In a recent Washington Post review of a couple of UFO books that have just come out, there’s a sentence that I think nicely summarizes Carl Jung’s thesis on UFOs:
[P]sychologist Carl Jung proposed that UFOs symbolized a wish that the gods, having departed from this violent world, were returning.
In other words, alien longing is eschatological longing. I’d buy that. And when I went to a UFO conference last year, I snapped this image of an alien statue on sale in the foray that was obviously referencing the Virgin Mary:
And aliens always have big eyes, don’t they?
Why is that?
Everybody seems to be looking for Dante’s Beatrice in some form, however weird. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some big-eyed beatific vision arriving from somewhere—anywhere—to simplify our adult existences and take us out of the messes that we find ourselves in?
But now we’re talking about Tea Partier politics, aren’t we?
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See and believe?
Prometheus Unbound 
The abduction phenomenon can be used as religion but there seems to be something more to it than that. If you read these accounts many describe the aliens as cold and distant, not full of love or bringing a hopeful message. Abductees have a tendency to try to make something positive of their experience but some accept that it is just scary intrusive and that it hasn’t changed their lives for the better.