Are there any UFO-encounter literature featuring spherical orb UFOs prior to 2000's?

Reading all the declassified reports and watching the videos, it rings home a book I read many, many years ago as a teenager called "Thiaoouba Prophecy". It's a now popular, out-of-this-world book that the author (now dead) wrote in 1986 and published with over 1 million readers to date, which describes an alien-abduction encounter: (PAGE 6) About 100 metres from us was an enormous sphere, from which emanated a bluish Aura. I later learned that it measured 70 metres in diameter. The light was...