Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  Kenny Dugan, senior pilot, exchanges some cozy banter with Barb, his chief stewardess. Suddenly the plane’s controls go haywire and a formation of screaming silver fried-egg-shapes whips past. “Kenny!” gasps Barb. “Did you see?” Kenny gets on the radio, but no one believes him! Twenty minutes later, the the fried-eggs’ energy rays have reduced our nation’s capital to rubble. “Why, Kenny, why?” sobs Barb as they circle over the ruined city. Kenny sighs and sets his jaw. “I don’t know, Barb. It’s just—did you ever dig up an anthill?”

  Ron and Conrad, college roomies, are walking back to their dorm. Their path is wide and sloping, lined with stately elms. It is after dusk; there’s a big moon on the horizon. Ron becomes agitated, “Conrad, what is that thing up there?” Conrad: “That’s the moon, pinhead.” Ron: “I’ve never seen the moon like that. It’s too low, it’s too orange.” Conrad : “That’s because—” He breaks into a lurid scream as the great yellow “moon” darts forward and gobbles them up.

  Wimp ‘n’ Dweeb hunch over a large computer screen, faces lit by the flickering light. “What do you mean, you can’t exit this program?” asks Wimp. “How about if I cut the power?” Wimp touches the switch and a surge of electricity turns his head into a smoking black skull. The machine’s speaker crackles. “Listen well, flesher, to what you must do.” Dweeb’s glasses glint as he nods his fealty.

  Keiko the pearldiver has been noticing something strange about the dolphins. They watch her in a new way, sly and knowing. Perhaps it has something to do with the nuclear sub accident?

  Joe the janitor has been noticing something strange about the monkeys in the lab. They watch him in a new way, as if silently amused. Perhaps it has something to do with the experimental brain-drugs?

  Geraldine the housewife has been noticing something strange about her husband Marc. He watches her in a new way, cold and alien. Perhaps it has something to do with what happened at the séance?

  Snort! It’s conscious! Double snort! It’s other!

  The U.S. immigration service calls people from other countries “aliens,” but they’re not really. They’re conscious all right, but they’re not very other. Even if someone’s idea of a fancy dinner might be a ringshaped pan full of gray water floating fishballs, tentacles, and congelation of striped goo, he or she is still, after all, primarily interested primarily in food, shelter, sex, and the possibility of raising children—just like me.

  It’s actually pretty hard to have a human be a convincing alien. The Consciousness part is easy, but the Otherness is hard. I guess the feeblest attempts at aliens I’ve ever seen are the sponge-heads on the 1989 TV show “Alien Nation.” These are whitebread folks without an ounce of Otherness in them. The main character’s a TV cop, for God’s sake. The Cosby family is more Other than these guys.

  If you start out with a nonhuman “person,” the Otherness comes almost automatically. Here it’s the Consciousness part that’s hard to pull off. The most extreme failure at suggesting Other Consciousness I’ve ever seen was in a particularly psychotronic “Outer Limits” episode where a man and his wife are terrorized by…tumbleweeds. The tumbleweeds do nothing whatsoever. They simply lie there in a pile on the black and white videotape. Certainly they are Other, but no matter how hard the music thrums, it’s hard to believe they have Consciousness.

  Since they are so often imagined as complex machines, UFOs are much easier to invest with Consciousness. And since they are presumably Not Of This Earth, they are Other as well—unless, as so often happens, we fill them with silver-overalled sex-freaks. What’s the story on UFOs anyway? They’re tailor-made for science-fiction exploitation of course, but how come so many people really and literally believe in them?

  The most interesting book on UFOs I know of is the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung’s Flying Saucers : A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press), first published in German in 1958. The book resulted from a short newspaper article about UFOs which Jung wrote in 1954. In this article, Jung says:

  “So far only on thing is certain: it is not just a rumor, something is seen. What is seen may in individual cases be a subjective vision (or hallucination), or, in the case of several observers seeing it simultaneously, a collective one. A psychic phenomenon of this kind would, like a rumor, have a compensatory significance, since it would be a spontaneous answer of the unconscious to the present conscious situation, i.e., to fears created by an apparently insoluble political situation which might at any moment lead to a universal catastrophe. At such times men’s eyes turn to heaven for help, and marvelous signs appear from on high, of a threatening or reassuring nature. (The “round” symbols are particularly suggestive, appearing nowadays in many spontaneous fantasies directly associated with the threatening world situation.)”

  Over the next four years this cautious statement was repeatedly picked up by the international press, who often presented Jung as an “eminent saucer believer.” When Jung issued denials of this, he was ignored. Struck by the readiness of the press to print pro-UFO stories rather than anti-UFO stories, Jung began to muse on the question of why it should be more desirable for saucers to exist than not, and his musings led to Flying Saucers : A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.

  The book begins with the observation that we are in the midst of a great historical “changes in the constellation of psychic dominants, of the archetypes, or “gods” as they used to be called, which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche.” The objective fact is that we do now have a modern myth of flying saucers. But are the saucers physically real? Jung distinguishes three possibilities: 1) yes, there are real saucers which are the basis of our myths about them, 2) no, saucers are a just a shared mental archetype which produces our UFO visions, or 3) although saucer sightings are caused by a shared mental archetype, physical saucers do happen to physically exist as well, and this double causation is an example of cosmic synchronicity.

