‘So, gentlemen, a Being, some new Being which, like ourselves, will undoubtedly multiply and increase, is now on earth. What? Why are you smiling? Because the Being is still invisible? But, gentlemen, what a primitive organ is the eye! It can barely spot our basic needs for survival. It misses the infinitesimal as well as the infinite. It does not perceive the millions of tiny organisms present in a drop of water. It does not perceive the inhabitants, the plants and the earth of the planets closest to us; it does not apprehend what is transparent. Put it in front of a piece of non-reflecting glass and it fails to notice. We go careering straight into it as a bird trapped inside a house will continue to beat its skull against the window panes. It fails to perceive solid but transparent objects. Yet these things exist. It cannot see air which is essential to human life; wind, which is the most powerful force in nature, capable of lifting men off their feet, flattening buildings, uprooting trees, and raising the sea into mountains of water which pulverize cliffs of solid granite. Why should we be surprised if it cannot make out a new kind of body to the human, and different from it only in that it does not emit light. Do you see electricity? Yet of course it exists. What is this being, gentlemen? I believe it is what the earth is waiting for, to supersede humanity, to usurp our throne, to overwhelm and perhaps feed on us as we feed now on cattle and wild boar. We have sensed and dreaded it for centuries. We have heard its approach with terror. Our forefathers have been haunted forever by the Invisible.

It has come.

All the legends of spirits, hobgoblins and evil, elusive riders in the sky were about it. It is his arrival which man has been dreading with such trepidation. And you yourselves, gentlemen, all the activities you have been engaged in in the last few years – hypnotism, the power of suggestion, magnetism – all point towards the Invisible. And I tell you he is here. He roams about anxiously, just as primitive man did, ignorant as yet of his full power and potential which will be realized soon enough! Finally, gentlemen, here is an excerpt from a newspaper article which I have come across, published in Rio de Janeiro:

An epidemic of apparent insanity appears to have been raging for some time in the province of São Paulo. The inhabitants of several villages have fled their homes and abandoned their crops in the belief that they are being hunted and eaten by invisible vampires living off their sleeping breath and drinking nothing but water or occasionally milk.4