wave over Washington D.C., the focus person that would provide the psi force for the events is not obvious. Yet, by using a similar approach to the study of the 1952 wave, it is possible to propose a group of focus persons that could be at the centre of the wave. In this case, there was a social tension that appeared quite evidently, although it is not often noted by ufologists. The “intense” period of the wave, from November 1989 to late spring of 1990, is also exactly the period of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communist dictatorships in most of the Warsaw Pact countries, as noted in a previous post. It was the effective end of the Cold War. Yet, again and again, a more localized look provides some more interesting insights.

Most of the UFO sightings are geographically centered on NATO installations: the Glons radar station (near Liège) that was then one of the nerve centres of the AWACS surveillance system (and visited by the SOBEPS); Mons where the NATO military headquarters are located (SHAPE); the zone between Mons and Brussels (where the NATO political headquarter is situated) was the location of the March 1990 UFO chase.   As well, many of the triangular objects observed in the sky of Belgium are very much reminiscent of the well-known NATO tri-dimensional dark metal sculpture of its logo at the entrance of the Brussels headquarters.  If NATO can be credited for its bloodless victory at the end of the Cold War, it also lost its raison d’être, which is struggling to re-establish ever since. 

 

References

Bougard, Michel and Lucien Clerebaut. (1991). "Chronique d'une vague". In SOBEPS, Vague d'OVNI sur la Belgique: Un dossier exceptionnel. Bruxelles: SOBEPS, pp. 51-296.

Walter von Lucadou. “The Model of Pragmatic Information (MPI)”. European Journal of Parapsychology 11 (1995): 58-75.

Walter von Lucadou, H. Römer, and H. Walach, “Synchronistic phenomena as entanglement correlations in generalized quantum theory”. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14(4) (2007): 50-74.

Walter von Lucadou and F. Zahradnik. “Predictions of the Model of Pragmatic Information about RSPK”. Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association Convention 2004, available online at http://archived.parapsych.org/papers/09.pdf.

 

 

 

 

Reading Notes – Holographic Paradigm

This post is renewing with presenting my reading notes about books or articles that might be useful to the advancement of the parasociological hypothesis. These reading notes are, once again, about an older book but still part of many contemporary debates: the holographic “revolution”. The book is an edited collection that re-groups the key texts (mostly from the philosophy journal ReVision) from the early discussions about the holographic universe.

In the 1970s, two scientists developed separately the idea that the universe might be a hologram. The first one is the neurologist Karl Pribram, who discovered that the brain is organized in a non-linear way when it comes to storing information. His research, in many ways, fuelled the idea of virtual database that is now a current way of storing information in computer programming. What it means is that brain cells are not only carrying information, but also contain information about how information storing is actually structured. To take a simple example, if one finds a datum he/she may also find elements or traces of its “address”, and thus it gives him/her an idea about the size and how many dimension the entire information has. For instance, “x4x, xxx, 9x9” does not tell us where the datum fits exactly, but it can tell us that it is a three-dimension construct and each dimension has up to one thousand possible spots. Holograms that we can see in movie theatres are constructed that way. Not only there are elements of images, but each element has a “tag” so that the full image can be re-constructed to become meaningful. Hence, the “tag” itself carries also precious information about information structuring.

The second scientist is David Bohm, a theoretical physicist, who explained the paradoxes of non-locality in quantum physics by showing mathematically the possibility of a 5th dimension. This additional dimension is more than just one more layer to the matrix of reality. Like in the case of the brain, objects and other realities of our ordinary 4 dimensional world also carry information about how information is structured in the higher degree matrix with 5 dimensions. In both cases, by sampling enough brain cells or objects, one can gather some useful information about how these fit in the greater scheme of thing. This is the holographic paradigm: any reality is contingent to a higher degree of information organization. This notion, without surprise, has also attracted the attention of those mystically minded, as it implies that there is a higher realm of reality “managing” reality at a lower level. The full notice is:

Wilber, Ken (Ed.). (1985). The Holographic Paradigm: Exploring the leading edge of science. Boston: Shambala.

