Reader Requests #2: Return to Wendelle C. Stevens
The Huckster, the Pedophile, and the Fascist
A few months ago, I briefly covered the life and crimes of Wendelle C. Stevens, a UFO researcher and publisher who notoriously vouched for Billy Meier’s credibility. Often unsaid by the UFO community, the retired Air Force colonel was a prolific pedophile who spent a meager seven years in prison for his crimes. While only punished for three counts of child molestation, he also plead guilty to “distribution of sexual material” to minors as well as production of obscene material involving children.1 In the court documents provided by Kal Korff and Steven Cambian in The CIA’s CONspiracy Against Wendelle Stevens, it is further made clear that he had a prior conviction for the same crime.2 He was a habitual offender who clearly showed little remorse, instead blaming the CIA for his conundrum despite receiving (in my opinion) a quite lenient sentence after his guilty plea.
To make the legacy of the semi-well-regarded Stevens even more complicated, I was contacted by a Getting Spooked reader who shared some of what they had seen in a collection of Wendelle C. Stevens’ papers. Among the material was some “strange Christian cult” literature—I am unsure of specifics but assume it might be related to Doris Ekker and the cult of Hatonn—and a subscription to Jew Watch, a notorious Holocaust denialist publication. Why did Stevens own such nasty white supremacist literature? They did not get into his possessions by accident.
In addition to the white nationalist subscriptions in the collection, this reader informed me that Stevens also possessed a copy of Robert White’s The Duck Book: Investment Survival for the 80s. White was a Cocoa, Florida businessman who published these tomes to promote survivalism and ultra-conservative values. Readers across the country formed “Duck Clubs” which discussed his writing and ideas. Fervently anti-communist, a member of a Duck Club eventually shot and killed a Seattle-area lawyer and his wife:
David Lewis Rice, 27 years old, has said he attacked the Goldmarks because he believed they were Communists. (…) He said the head of the (Duck Club) chapter told him Mr. Goldmark was the regional director of the American Communist Party. In fact, investigators found no evidence that Mr. Goldmark had any ties to the party.3
Such an incident was perhaps the unavoidable result of White’s hyper-paranoid philosophy, which saw boogeymen in a global “communist conspiracy” of “international bankers.” The organization was even clocked as one of several anti-Indian groups with the goal of annexing the Pacific Northwest as a separatist state.4
Clearly, in addition to his status as an unrepentant child molester, Wendelle Stevens was flirting with neo-Nazi movements. This should come as no surprise given his affinity for Billy Maier and the Pleadians who lived “under a very strict, militaristic organization ruled by definite moral standards.”5 Contactee movements spanning decades have often been connected to white supremacist views, including the contacts of George Adamski and George Hunt Williamson.6 In an all-too unsurprising turn of events, the narratives of Williamson, Meier, and others were stirred into the rancid new age Nazi stew of The Phoenix Project—a tale for another time but undoubtedly relevant given the typical effect of Stevens’ ideologies of choice in combination. As stated, I speculate that the “strange Christian cult” material mentioned may have come from this group.
For more on Stevens and his unsettling blending of ufology and fascism, I highly recommend Martin Cannon’s appearance on UFO Classified with Erica Lukes which can be found below. Additionally, Cannon astutely mentions Stevens’ connections to The Phoenix Project, the Ekkers, Hatonn, and George Green.
Put into this context, the discovery of antisemitic, far right, and extremist material in Stevens’ possession is not surprising in the least. As said previously, his reputation in ufology was largely unscathed in his lifetime which is baffling. Not only should he have received a longer sentence given his horrific crimes against children, but his input into ufology also had unhealthily fascist overtones—only further demonstrated by these discoveries passed along to me.
One last tidbit: According to Jacques Vallee’s diaries, Hal Puthoff apparently went to see Stevens in jail in August 1986 where he was “languishing (…) for some incident in Arizona.”7 Ignoring the questionable phrasing of what was in reality sex crimes against children, what is darkly humorous about this visit is the fact that Puthoff himself was previously sponsored by the CIA in his work at the Stanford Research Institute—the very agency that supposedly put Stevens in jail. Despite this, their conversation seemed rather amicable. Puthoff relayed to Vallee the paranormal scuttlebutt he had received from Stevens: A hybrid child in Brazil, updates about the UMMO situation, and, of course, Stevens’ “claims that he was framed after the FBI warned him not to look for proofs that Eisenhower had classified the UFO matter above top secret.”8 I imagine this obfuscation tactic would be successful in the current UFO climate as well, blaming your own moral failings on your investigative vigor. Regardless, this prison visit also implies that at least some individuals in the UFO culture still accepted Stevens as one of their own. Even after his heinous crimes were undoubtedly known, he was assimilated back into the fold quite quickly following his stint in jail. Hopefully, this dark history will become more visible for the UFO-curious
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Korff, Kal K. and Steven Cambian. “Summons for Wendelle C. Stevens, 11/17/82.” The CIA’s CONspiracy Against Wendelle Stevens. Truth Seekers / Spectral International, 2020. Page 82-86. Available here.
Ibid., “Minute Entry for Wendelle Stevens, 11/16/82.” Page 87.
“THE DUCK CLUB: ANTI-COMMUNISM AND INVESTMENT ADVICE FOR MILLIONAIRES.” The New York Times. 2 June 1986. http://web.archive.org/web/20141214040642/http://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/02/us/the-duck-club-anti-communism-and-investment-advice-for-millionaires.html.
Rÿser, Rudolph C. The Anti-Indian Movement on the Tribal Frontier. Center for World Indigenous Studies, June 1992. Page 46. https://cwis.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Anti-Indian-Movement-on-the-Tribal-Frontier-1992.pdf.
Vallee, Jacques. Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception. New York: Ballantine Books, 1991. Page 192.
Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Page 150.
Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 3 – On the Trail of Hidden Truths: The Journals of Jacques Vallee, 1980-1989. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2012. Page 257.
Ibid.