One of the major influences on Méheust’s thought was the enigmatic spiritual teacher, ufologist, and mystical writer Aimé Michel, the same man who had such a powerful influence on the young Jacques Vallee. It was Michel, in fact, who helped Méheust find a publisher for his first book on flying saucers and science fiction, which appeared in March of 1978, after which both men engaged in a long and fruitful correspondence.6 Since Michel was a key figure in the early lives of both Vallee and Méheust and played a central role in a kind of Fortean renaissance in France, it is time now to meet him more fully and introduce the French metaphysical movement that he helped inspire: fantastic realism.
Aimé Michel was a living paradox. A humpbacked dwarf of a man who suffered intensely throughout much of his life and wrote about his body as “the Machine,” he thought in cosmic terms and looked upon humanity as a transitional species evolving toward a spiritual identification with the entire universe. His was both a deep and painful pessimism and a nearly limitless cosmic optimism.
There were biographical reasons for this gnosis, for this radical vision of the Human as Two. As a young child on his first day of school, little Aimé was cruelly stricken down by polio. He would lie paralyzed for three years. He was now essentially locked into his own consciousness and unable to communicate with the outside world, and this at a crucial stage of psychosocial development. Aimé gradually learned to observe the intricacies of his own mental processes. These, Méheust points out, now moved outside the habitual or normal channels of social thought and made strange connections. Michel even claimed that he learned to think without words. He also observed his fellow playmates, with whom he could not play, as entranced “somnambulists” acting out a dreamlike social script—the consensual trance.
The result of this three-year meditation was a kind of permanent childhood, a stable altered state of consciousness that left Michel remarkably open to the inexpressible, the improbable, and the nonhuman, an openness that others, including and especially Bertrand Méheust, felt as a kind of “aura” or philosophical charisma, as an alien presence. Aimé Michel was a stranger among men, a being between worlds, in his own words now, “neither man nor woman, neither from here nor from there” (ni homme ni femme, ni d’ici ni d’ailleurs). This is how, Méheust explains, Aimé Michel was “born a philosopher,” not in the vein of a professional academic, but in the lineage of a Socrates, a Descartes, or a Pascal.7
This is also how he lived. In his adult life, Michel sought out nature’s solitude, thought and wrote well outside the French academic system, and lived a life of eccentric holiness through which he came to understand the physical phenomena of mysticism (ascetic practices, stigmata, levitation, and psychical powers of various sorts) to be both signs and engines of an evolving superhuman (surhumain) that would eventually reveal itself and unite the thought of humanity with the very thought of the Universe—a kind of cosmic consciousness coming to be.8 Like Bergson before him, Michel saw the strongest evidence for this process in the transformative experiences of the mystics and the data of psychical research. He also understood the baffling appearances of UFOs in a similar light—for him, these phenomena, about which he wrote before almost anyone else in France, were portents of our own superhuman future.
This was no sugarcoated optimism, however, no simple vision of a clear, happy future. There was another side to Michel’s view of the human, a darker, more pessimistic, more tortured side. As we have already had occasion to note with respect to his correspondence with Jacques Vallee, Michel constantly stressed the limits of human knowledge and our fundamental inability to understand what might be at stake in something like a UFO or a truly alien form of consciousness. For Michel at least, such an alien-to-human communication really is impossible, at least for now. He was also appalled by what Méheust calls “the mystery of cosmic evil,” and especially “the absolute scandal” of the suffering of animals.9 For Michel, we are caught in a cosmos with hopelessly inadequate sensory, cognitive, and moral capacities. We are thrown into a world and a body that bring us, and so many other sentient creatures, unspeakable suffering and untold pain.
Aimé Michel also had a fascinating take on modern science. He eventually came to the conclusion that physics and science as a whole are the richest and most promising veins of a new mystical worldview. Such disciplines, after all, had revealed a world far more fantastic than any previous religious or mythical register. Charles Fort, of course, had seen the same. I mean, who needs, really, a bilocating saint or a witch turning into a crow when everything is teleporting all the time on a subatomic level and birds were once dinosaurs? It was precisely this kind of thinking that so inspired Aimé Michel. He in turn inspired a French metaphysical movement that exploded around the publication of a single blockbuster book.
