Our UFOs, Ourselves: Why I Built A Full Scale Flying Saucer

I never cared much about UFOs, about whether they exist or not. But I am interested in the fact that UFOs are a mystery that people want to understand. I think that the UFO phenomenon is a kind of indicator that tells us something about ourselves.

Carl Jung once published a collection of essays called Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky . He believed that UFO sightings increase during wartime and decrease during peacetime. Jung proposed that people believe in UFOs when they're under great social duress and I think we do the same thing with other "unbelievable" things.

Still frame grab from video footage of Peter Coffin's UFO art performance over Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.

I began to wonder what if I created a UFO, announced it in advance without trying to surprise or frighten people -- no "shock and awe," just a friendly light spectacle that represents what we imagine a UFO to look like? What would happen? People might ask why someone would go to the trouble of making a UFO if fooling the rest of us wasn't the intent? UFOs are not supposed to be manmade, they're supposed to be a mystery. Does it make it more real because it's manmade? Less real? I hope these questions will lead people to think about the UFO phenomenon objectively.

The UFO has flown over South Brazil including Ipenema and Copa Cabana beaches in Rio and before that over the over the Baltic Sea, near the coast of Gdansk. There we worked with a team of sociologists to gauge people's reactions and to find out how they felt about their own sighting of a UFO. In Gdansk, people often engaged in conversation about individual spirituality and religion in comparing their own experience to the UFO sighting and what it represented. In Rio, the UFO became a reason for people to party and gather together and it was often talked about this way in the media before and after the flight.

In preparing the UFO for these flights, I thought about what it means to make something invisible, visible and how to create something that is real to the imagination for the sake of fulfilling the desire to believe and see things. That's something we do in art. We make art to help us understand things we don't understand. We're visually inclined and want to see things in order to understand them. There's something satisfying about seeing something we can only imagine or want to believe is real even if we know it's not.

In the end, this isn't meant to trick believers or fool doubters. I don't want anyone to feel they've been duped. There are plenty of things we don't see around us in the skies already. This is just a thing we've created. Let's look at it.

This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post and Station to Station. Station to Station is a public-art project conceived by Doug Aitken. This series will feature artists from the project sharing their thoughts and ideas related to Station to Station. For more information about Station to Station, click here. And to follow the conversation on Twitter, see #TrackSTS.