The following is an article from the October '92 (Vol. 1, #9) issue of The
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{The End of the World...again}
                      The Omega Projection
                       by Martin Kottmeyer
Review of Kenneth Ring's _The Omega Project: Near-Death
Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large_, William
Morrow, 1992.
   _The Omega Project_, it must first be said, is a marvelous
achievement and will be properly recognized as a landmark in
the study of the psychology of the UFO experiences. It gives
us a solid empirical base for the first broad overview of
the mental landscapes of people who have been caught up in
the UFO myth.
   Two fundamental observations should perhaps be offered
before proceeding to my particular bone of contention: how
UFOlogy's world destruction fantasies should be interpreted.
Ring's finding that UFO encounterers believe in alternate
realities will prove to be crucial in the inevitable
questions about their reality-testing skills and definitions
of psychopathology. Second, the compelling linkages between
near-death experiences and UFO encounters will prove to be
eventually explicable in terms of the neurophysiology of the
brain in crisis. The self-observed inversion of behaviorial
patterns after near-death experiences and UFO-related mental
states has obvious parallels in the generalized reversal of
conditioned behavior observed by Pavlov when some dogs
nearly drowned in a flood at his lab. He subsequently
achieved the same result by means of torture. Ring's
findings suggest a significant portion of UFO experiences
are a product of transient or reactive paranoid psychosis.
This does not exclude other obvious mechanisms such as
nightmares, active imaginations, and hoaxing from being
reasons for alleged UFO experiences. No one should expect
every experience to be explicable by a single process.
   The treatment of world destruction fantasies among UFO
experiencers by Ring is the topic I choose to focus on here
because it is a subject which has captured my theoretical
interest in the past . (See "Dying Worlds, Dying Selves,"
_Ufo Brigantia_ #47, Jan. 1991, pp. 24-32, and "Ego Freakout
and Saucerers of Doom," _The Wild Places_ #3, late 1991, pp.
24-28.)
   Ring found that fully 85 percent of UFO experiencers
report an increase in their concern for planetary welfare --
60 percent said it strongly increased. This provides a nice
panoramic backdrop against which to view a study of Bedroom
Visitor Contacts by Jenny Randles in her 1983 book _Ufo
Reality_, which found the motif of imminent earth catastrophe
as a reason for alien visitation in 28 percent of the cases
of this form of UFO experience.This also provides solid
support for the often expressed sentiment that end-of-the-
world style beliefs are an unusually repetitive feature to
UFO experiences. Certainly, it is a feature of the UFO
landscape which is hard to overlook.
   Ring echoes the consensus that the message of apocalypse
pervades the literature of UFO abductions. He brings us
Betty Andreasson's abductions and the portents of ecological
horror in _The Watchers_ as a prominent example. He shuns
Raymond Fowler's literal acceptance of her experiences as
truly extraterrestrial, but he feels "the message" should
not be ignored. There is a sensitivity among abductees to
the concerns of ozone depletion and deforestation.
Confronted with somewhat similar yet somewhat different
nuclear annihilation concerns of contactees, he squeezes
them into his schema by regarding them as a similar species
of ecological consciousness. Ring advances a theoretical
construct termed "Mind at Large" that senses that the planet
is now imperiled and releases seeds of salvation into
mentally fertile humans to later flower with prophecy.
Abductions reflect dark forebodings and intuitions that
dress messages in space age fascinations to steal our
attention and awaken us to the planet's plight before it is
too late. They are a diagnostic warning coded in symbols and
images which, correctly interpreted, spurs us to right
action.
   This all sounds hopefully rational and leaves one with
the gentle glow that abductions are really important after
all and not the waste of time they can seem when the
spaceship model is found in the attic or the current guru
shoots himself in the foot. The glow fades, however, in the
cold dark of history. Most alien prophecies of cataclysm
over the decades have no evident ecological component.
Contactees have warned of cosmic debris clouds, comets of
doom, colliding suns, nuclear firestorms, and our planet
blowing up. The most common scenario in the literature has
the earth flipping over with the continents sinking Atlantis-
like into the drink. Trying to decode these images into
environmental concerns would require elaborate and dubious
apologetics. Moreover, the aliens rarely request political
or other substantial action. They ask us to be good and
transmit good vibes,which environmentalists would not regard
as a helpful response.
   The prophecies have an absurd air of caricature.
Andreasson warns that mankind will soon become extinct
through sterility _ an outrageously perverse sentiment in
the context of earth's ballooning population. Aliens
repeatedly warn that human actions threaten "the balance of
the universe." Can aliens be that astronomically illiterate
or contactees be that prideful of human powers? Dates for
the end-time cataclysm have been repeatedly set and
repeatedly shown to be wrong. Why does the Mind at Large
present its message in a roundabout way, so
overdramatically, so irrationally? If the planet is in
peril, why not say it straight out and present the argument
in a reasonable form?
   World destruction fantasies have been with humans since
aboriginal times and pervade mythology and cultural history.
This suggest a more uniformitarian approach involving human
psychology as its locus of genesis. In fact, psychologists
have already done some thinking on world destruction
fantasies since they encountered them often in their work.
The idea which seems to have gained widest acceptance is
that they represent projections of an internal catastrophe.
The self when faced with death and mental disintegration
expresses its personal loss of stability through a metaphor
involving the fate of the world. Such fantasies have long
been known to occur in conjunction with paranoid fantasies
and within states of reactive psychosis. Triggers include
certain forms of individual crisis events, organic brain
dysfunction, and hallucinogens, such as LSD.
   That the genesis is personal and not societal or some
quasi-transpersonal external Mind at Large is sometimes
reasonably apparent. Andreasson's prophecies of sterility
make simple projective sense when we recall her painful
memories of having had a hysterectomy that necessitated an
abortion. To speak of the balance of the universe may puzzle
one at first in its blatant derangement, but to fear one's
own balance of mind is threatened by the fears prompted by
nuclear annihilation is easily understood. This will perhaps
seem to be a species of interpretation analogous to Ring,
but the intent is not to decode a message but to unscramble
a fiction to recognize its creative mechanisms and
understand why a UFO experience should not fool you to think
it should be treated with the same respect as a logician's
syllogism.
   Ultimately, world destruction fantasies should be seen
more as a diagnostic sign that the UFO mythos is a paranoid
delusion than as an omen of the fate of the world sent by a
cryptic Mind at Large. Ring may have gotten the wrong angle
on the data in this instance, but, on the positive side, at
least he did not follow Fowler into naive apocalyptic belief
that Andreasson is literally correct. Abductions, I safely
predict, will be explained by known psychological processes.
The Omega Project, knowingly and unknowingly, is proving to
be an important advance in demonstrating that proposition.
[Martin Kottmeyer is a regular contributor to _The REALL
News_ and has written for several British publications,
including _Magonia_, _UFO Brigantia_, and _The Wild Places_.
He lives in Carlyle, Illinois.]
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