The wing-feathered serpent and its UFO connection?

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A piece in the May 1975 issue of Official UFOmagazine, Aliens among Us: Encounters and Visitations by Nancy Grunthal [Page 44 ff.] has a lengthy tale of a man named Fred Clarke (not his real name) who, in 1974, saw “an emblem of a winged and feathered serpent” on the jackets of a “hippie couple” sitting across from him on a subway train.

Then six months later, while driving home, at 1 a.m. in the morning from a lodge meeting in New Jersey, Clarke’s car stopped functioning and he saw an oblong, hovering form with a tripod-like apparatus settle on the highway from which “two short beings, about four feet five inches” emerged and glided over to his car.

“They sure weren’t walking, I can tell you that,” [said] Clarke. “It was like they were floating, and they were moving much faster than a person could walk … They came over to the car, and I remember I could see the serpent emblem on their silver uniforms.” [ibid, Page 44]

They rubbed their “hands over the hood and sides of the car, like they were scanning it with some kind of device … Then they went over to the edge of the service road and scooped up some rocks and dirt, put it into a sack and floated back to their vehicle.

“As soon as they climbed aboard, the landing gear retracted and a reddish-orange light seemed to illuminate the craft … Clarke heard … a humming and then a buzzing noise as the craft shot vertically up into the sky … [whereupon] his car engine started automatically. [ibid]

Clarke tried to tell his sorry to others, including his wife, but was rebuffed, his wife saying “You’re overworked and it seems to be affecting your mind.” [ibid, Page 46]

Clarke was then reluctant to tell his tale and “might have [been] able to forgeten [sic] the whole thing, except that every so often we would see guys and gals of all ages … with the symbol of a winged, feathered serpent on their jeans, jackets, or pants. It never failed to make him shudder.” [ibid]

Did Fred Clarke pilfer his story from that told by Nebraska police sergeant Hebert Schirmer, who detailed an encounter in 1967 with UFO entities also wearing a winged, serpent emblem?

See Phantoms and Monsters site for that story by clicking HERE.

The winged, feather serpent, and the glorified serpent are integral to mythology and religious texts, as most of you well know:

The Universal Kabbalah by Leonora Leet

And the opening book of The Hebrew Bible (The Old Testament) presents the serpent in a less than glorious light. [Genesis, Chapter 3]

Also the Book of Daniel (referenced above) in The Bible has a serpent (dragon) in Chapter 14:22.

The serpent has also been a part of great literature:

[In] the Eighth Circle of Hell, Virgil and Dante face many dangers. Because of the collapsed bridge, they must navigate treacherous rocks, and Virgil carefully selects a path before helping his mortal companion along. Dante loses his breath for a moment, but Virgil urges him onward, indicating that a long climb still awaits them. They descend the wall into the Seventh Pouch, where teeming masses of serpents chase after naked sinners; coiled snakes bind the sinners’ hands and legs. Dante watches a serpent catch one of the sinners and bite him between the shoulders. He watches in amazement as the soul instantly catches fire and burns up, then rises from the ashes to return to the pit of serpents. [Dante’s (Divine) Comedy, Cantos XVII,  XXIV and XXV]

Jung, in his treatise Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things seen in the Skies [Princeton University Press, 1978, paperback], on Page 20, in the midst of his discussion of the Madala (which he thought was a psychical projection of UFOs), offers a dream of a six year old girl, that depicted “three snakes [crawling] around [a] fire” representing an archetype, mythic memes in the collective unconscious of all humans.

http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/symbols.html

Peter Kolosimo, in his book, Spaceships in Prehistory[University Books, NJ, 1976], has several serpent themed photos: an Aztec plumed serpent, a Roman reptile on the altar in the Casa dei Vettii at Pompeii, a serpent on a boundary stone of the Kassites epoch, a cup from the valley of the Indus (dated circa 2500 B.C.) showing two serpents held by a human figure, and a Danish “serpent god” from 3000 B.C. [Pages 84-87]

And while some of you have seen depictions of flying serpents in the decorative art of the Meso-American and Oriental cultures, I found no specific cave drawings of serpents from the Neolithic era or early Stone Age.

I was hoping to suggest that persons seeing winged, serpent images on UFOnaut uniforms were dredging up the image from their Jungian collective unconscious.

(In Freudian psychology, the serpent is a, tenuous, per Brill, symbol of the male genitalia, of course which has no bearing here or in UFO lore.)

I know a few UFO buffs see serpentine humanoids as the ETs piloting UFOs, but that’s a stretch, derived from UFO witnesses who have need of Analytical Psychology as Jung proposes in his Flying Saucer book.

Ancient Astronaut theorists have a field day with the Flying Serpent god of the Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl, saying that Quetzalcoatl was actually an ancient astronaut who visited the Earth and helped the Aztecs develop or evolve.

(While I like the AAT’s speculations – they are imaginative – I think we can insert the word God or gods for the ancient astronaut mantle and be as risible as the AATs are.)

But since there is a vast canon of serpents, flying and not, in all of the Earth’s literature extant, plus a large portfolio of serpents in drawings or etched in ancient sculpture, one has to take the observation of “Fred Clarke” in the Official UFO magazine cited above and the 1967 report by police officer Schirmer somewhat seriously.

Is there a presence showing up, in situ, displaying a winged, feathered serpent as a symbol full of meaning for those who can discern it?

(And remember, that serpent in Eden caused us a lot of grief, which should cause us to try and determine what or who it really was so we can apply payback.)

RR