This is a skeptical inquiry into a remarkable 19th century French medium, here called Helene Smith. Her actual name was Catherine-Elise Muller (b. 1861 d. 1929). She popularized the concept of automatic writing, which earned her admiration from the latter-day Surrealists. And her interplanetary psychic visions are extremely similar to contactee accounts from the 1950s and 1960s.Helene, at the hands of her bossy and controlling sprit guide "Leopold," visited remote times and places, particularly 15th century India (where she was a doomed princess), and 18th century France (where she was Marie Antoinette), and of greatest interest, Mars. This book documents the Martian language and writing, includes hand-drawn illustrations of scenes, and mysterious vignettes of life on another planet. Included are over forty short texts in "Martian," with translations in French (interlinear) and English.Flournoy"s book brought Helene fame, and the book is still in print over a hundred years later. However, she was not appreciative of his critical approach, and refused to work with him any further after the book was published. (Quote from sacred-texts.com)About the AuthorTheodore Flournoy (1854-1920) was a professor of psychology at the University of Geneva and author of books on spiritism and psychic phenomena. He is most known for his study of the medium Helen Smith (or Helene Smith - a pseudonym for Catherine Muller) who relayed information about past lives through a trance state, entitled From India To The Planet Mars (1899). He proposed this information as "romances of the subliminal imagination", and a product of the unconscious mind (Stevens 1994). Flournoy was a contemporary of Freud, and his work influenced C. G. Jung"s study of another medium - his cousin Helen