UFOs and Wish Fulfillment

Rich Reynolds at the UFO Iconoclasts has a new post titled UFOs: Alone in the woods with your thoughts and a wish-fulfillment wherein he speculates about UFOs as a result of wish fulfillment on the part of the observer. An excerpt: You can read the entire post here. I find this an interesting line of thought worthy of discussion, but perhaps from a slightly different angle than Rich takes. I left the following comment:

Drab lives, with sexual frustration, could easily spark a wish to see or experience something unique or unusual. Today, the public (the masses) with their need to have fifteen minutes of fame – that damn Andy Warhol perquisite for life – could evoke, and often does, a wish-fulfillment, and in some, at the edge of geekiness, would use UFOs to bring that about. We often find, don’t we, that those who’ve seen a UFO or had an experience are people with a prior-to-their incidents interest in science fiction and its accoutrements (movies, TV shows, books, magazines)... That would be the basis for their wish-fulfillment, the underlying material(s) for their claim to unique human experience. 

I find this idea to be an interesting area of thought experimentation, although perhaps not quite in the same way as Rich does. I left the following comment at his blog:

This leads me back to the idea I posited in my book, that some advanced non-human intelligence is interacting with us as a way to inspire us to imagine a much broader world (for lack of a better term - interesting and fulfilling also work) than the one to which we have confined ourselves (or been confined, depending upon how you look at it). That's what art, in all it's forms, does, and I see the paranormal as an artistic presentation (and sometimes co-creation). Thus, in a sense, "they" are encouraging us not just to "wish" (upon a star?)... but ultimately to make those wishes come true.

Paul Kimball