mystery was not what ufos were, but "What are we to make of the whole world-wide rumor complex…what are we to make of the rumor – the ufo mythos?" What was the meaning of all the mythologizing that attends the spread of the ufo rumor? Science fiction aspects of the UFO mythos Bertrand Méheust, a French sociologist, began a study of the science fiction parallels to ufo mythology when he stumbled upon a copy of the 1908 novel The Lightning Wheel by Jean de la Hire in his family's attic. He opened it and began reading how the central characters find themselves being lifted up by a ray into a flying disc that hums and glows with a halo of light. The discovery stimulated a search for parallels between ufo experience narratives and pre-1947 science fiction literature. Meheust found dozens of them, many of the more impressive including such wondrous effects as invisible force-fields, mesmeric mental effects, materializations and dematerializations, teleportation, traveling through walls, levitating entities, and engine-stopping rays. One could also find humanoids visiting earth for a range of motives that parallel later UFO thought: wanting to spy on humans, experiment on us, breed with us, create a multi-generational program to shape humanity, deal with their dying world, invade our world, and teach us lessons about cosmic history and the need for peace. While some of this can be relegated to coincidences driven by similar reasoning and expectations about the future, often these wonders are more reminiscent of supernatural and old occult mythology than what is really reasonably expected to be created using future technology. Michel Monnerie wove Meheust's study into his larger historical critique of what shaped ufo mythology. Michel Meurger deserves special mention for expanding Meheust's thesis into an impressive compendium of parallels brimming with nearly 800 footnotes and a set of dozens of illustrations. One subsequent paper, in English, presents a focused historical study, showing a continuum between the nightmarish medical horrors experienced in modern ufo abduction narratives, back through the mad scientists of pulp science fiction, that built in turn upon anti-vivisection propaganda and rumors circulating in the 19th century. Jacques Vallee was among the first ufologists to note that electromagnetic effects associated with ufos could be found in earlier fiction such as a play written by Arthur Koestler and the first flying saucer novel – Bernard Newman's The Flying Saucer (1948). This observation has