  “Archetypes” are not really so complicated as one might think. As I point out in my book Mind Tools (Houghton Mifflin, 1987) archetypes are meant to be minimally simple concepts. Small numbers like one, two, three and four are archetypes. Two, for instance, is the archetype of Otherness, of Sexuality, and of Opposition—nothing more intricate than the basic idea of two things. In Jung’s opinion, the saucer or the UFO is an instance of the Circle archetype. The Circle suggests Unity, Wholeness, and—due to its mandala shape—Balance. The Circle also suggests the Egg and the idea of Health. In the cold war 1950s, it was common for political cartoonists to show the earth as cracked in two by superpower tensions. Some of these tensions remain, but today’s ecological fears for the Earth are better summed up in the image of a dirty, scarred planet wrapped in plastic and covered with toxic sores. An unblemished celestial disk is a perfect antidote to either of these unhappy visions.

  When he speaks of “synchronicity,” Jung expresses his belief that he universe is endowed with overall holistic patterns that do not arise from chains of cause and effect. The old religious view of a world made all at once by a wise Creator is a synchronistic world-view: in God’s created world, all the parts are set into harmonious motion together, and wonderful coincidences are everywhere. The mechanistic steam-age physics of the nineteenth century led away from this concept, but today’s quantum mechanical worldview fairly convincingly validates synchronicity, at least on a small scale. It is indeed in the nature of our world that coincidences do happen more often than mere probability would suggest.

  For a science-fiction writer, Jung’s third option is of course the sexiest. In this viewpoint, saucers are real, but our sightings of them have no causal connection with them. Our UFO sightings are produced, as one would rationally expect, by our need for Unity and Health. Yet the divine synchronicity of the Cosmos has brought it about that real saucer-like objects are actually present. Even though the UFO believers are fantasizing, there really is something there! Ian Watson’s fascina
ting UFO novel, Miracle Visitors, has a field day with these notions.

  Flying Saucers : A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies is a prolonged meditation on the psychic significance of people’s seeing UFOs. Jung speaks of these sightings as an instance of a “visionary rumor,” comparable to the collective vision of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal. In our fear and psychic need, we hope for help from superior beings, yet many of us have lost any faith in the traditional angels and Gods. As members of a technological civilization, it is natural for us to imagine help from above coming in the form of superior beings in wonderful machines.

  But why must UFOs come from the sky? Jung makes this interesting point:

  “Today, as never before, men pay an extraordinary amount of attention to the skies, for technological reasons. This is especially true of the airman, whose field of vision is occupied on the one hand by the complicated control apparatus before him, and on the other by the empty vastness of cosmic space. His consciousness is concentrated one-sidedly on details requiring the most careful observation, while at his back, so to speak, his unconscious strives to fill the illimitable emptiness of space. Such a situation provides the ideal conditions for spontaneous psychic phenomena…”

  The ultimate experience with a Conscious Other is, of course, the religious experience. Yet many of us are so ill-prepared to deal with the religious concepts of unity and wholeness, that we interpret a desire for religion in terms of sex and power. It is no wonder that so many UFO encounters have a sexual component, or that UFOs are so often thought of as being invaders intent on conquest. In Jung’s opinion, UFOs are first and foremost projections of our desires for a healthy world and a union with God. But as “civilized” people under the thrall of factory technology, we imagine these UFO images to be machines filled with people interested in power and sex.

  Jung ends his book by advocating the third of the possibilities mentioned above:

  “It seems to me—speaking with all due reserve—that there is a third possibility: that UFOs are real material phenomena of an unknown nature, presumably coming from outer space, which perhaps have long been visible to mankind, but otherwise have no recognizable connection with earth or its inhabitants. In recent times, however, and just at the moment when the eyes of mankind are turned towards the heavens, partly on account of their fantasies about possible space-ships, and partly in a figurative sense because their earthly existence is threatened, unconscious contents have projected themselves on these inexplicable heavenly phenomena and given them a significance they in no way deserve. Since they seem to have appeared more frequently after the second World War than before, it may be that they are synchronistic phenomena or “meaningful coincidences.” The psychic situation of mankind and the UFO phenomenon as a physical reality bear no recognizable causal relationship to one another, but they seem to coincide in a meaningful manner. The meaningful connection is the product on the one hand of projection and on the other of round and cylindrical forms which embody the projected meaning and have always symbolized the union of opposites.”

  In other words, there really may be things in the sky, but they are neither flying machines from other planets, nor giant apparitions of the Virgin Mary, nor winged horses bearing bearded gods. A belief in saucer aliens is qualitatively no different from belief in ghosts and goblins. Perhaps it does indeed make sense to suppose that such spirits crowd around us—and I’ll return to this question below—but we need to understand that scientifically plausible extra-terrestrial beings (ETs) have nothing to do with UFOs.