Louis Pauwels was a French editor and publisher who, with his collaborator, the chemical engineer and former Resistance fighter Jacques Bergier, published Le Matin des Magiciens in 1960. The book came out in England as The Dawn of Magic in 1963, and a year later in the U.S. as The Morning of the Magicians.10 The same movement spawned its own magazine, Planète. It was in the pages of the latter periodical, edited by his friend Louis Pauwels, that Aimé Michel set down the outlines of his vision and its quest.
Although the invocation of magic and a certain cosmic spirituality were the primary rhetorical strategies here, what these authors were really proposing was what they called a fantastic realism. The authors explain their approach to the impossible:
We call our point of view fantastic realism. It has nothing to do with the bizarre, the exotic, the merely picturesque. There was no attempt on our part to escape the times in which we live. We were not interested in the “outer suburbs” of reality: on the contrary we have tried to take up a position at its very hub. There alone we believe, is the fantastic to be discovered—and not a fantastic leading to escapism but rather to a deeper participation in life. . . . The fantastic is usually thought of as a violation of natural law, as a rising up of the impossible. That is not how we conceive it. It is rather a manifestation of natural law, an effect produced by contact with reality—reality perceived directly and not through a filter of habit, prejudice, conformism.11
Such ideas, of course, were distant echoes of Myers and the S.P.R.’s search for “the telepathic law” and a true science of religion. They were also essentially Fortean. What Pauwels and Bergier were ultimately after, then, was precisely what Fort represented for them, that is, “a new mental structure” that was not binary, “a third eye for the intelligence” that could say yes and no at the same time, like the subatomic particle that is also a wave, they pointed out.12 In short, Fort’s philosophy of the hyphen.
I am not speculating here. I am simply taking the authors at their word. They tell us that the phrase itself, fantastic realism, was indebted to both the surrealism of André Breton, whom Pauwels describes as “a very great friend,” and the general methods of Charles Fort, whom the authors openly acknowledge as “one of our most cherished idols,” who “before the first manifestations of Dadaism and Surrealism . . . introduced into science what Tzara, Breton and their disciples were going to introduce into art and literature.”13 Indeed, it was at Pauwel’s instigation that The Book of the Damned first appeared in France, in 1955.14 It hardly made a mark. So Pauwels tried again, this time with Bergier.
They made a mark.
A deep mystical humanism, or what they called “That Infinity Called Man,” constitutes one of the deepest messages of the book. And the accent was definitely now on the mystical. Whereas Breton, for example, had explored the Freudian regions of sleep and the unconscious, Pauwels and Bergier were now exploring “their very opposites: the regions of ultra-consciousness and the ‘awakened state.’” Central to this awakened state—the constant phrase invokes Gurdjieff—was the realization that the line between the imaginary and the real is a very thin one, that reality seen truly is truly fantastic.
Science Fiction and Flying Sauce
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Méheust’s first book appeared in 1978: Science-fiction et soucoupes volantes: Une réalité mythico-physique, or Science Fiction and Flying Saucers: A Mythical-Physical Reality.15 The book was a study of the UFO phenomenon, his first love and in many ways the subject that defined the direction and metaphysical shape of everything that would follow. Méheust explained to me that he did not understand what he was writing when he began this first book. He was following a series of deeply felt, but still vague intuitions. He was practicing what he called a “hermeneutics of the self,” which is to say that he was discovering what he thought not as he thought, but as he read and wrote. It was almost as if the book was “channeled,” he confessed. The phrase is a common one among creative writers who do not experience their writing as entirely subjective events, who sense their words and ideas as coming, somehow, from outside them. This, of course, is often literally true in the simple sense that the act of reading is an “outside influence.” But often the influences, even the reading influences, feel far weirder than that, as if external events are reading and writing the author as the author reads and writes. It is as if one is reading the paranormal writing one.
