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156 tend to be highly localized. Although some “hard-core” UFO reports stand up better than many a court case, Hall acknowledged that some UFO buffs load their reports with interpretation. However, some scientists caught up in the UFO controversy defend their positions with more emotion than logic. Faced with detailed reports by reliable witnesses, they loudly and confidently assert interpretations that conflict strongly with available testimony and show a startling degree of disrespect for the reason and common sense of intelligent people. Hall concluded that reports as persistent and patterned as hard-core UFO sightings must be systematically motivated in some way. Either there must be a distinctive physical phenomenon that witnesses have observed, or there must be a powerful and poorly understood motivation. He found it more plausible to believe that there is a physical stimulus than to believe that multiple witnesses misperceive in such a way as to make them firmly believe they saw something that jars their own beliefs and subjects them to ridicule from their associates. To Hall, the very strength of our resistance to UFO evidence suggested that there clearly was a phenomenon of surpassing significance. That phe- nomenon was going to force some of us to make fundamental changes in our knowledge, a good definition of scientific importance. The arguments are about who has to change. A Jungian Analysis Eminent Swiss psychologist Carl Jung published a book in 1959 entitled Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. He was in no doubt regarding their objective reality. “Either psychic projections throw back a radar echo,” he wrote, “or else the appearance of real objects affords an opportunity for mythological projections.” Jung sug- gested that UFOs might be real physical phenomena of an unknown nature. Addressing people’s need to believe in flying saucers, Jung inter- preted the UFO phenomenon in the context of the Cold War. In a dark time for humanity, a miraculous tale grew up of an attempted interven- tion by extraterrestrial “heavenly” powers—and this at the very time when humans were seriously considering the possibility of space travel and of visiting other planets. The world situation was calculated as never before to arouse expectations of a redeeming, supernatural event. Jung believed that UFOs had become a living myth. “Just at the moment when the eyes of mankind are turned towards the heavens, partly on account of their fantasies about possible spaceships, and part- ly... because their earthly existence feels threatened, unconscious contents have projected themselves on these inexplicable heavenly phe- nomena and given them a significance they in no way deserve.””” The UFO Controversy