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It is easy to imagine several reasons why the extraterrestrials might not want to contact us. Did they plant us here as a colony many thousands of years ago and are carefully observing our evolutionary development? Do they envy us for our natural resources and want to conquer us, although present logistic problems make such an effort impossible? Are they waiting for us to straighten out our wars and race problems? Are they simply uninterested in us as contemporaries, preferring to observe us as specimens? Entomologists study the honeybees very carefully but make no diplomatic contact with the queen! Imagine the Aborigines of Central Australia, who are still in the stone age and who have not even developed the bow and arrow. They have had no contact at all with modern civilization. What happens when a jet plane flies overhead and one of them observes it? When he tells of the huge, shiny bird that didn't flap its wings, had no feet, made an ear-splitting roar, and even had smoke coming out of its tail, surely his fellows assume that he is crazy. Or if the phenomenon becomes so common that it must be accepted as real, they could hardly be expected to deduce from it the conditions of our modern civilization, let alone our motives. "Why," they might ask, "don't the intelligent beings who guide this mighty bird land and trade bone nose-pieces with us?" Actually, many of the Aborigines, even those who have come in contact with civilized men, still interpret the airplane in a religious context, as witness the establishment of the cargo cults among these peoples (Worsley, 1959). We cannot, then, eliminate the spaceship hypothesis, although some of the arguments against it are quite impressive. We should, in deference to the scientific method, examine with a completely open mind any evidence which might be marshalled in favor of the hypothesis. Let us consider the four alternatives to it. Given certain special circumstances, nearly anyone can be confused and amazed by the appearance of some conventional object which under other circumstances might cause no bewilderment whatsoever. What psychological factors lead to such misinterpretations? In various instances, reported UFOs have clearly been demonstrated to be balloons, kites, birds, conventional aircraft, artificial satellites, planets and stars, meteors, clouds, natural electrical effects such as ball lightning (Klass 1966), and optical effects such as reflections, mirages, sundogs, and defractions caused by inversion layers in the atmosphere (see Menzel and Boyd, 1963, and Air Force files). Let us consider the level of certainty in classifying a given sighting here. Often, the sighting may be placed here with absolute certainty. A balloon reported as a UFO was never out of sight of its launchers. A perplexing light in the sky takes form as an airplane as it gets closer. My children woke me at 6:00 A.M. in Tubingen, Germany, saying that they were watching a hovering UFO over the city. I grabbed my binoculars and watched the brilliant light move rather rapidly both toward us and away from us and even from side to side. After about a minute, I decided to make my observations more precise, backed up against a doorway, and aligned the object with a spot on the window frame. Upon doing this, it stopped moving, and we were soon able to identify it as Venus, then the morning star. Its lateral motions were apparently illusions due to our own movements, and, its II. Conventional Phenomena Misinterpreted