The Sun Came Out Last Night and Sang to Me

"One can see something, but one cannot tell what it is. And it is difficult, if not impossible, to form any precise idea of these objects, since they do not behave like bodies but rather like weightless entities, like thoughts."— C.G. Jung

From antiquity, the term alien has served as a tool of governance—used to classify the foreign, the unfamiliar, the Other. Derived from the Latin for “born of another land,” the alien has long been a projection of geopolitical anxieties. In modern times, while no conclusive material evidence exists to confirm the presence of unidentified flying objects—now reframed as UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena)—subjective testimonies continue to proliferate. These range from individual visions to mass hallucinations, revealing more about the psyche than about interstellar fact.

In 1958, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung published A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, in which he approached the UFO phenomenon not as a physical mystery, but as a psychic one. Jung argued that these visions are psychological projections, symbolic manifestations of collective need. Often circular or mandala-like, their forms evoke totality, order, and salvation—archetypes summoned in moments of cultural or spiritual disintegration. For Jung, the UFO serves as a compensatory image, a mirror to the fractured inner world of modern humanity, embodying what he called the Selbst—the integrated self formed by both conscious and unconscious experience.

UFO sightings fluctuate in frequency. They spike during moments of crisis and vanish in times of equilibrium, suggesting their emergence is bound not to space-time but to the state of the collective psyche. During the Cold War, their prevalence coincided with nuclear anxiety, functioning as mythic stand-ins—either divine saviors or embodiments of foreign threat. In this light, extraterrestrial narratives in the United States (which accounts for 92% of recorded sightings) came to reflect deeper fears, including those surrounding immigration, collectivism, and racialized otherness. The alien became a cipher for all that threatens hegemonic purity—a being stripped of individuality, imagined as part of a hive mind, situated eerily in the "uncanny valley" between human and not.

The UFO’s transgressive role often extends to the physical realm: abduction. This motif—of a living body taken without consent—resonates with psychoanalytic overtones. Jung, drawing from Freud, interpreted the sexualized symbolism of the UFO’s rounded and elongated forms as expressions of subconscious desire and fear. These visions do not merely appear; they penetrate. They disturb.

In Mexico, the UFO gained particular cultural traction between 1985 and 1994—a period marked by seismic social and political upheaval. How are we to interpret the figure of the alien in a nation where over 264,000 people are officially missing? Where more than 120,000 have been "abducted" not by intergalactic visitors, but by the state and organized crime? This project proposes a fictional extraterrestrial invasion of Mexico during those years, anchored in historical events: the 1985 earthquake, the solar eclipse of 1991, the onset of neoliberalism, the Zapatista uprising, the femicides in Ciudad Juárez, the assassination of Colosio, the 1994 peso crisis, and the emergence of the mythic Chupacabras.

The figure of the alien in Mexican popular culture functions as metaphor—as a response to the economic and cultural anxieties spurred by globalization and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Echoes of colonial trauma resurface in tales of contact with “superior beings,” continuing a lineage of conquest and submission. Here, the extraterrestrial is not only a visitor, but a specter of historic violence.

Visual representations of UFOs—glowing spheres suspended in the sky—often resemble traditional depictions of souls or phantoms. They become vessels of the dead, chariots of Charon transporting the lost, or divine observers—omnipresent, omniscient. As Jung proposed, in an era where the idea of a living God fades, the UFO steps in as a spiritual placeholder. The public yearns for belief, not out of empirical curiosity, but for existential comfort.

Whether or not UFOs exist materially, they persist symbolically. They are our modern myth—projecting the hopes, fears, and unresolved questions of contemporary Mexico.