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Human beings harbor a primal, archetypal fear of the "other" and the "unknown."

We may not be the only creatures in the vast cosmos with the intrinsic capacity for evil.

There is a psychological tendency to project evil onto others rather than acknowledging it in ourselves.

Though the phenomenon of evil has, with few exceptions (see, for example, Jung, May, Milgram, Fromm, Frankl, Lifton, Peck, Becker, Diamond, Baumeister, and Zimbardo among many others) been for the most part ignored, neglected, minimized, or dismissed by mainstream psychology up until now, it can no longer be denied or avoided today without potentially calamitous consequences.

For instance, what if we really are being visited by aliens from other worlds and they turn out to be aggressive, violent, malicious, and have evil intentions? How will the world cope with such an extraordinary existential crisis? As Carl Jung (1961) presciently put it shortly before his death, "Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence.... We stand face to face with the terrible question of evil and do not even know what is before us, let alone what to pit against it." (pp. 331-332). Every era or generation, it seems, must encounter the archetypal problem of evil in some new way or different form in order to be forced to recognize, acknowledge, and learn to confront it.

In this sense, the UFO or UAP phenomenon provides a real Rorschach-like receptacle for us to project both our greatest fears and hopes, and, maybe most of all, to give us something or someone we can see as evil rather than recognizing it in ourselves and our world. Confronting and coming to terms with the reality of evil in life is an existential, philosophical, ethical, moral, and spiritual challenge par excellence and one with which psychotherapists and their patients wrestle every day, whether consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.

Xenophobia, a term derived from the Greek words xenos (stranger) and phobos (fear), is, by definition, an extreme or........

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