Sacred Skies: UFOs and the Religious Function of the Psyche

In this captivating episode, host Thomas Elsner sits down with Elliott Morgan—stand-up comedian, actor, and PhD student in depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute—to explore the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the UFO phenomenon. Drawing on Carl Jung's groundbreaking 1959 work Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, their conversation delves into what Morgan calls "the enchantment around UFOs" and its profound implications for modern consciousness.

As congressional hearings bring unprecedented credibility to reports of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), this discussion shifts focus from whether UFOs exist to examining what the phenomenon reveals about our collective psyche. Morgan argues that UFOs may represent a "newly dominant archetype" in the Western psyche—specifically, the trickster—bl ...