Wendelle Stevens Runs a UFO Conference Badly
The CUFORN Bulletin Recalls the 1991 First World UFO Congress
Being realistic, I am a little burnt out from my day job and various spinning plates of research. I am currently working my way through Jacques Vallee’s Forbidden Science journals for future article material, but progress is slow-going. For this reason, I am taking it a little easy this week but wanted to relay a bit of goofy UFO history that I came across in my research for the two installments of the newsletter covering the slimy UFO researcher, Wendelle C. Stevens. Back to regularly scheduled programming soon.
It is 1991. Wendelle Stevens has resumed his role as a semi-prominent UFO personality after serving prison time for child molestation. Larry Fenwick of the Canadian UFO Research Network (CUFORN) uses his newsletter, The CUFORN Bulletin, to convey his experiences attending the First World UFO Congress—a new conference organized by the aforementioned Stevens. He dedicates an entire issue to the highs and lows of his time as a speaker which can be found via Archives of the Unexplained here. While I didn’t intend for Stevens to become the resident antagonist of this publication, I must admit to finding his relatively unscathed reputation baffling. That being said, not only was he a pedophile and likely fascist, but he also seems to have not been a very good UFO conference organizer.
Stevens came to CUFORN editor Fenwick with an offer to speak at the conference, claiming that he was “well known (...) in Tucson” and expected “a lot of media publicity.”1 He wanted Fenwick to speak on the 1989 Guardian UFO case of Carp, Ontario—a complete can of worms you can learn more about from the recent CBC documentary UFO Town. Fenwick himself considered the case “an obvious hoax” based upon other credible sightings but recognized that Stevens “tend(ed) to take everything at face value, with a minimum of skepticism.”2 Nevertheless, Fenwick decided that he would take the speaker gig and cover the Guardian case and other aspects of his UFO research.
From the 3rd of May to the 7th, a variety of UFO researchers, contactees, and abductees gave speeches at the Tucson Hilton Hotel. Among other guests, Fenwick notes that Bill Cooper was an attendee “whose table was placed in a rather a propos location-- next to the men's lavatory.”3 Fenwick’s recollection of the event and the appearances from a bevy of UFO cultural personalities is worth a read, including cameos from Linda Moulton Howe, Judy Doraty, Vladimir Terziski, Anthony Dodd, Robert O. Dean, Christa Tilton, Al Bialik, and others. But what I was drawn to because of my research into Stevens was the fact that the conference seemed to be a rather amateur production.
Speakers were allotted 45 minutes each, but no one informed the speakers of this fact with some going two hours over time. Translators shared the microphone with the respective speakers resulting in sentence-by-sentence speeches that were difficult to follow. During Fenwick’s own presentation, the person operating the slide projector had no idea how to do so. Stevens had promised to publish all the speeches in a book following the conference but instead just gave each attendee short summaries of the speeches at the conference itself. He would later sell audiotapes of the presentations via his operation The UFO Library but fibbed in the advertising for the tapes, saying that there were “thousands in attendance.”4
Fenwick, who dealt with a multitude of small problems in his travels to Tucson, found that Stevens had misrepresented much of what the conference would provide. “Upon arrival at Tucson, I was expecting a Congress desk set up opposite the baggage claim area,” he writes. “Stevens had said it would be there, but it was not.”5 Stevens requested thousand-word speaker bios that were seemingly never published or utilized—most speakers introduced themselves. He promised to pay for Fenwick’s meals but did not. On the whole, Fenwick came to find the entire experience a perfect encapsulation of Murphy’s Law: That everything that could go wrong, will go wrong. Stevens reported that the whole venture lost $11,000.
In addition to all his other flaws—and we have explored many of them—Stevens appears to have been a none-too-skilled UFO conference organizer. However, the story behind that conference is not without its charm, due in large part to Fenwick’s colorful recollections. This specific issue of The CUFORN Bulletin presents a fascinating time capsule of the varied personalities that made up the 90s UFO milieu and a further indictment of the skeevy former Air Force colonel who has intermittently plagued Getting Spooked for months.
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Fenwick, Lawrence J. The CUFORN Bulletin 12, no. 3. May-June 1991. Page 3. https://files.afu.se/Downloads/Magazines/Canada/CUFORN%20(Canada,%20Fenwick)/CUFORN%20Bulletin%20-%20Vol%2012%20No%2003%20-%201991%20-%20May-Jun.pdf.
Ibid.
Ibid., page 4.
Ibid., page 5.
Ibid., page 9.