Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, March 2026
Keel and Jung on strange subjective experiences
by: Brent Raynes
“Essentially, the contactee experience is identical to religious apparition phenomenon and probably is caused by the same factors,” John Keel warned me back in 1971. “It might be best to familiarize yourself with the medical and psychiatric studies of the religious cases before you tackle the UFO variation.”
Though that seemed like a tall order at the time, it was Keel and I took it quite seriously. Still it was a challenge.
Keel and the noted UFO author and scientist Jacques Vallee both saw the October 13, 1917 religious event at the small town of Fatima, Portugal, witnessed by an estimated 70,000 people, as a major UFO type event. In his book Dimensions, Vallee wrote: “Not only was a flying disk or globe consistently involved, but its motion, its falling leaf trajectory, its light effects, the thunderclaps, the buzzing sounds, the strange fragrance, the fall of ‘angel hair’ that dissolves upon reaching the ground, the heat wave associated with the close approach of the disk – all of these are frequent parameters of UFO sightings everywhere. And so are the paralysis, the amnesia, the conversions, and the healings.”
An intense religious revival broke out in Wales back during the winter of 1904-05 where many observed mysterious lights in the sky. A 38-year-old Welsh woman named Mary Jones, described as an ordinary, happily married peasant woman who was deeply religious, became a central figure in this revival. Reporters from the Liverpool Echo, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, and London Daily News travelled to these gathering, that were garnering a great deal of attention, to see what was going on. These reporters even wrote about seeing unexplained light phenomena that they couldn't explain. Beriah G. Evans, who was writing for the London Daily News (February 9, 1905) described how while being in the company of Mrs. Jones, he observed pretty phenomenal things. He wrote: “'We cannot start yet,' she told me on the occasion of my visit, 'the lights have not yet come. I never go without them.' A few minutes later, on going out to see, she returned saying: 'Come. It is time to go. The lights have come!'”
It was about 6:15 p.m., Tuesday, January 31, 1905. There was Evans, Mrs. Jones, and three others. All of them witnessed a brilliant star-like object to the south emitting “diamond-like sparklets.” “It took a sudden leap of considerable distance towards the mountains, then back again to its first position, and again rushing towards us,” Evans reported. Next it disappeared from sight and then reappeared much closer to their position, and then it went out. “Following the disappearance of the star came immediately two brilliant and distinct flash-lights, illuminating the stone dykes and heather on the mountain side, the first flash two miles away, the second immediately following a mile higher up the valley, and in the direction we should have to travel. 'Come,' said Mrs. Jones, recognizing the omens, 'We shall have a glorious meeting!' And we did.”
Though up to that point, all five had seen the same things, the next two anomalous displays were only witnessed by Mrs. Jones and Mr. Evans, even though all five of them were still walking in the road together and all five should have seen what followed next. Evans wrote: “Three bars of clear white light crossing the road in front from right to left, climbing up the stone wall to the left, showing every interstice and bit of moss as clearly as though a searchlight had been turned upon it. There was no house, or human being other than our party, near, and no conceivable human agency could have produced this effect.'”
Next a “blood-red light” appeared about a foot off the ground, in the middle of the roadway. Interestingly, Evans noted that it “did not illumine surrounding objects.” Evans was surprised when he later learned that the others had not seen what he and Mrs. Jones had seen, and wrote that those others were equally astounded. “Mrs. Jones, without any suggestion from me, described there and then the appearances precisely as they had presented themselves to me.”
Evans came to learn of another similar instance involving a London journalist who witnessed, along with a woman standing near him, a white light that swept along the ground, near a chapel, stopping on a wall. Half a dozen other witnesses present said they didn't see it.
The late Swiss psychologist Dr. Carl G. Jung struggled to understand such anomalies. He wrote: “...I was once at a spiritualistic séance where four of the five people present saw an object like a moon floating above the abdomen of the medium. They showed me, the fifth person present, exactly where it was, and it was absolutely incomprehensible to them that I could see nothing of the sort.”
Jung knew of a few other cases like this and could not determine for certain what the explanation for such occurrences was. Jung proposed that UFOs, psychic, and religious apparitional and visionary phenomena might be something he called “psychoid.” Psychoid represented something that existed on the borders of what we perceive as mental and physical; a third order of reality with overlapping characteristics. On this point, quantum physicists and parapsychologists should find themselves treading upon fairly common ground. Jung's concept of synchronicity (meaningful coincidence) operated on the premise that ideas (mental) and events (physical), though demonstrating no causally direct connection as perceived in terms of standard classic physics, could no doubt be linked as psychoid-related phenomena. Obviously Jung perceived the UFO phenomenon as something of deep potential importance, having devoted the last years of his life to writing a book exploring this very complex and controversial subject, including parapsychology in on the conversation, intimately entangled with his pioneering theories of archetypes and a collective unconscious, and engaging in extensive dialogue over these issues with one of the early pioneers and founders of quantum physics, Wolfgang Pauli.
Jung had another quite puzzling experience that is documented in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe, and translated from German by Richard and Clara Winston (Vintage Books, April 1989). It begins with Jung’s own words, “Even on the occasion of my first visit to Ravenna (Italy) in 1913, the tomb of Galla Placidia seemed to me significant and unusually fascinating. The second time, twenty years later, I had the same feeling. Once more I fell into a strange mood in the tomb of Galla Placidia; once more I was deeply stirred. I was there with an acquaintance, and we went directly from the tomb into the Baptistery of the Orthodox. Here, what struck me first was the mild blue light that filled the room; yet I did not wonder about this at all. I did not try to account for its source, and so the wonder of this light without any visible source did not trouble me. I was somewhat amazed because in place of the windows I remember having seen on my first visit, there were now four great mosaic frescoes of incredible beauty which, it seemed, I had entirely forgotten. I was vexed to find my memory so unreliable.”
He noted that one was of the Baptism in the Jordan, the second one the passage of the Children of Israel through the Red Sea, the third one may have been of the cleansing of Naaman from leprosy in the Jordan (he admitted the memory of it soon faded from his mind), and the fourth one, which he described as the most impressive one of all, was of Christ holding out his hand to Peter, who was sinking into the waters. He recalled how he and his companion stopped in front of this one for at least twenty minutes. He remembered how they had discussed “the original ritual of baptism, especially the curious archaic conception of it as an initiation connected with real peril of death. Such initiations were often connected with the peril of death and so served to express the archetypal idea of death and rebirth. Baptism had originally been a real submersion which at least suggested the danger of drowning.”
As he was recalling this incident years later, he still retained a very detailed memory of that fourth mosaic. The blue of the waters, individual chips of the mosaic, inscribed scrolls proceeding from the mouths of both Peter and Christ, which he tried to read.
After leaving the baptistry he went straightway to Alinari to purchase photos of the mosaics. However, unable to locate any and because they were pressed for time, he decided that perhaps later he might buy such photos in Zurich. After returning home Jung asked an acquaintance of his who was soon to depart for Ravenna to obtain pictures of the mosaics for him. However, he would soon report back to Jung that he had found those mosaics in fact did not exist!
“The lady who had been there with me long refused to believe that what she had ‘seen with her own eyes’ had not existed,” Jung noted. “As we know, it is very difficult to determine whether, and to what extent, two persons simultaneously see the same thing. In this case, however, I was able to ascertain that at least the main features of what we both saw had been the same.”
Subjective Encounters?
Back in the 1970s, J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee, viewed by many in the UFO field as two of the most high-profile and respected scientists in ufology, sat down together (sometimes with others) and engaged in an open interactive discussion on the UFO phenomenon, documented in their book The Edge of Reality (1975). Together they thoughtfully commented on many different areas of this subject, including even various paranormal and occult aspects, doing their very best to cover everything relevant and under serious discussion in the field comprehensively. Regarding “ghosts” and apparitions, Hynek pointed out that in the “great, great, majority of UFO cases, if one person sees it, they all see it. It attests to a solid reality. In a room of five people, if three people said, 'We saw it,' and two people said, 'We looked and couldn't see it,' that would be damning. But that doesn't happen.”
Is that true?
In 1992, John Keel described in a Fortean lecture a UFO case back in the 1960s, where he and zoologist and author Ivan Sanderson had investigated a family in New Jersey who had reported seeing a huge “flying saucer” with windows, judged to have been a mile across in size, located between two mountains at perhaps 2,000 feet. The husband had been a really reliable witness, the president of a fairly large company. “They were not about to make up flying saucer stories to entertain Ivan Sanderson and John Keel,” he said. “Ivan put articles in the newspapers there in New Jersey asking if anybody else had seen anything unusual on that day.” But no one else reported it. “Why didn't 3,000 other people see the same thing?” Keel asked.
Increasingly, ufologists seem to be noticing more and more reports of miniature-type UFO, or small orbs. However, some reports even described tiny occupants just inches tall, and even stranger, if that's possible, some describe how they can change size, becoming human sized, and how humans can be shrunk down to fit into tiny saucers. Back in the late 1960s, I talked with a man and his elderly mother in Maine about strange pulsating balls of light, generally about the size of a “ten quart water pail” I was told, and how they had observed them on several occasions back in the 1930s. On one occasion, they observed from a distance one of these balls of light near the ground where a farmer was working crops with two horses and a two-row cultivator. “He worked down from above it on the hillside two rows at a time until he entered the row where it was,” the man told me. “He nor the team, showing no signs of anything abnormal, ran over it. As the horses walked over it, it grew small until about the size of a baseball. When the cultivator teeth went over it it rolled with the dirt and regained its former size behind the machine.”
