Salvation from the Skies: Convergent Analyses of Flying Saucers in American Cinema and Post-Freudian Psychohistory

Abstract

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is commonly recognized as one of the twentieth century's most influential science fiction films. Carl Gustav Jung is commonly recognized as one of the twentieth century's most influential theorists of human consciousness. Despite representing very different cultural discourses, the film and the psychologist both articulate a remarkably similar interpretation of the cultural phenomenon of alleged UFO sightings in the post-war period throughout Europe and the United States. Both texts represent the appearance of UFOs as a response to human anxiety about the precarity of planetary existence in the post-war period. The UFOs, both film and psychologist postulate, hold the promise of salvation from the aggressive instincts that had recently led to World War II and that threatened to imminently spark World War Ill. More than simply allowing an opportunity to read The Day the Earth Stood Still from a Jungian perspective, the correspondence between these two texts suggests the extent to which one profile of flying saucer mythology is its identity as a symptom of existential planetary dread.