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Everything about these stories seems to cry hoax. The proof is typically a series of photographs (which could easily be fraudulent) and copious quantities of pseudoscience. Someone who had really contacted visitors from another world should surely be able to do better than that. Why should visitors from another world bother with such obscure representatives of the human race, anyway? Their message is always that man must cease his wars or be destroyed, but why should such an important message be given to someone who is bound to be considered a liar when he delivers it? It is interesting to consider the possibility that the contactees are genuine. When considering the UFO phenomenon, all sorts of wild alternatives come to mind. If the extraterrestrials wanted to be ignored by the scientific community on Earth, they could hardly choose a better and more effective way than the delivering of profound messages to the souls who presently claim contact! It is possible that secret devices being tested by earthly governments are misinterpreted as extraterrestrial machines. That this explanation might account for the phenomenon as a whole is, however, quite unreasonable. To begin with, the performances of the UFOs makes our present rockets appear puny indeed. Could any modern government suppress such a capability for nearly 20 years (since 1947)? Most convincing is the fact that the UFO phenomenon goes way back into history. UFO enthusiasts, for example, often cite the first two chapters of the Book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament as an excellent example of a flying saucer sighting (Menzel and Boyd, 1963, indicate that it was probably a sundog, but this is a far-fetched explanation for the details reported by Ezekiel). Vallee (1965) documents the sightings previous to 1947. He states that he has on file more than 300 UFO sightings prior to the 20th century, although he apologizes because he has never had time to make a thorough search. He considers his cases to be only a small sample of those which might be available. They were carefully chosen for their high quality, roughly conforming to the criteria of good sightings described above. 19th century. The great majority of these more recent accounts were recorded in the scientific literature, particularly that of astronomy (often in the annals of the various astronomical observatories). It is important to emphasize that these are accounts which are not readily explainable - as natural phenomena. Classic, for example, are the observations in Nuremberg (April 14, 1561) and in Basale (August 7, 1566) which have been analyzed in some detail by Jung (1959). Both of these sightings involved large inclined tubes in the sky from which spheres originated, an event occurring sometimes in more recent times (Vallee 1965, cites 13 examples between 1959 and 1964). Spheres and discs appeared to fight each other in aerial dances. The inhabitants of these two relatively large cities observed this strange phenomenon for a long interval of time on each of the dates given. V. Secret Weapons Some 60 of these 300 accounts occurred previous to 1800, and the remainder were recorded during the A great attempt was made to consider the scientific accounts of the 19th century in terms of the