The UFO Epiphany
Jung claimed that the common visions of UFO’s in the 1950s, typical throughout history at the end of epochs, heralded a new psychic paradigm—the so called Age of Aquarius. You heard that right: the song that plays after Steve Carrell loses his virginity in 40 Year Old Virgin is an expression of Carl Jung’s UFO apocalypse prophecy. Jung is following a long-form astrological calendar based off of axial tilt. As the earth spins, its axis is not fixed but rather turns in a giant wobble that takes 26,000 years to complete; divided into the twelve zodiac signs, each lasting 2100 years, we are now in the Age of Pisces, and will proceed, momentarily, into the Age of Aquarius—the New Age, (you may have heard of it) as opposed to the old one.
This UFO hot take amounts to a kind of secular-ish millenarianism that you find everywhere these days, from the Strange Attractor theory of history, to the end of the Kaliyuga era spoken of in divine mother sects (and not to mention the good ol Christian apocalypse championed by the highest levels of our government). In an era of continual crisis and accelerating paroxysm, with the collapse of meta-narratives and the volcanic rise of paranoid knowledge, it does seem like something is coming to an end, but what is it?
Were I to guess, and with UFO’s in mind, I’d say it is the crack-up of materialism itself, whether it’s the disenchantment of material wealth, or the downfall of hard science authority, the material épistème seems to be losing its edge. This has ripple effects into all zones of knowledge. The signal is lost in the noise (or it’s all signal). Now the UFO is just a drone flying over New Jersey, the internet is a sea of AI slop, and strange human behavior is due to whatever they put in the vaccines (egg whites). But seriously, let’s debunk the paranoid conspiracy of “them” being in control, with the more credible fantasy that no one is in control; it’s just self-interested grift all the way down. So you can see how if you did encounter an angel, in the form of a flying object violating the laws of physics, it’s very unworldliness may arrive as an epiphany; one that eludes categories, and does not fit neatly into the prevailing epistemic paradigm, where such things are not supposed to happen.
Carl Jung and the coming era aside, the idea of apocalypse-as-epiphany gets transmuted, isometrically, down into one of the little known uses of psychedelics: the psychedelic experience as apocalypse—a psychedelic eschatology—to totally obliterate everything you thought you ever knew. This kind of journey, not recommended for everyone, is not healing or world-making, but rather world destroying. If you take enough of it, your world is guaranteed to be destroyed, and you may even see an angel. What happens after that is anyone’s guess, but chances are it will be other-than your current life as it is.
