The Truth About Flying Saucers [antikvár]

PREFACEMy sole claim to fame in an era in which the art of literature chases its own tail and can no longer distinguish between light and darkness is that my work has managed to win the friendly confidence of those who would employ science in the service of a bold imagination, which official science regards as "proper to those ashamed of knowledge"to use Gabriel Marcel's striking phrase.My contact with Aimé Michel is a surprise and a meeting in a world where Paracelsus is more important than Descartes, a world avoided by high-class stupidity and which distrusts routine and charlatanism alike.Through Aimé Michel's book I have made the acquaintance of minds like those of Lieutenant Plantier and Captain Clérouin. They are far ahead of a school of psychologists which indulged in fantastic hops from Paul Bourget to Freud, with no common associations save certain solitudes half or wholly misunderstood.Aimé Michel's book passes from the objeaive to the subjective with airy ease. Each day adds proiifically to the evidence he has brought forward, and when the scoffers, the fools, the romantics and the braggarts have done eir worst, there remains a strong smell of truth. I sadly recall Renan's words : "Truth could mean disappointment." For even in an era of decadence, monstrously remote from the golden age of the giant insect world, the ants (among others) enjoy privileges to which humans cannot yet aspire (in the matter of procreation and heating, for instance).The superiority to ours of some other form of progress does not prove that a mass visit of the contrivances called "saucers" would do us any good.