The Holographic Paradigm and social sciences

The book provides input from various people (including one social scientist) but without making any references to the knowledge produced by the social sciences. Once more we have a “leading edge science” book where psychology, physics and philosophy are used to support the argument for a new look at the world, but without using sociology and its sister sciences. It is very regrettable because the holographic paradigm has been part of the social sciences since day one, although described under a different vocabulary. People are not just people. They belong to higher orders of information structuring by their gender, ethnic origin, language, social class, level of education, etc. This is so obvious to any social scientist that one is wondering where the big fuss is.

For instance, qualitative social scientists, and for that matter any good management consultant, know that you do not need to interview everyone in a community or an organization to get a good understanding of what is going on. Only a few well selected people usually will do. Why? Because people also carry information about how life is structured in a community or organization (who is the boss, who holds the power, the key histories or narratives one needs to know to be part of the group, what’s in and what’s out, etc, etc , etc). Human communities are holographic. Sociologists know quite well that the social realm is a higher degree of structuring information that can be accessed by sampling enough individual about it. The Holographic Paradigm is actually old news for the social scientists. Maybe that’s why they were ignored, as they would remove the “edge” to the news. To be fair, however, there was a “fad” in the 1980s and 1990s in the social sciences about studying the social realm through the vocabulary of the holographic paradigm. For what I can assess, this has not gain much traction, probably because, in the end, it is old wine in a new bottle.

The Holographic Paradigm and parapsychology

In the book, there is, unfortunately, only one and very short text from Stanley Krippner dealing directly with the impact of the Holographic Paradigm on parapsychology. It would have been good to get a more extensive reaction from Krippner and the parapsychological community. In any event, the notion that the universe is holographic is certainly a useful one for parapsychologists. This notion is very much in tune with the Jungian concept of “Absolute Knowledge” and the Laszlo’s notion of Akashic field, speculating that knowledge exists in other forms, free of time and physical constraints, which can be access through ESP. Similarly, the introduction of a notion of higher order of information structuring can help to explain various time paradoxes found in parapsychological experiments, especially for retro-psychokinesis. But as parapsychology depends very much on positivist recognition from the institutional scientific community, the holographic paradigm remains very difficult to verify empirically. If it is possible to make a sound argument about the holographic nature of the brain, quantum physics, and the social realm that does not mean that the rest of the universe is holographic. That is where parapsychology stands on this issue for the time being; an interesting but hard to test idea.

The Holographic Paradigm and parasociology

Parasociology, as an attempt to fuse parapsychology and sociology together, is in mixed position with regards to the Holographic Paradigm. Societies can be easily described as hologram, as discussed above, but to really use the holographic approach to its fullest extent, one has to stipulate some sort of meta-social hologram. According to the theory, this meta-social hologram would be one degree (or dimension) higher in terms of abstraction, away from the empirically observable social realm, that describes another level of information structuring. To me, this sounds very much as a re-description of the notion of social unconscious. The main difference, however, would be that by borrowing from parapsychology the social unconscious would become information also freed (or at least partially freed) from time and geographical constraints. This is an interesting idea, but yet again this not that new. The parasociological notion of social unconscious is partly built on Jung’s concept of collective unconscious, which is explicitly described by Jung as timeless and unconcerned with geography. All in all, it is still old wine in a new bottle. Furthermore, the possibility of empirical verification is not improved by using the holographic approach. Ultimately, the holographic paradigm adds weight to the possibility that such an approach may explain many aspects of reality because it is found in different realms (biology, physics, social sciences), but it is still quite far from becoming a theory of everything.

Concluding remarks

Brain cells, and photons going through a splitter, are relatively simple carriers of information, and using a holographic approach to reconstruct how they fit in a larger scheme is certainly an effective approach. But what about complex datum, like a single human being, who has so many possible “tags” to so many possible larger psycho-social constructs? This is simply not very effective, and ultimately (strangely) it is a very reductionist approach – something the Holographic Paradigm claims to steer away from.

