In the same way that reading Jung can provide insight into The Day the Earth Stood Still, it is also the case that watching the movie can illuminate aspects of Jung’s UFO analysis. Specifically, as a dramatic text, the film foregrounds affective elements of the UFO fantasy – the fear, desire, and awe – that animate the Jungian symbology.
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What explains the phenomenon of UFO sightings? Although reports of mysterious objects in the sky date back to antiquity, in the decades following World War II, flying saucers, or UFOs, escalated into a popular culture craze, some might even say a low-level mass hysteria, becoming associated with narratives of extraterrestrial visitation and even abduction. To this day, thousands of UFO sightings continue to be reported every year in the USA, and speculation continues in the mainstream press regarding the possibility of their extraterrestrial origins.
In a 1958 book, Flying Saucer: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, the famous psychologist Carl G. Jung articulates the position that whether or not flying saucers are real, the very fact that so many people believe in them is a phenomenon of critical importance as a symptom of contemporary mass psychology. Jung went on to speculate that the global precarity of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation on a planetary scale, along with other planet-level emergencies such as overpopulation, caused the global civilization as a whole to yearn for a symbol of reconciliation capable of saving the world from a fate that seemed to have neither any earthly solution nor any earthly means of escape.
In 1951, 20th Century-Fox released one of the most influential science fiction films of all time, The Day the Earth Stood Still, which depicts a scenario that seems in many ways to anticipate Jung’s analysis of the flying saucer phenomenon. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, the alien Klaatu lands his flying saucer on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and presents humans with a magical solution to the problem of nuclear war. Klaatu announces an ultimatum whereby the human race will essentially have no choice but to abandon the suspicious, aggressive, and violent behaviors and attitudes that had recently led to World War II, that currently (in the world of the movie and in the geopolitical reality of the early 1950s) prevented world leaders from being able to communicate reasonably, and which threatened imminently to spark World War III. In the overall arc of the movie, as well as in a number of specific details, The Day the Earth Stood Still represents UFOs as fulfilling the same fantasy function that Jung would go on to describe.
It is unlikely that Jung ever saw The Day the Earth Stood Still, but both the film and the psychologist express parallel interpretations of the cultural phenomenon of UFO sightings, regarding them as fantastic wish-fulfillment apparitions reflecting a mass desire on the part of a frightened global citizenry to be delivered from the responsibility of managing their own planetary crises. Observing the specific areas of correspondence between Jung’s text and the 1951 film suggests cultural and phenomenological perspectives on the meaning of UFO sightings, extraterrestrial life, and planetary politics in an age of telluric-scale crises.
Correspondence #1: Collective human dread
Jung describes UFO rumors as being “based essentially on an omnipresent emotional foundation, in this case a psychological situation common to all mankind. The basis of this kind of rumor is an emotional tension having its cause in a situation of collective stress or danger” (p. 13).
The film repeatedly displays the anxiety of the crowds of people, whose faces reveal their dread and whose bodies recoil in fear of the unknown. Moreover, the movie insinuates that this fear is not exactly caused by the arrival of the flying saucer, but that the arrival of the flying saucer triggers a collective fear that is already rampant. The fear itself informs the dysfunction that prevents the world leaders from being able to peaceably assemble to hear Klaatu’s speech. The central part of the film consists of Klaatu’s attempt (and ultimate failure) to understand human beings’ “strange unreasoning attitudes.”
Crowds of humans gawk in their habitual state of xenophobic fear.
Correspondence #2: The new religion
Jung: “In the threatening situation in the world today, when people are beginning to see that everything is at stake, the projection-creating fantasy soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets” (p. 14).
The film casts Klaatu the alien as a figure similar to Jesus Christ, who, in the gospel narratives, comes to Earth in good will, makes human beings feel ashamed of their sinful behavior, is killed and resurrected, and ascends to heaven with a promise to return to pass his final judgment. In equating Klaatu with a spiritual figure offering redemption from original sin, the film echoes Jung’s thesis that flying saucers are a modern instantiation of longings that have traditionally been expressed in religious terms.
