On the astrology of UFOs and the evolution of consciousness
What a spate of bizarre airship sightings in the 1890s tells us about the future
In November 1896, hundreds of residents of San Francisco reported sightings of a strange object in the sky: a large, elongated “airship” with strong searchlights that could fly against the wind. The sightings continued for months in the Bay Area, then abruptly ceased in March 1897. But by then strange craft were being seen across rural America: Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Illinois. Some of these “phantom airships” had wings, others were fitted with what appeared to be turbines, some even seemed to be pedal-powered.
But it gets weirder—because, just like the UFOs of current lore, many of these objects were capable of incredible manoeuvres. According to French ufologist and scientist Jacques Vallée, writing in his classic Passport to Magonia, they “exhibited all the typical activities of UFOs: hovering, dropping ‘probes’… changing course abruptly, changing altitude at great speed, circling, landing and taking off, sweeping the countryside with powerful light beams.”
The craft had occupants, too. Often they seemed like ordinary Americans: mechanics in overalls making repairs to their ships or even asking for directions. But sometimes they were far stranger. In April 1897, the Table Rock Argus reported that a group of witnesses had seen a ship with visible passengers, including “a woman tied to a chair, a woman attending her, and a man with a pistol guarding their apparent prisoner.” In November 1896, a man named Colonel H G Shaw claimed to encounter a metallic object with a rudder that had landed in Stockton, California. Three 7-feet-tall beings supposedly emerged from the craft “emitting a strange warbling noise” and attempted to physically force Shaw into the ship. He managed to fight them off and they departed into the sky at breakneck speed.
Some of the incidents may well have been made up by pranksters or the scurrilous practitioners of the “yellow journalism” of the period. But many have never been explained. And there were hundreds of sightings, enough for serious researchers like Vallée to conclude that something was happening that was worthy of attention.
Anyone with more than a passing interest in the UFO phenomenon will recognise many of its most common tropes here: strange craft performing incredible manoeuvres, bizarre occupants, and even attempts at abduction. However, the form of the visions was quite different to the flying saucers and “greys” we became accustomed to hearing about in the 20th century. The airships were of their time, with what we might see today as a steampunk aesthetic. Impossible manoeuvres aside, they were somewhat similar to the real airships that would appear in the skies in the early years of the 20th century. Flying saucers they were not.
In Passport to Magonia, Vallée notes intriguing similarities between these stories, the UFO phenomenon of the modern era, and—going back in time—folklore concerning other strange beings believed to inhabit the Earth: fairies, who, just like “aliens”, had a penchant for abducting human beings. Vallée’s thesis is that all these phenomena are in fact one and the same, and that they are fundamentally illusory, deliberately absurd, and intended to manipulate the human psyche at the level of folklore and myth. He writes:
Perhaps the airship, like the fairy tricks, the flying saucers, was a lie, so well engineered that its image in human consciousness could sink very deep indeed and then be forgotten—as UFO landings are forgotten, as the appearance of supernatural beings in the Middle Ages are forgotten. But, then, are they really forgotten? Human actions are based on imagination, belief, and faith, not on objective observation… And to control human imagination is to shape mankind’s collective destiny, provided the source of this control is not identifiable to the public.
It’s sometimes said that science fiction writers imagine the future that inventors and engineers go on to build. But where do science fiction writers get their ideas from? Perhaps their sense of the possible derives from myth and the contents of the collective conscious, which can be seeded by transformative encounters like those described above.
But here’s where things get really interesting. The phantom airship wave happened at a time of immense astrological importance: when Pluto and Neptune conjoined for the first time in almost half a millennium.
The Pluto-Neptune cycle: Transformations of consciousness
Lasting around 492 years, the synodic cycle of Pluto and Neptune is the longest of all the outer planet cycles—and consequently the most powerful. Here’s what Charles Harvey had to say about it in Mundane Astrology:
Both planets have to do with the deep unconscious/superconscious of the collective, to an opening up to higher, transcendent collective ideas and ideals. We would suggest that in some sense they relate to the higher ideas and ideals of the time, and to the larger spiritual, cosmic and human purposes which are coming into manifestation.