From a parasociological perspective, UFO events are like any other human events: they are composite events. The symbolic, psychical, emotional, social and physical forces at play to create such events are difficult to distinguish from each other. Furthermore, it may not be useful to distinguish them in a detailed way because we may loose from sight the “tag” that links qualitatively different realities together (e.g., the social unconscious and balls of light). Holographic thinking, in the end, is very much an expression of mathematical thinking where everything can be reduced to numbers (qualitative unification). Unfortunately, reality cannot be unified this way as qualitatively different realities cannot be subsumed into each other. All those who tried such qualitative unification have failed, and the Holographic Paradigm is very likely to face the same end if it does not steer away from mathematical thinking.

Eric Ouellet © 2010

UFO Waves and Collective Unconscious

As discussed in several previous posts, one of the keys to link parapsychology to sociology is the concept of collective unconscious. It is a key because the genesis of psi effects is in the unconscious mind, according to parapsychologists. The question is therefore: is there an equivalent at the collective level? Two of the founders of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, developed a number of ideas about what they call the collective unconscious. Their respective views are very much in line with how then regard the individual unconscious.

Freud and the dark side of the unconscious

For Freud, the unconscious is the place where all the frustrations are stored as an individual learns to live within the rules of his/her society. The unconscious is not a nice place. At the collective level, if one follows Freud, the collective unconscious is where bad stuff emerges. The rise of Nazi Germany was oftentimes interpreted as this irrational projection of collective frustrations towards others. I my opinion Freud holds the key on the scary part of paranormal events. More on this later. For a quick overview of Freud’s ideas on the issue of collective unconscious please refer to this exhibit website.

Jung, non-locality, and synchronicity

Carl Jung, on the other hand, had a broader understanding of the unconscious. For him, everything that was not in the domain of the conscious was in the unconscious, good and bad. Jung, however, was also very interested in studying paranormal phenomena, and he was the first to see a link between the unconscious mind and the psi effects (although he did not used the word psi). For him, the existence of paranormal events had to be explained by something greater than simply individual’s unconscious mind. It is in this context that he developed the idea of the collective unconscious where individual minds are connected to one another. This connection was done through fundamental archetypes (symbolized thought-forms) that are supposedly hard wired in the human brain. This idea of universally shared archetypes (and he did extensive research to find them in Eastern and Western esoterica) was also coupled with research in quantum physics and the idea of non-locality (in quantum physics it is accepted that related simultaneous events can occur without having a cause-and-effect to explain them), through his work with physicist Wolfgang Pauli. In this context, Jung saw the possibility to have meaning full conjunctions of events that have no direct cause-and-effect, which he called synchronicity. For him, synchronicity could provide an explanation for telepathy, but also for clairvoyance and premonition. For Jung, the unconscious mind is to be understood within the realm of emotions, which do not know time limitations (i.e., a feeling is something that remains in spite of time – people forget, or redefine experiences, but feelings do not change when they are brought back to consciousness – anyone who had a traumatic experience can confirm that). The possibility that also feelings transcend materiality was proposed by Jung to explain psychokinetic effects as well. Following the same logic, for Jung hauntings were therefore synchronistic events where subjective elements are mixed with objective effects out of the unconscious. In other words, when there are too many synchronistic events, which source can be either natural or psi-related (like the wind opening a door, while there is an electrical short-circuits), they constitute a larger meaningful event without having internal direct cause-and-effect relationships. For Jung, it is what we call haunting, but it does not imply the involvement of non-human entities.