Klaatu and Christ both address the humans before ascending to heaven. Bottom public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Correspondence #3: Atomic anxiety
Jung addresses conjectures that “the recent atomic explosions on earth . . . had aroused the attention of these very much more advanced dwellers on Mars or Venus” (p. 15).
The reason for Klaatu’s visit in the film is that the interplanetary community is aware that Earth has developed both nuclear weapons and space rockets, and their policy is to prevent any species from developing the capacity to harm their neighboring planets. In this way, both the film and Jung suggest a direct causality between the development of nuclear weapons and the arrival of phantasmic space beings whose role is to defuse the planetary threat posed by nuclear war.
Correspondence #4: Original sin
Jung addresses the speculation that “these visitors … are not at all certain of being well received on earth” (p. 15).
The film verifies Jung’s aliens’ suspicions by dramatizing how Klaatu’s flying saucer, immediately on landing, is surrounded by tanks and artillery, and how Klaatu is shot immediately as he comes out of his craft and then again, fatally, as part of a systemic “search and destroy” manhunt. Both the rumors Jung describes and the portrait of human behavior depicted in the film serve as coded confessions on the part of mass consciousness regarding the original sin of human aggressivity.
Correspondence #5: Technological angels
Jung: “These space-guests are sometimes idealized figures along the lines of technological angels who are concerned for our welfare” (p. 16).
“Technological angel” is an apt term to describe Klaatu, who descends from heaven with the angel wings of his interstellar spacecraft, communicates through equations in celestial mechanics, dresses in glittery raiment, pities the follies of the human race, brings news of heavenly events beyond the ken of his earthly audience, and offers human beings a path to salvation from both their own sin and from the eternal damnation threatened by the robot Gort, the archangels’ wrathful sword.
Klaatu as a “technological angel”
Correspondence #6: Projection
Jung considers the coincidence that the “living myth” of flying saucers emerges “at the very time when human fantasy is seriously considering the possibility of space travel and of visiting or even invading other planets. We on our side want to fly to the Moon or Mars, and on their side the inhabitants of other planets in our system, and even of the fixed stars, want to fly to us” (p. 17).
In the same way that Jung explains the impression that UFOs are visiting us as a kind of mirror image of human beings’ own aspiration to fly to other planets, Klaatu explains that human’s innovation of space travel is one of the reasons why he is coming to Earth. As a planetizing technology, space flight suggests the possibility of seeing earth from an “alien” perspective. The credit sequence of the film shows Klaatu’s approach to earth from outer space, as if Earth itself were the alien planet, suggesting the potential of an “alien” perspective to hold a mirror to humanity and show us ourselves as we appear from an external point of view.
Correspondence #7: Mandalas
Jung believed that the round shape of flying saucers indicated they were variations on the mandala, the “apotropaic circle,” the “prehistoric sun-wheel,” or “the magic circle,” signifying “a modern symbol of order, which organizes and embraces the psychic totality” (p. 20).
Klaatu’s flying saucer is, of course, round, and circles of varying sizes also figure prominently in its interior. The symbol of roundness is also reflected in the film’s opening sequence, which shows Klaatu’s approach to the Earth itself, the roundness of which expresses a sense of totality that transcends the divisiveness and conflict that exist on the planet’s surface.
Mandala shapes in the outline and interior of Klaatu’s flying saucer.
Conclusions
The correspondence between these two texts suggests an array of interpretive possibilities, listed here in order from more limited and direct to more speculative and far-reaching.
- Popular films can be analyzed productively alongside works of psychosocial analysis for insights about sociocultural reality.
One could watch The Day the Earth Stood Still and come away with the same impression about the symbolic meaning of UFOs that one might get from reading Jung’s book. This fact suggests compelling evidence for the value of imaginative fiction as a tool of cultural analysis.
- The Day the Earth Stood Still can be interpreted profitably from a Jungian perspective.
