Impossible Possibilities (1971)

Pauwels, Louis and Jacques Bergier. Impossible Possibilities. Stein and Day, 1971.

On the heels of their successful (if now forgotten) publication Morning of the Magicians, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier ran a French fantastic realist magazine called Planète from 1961 to 1972. Towards the end of that prolific decade, they launched this follow-up to their smashing debut. Once again, they are interesting in speculating on the strange, the weird, the fantastic, but in a responsible manner that will ultimately collapse the boarders that cultural materialism and consumerism have erected around our minds. As they state in the prologue: "We have no philosophy to teach, no school to found, no wisdom to propound. We are seekers, nothing more." The authors took a cue from a precursor, an American named Charles Fort, whose obsessive study of anomalous phenomena begat the so-called Fortean manifesto The Book of the Damned. All aforementioned parties are interested in opening their minds to any and every phenomenon in the attempt to make connections with the world behind the one we see and turn our collective consciousness forward into the future (instead of continuing to look backward and stay within the thinking of the ancients). As this book makes clear in the opening pages, it is time for a second Renaissance. A glance at the contents is telling: UFOs, electronic brains, magic, alchemy, infinity, magnetism, hypnosis, anti-matter, quasars, and so on. As with their first book, again, nothing is off limits. While the studies and claims may prove dubious for the twenty-first century reader, the charming exuberance of the writers' devotion makes the text hard to toss aside.