The Outstater
War of the Worlds II
A LEARNED PROFESSOR of my acquaintance argues that we have become an “unserious” people. I not been sure how to test his theory — COVID, AOC and the Obama Library being indicative but not decisive. That was until the arrival of 31/ATLAS.
I am referring of course to an interstellar object, possibly a comet, possibly an alien craft, that our advanced astronomical equipment first noticed in July and will come near the sun later this month.
Let us dismiss out of hand the boring comet theory, advanced only by boring scientists boringly fixed on the boring available evidence, which is boringly difficult to collect and interpret. This, remember, is a test of whether we are a serious people.
More interesting are the “observations” by purportedly credentialed social-media sources that 31/ATLAS appears to have headlights and be hollow (as if it were a spaceship). Also, it is shedding metals in a peculiar mixture and it has an odd tail, that and its course has varied slightly as if it were under some sort of navigation.
That last has drawn quibbles from the boring quarter that perhaps the estimate of its weight was wrong in the first place thereby charting a wrong predicted course. After all, it is 130 million miles away traveling at 42 miles per second.
Searching my book shelf for enlightenment, I find a work on the general subject by the famed psychologist Carl Jung, “A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.” Jung dismisses such sightings not as evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft but as a contemporary myth emerging from the collective unconscious — a shared reservoir of archetypal images and symbols in the human psyche. I defer to my assistant, Grok, who apparently has read the book, which I never got around to doing:
“Jung suggested that these objects represented mandala-like symbols of wholeness and unity, often appearing during times of global anxiety (such as a tariff war) as projections of inner psychological turmoil or compensatory visions for a fragmented world. Jung emphasized synchronicity, where external events like UFO sightings mirror internal psychic states, without definitively claiming whether the phenomena were physical or illusory — an archetypal phenomena rather than literal visitations.”
Got that?
In recent days, however, the “analysis” on social media has jumped over the question of whether or not it is a comet, let alone an archetypal phenomena. The focus now is directly on why an alien society sent it.
One theory is that an engineered craft would be a cheaper message than radio signals, which, we are told, take huge amounts of energy to generate over interstellar distances. A space ship, once it is launched at the necessary speed and a course plotted, is relatively free — or so they say.
That settled, we are now trying to understand what the interstellar visitors want with us. Those theories vary wildly, of course, but seem to coalesce around the need to impeach Donald Trump. — tcl
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