Flying Saucers: Madness, Mandala or Machine

History

Flying Saucers: Madness, Mandala or Machine is held in the archive as a research monograph by John F. Schuessler, one of the more durable American civilian-research figures from the 1970s through the early 2000s. Schuessler was the lead investigator on the 1980 Cash-Landrum case in Texas (Vickie Landrum, Betty Cash, and Colby Landrum's encounter with a diamond-shaped object near Huffman, Texas on 29 December 1980), the longtime MUFON International Director and then Executive Director, the founder of the National Institute for Discovery Science's later research arm, and the author of the foundational case-record monograph The Cash-Landrum UFO Incident. The Madness, Mandala or Machine monograph reflects Schuessler's interest, alongside the case-investigation work, in the higher-level interpretive frameworks the field's documentary record could be read through.

The title's three-framework structure is the monograph's organising principle. "Madness" represents the psychological-interpretive wing, the position that the witness reports reflect dissociative, hallucinatory, or sociogenic phenomena rather than external aerial objects. "Mandala" represents the spiritual-symbolic wing, the position taken in the long Carl Jung interpretive tradition (Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, 1959) that the saucer reports reflect a contemporary projection of the mandala archetype rather than a phenomenon to be investigated empirically. "Machine" represents the nuts-and-bolts wing, the position that the reports describe physical craft of unknown origin and that the appropriate investigative response is the engineering-and-evidence methodology APRO, NICAP, MUFON, and later AARO have applied.