If Neptune represents dreams, the imagination and the fundamental connectedness of all things, then Pluto is the titanic forces that drive us from the depths to create change—or that impose change on us unwillingly. The Pluto-Neptune cycle is about the human species’ grandest concerns: spiritual transformation, the formation of global consciousness, and our very place in the cosmos. Astrologer Palden Jenkins has an excellent treatment of how it correlates to history in this comprehensive article.
Perhaps the most striking demonstration of this cycle’s significance are the remarkable teachers and thinkers that emerged all around the world around the time of the conjunction of Pluto and Neptune in Taurus in 578BCE, the beginning of the period referred to as the “Axial Age”. Among them:
Lao Tzu, the Chinese author of the Tao Te Ching and founder of Taoism;
Confucius, the philosopher whose teachings formed the basis of Chinese culture and society;
Gautama Buddha, the Indian ascetic and founder of Buddhism;
Zoroaster, the ancient Persian founder of Zoroastrianism;
The unknown Hebrew author(s) of Deutero-Isaiah, a core part of the Torah/Old Testament;
The earliest Greek philosophers like Pythagoras, Pisistratus, Xenophanes and the Seven Wise Men.
Lao Tzu: founder of Taoism
Even non-astrological writers have expressed wonder at how so many world-changing teachers could emerge independently in so many disparate places at the same time. The emergence of these thinkers led to a dramatic shift in human consciousness, when humans began to think deeply about how the cosmos worked, and what it meant to live a good life.
The current Neptune-Pluto cycle and the birth of the modern UFO phenomenon
Before we consider what any of this has to do with UFOs, we need to understand an important principle of astrological historical research, and indeed astrology in general: due to the fractal nature of time, archetypally relevant themes evident during a conjunction will characterise the cycle it initiates. A conjunction is a microcosm, reflecting the macrocosm of a cycle’s full unfolding.
The last complete Neptune-Pluto cycle began in 1398, at a time when early church reformers like Jan Hus and John Wycliffe began to protest against the doctrines and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. By the end of the cycle, half a millennium later, the church had been stripped of power, our vision of the cosmos had been utterly transformed, and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche could proclaim in 1882—as astrologer Tony Dickey points out—that “God is dead”.
From our vantage point in 2022, we’re currently around 130 years into a Pluto-Neptune cycle that began with conjunctions of these planets in 1891 and 1892. Richard Tarnas, author of Cosmos and Psyche and pioneer of archetypal astrology, writes that conjunctions begin to make their effects known when outer planets are around 20 degrees apart. By this reckoning, the two planets were in orb from around 1876 to 1908.
This was the heady period in American history known as the Gilded Age, an era of infamous wealth disparity and stunning industrial progress, when a mind-boggling array of inventions and new ways of thinking came into being. Palden Jenkins cites “the beginning of flight, the internal combustion engine, electrical technologies, plastics, pharmaceuticals, corporate multinationals, telegraphy, psychotherapy, the new age movement (Theosophy and spiritualism), socialist parties, third world nationalism, feminism (suffragettes), quantum physics, nuclear technologies…” Many of these are technologies required to connect a global civilisation together, perhaps facilitating the emergence of a “global consciousness”.
You could choose any one of these developments and note its huge impact on the world since that time. But the phenomenon I want to concentrate on here is the one we started with: the sightings of mystery airships across America in 1896 and 1897. Let’s recall Vallée’s theory about UFO experiences: that they are intended to seed and manipulate human consciousness at a mythical level, below our threshold of collective awareness. Bearing in mind that a cycle’s birth contains the seeds of its becoming, the significance of the airship wave comes into sharper focus.
Is the future about to throw us an incredible curveball? Could the UFO phenomenon play an essential role in the unfolding of the current 492-year cycle? The logic of the astrology seems to point in this direction—and so do current events.
From Roswell to disclosure—and beyond?
Around 1940, Neptune moved to within 6 degrees—the orb Tarnas uses for the 60-degree aspect—of a sextile with Pluto. In an outer planet cycle the waxing sextile is the time when whatever was set in motion during the conjunction begins to become visible and integrated into the pattern of life.
