Gamma ray bursts remained essentially non‐understood or misunderstood from their 1973 discovery (not, I will claim, “serendipitous”) to the first, 1997, redshift. This is by no means a record. The poster explored some of the examples of longer‐standing puzzles and the after‐dinner talk some of the details of the GRB case. The most striking feature of the GRB history is probably the unanimity with which “all we, like sheep, went astray,” which followed the epoch of “we have turned everyone to his own way.” Some of the reasons for this, the range of hypotheses, and how GRBs were presented to the astronomical and larger communities are discussed. © 2004 American Institute of Physics