In my first artwork, completed in 1995, I portrayed myself performing the three phases of a fake UFO sighting. There are no precise dates for the earliest reports of UFO sightings, but they undoubtedly became widespread in the wake of the startling acceleration in technological development that took place at the end of WWII with the invention of the atomic bomb and the digital computer. This could not escape the notice of the greatest investigator of the collective unconscious, Carl Gustav Jung, who in 1958 wrote a short essay on the subject: “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies”. Jung viewed the unconscious of his times as something lacerated, fragmented by political, social, philosophical and technological forces of extraordinary scale beyond the human grasp. Jung considered the UFO the quintessentially modern archetype. UFOs symbolize the fact that the marvels of science and technology have turned into the horrors of war and destruction. A circular spaceship hints at the possibility of reconciling human and non-human experience in the universe, since the circle is an archetypal symbol that lies at the base of every human culture, where it invariably represents, unity and integration, wholeness and cyclicality. Modern culture has largely dispensed with religious icons and sacred images of devotion such as crucified Jesuses and transfigured Madonnas, as these no longer induce mystical visions and provoke raptures in a largely secularized West. Instead, it’s the UFO and other similar sci-fi tropes that best symbolize the fears and desires of a technological era, and also express our lingering yearning for the religious and the transcendent in the space age, rendered as the mystery of the universe’s origin and human evolution.