The parallelisms between The Day the Earth Stood Still and Jung’s conception of the human condition provide grounds for a more sustained Jungian analysis of the film, which could examine the archetypal representations in the film such as the Child (Bobby), the Wise Old Man (Professor Bernhardt), the Shadow (Gort), and the Anima/Animus (Helen/Tom), tracing how these different aspects of the collective unconscious participate in our psychological response to the “alien.”
- The Day the Earth Stood Still can be used to illustrate critical points in Jung’s analysis of UFO sightings.
In the same way that reading Jung can provide insight into The Day the Earth Stood Still, it is also the case that watching the movie can illuminate aspects of Jung’s UFO analysis. Specifically, as a dramatic text, the film foregrounds affective elements of the UFO fantasy – the fear, desire, and awe – that animate the Jungian symbology.
- Other films about UFOs may also be interpreted as reflections of, variations on, and/or departures from the “saviors from the skies” model articulated by these two texts.
While films like 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and E.T. align with the “Saviors from the Skies” model of extraterrestrial visitation, another genre of alien films epitomized by War of the Worlds, Alien, and Independence Day stage a counter-fantasy in which UFOs are avatars of global destruction rather than figures of salvation. Indeed, the psychoanalytic defense mechanism of “splitting” may be brought to bear on this phenomenon of imagining extraterrestrial life in these dichotomous terms.
- Both texts triangulate specific aspects of mass-consciousness that prevailed in Europe and North America as post-war populations struggled to emotionally process the implications of emergent technologies and their planetary implications.
While the theories of Jung may be reasonably disputed, and while The Day the Earth Stood Still’s representation of UFO-borne global salvation can be dismissed as fictional entertainment, the coincidence of these two texts supports the credibility of the Jungian/Day the Earth Stood Still-ian interpretation of the UFO phenomenon. That two different texts operating within the parameters of such divergent disciplines – popular cinema on one hand and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory on the other – came to the same conclusion may provide grounds for enhanced credence regarding the “Saviors from the Skies” hypothesis of UFO sightings.
- We live in an ongoing age of planetary crisis that is relatively new in human experience, and film, literature, and cultural theory provide avenues for assimilating and coping with this new stage of human reality.
Margaret, Tom’s secretary in The Day the Earth Stood Still, laments that, in an age of global threat, she wants to run somewhere, but she doesn’t know where to go. Jung describes a common sentiment that “humanity would like to escape from its prison” (p. 17), the planet earth, to avoid looming planetary dread. Whether the threat comes from nuclear war, a global pandemic, or climate change, stories, dreams, rumors, and fantasies not only provide imaginative avenues of escape, but they also can help to creatively visualize new ways of thinking about our planetary condition.
- The frequency of UFO sightings can be analyzed as an index of global anxiety.
If the spike in UFO sightings in the decade following World War II can credibly be interpreted as an imaginative response to the threat of looming nuclear war, what explains the steady rise in global UFO sighting reports that began trending up in the mid-1990s and peaked in 2013 (and which remains high, at more than 5,000 per year in 2022)? A logical explanation may be the rise in anxiety about climate change during this period, suggesting that UFO sightings data can be interpreted as a barometer of planetary dread.
The fundamental experiences that constitute human reality – their perception of otherness, the negotiation of humanity and of planetarity, the cognizance of futurity and possibility – tend to be some of the most difficult subjects to conceptualize. Human reality takes place in time, within the context of a situation, and within the phenomenological landscape of individual participant-observers, and, for this reason, imaginative forms of analysis – a category that encompasses both filmic media and speculative theoretics – can map out connections, trends, themes, and possibilities that are opaque to more literal or objective forms of analysis. Whether or not one believes in UFOs or accepts the “Saviors from the Skies” hypothesis, texts like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Jung’s Flying Saucers perform the cultural work of allowing us to explore the frontiers of what we believe, what we know, and who we are.
Reference
Jung, C. G. (1958 [1978]). Flying saucers: A modern myth of things seen in the skies. Trans. F. C. Hull. Princeton.