The best source on this is: Main, Roderick. (1997). Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Jung and UFOs

Given Jung’s interest in the paranormal, it is no surprise that he also wrote about UFOs. This can be found in his famous book: Flying Saucers: A modern myth of things seen in the sky. Jung remained faithful to his approach and saw in UFOs an archetypical symbol that was made more modern through a “rumour” alleging that UFOs might be spaceships. He did not exclude the possibility that UFOs could be a collective hallucination that had a degree of objectivity through some sort psi process (very much in the same way he understood hauntings). However, he was more at pain to explain the physical dimension of the phenomena. Jung wrote in Flying Saucers (1978 edition) that an

“[...] alternative hypothesis [to anti-gravity] that Ufos are something psychic that is endow with certain physical properties seems less probable, for where should such a thing come from? If weightlessness is a hard proposition to swallow, then the notion of a materialized psychism opens a bottomless void under our feet. Parapsychology is, of course, acquainted with the fact of materialization. But this phenomenon depends on the presence of one or more mediums who exude a weighable substance, and it occur only in their immediate vicinity. The psyche can move the body, but only inside the living organism. That something psychic, possessing material qualities and with a high charge of energy, could appear by itself high in the air at a great distance from any human mediums—this surpasses our comprehension.” (p. 110).

I think Jung was on the right track for the most part, but given the way he construed the collective unconscious he could not think beyond the level ofthe individual (clearly seen here by focussing on individual mediums). Jung was a psychologist and it is no surprise that he focussed on the individual. His construction of the collective is reductionist as it brings back the entire concept to the individual. What is needed here is to rethink the collective unconscious as a collective level or sociological concept, without being reductionist.

A sociological understanding of the collective unconscious

Jung was criticized also for reducing to an almost biological level the content of archetypes. The notion that somehow specific content is hard wired in the human brain remains to be proven, and as far as we understand human behaviour, biological reductionism does not hold water very well. I think that it is possible to develop an understanding of somewhat predictable patterns for the unconscious (I would not use scientific law here as it is too strong), while what is populating the unconscious could be kept open and dynamic.

One of the first steps to conceptualize the collective unconscious in a sociological way is to go back to the roots of the concept. For this, I use an interesting article, where one can find the sources of what I discuss below. Greenwood, Susan F. (1990). “Émile Durkheim and C.G. Jung: Structuring a transpersonal sociology of religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 29(4): 482-495.

Interestingly, Jung’s collective unconscious and the founder of sociology’s (Durkheim) concept of collective consciousness have actually the same origin. For instance, Durkheim used the concept of collective representations to investigate the content of collective consciousness. He borrowed this concept from the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939). Jung acknowledged that his concept of archetype and Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of collective representation are the same thing. This means that conceptually collective representations are pathways for both the collective consciousness and unconscious. This was implicitly noted by many sociologists, as Durkheim’s concept of collective consciousness, when used in its French original version “conscience collective” creates an ambiguity that he found useful. The word “conscience” in French can mean either consciousness or conscience in English. As Durkheim voluntarily kept the idea of conscience as part of his concept, this leaves the door open to the possibility of an unconscious collective mind as well.

From Greenwood’s article (p. 488), here is some explanation about both concepts:



While for Jung, (p. 489),



Another quote shows how much Durkheim and Jung have in common. But I would to highlight that a sociological unconscious, as Durkheim noted, is a “partially autonomous reality” that is feeds through a “multitude of minds.”



Hence, if we give a Durkheimian turn to Jung’s concept, then collective representations and symbols that open the doors to the collective unconscious may have a long duration across generations, but they do not have to be hard wired through an archetypical approach. The second point is that Durkheim provides a truly sociological perspective in considering the collective unconscious as autonomous from the individuals, and thus avoids reductionism.

All this does not prove anything about the paranormal and UFO waves, but it shows that at least an autonomous and social dynamic collective unconscious is thinkable and has some basis in sociological theory.

To go back to Jung and UFOs, then it is thinkable that a large group act unknowingly as a medium, and could produce psi effect like materialization at a certain distance. The distance might remain somewhat of a limiting factor, and this may explain the existence of UFO waves, which are by definition localized. Furthermore, the psi-effect might have a degree of autonomy from individuals as it is the outcome of a multitude of minds unconsciously feeling at the same time. UFO waves are also known to move away from the original epicentre (it moved from West to East during the Airship wave of 1896-97, it moved also West to East during the 1954 French wave).

Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet