[mythistorian]

Thank you Shaahayda, thank you so much for your contribution and wonderful UFO story (I was secretly hoping of coaxing such testimonials from our mythophiles), it is a wonderful read and indeed brings to mind precisely the passage you cited on the logic of becoming in the negativity of their disappearance.

This act of disappearance is an archetypal quality of a certain underworld experience. In the context of Greek mythology, it is the realm of Hades and Persephone, a realm of invisibility. In the context of Maya mythology, it is the quality of Xibalba, the turning away from life, the power of making invisible, of invisibilizing all reality.

Xibalba is a movement into the underworld, a turning away from visibility and phenomenality, in the mysterious pulsations of death-drive. In a strange way, stepping into a realm beyond the pleasure principle, we are entering a terrain beyond phenomenology as well, beyond the shinning essence, into a kind of anti-phenomenology which is caught in the play between the visible and the invisible. This process of de-phenomenalization is what Jungian analyst Wolfgang Giegerich might have called the process of “absolute negative interiorization.” Rather than a transcendental phenomenology of the essence, the disappearing UFO points to a descendental process of the non-essence. In its miraculous self-vanishing, UFO follows the unconscious movement of myth as a movement into the mythic unconscious. In my own work with Maya mythology I have described this movement as a descendental journey of Xibalban depth-interiorization.

The other part of my statement about the UFO being a symbol of total transformation and self-creation, is a little easier to explain. For it is generally acknowledged that if UFOs turned out to be real, if they really came forth to establish their presence, it would “change everything.” Our religious dogmas and scientific convictions would all have to be revised; our place in the universe would undergo a new kind of Copernican revolution in the discovery that “we are not alone,” etc…