  So what about ETs? When one looks at the size of the universe and the diversity of the life-forms here on Earth, it seems overwhelmingly likely that living creatures must exist elsewhere. Life is, after all, nothing more than a self-sustaining information process which feeds off the existence of an energy gradient. With stars scattered about space as they are, energy gradients are everywhere, as are the specks of matter which can carry and process information.

  The world is a huge, chaotic computation, and what we call living beings are small vortex-like attractors in the great flow. The matter of my body changes constantly; all that persists is the pattern that is me. I am a chaotic attractor, drawing particles into the orbits which make up my body. The same is true of animals and plants, of course, and one might regard things like tornadoes, sunspots, or active computer programs as equally vivacious. A life is an individualized process which lasts for a while. Such a life is intelligent to the extent that it reacts to stimuli in repeatable (but perhaps not exactly repeatable) ways.

  In such a broad and vague view of life, one can readily regard things like the sun or the galaxy as alive in their own right; and intelligent as well. But if the sun is intelligent, why doesn’t talk to us? Well, we’re intelligent, but we don’t talk to ants. The problem is that we, ants, and the sun have no common interests. We have nothing to talk about. Like you’re on a double date with an ant, the sun, and maybe a tree—what do you talk about? The ant waves its feelers, the tree opens blossoms, the sun sends out a solar prominence, and you…you say, “Where do you want to eat?”

  Of course the extraterrestrials we really want to find are creatures something like ourselves. Lizards, sure, or squids, or bugs or rats, maybe—let’s not be simian chauvinists—but at least our sought-after ETs should be about our size and live about the same speed we do. Science fiction is filled with planets full of these guys, building their cities, fighting their wars, mating, eating, and so on. No one has written more entertainingly about these kinds of aliens than Robert Sheckley.

  The kicker in Sheckley’s alien stories is always that the aliens are some kind of inversion or caricature of human beings—and this is true of all the other science-fiction aliens. Once this fact sinks in, we realize that most of our speculations about ETs are incredibly culture-bound. Radio-communication by modulated electromagnetic signals of a certain wavelength is something that we take as so natural that we assume that ETs would also use radio. Our best hope for detecting ETs is to scan the radio-crackle of the sky. But is this really so reasonable? Radio has been around for less than a century here, on a planet that is billions of years old. Why would ETs everywhere use radio forever? Why not gravity waves or quarkon flux?

  People labor under the chronic illusion that the present moment is the apex and culmination of all past history. Every now and then the world changes, and we realize that nothing is eternal—not even the Berlin Wall. No matter how hard we push our fantasizing about ETs, we are doomed only to hold up funhouse mirrors of ourselves. The chances of ETs flying here in a metal rocketship are about as great as them arriving on a horse or on a wooden boat.

  Why am I being such a wet blanket? I guess its because I think talk of UFOs and ETs distracts the mind from the true wonder of the actual world. I don’t want the gee-whiz, what-if world, I want the world that I see every morning. I want it to matter, and I want it to be interesting, just as it is, here and now. I don’t want to have to believe in a lot of fairy tales to see the wonder. If aliens are worth thinking about, I want to see them here and now.

  Consider another computer analogy. With any given machine there’s a certain upper limit to how rapidly you can get it to create and display new graphic images. If I think of the world around me as a kind of computation, its also true that there’s a certain upper limit to how rapidly information can be fed to me—at least in a format which I can understand. My brain is, if you will, a certain kind of information display device, capable of so-and-so many colors and so-and-so many windows at such-and-such a bandwidth. Being in a pressure suit talking to green squid on a methane moon wouldn’t increase my upper bounds. The squids wouldn’t really be much stranger than the people in the parking lot at a Grateful Dead concert anyway. All the weirdness and alienness I’m capable of perceiving is already somewhere here on this planet.

  My basic feeling about alien contact is that every minute of every day is a veritable fugue of alien contact. I think other people ar
e aliens, I think animals are aliens, I think objects are aliens, I think the laws of nature are aliens, and I even think that thoughts are aliens. I’ve always been a very alienated guy. I had an unhappy childhood. I was having such a bad time growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, that my parents sent me off to a boarding school in Germany for a year. I didn’t know German. In the spring it rained a lot and all the puddles were full of yellow dust. I thought it was fallout, I thought there had been a nuclear war and nobody had told me. It wouldn’t have surprised me if a saucer had come to pick me up. Youthful dreams of glory.

  Although science-fiction provokes wonder, it can also cancel wonder. If you spend all your time staring at the sky thinking, “If only, if only,” always waiting for the big ships to land, well if you do that then you don’t notice the field you’re standing in, the odd insects in the grass, the peculiar shapes of the grass seeds, the funny shape—if you ever stop to really look at it—the funny shape of your hand, and especially the funny shape of your foot, like if you straighten the foot out and look at the way the heel bulges out…odd, very odd.

  I dig UFO novels more, actually, than space opera. Because space opera is really so quite essentially bogus because like maybe there really ISN’T any hyperdrive, and we really WILL always be pretty much confined to this planet and environs. Of course sooner or later we can send a generation starship, or send out our DNA in spores, but it may very well be really true that no individual human is ever going to be able to travel out to the stars and come back and tell about it.