So it was with Méheust and the origins of Science Fiction and Flying Saucers. The work began as another comparative event involving the reading of a book, similar to the events with which I began this chapter. It was 1974, and a twenty-seven-year-old Bertrand Méheust was rummaging through the library of his family’s loft when he came across an old science-fiction novel, Jean de la Hire’s Roue fulgurante (The Lightning Wheel). The cover featured a flying disc-shaped machine surrounded by a halo of light. He opened the book. The story began with the heroes being lifted into the humming sphere by a beam, losing consciousness, and awakening to find themselves in a brightly lit room. This was by no means a great work of literature. Indeed, the few pages Méheust read in the attic struck him as rather incoherent.
Then he saw the publication date: 1908. This stunned him. The date was so shocking because it was (and still is) widely assumed that the “flying saucer” did not appear on the cultural scene until 1947, when American pilot Kenneth Arnold sighted his nine silver disks. The first widely publicized abduction, we might also recall, did not occur until 1961, when Barney and Betty Hill reported their experience of “losing” two hours on the road and later remembered, under hypnosis, being abducted by aliens on board a spaceship.
But here was a set of strikingly similar images and an abduction story in 1908, and in a forgettable science-fiction novel no less. How could this be? Méheust recalled that some years earlier, while reading Jules Verne’s Robur le conquérant (1885), he had been much intrigued by the similarities between Verne’s famous flying Albatross machine and the strange flying vessel or floating ships that were seen across America and widely reported in the newspapers of 1897. It was if Verne’s science-fiction image had become an experienced cultural reality across the American landscape, and that within just twelve years (SF 223–29).
These two comparative events of reading Jean de la Hire and Jules Verne in effect “lived out” or intuited the thesis and comparative method of the book before there was a book. The focus of the work is a series of elaborate demonstrations of the historical coincidences that appear to exist between the narrative and visual frames of the UFO experiences of the second half of the twentieth century (1947 to the present) and the science-fiction stories of the first half of the twentieth century (1880–1945). Flying discs accompanied by buzzing noises, harmful or healing beams of light zapping people, abductions via levitation or teleportation, large-headed dwarves or humanoids, physical examinations on board a spaceship in a lighted room—point by point, detail by detail, Méheust demonstrates with texts and glossy pulp-fiction art how the later encounters “realized” or reenacted the earlier sci-fi scenes, and this down to astonishing details. Rhetorically, Méheust is mischievous here. So, for example, he will present three encounter stories without telling the reader which ones are “fictional” and which ones are “real” until a few pages later. Through techniques like this, he shows, over and over, that it is simply impossible to tell the difference between fiction and lived reality within the two sets of stories.
The treatment of pulp-fiction art and comic-book images pushes this point still further. Méheust, for example, reproduces a fairly typical cover of Astounding Stories from June of 1935, this one illustrating a version of the classic sci-fi abduction and medical experiment scenario that would become a standard feature of the later UFO accounts. He can also juxtapose a few panels from a French comic book from 1945, this one involving an odd globe-shaped spaceship with little men hopping from its portal, and a strikingly similar drawing based on a real-life UFO encounter from 1967. To employ the language of the British psychical researcher Hilary Evans, what we appear to have here is neither exactly fiction nor pure fact. It is “faction.”16
The same could be said, of course, about that strange fusion of fact and fiction we call “religion.” And indeed, like Vallee before him, Méheust is very clear that the UFO phenomenon manifests all sorts of folkloric, religious, and spiritual themes. For example, he was interested in the parallels with the history of Christian mysticism, which involves things like beams of light bestowing mystical illumination and effecting levitation (SF 17, 120–21, 164). Méheust was especially impressed with the profound physical dimensions of mystical events that the English Jesuit Herbert Thurston and his own French master, Aimé Michel, had written about.17 Thurston was a well-known expert on the lives of the saints. Through his association with the S.P.R., he had become convinced that the extraordinary transformations of the body (stigmata, luminosities, seeming imperviousness to pain or fire, various magical or psychical powers, even apparent human flight in the cases of Teresa of Avila and Joseph of Copertino) reported in the hagiographical literature were real. He had also become convinced that they were somehow related to the psychical phenomena studied by the S.P.R. This all struck Méheust as terribly pertinent to his UFO literature, of both the fictional and experiential types, since it seemed to suggest a link between mystical states of consciousness and highly unusual physical phenomena. Sometimes, moreover, the parallels were nearly exact, as for example when St. Francis was “zapped” by the beams of light that bestowed on him his stigmata wounds (UFO encounters often zap people with beams of light and leave odd scars or wounds).
