Le Matin des magiciens

This book, an account “sometimes legendary and sometimes accurate,” is devoted to “fields of knowledge scarcely explored […], on the borders of science and tradition.” It grew out of the meeting between the journalist and writer Louis Pauwels and the chemical engineer Jacques Bergier. Five years of research, drawing on a vast body of documentation, were required to conceive and shape the book, a publishing phenomenon that sold a million copies and revived interest in “fantastic realism.”

Bergier became so closely identified with the book that he appears, eight years later, drawn by Hergé in Flight 714 to Sydney, in which Tintin encounters traces of a very ancient civilization of extraterrestrial origin. He is one of the rare characters in the Tintin albums to be given such a directly biographical embodiment.