Custom essays on Unidentified Fundamental Obsession

Unidentified Fundamental Obsession
Throughout all their history humans have been striving for knowledge, understanding of the environment they live in, accounting for inexplicable phenomena, solving various enigmas and mysteries, and defining, or rather confirming, their rank and position in the universe. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs “the desire to know and to understand” occupies the 5th place and rests on the four previous ones (212). However, this feature is specifically anthropic and is what, if not elevates, but still differentiates the humans from the other species of the animal kingdom. Virtually all the epochs that left some historical documents from the time of Sumer and Egypt until the Middle Ages, and even the Renaissance, left us numerous writings and passages claiming to explain and answer the “major unknowns.” These answers are incorporated into myths, legends, lore, which is characteristic of practically any civilization, and religious, philosophical, and scientific writings and treatises in more advanced and developed societies.
The mass obsession with the UFOs is undoubtedly determined by the fifth need of Maslow’s classification. It is related to the intellectual, and maybe even spiritual, demands of the modern people. The nineteenth and especially the twentieth century science totally and ultimately ousted mythological creatures from their traditional habitats – the deeps, the forests and woods, the rivers and marshes, the mountains and hills, the firmament and abyss.

The whole flocks of imaginary creatures were deprived of their conventional dwellings, so a modern person does not fear, hope, or expect to encounter a goblin, a mermaid, a gnome, a nix, a gremlin, or an imp when they travel by land, sea or air. A great number of formerly inexplicable things and phenomena were scientifically explained, mysteries solved, questions answered. But the human natural want to deal with enigmas remains the same as it was centuries and millennia ago.
It would be not correct to contrast the ancient and modern people emphasizing that it is modern generation that dares “to model the entirety of nature” (Achenbach), and implying that the forefathers of today’s people were focusing only on a part of this world, a tiny and insignificant constituent of the cosmos remarkable only for the fact that it is the home of human beings. Such a view seems true only from the modern standpoint. For the ancient people, their settlement and the surrounding locality was the whole, the entire universe. What was beyond their boundaries was perceived and viewed as extravagant, inhabited by strange people and legendary creatures.