of correspondences with David Woodard, Swiss writer Christian Kracht discusses his longstanding interest in Vril. David Bowie's 1971 song "Oh! You Pretty Things" makes reference to the novel. Stage adaptation A stage adaptation of the book was written by journalist David Christie Murray and magician Nevil Maskelyne. The production premiered at Saint George's Hall in London on 2 January 1905. Both Nevil Maskelyne and his father John Nevil Maskelyne collaborated on the special effects for the play. The play did not meet with success and closed after a run of eight weeks. Vril Society Willy Ley Willy Ley was a German rocket engineer who had immigrated to the United States in 1937. In 1947, he published an article titled "Pseudoscience in Naziland" in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. He wrote that the high popularity of irrational convictions in Germany at that time explained how Nazism could have fallen on such fertile ground. Among various pseudoscientific groups he mentions one that looked for the Vril: "The next group was literally founded upon a novel. That group which I think called itself 'Wahrheitsgesellschaft' – Society for Truth – and which was more or less localised in Berlin, devoted its spare time looking for Vril." Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels The existence of a Vril Society was alleged in 1960 by Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels. In their book The Morning of the Magicians, they claimed that the Vril-Society was a secret community of occultists in pre-Nazi Berlin that was a sort of inner circle of the Thule Society. They also thought that it was in close contact with the English group known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Vril information takes up about a tenth of the volume, the remainder of which details other esoteric speculations, but the authors fail to clearly explain whether this section is fact or fiction. Historians have shown that there has been no actual historical foundation for the claims of Pauwels and Bergier, and that the article of Willy Ley has only been a vague inspiration for their own ideas. Nevertheless, Pauwels and Bergier have influenced a whole new literary genre dealing with the alleged occult influences on Nazis which have often been related to the fictional Vril Society. In his book Monsieur Gurdjieff, Louis Pauwels claimed that a Vril Society had been founded by General Karl Haushofer, a student of Russian magician and