On 24 June 1947, an amateur airplane pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying close to Mount Rainier in Washington State when he saw nine bright, shining objects flying in formation. He calculated that they were moving at around 1,700 miles per hour, more than twice the speed of sound. He told reporters what he had seen and the story became a sensation: the first widely reported sighting of “flying saucers” in the modern era. Just a couple of weeks later, in New Mexico, came the infamous Roswell incident, when the debris of a crashed “flying disc” was supposedly recovered by the US Army. Later versions of the story would claim that the bodies of its extra-terrestrial crew had also been found.
The great UFO flap of the 20th century had begun: an outlandish shadow to the space race that was beginning in the same period. Over the years, its mythos would take shape: the iconic “flying saucer”; the image of the bug-eyed “grey” alien; the tales of abductions, of terrified people being beamed onto craft in the dead of night; the cattle mutilations, hybrid babies, men in black, Area 51 and all the rest.
It’s worth noting that there are essentially two schools of thought in ufology: the “nuts and bolts” school and the “consciousness” school (although there is much overlap between the two). The former sees UFOs as primarily a material phenomenon, technology that can be studied and potentially acquired for human use. Many researchers in this camp believe that shadowy parts of the US “deep state” are in possession of the wreckage of alien craft, and are studying their designs and materials and even attempting to build vehicles of their own.
The consciousness school, of which Vallée is a prominent voice, argues that the phenomenon needs to be studied in terms of its effects on the psyche of those who experience it, and on the collective conscious in general. But, as with astrology—which seems to be simultaneously divinatory and something like a natural science—the UFO phenomenon is likely dualistic, operating at both the psychic and material levels. The more thoughtful ufologists understand this.
Interestingly, the sextile that seemed to herald the (re)appearance of the UFO phenomenon remains in effect to this day. Pluto has spent the past 80 years in a part of its highly elliptical orbit where it proceeds around the zodiac roughly as fast as Neptune. The two planets are still within 6 degrees of orb of the sextile and will remain so until around 2039. But there have been two periods when the sextile regularly went exact: 1950 to 1956 and 1976 to 1986. It will do so again from 2026 to 2032. (You can see the full list of the dates of these aspects on Astro-Seek here.)
Since 1947, the UFO phenomenon has waxed and waned in public consciousness. But the most active periods were those when the sextile was perfecting. The 1950s were a heyday—the term “unidentified flying object” itself was coined in 1953—and so were the late 1970s. Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which featured a French scientist character based on Jacques Vallée and played by legendary film director François Truffaut, came out in 1977, stimulating a massive wave of interest in the issue.
Incredibly, today it’s clear that something resembling a process of “disclosure” is underway. In December 2017 the New York Times published a bombshell story revealing what many had long suspected: that the Pentagon was indeed investigating UFOs, through its “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program”. And after decades of secrecy and denial, the US military itself began releasing footage of what it calls “UAPs”: unidentified aerial phenomena. Effectively, the Pentagon was admitting that these objects were real, and that their origins were unknown. In June 2021, the Pentagon released a report on an analysis of 144 cases of encounters between military pilots and UAPs. It could explain only one of them.
What’s happening is nothing short of seismic in its implications. Interestingly enough, space exploration seems to be experiencing a resurgence at the same time, with billionaire Jeff Bezos rocketing into space and Elon Musk setting his sights on Mars. This is surely no coincidence.
Based on the astrology alone, we can confidently predict that this subject is not going away. It was evident at the Neptune-Pluto conjunction in the form of the mystery airships, suggesting it will be a major theme of the cycle. And it returned to prominence in 1947, soon after the sextile came into orb. I suspect that sightings of UFOs and public awareness of the issue will rise to a new crescendo, peaking once again between 2026 and 2032, when Pluto and Neptune begin to perfect the sextile once again. And if we’re doing “disclosure” now—who knows where we’ll be by then.
In 2025, Uranus will ingress into Gemini, the sign it was in when the United States made its Declaration of Independence in 1776. More than a few astrologers are eyeing this development nervously, given that Uranus’s first return to Gemini coincided with the American Civil War and its second with World War Two. With this in mind, The Astrology Podcast host Chris Brennan recently put out this tweet:
Chris was presumably at least half joking. But given all of the above, I’m starting to wonder if he may end up being pretty close to the mark. These are strange times—and they’re going to get stranger.
If you made it all this way, thanks! A hat tip to Twitter user @cogdissident2 for inspiring the writing of this article.