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usually cannot be repeated. The astronomer may also witness such events, e.g., the flares on Mars (Salisbury, 1962; Ley, Willy, and Wernher Von Braun, 1960), but at least he is a trained observer, and none of his colleagues are likely to doubt his word. In the case of the UFOs, although many observers may be highly trained in certain aspects of contemporary modern life, few, if any, could claim much competence as carefully schooled UFO observers! Frequently, they are not trained to differentiate between observation and interpretation, and often there is a strong tendency for all but close friends to doubt their word. Here, then, is a phenomenon of nature which could, and should, be of extreme interest to the scientist. But it is a difficult one for even him to study. How do we study events which cannot be repeated and which are recorded only through the minds of observers who can scarcely resist the temptation to enlarge their stories and to intermingle the facts with their own interpretations and psychological responses? About all we can do at present is to evaluate the reports, although sufficient desire might make more than this possible (in the Exeter sighting described below, observers could have actually waited, fully equipped with high-speed camera and other devices, for the return of the objects). Professor J. Allen Hynek (1966), the Director of the Observatory at Northwestern University, and for the past 18 years consultant to the Air Force in their study of UFO sightings, has often stated that to make progress we must accept the fact that the UFOs do exist - as reports. The Air Force and several private groups have accumulated bulging files of these reports, containing everything from detailed interviews to the remnants of pancakes submitted by a witness who claimed he had received them from a space man! These reports and the many which will be obtained in the future (using hopefully better means of information gathering) are the data with which we must work, and the only data so far available. What can we do with them? One obvious approach is to propose as many possible interpretations as can be devised and then to evaluate the data in terms of these hypotheses. The process will be a circular one, in which hypotheses are formulated on the basis of the data, and the data are then re-examined in terms of the hypotheses. In the following paragraphs, five hypotheses are discussed and then a few representative sightings are considered. The subject has been reviewed by several authors in book form, often competently, but virtually always with some degree of prejudice (for: Hall, 1964; Keyhoe, 1960; Lorenzen, 1962, 1966; Michel, 1958; Vallee 1965; Vallee and Vallee, 1966-against: Menzel and Boyd, 1963). Although earlier observers usually interpreted the UFOs in terms of miraculous religious events, most UFO observers during the past 19 years have suggested that the objects which they observed were extraterrestrial spaceships. Can we eliminate the spaceship hypotheses in any rigorous scientific manner? Logically one might think of two approaches: either we must show in each and every instance ever reported that the object was not an extraterrestrial spaceship, or we must show by some sort of scientific logic that it is I. Extraterrestrial Spaceships Or Other Machines