In this paper, we present a indirect adaptive control method using a wavelet neural network (WNN) for the control of chaotic nonlinear systems without precise mathematical models. The proposed indirect adaptive control method includes the off-line identification and on-line control procedure for chaotic nonlinear systems. In the off-line identification procedure, the WNN based identification model identifies the chaotic nonlinear system by using the serial-parallel identification structure and is trained by the gradient-descent method. And, in the on-line control procedure, a WNN controller is designed by using the off-line identification model and is trained by the error back-propagation algorithm. Finally, the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed control method is demonstrated with applications to the chaotic nonlinear systems.