Given the proliferation in recent years of ufo/paranormal/dreamtime imagery in the media (VW's "Reverse Engineered From UFO's" ad comes glaringly to mind), do you feel that this is actually changing or affecting the phenomenon itself? Is the mass-media consciousness causing the UFO phenomenon to change the way it interfaces with us?
 
 

It's interesting you bring up the VW ads, because I've been experiencing Phildickian mystical experiences with Volkswagens.   Philip K. Dick saw a fish necklace and it triggered something real in him.  In my case, an unbidden dream of Sai Baba in a Volkswagen has developed, several years later, into what pathological debunkers would no doubt call an "obsessive/compulsive complex," but others would call "crazy wisdom."  I've found that I can use Volkswagens in a shamanistic way, as portents.  In a way, it makes sense.  Since we've given up a natural environment, where flocks of birds or a gust of wind can determine portents, it's inevitable that automobile magic and license plate numerology are the main options available to most of us.

So to try and come to grips with your very good question, I must answer by saying, I think that our "popular" "responses" in ads and magazines are to a very large extent predetermined by the phenomenon.   We, for example, are reverse engineered from the images before us, pumping brand names into our holy desires, and making fashion slavery not only fashionable, but downright patriotic.

Since I work for "Marketplace," a radio program dedicated to analysis of market trends, it has become clear to me that a large proportion of people consider unlimited growth an acceptable and laudable way to ensure never-ending prosperity.

Therefore, it is understandable that a foreign phenomenon would influence this handy-dandy ideological resource to its own ends.   So, instead of us influencing the phenomenon, it's US giving the phenomenon enough rope to hang us (up).

Or in my case, it's Sai Baba utilizing the Volkswagen to symbolically illustrate the dynamics of the guru/chela relationship (a thing I have basically rejected on political grounds for many years). 

Has anyone seen the VW ad in which the young couple has a series of synchronistic experiences to the music in their stereo?   Is it not the phenomenon itself which, through years of persistence, inspired that ad?   Could an ad agency have invented such a spot without the groundbreaking work of the likes of Robert Anton Wilson, William Burroughs, even Allen Ginsberg and his William Blake fixations?

Of course, in a way, it's cybernetically axiomatic that our responses would enter the mix.  But we flatter ourselves if we think it's we who call all the shots.  That's the fallacy fallen into by the missionary skeptics.  I think that what our response to the phenomenon represents is not so much a changed landscape, but, rather, two sides of a curtain coming to meet each other on a stage called life, as the final scene of the current play is enacted.  We will meet each other and we shall rise together to become the reality that our separation prevented. 

At such time, all signs and pointers will fit nicely together; and all assignations of blame and congratulations will be thrown alike onto the agency of active godhead.  We are all simply pieces of such godhead, after all, and if we seek our selves in the context of Madison Avenue, we will glimpse our shadows-in-law there; if we seek our selves in the context of divine love, we will eventually observe manifestations thousands of times brighter than television and movie screens.