The Dragons of Ufology

“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”
-Joesph Campell

It is difficult to imagine a entire world as it existed centuries ago that did not have and could not imagine the technologies we have in our possession as their descendants. Yet, as noted by others, human psychology has little changed over the centuries in terms of the power of mythology that superimposes the mystery of our own origins against forces that seem incommensurable to our mind as organising “powers” of creation.

One could reasonably say we inhabit a house of mirrors of our own constructions as projections but then we might be leasing it from dragons as a oddly persistent symbology that is indelibly etched from our earliest recorded history up to the 21st century.

When did this become that?

Whether it is physicists in search of a “god particle” with mathematics or the magicians armed with tripods, magical correspondences with the aim to invoke superior knowledge, the hunt continues for a definitive and conclusive origin tale.

Of course logic would seem to tell us that there may be other species in a ill defined elsewhere who have acquired the keys to our common origin and since one of our key characteristics is tool making, one can easily also imagine these distant cousins wielding incredible tools. That being said, one knows that dreams are metaphors.

Have we remade the dragon reptile in our own image unknowingly? Have we a shadow image of a psychological profile? Not of them but of us? A further exploration of this possibility is due as well as the threads that weave this tapestry together in order to ask, is there discernible pattern in this specific motif ?  Is this motif hiding in plain sight? Those hugely popular Grey Reptilians want to know. You know them, the shadow creatures that invade dreams. The "Greys" are the ones we love to loathe.

I suggest to you that they are us, a projected shadow that expresses a fear of technological science.

Consider the once pervasive and global dragon mythology. How do we account for a common creature found among all global cultures that “breathed fire” across the atmosphere? How do we account for the same “fire” in what were once called UFOs now more reasonably termed UAP?

Dragons were thought to be wise with a prescient knowledge much like extraterrestrials. Much like extraterrestrials, they lit up the atmosphere. So powerful were they thought to be that this assumption prompted the Chinese emperors to adopt this erstwhile creature as a emblem for their own power.
A game of association.

One thinks about our own mythologies in their earliest formulation as in The Epic of Gilgamesh where the protagonist confronts a dragon in contest. You could say nature itself could lie behind this situation, the survival of humanity against the all powerful natural world of our environment.

In other words, a contest against a foe much like the later variant of Melville”s “Moby Dick” which not surprisingly was based on the sinking of a whaling vessel.

Compare these older superimpositions to our own times as the ancient instinctual fears surface via Professor Stephen Hawking who prophesied that "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans". His reasoning is simple; an examination of how our species has evolved, and how we have approached colonization of our world, should serve as a lesson for how a more advanced alien species might consume our tiny planet and its resources.”

Extraterrestrials as Dragon lore, swooping down to consume our crops or perhaps even ourselves as hapless bystanders in the face of overwhelming power based not surprisingly on our own species psychology. In Persia, the dragon was used as a banner of war. Biblical accounts in Christian texts equate dragons with pride.

All of these associations take us to the present where it is interesting to note how this affected Ufology that have a mirror image in our culture, primarily in film. A distorting lens. Theories as emblems of combatants and then there is the dragon’s association with pride. Yet we have two global variants of the same atmospheric phenomenon which could be likened to mysterious fires in our atmosphere as if it were all some vague alchemical transformation that brings out what John Keel thought were demonic forces and of course, mythological demons are rooted in our own uncontrollable compulsions and weaknesses. A sort of feedback loop of projections based on sociopathic interpretations of our own nature as well as that of our environment in which we are in the midst of a contest for survival at any cost.

One example of global dragon culture as tied to survival is found within the Vietnamese people as the dragon brings rain, essential for agriculture Dragons abound everywhere in this sense of the word. In ancient cartography an unexplored landmass was full of dangers arising from the natural world hence the notation, “Here there be dragons”. Perhaps outer space now sufficed as a modern day equivalency in SETI anxieties.
Dragons? They never left us.

What was once fire ………...now to our eyes, at a distance, resembles a plasma. The satirical legacy of Swift from Gulliver's Travels found a home in David Ickes characterization of the powerful as dragons in disguise. Of course there are the reptilian "Greys"who exercise similar omniscient power as modern day humanoid dragons.

Dragons above, so below? Which side is reflective of the other? Does a mysterious physicality create a bizarre psychology that is a house of mirrors we inhabit? Or is we have by nature superimposed a pattern that symbolizes our fragile place in the universe simply based on our own demons?

Can mythologies contain a buried kernel of truth?

Perhaps they are prophetic as in the myth of Prometheus and his subsequent fate due to his theft of creating fire, a fire from the sky or that tree of knowledge from whence the apple came and the subsequent banishment from the natural world. Of course, the temptation came from a reptile.

Perhaps all of this has an element of alchemy to it as portrayed in another arcane symbol. The snake eating it's tail...a sort of mythological genome that we carry unawares of it's profound yet buried circular path.