Madness and UFOs

My Abnormal Psychology class (at Wayne State University) often went to Wayne County General Hospital aka Eloise (Psychiatric Hospital) for “field trips.”

While there, it struck me that patients listed as schizophrenic or as paranoiacs had a calmness that only broke into spasmodic outrage or tempered violence when their reveries were provoked or interrupted by staff (to get them to move, take medicine, et cetera).

I thought these mentally troubled individuals were accessing something they thought was real but which we outsiders assumed were hallucinations or delusions.

This takes me back to my previous posting about persons who seem to have perceived UFOs and/or creatures from them or within them.

Such “witnesses” entered, as I conjectured, another reality [sic] when they were in that twilight stage between consciousness and daydreaming or somnambulism.

That is, certain persons (as those I listed) experienced an alternate reality for a brief moment, a reality that only became accessible when their mind and senses were removed from conscious behavior.

This is when someone enters a “zone” as they do rote chores or activity that are part of their daily or regular habits.

In the cases of mentally aberrant individuals, they are removed from the common reality when the (Platonic?) “real reality” intrudes upon them and they can’t cope with the insertions of voices and images from that real reality.

They break down, as it were – some more than others.

A scrutiny of outsider literature (poetry included) doesn’t produce anything akin to UFO sightings but outsider art brings forth many examples of odd objects, in the sky, or obtrusive lights to the disturb’s milieu or personal being.

Some examples (similar to those when I broached this topic several years ago):

What happens is that objective reality clashes with the real reality and all that a mentally afflicted person experiences is a mash-up the two realities; these are people who can’t contain a mental balance when this happens…..they disintegrate psychically.

Jung approached the matter by attributing his archetypal mandala symbol as the template for UFO sightings by some. (See Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of things Seen in the Skies).

Richard Maurice Bucke, in his magnum opus, Cosmic Consciousness, provided an overlay of some human incursions into the (Platonic?) real reality, but that reality remained non-described pretty much by those who has the epiphanic vision: Lao Tse, St, Paul, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, et al.

William James in his The Varieties of Religious Experiencealso approaches the matter of the other reality but he also doesn’t provide definitive description.

For those named by Bucke and those whom James referred to the “vision(s)” they had did not destroy them; they were of keen minds and stable mental ability, intellectuals one and all.

Those who have the twilight “zone” experience shrugged it off and dismissed their episodic vision as an odd, unexplainable occurrence.

Schizophrenics, severe manic-depressives (bi-polar persons), and paranoiacs lost their mental faculties when they were subject to the other reality, and they psychically disintegrated.

Why some are so afflicted and others, the common folk, are not or were not, is a matter for neuroscience and/or psychiatry.

But is seems to me that, on occasion, some persons step into the other reality, the “real reality” and don’t come back, at least not fully.

That UFOs fly into our objective reality and disappear abruptly tells me that our reality is sometimes in flux and some persons experience that moment when the two realities collide.

Mad persons don’t cope with the collision while others do.

I’m not saying that UFOs are a major delusion, as Jung seemed to suggest. Rather UFOs are an insertion, by accident or design (See Jose Caravaca’s “external agent” thesis) and are experienced in various ways by humans, some handling the experience sanely (Bucke’s listings), others dismissing the episodes as bizarre and odd but otherwise immune to psychic disturbance, and still others mentally devastated by their experience of the other reality from which UFOs come, even if UFOs are not the hallmark of their experience.

RR