American scientists, convinced that the 'gene groups have been disturbed' advised that a 'new race of men is appearing endowed with superior intellectual powers'. 'Some mutants', Pauwels and Bergier suggest, 'could have in their blood substances capable of improving their physical equilibrium and raising their intelligence-coefficient to a level higher than our own'. Speaking of LSD-25, and anticipating the theories of another doctor -- Timothy Leary -- they speak of 'mutants, whose glands would spontaneously secrete tranquilizers and substances capable of stimulating the activity of the brain'. They call these the 'forerunners of the new species destined to replace Man'. Our successor, they warn, may be here already.

Science isn't the only source of their belief. Pauwels and Bergier call on the Hindu philosopher-sage Sri Aurobindo and the Catholic paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. They also bring in Andre Breton and another great French writer, Guy de Maupassant. In his classic horror tale 'The Horla' Maupassant envisions the coming mutant in a form that would become a caricature by the end of the decade: the demonic individual, possessed of hypnotic powers and a dominant will, all characteristics that would be exploited by the sensational press surrounding Charles Manson.

But Pauwels and Bergier weren't the only ones thinking about mutants in the early sixties. One of the hit 'weird' films of 1960 was VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, based on John Wyndham's 1957 novel, THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS. In it, a strange meteor shower leaves all the women of a small English town pregnant, although they are still virgins. The children turn out to be members of an eerie collective mind, possessing enormous intellects and incredible psychic powers. As they will be a few years later when the hippies begin to sprout, the adults are understandably frightened and eventually destroy these strange creatures.

Science-fiction novels exploring the mutant theme, like Theodore Sturgeon's MORE THAN HUMAN (1953) and Robert Heinlen's Crowley-influenced bestseller STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND (1961) became cult favorites in the sixties. Along with CHILDHOOD'S END, MORE THAN HUMAN was a central influence influence on the ideas of Ken Kesey, leader of the LSD-fueled Merry Pranksters, and originator of the famous Trips Festival that got the San Francisco acid-rock scene going. In 1964, after their first run across the States in their famous psychedelic bus, the Pranksters began to feel the effects of their daily diet of LSD. They felt they were acquiring strange powers, and developing a group mind, like the children in VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED. Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty in ON THE ROAD, was the pranksters' driver. He discovered he could turn his attention to several things at once -- a power that often frightened uninitiates in the passenger seat. Kesey seemed to be able to read minds. As other alternative groups in the sixties would experience, a weird gestalt began to evolve among the Pranksters: they began to feel their separate psyches were fusing into a single collective consciousness with superhuman powers: telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition. With Teilhard de Chardin, they began to believe that 'Nothing in the universe can resist the cumulative ardour of a sufficiently large number of enlightened minds working together in organized groups'.

Eventually the mutant theme reached adolescent candidates like myself through superheroes like Marvel Comics' X-MEN, which began in 1963: mutant teenagers with weird powers who band together for support in a world that won't accept them. By 1966, and the beginnings of Haight-Ashbury, other teenagers had banded together, faced with a similar problem. By then the hippies too were calling themselves mutants. In the SAN FRANCISCO ORACLE for January 1967, a 'Manifesto for Mutants' proclaimed: 'Mutants! Know now that you exist! / They have hid you in cities / And clothed you in fools clothes / Know that you are free.'

... The ideas of another prophet of a new race, Madame Blavatsky, would have curious echoes with the hippie movement. Pauwels and Bergier even suggest that the 'mutants' may 'welcome some great catastrophe' in order to better recognize what Gurdjieff calls the 'seriousness of the situation' -- an apocalyptic theme that would emerge in different forms in the mystic sixties.

The counterculture's intuition of an impending apocalypse grew out of its dissatisfaction with modernity and its sense that the coming new age would embody many beliefs rejected by modern civilization. Pauwels and Bergier agreed. 'If the present', they wrote, 'is detaching itself from the past, this means a rupture, not will all the past periods, and not with those that reached maturity, but only with the most recent past, i.e., what we have called "modern civilization".' The contemporary of the future, they say, will be 'more religiously minded'. 'Too much modernism separates us from the past; a little futurism brings us nearer to it.'