Méheust began to suspect that just as Christian mysticism had produced a certain type of fictional literature that clearly exaggerates but also preserves the experiences of the saints, so too the UFO phenomenon produces a certain type of fictional literature, science fiction, that exaggerates but also preserves the experiences of the witnesses and contactees. The comparative model, then, looks like this: mystical event : hagiography :: UFO phenomenon : science fiction. That is to say, Christian mysticism is to the hagiographical literature as the UFO phenomenon is to the science-fiction literature.
There were differences, of course. The hagiography, after all, was written after the lives of the saints and for the edification of the faithful, some of whom would then imitate this literature and become future saints, thus establishing the typical dialectical relationship between consciousness and culture, or in this case between sanctified subjectivity and public textuality. The science-fiction literature, however, was written for cheap adolescent entertainment and was generally not known by the later abductees. This is the central intellectual scandal of Méheust’s first book. How exactly does one derive the absolutely terrifying and often completely debilitating traumas of the later UFO abductions from an earlier lowbrow literature sold literally for pennies to pimply adolescents? This is a question Méheust asks himself and his readers in the strongest terms (SF 59, 202).
Contrary to first expectations, whereby one would simply reduce the later abductions to the earlier cultural fantasies that had entered the public realm, Méheust’s own understanding of this morphing of science fiction into occult experience is
much more complicated, as he sees these alien narratives as engaging real metaphysical ground and as being dependent on the earlier imaginal frame of science fiction. That is to say, in my own terms now, Méheust refuses to reduce consciousness to culture, while at the same time he demonstrates how consciousness must express itself through culture, and in this case popular culture. He shows how consciousness encoded in culture is finally fantastic.
Méheust thus refuses, like a good author of the fantastic, to allow the reader to settle into any comfortable conclusion concerning the final nature of the experiences under discussion. As he repeatedly reminds his reader, the central idea of the book is the mindboggling observation that these experiences clearly possess both physical and psychical components (SF 237). UFOs leave traces on radar screens and landing marks on the ground. Entire militaries worry about them, and fighter jets routinely chase them. They occasionally heal people (SF 150). They also occasionally kill people (SF 146–47). They clearly cannot be reduced to subjective fantasies. But they also, just as clearly, behave like dreams, like myths or “super-dreams” seen in the sky (SF 117, 200, 215, 229, 289, 296).
Moreover, and more bizarrely still, they are mischievously omnipotent in their ability to show themselves to us in quite outrageous ways, as in a picture window, while at the very same time completely eluding any lasting or conclusive contact. We have more than enough evidence, up to eighty thousand cases reported around the world, Méheust notes. And yet we have nothing, not a single piece of incontrovertible evidence. Working much like a mystical text, they reveal themselves only to conceal themselves. Apparently, they can never be known as they are. The UFO, then, is “the unnameable thing” (la chose innommable) that clearly manifests intentional properties but frustrates all psychological and sociological explanations. Whatever it is, it exists “before all determination” (SF 19, 33–35). Accordingly, the UFO phenomenon creates epistemological conditions that are inherently solipsistic, circular, and maddeningly paradoxical for those who attempt to engage it (SF 277–78). In a word, my word anyway, they are hermeneutical realities.
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 29