The Westernized world has a fascination with extra-terrestrials that has been going on and getting stronger ever day since the 1940's. As the old aeon wanes and belief in the old paternalistic gods dies, people still need something to believe in, something larger and more powerful than themselves. Like all gods humanity both fears and loves these new gods, the extra-terrestrials. Hollywood has always been the first place ideas from the collective unconscious manifest and the collective mind has recently been obsessed with it's otherworldy saviors.

Take for example the recent spate of alien films demonstrating the fearful aspect, Independance Day and Starship Troopers, the extra-terrestrials are invaders and enemies, fearsome and disgusting looking, which humanity manages to band together and defeat. This is by no means new, just a newer manifestation of the same theme which occured in older movies and books, like The Day the Earth Stood Still. Compare this to movies which represent the compassionate aliens who are here to solve all the worlds problems, such as Contact, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and of course E.T.

As always, man projects his gods in his own image, hence the extra-terrestrials look like us, except when they are in thier fearsome destroyer aspect, but they have bigger heads signifying greater intelligence. They think like and have the same emotions as us, but being gods they have more of it, either greed for conquest of new worlds instead of new countries, or human compassion and love for the whole human race teaching us how to put aside our squabbles and love each other. Also the Western mind is obsessed with technology and, so our alien superiors must have superior technology to our own, which we expect them to teach us when they land. And of course they are fascinated with humans, because humans are fascinated with themselves and expect every other race in the universe to be as well.

What was just a rash of 'flying saucer' sightings has now become a media/commercially fueled enterprise, feeding more energy into it and producing more sightings. Now television shows about extra-terrestrials get high ratings and every hack writer in the business has put out some trashy book rehashing the same psuedo-scientific facts about extra-terrestrial visits, and they still make money. You see those alien head stickers everywhere now, symbols of the new gods. And as more energy is fed into it, as the media makes it more believable and it becomes more socially accepted, the phenomena produced is greater and greater.

Now this belies a certain lack of critical thinking on the part of the mass of humanity, and it is our function as magicians to counter this tendency. Critical thinking is essential to the magician for avoiding the very real dangers of delusion and obsession that come with initiation into the mysteries. There are many malevolent forces within and without the magician that will try to lead him into madness.

But what about the actual sightings of spacecraft? And excluding the millions of reports by untrained observers of swamp gas, cellestial bodies, hoaxes, comets, lightning bugs, and conventional aircraft, that observers are sure are UFOs, there are a few fairly credible sightings. But this is where all that collective power goes, psychic pressure of millions of believers manifests in visible form. And it always follows public expectations to further feed the energy, in the 40's people expected to see flying saucers and they did, now they expect more advanced craft with different shapes and light configurations and so forth, and they are not dissappointed. This is why there is never any physical evidence and why the extra-terrestrials never land on the White House lawn to try to negotiate, because that isn't needed to power the belief. The sightings alone foster a greater buildup of psychic energy that continually produces more sightings to produce greater belief.

This is exactly the same phenomena that occurs in 3rd world countries dominated by the Catholic Church, which is where Mary and Jesus sightings occur almost exclusivly, because it is powered by belief and in these poverty stricken countries, the people need something to believe in. Which is not to say that these people are hallucinating, the psychic pressure a few million people can exert is tremendous, more than enough to produce a visible apparition.

Now this article totally ignores the true fringe fanatics who claim abduction. These are the same spotlight seekers who under the same hypnotic regression were able to 'recall' memories of previous lives as Richard the Lionhearted, or Satanic Ritual Abuse or other unproven child abuse. These are the hysterics that follow any large trend that gives them an opportunity to make outlandish claims and garner the attention they crave.

But now we come to the real question. Just where is all this psychic energy going? What is going to happen when this energy is channeled in ever growing amounts into these New Gods? It can go either way, paternal moralistic aliens, embodying the old aeon and representing a force humanity is comfortable with, telling us all to go back to the old morals. Or enlightened ambisexual aliens of the new aeon who are here to expand our minds and teach new social orders. As magicians it is in our hands to guide and shape this energy into constructive forms that will be beneficial to humanity, rather than letting it follow it's own whims. But either way it will certainly be interesting to see how far it goes before humanity grows up enough to quit needing external gods.

But how is critical thinking applied to such a situation as above? Think about it this way, a superpowerful, superadvanced race of beings on another planet has devised a spacecraft that can conquer the laws of time and space, and travel faster than the speed of light to get to this planet, and then all they do is fly around the sky making flashing lights and buzz redneck farmers in Idaho? Any alien race as smart as these are supposed to be is going to know better than that, if they wanted to contact or influence events on earth, there are better ways, such as radio broadcasts, or telepathic broadcasts, or even incarnation, which seems to work for all the other advanced species.

Or how about the ridiculous conception that the US government has managed to shoot down this superadvanced spacecraft with our stone age projectile weapons, one step above throwing rocks, and they are hiding the remains from the public, which would cost billions of dollars in bribes alone? When you step back and think about these things they seem beyond ridiculous, ideas on the same level as those about a God being in contact with the pope for the purpose of regulating our finances and sex lives.

But the true believers will counter with, 'What about all the millions of sightings?', well what about all the millions of sightings of the Virgin Mary? No one has sent out a task force to investigate them yet. I'm sure many of you have seen videotapes of lights in the sky darting around, changing colors and acting bizzare, but people have been seeing those same things for thousands of years, but they have been calling them elves, ghosts, leprechauns and fairies. These kinds of bizzare paranormal events have been going on for as long as recorded time and there is no reason whatsoever to believe these are extra-terrestrial spacecraft.