Retired
USAF Lt. Col. and UFO researcher
Wendelle C. Stevens, author of such books as 1986's UFO
Crash at Aztec: A Well-Kept Secret, has died
at the age of 86. He passed away on Tuesday, September
7, 2010, at 4:21 p.m. of a massive heart attack. Another
source says he died at 4:44 p.m. in his home in Tucson,
Arizona of respiratory failure. He is dead, which is for
certain.
Wendell
C. Stevens was born January 18, 1923, in Round Prairie,
Minnesota.
After
enlisting in 1941 in the U.S. Army, he was transferred
to the Air Corps in 1942. He was accepted for Aviation
Cadet Training the same year, and graduated from Fighter
Pilot Advanced Training in 1943 as a very young 2nd lieutenant
in the then U.S. Army Air Corps. After that, he attended
the first Air Corps Flight Test Pilot School at Kelly
Field, where he learned to fly
all the aircraft in the Air Corps inventory at that time,
and a few U.S. Navy aircraft. He was assigned
as the first commander of the First ARU Floating, an aircraft
maintenance squadron, in the Pacific theater. This continued
until the war ended in 1945.
After
the war ended, Stevens was reassigned back to the Flight
Test Division. He continued in this capacity until the
summer of 1947, when he was rotated to Alaska, where he
supervised a special highly-classified team of technical
specialists who were installing hi-tech data-collecting
equipment. It was there that the data-collecting equipment
onboard B-29s detected UFOs.
Stevens
also served as
U.S. Air Attaché in South America. He
retired from the USAF in 1963, and worked for Hamilton
Aircraft until 1972. He retired
as a Regular Air Force Lieutenant Colonel,
a grade which he still held
in retirement.
Wendelle
Stevens was actively involved in Ufology for 54 years;
first as Director of Investigations for the Aerial
Phenomena Research Organization (APRO)
in Tucson, Arizona, where he retired.
Becoming
disenchanted with the dearth of detail on contact events
reported in contemporary books and journals of the time,
several years ago, Stevens began preparing detailed reports
of his own investigations of extensive and on-going UFO
contact cases that came to his attention. These reports
often ran to over 200 pages - and some to over 600 pages
- in length, and were published in heavily-illustrated
permanent hard cover library-style bindings.
He
amassed one of the largest collections of UFO photos and
investigated a number of contact cases, published in more
than 22 books. His most famous one was the Billy
Meier case in Switzerland.
In
December 1997, he received an
Award for Lifetime Achievement at the First
World UFO Forum in Brazilia, capital of Brazil.
He was a founder and Director of the International
UFO Congress and recently transferred his
extensive photo collection, library and archives to Open
Minds Production.
Stevens
often expressed strong opinions. For example, Stevens
included a section in his UFO
Crash at Aztec book about the alleged crash
of a UFO at Laredo, Texas on July 7, 1948, believing that
the UFO was a top-secret U.S. experimental aircraft and
that the burned body allegedly found was that of a large
rhesus monkey. In a 2009 interview, Stevens said that,
although he believed many UFO incidents do involve extraterrestrial
spacecraft, he thinks the 1948 Laredo crash was really
a secret experiment that originated at the White Sands,
New Mexico missile range.
For
serious ufologists, one of the most problematic associations
that Stevens had was with Billy
Meier, who most in Ufology feel is a hoaxer.
Wendelle C. Stevens' several volumes of Message
from the Pleiades: The Contact Notes of Eduard Billy Meier,
were the world's introduction to the citizen of Switzerland
who claims to be a UFO contactee and the source of many
controversial UFO photographs presented as proof that
Meier has had contact with space aliens.
Source:
http://copycateffect.blogspot.ca/2010/09/stevens-obit.html