An earthling's alien encounters

Copyright 1996 South China Morning Post Ltd.

South China Morning Post

BYLINE: You don't believe in UFOs? First talk to Wendelle Stevens, as Elisabeth Tacey did this week

Colonel Wendelle Stevens, UFO investigator, does not look or speak like a madman. But what he says might have come right out of the script for the film Independence Day and seems ridiculous. In the quiet of a plush hotel coffee-shop, he explains that aliens are constantly coming to visit us. South China Morning Post, November 8, 1996 They may not arrive in the enormous battleships that threatened the world in Independence Day, but nevertheless they come. Colonel Stevens was in Ecuador three weeks ago talking to eight women from an isolated native tribe who are even now, he says, carrying implanted alien foetuses which will be retrieved halfway through term to complete their growth in an alien laboratory. Many governments around the world - including China's - have recovered crashed flying saucers which they are studying to try to learn the advanced technology used, he says. They feed out disinformation or simply lie because they want to keep the technology for themselves. For its part the Hong Kong Government says it has never caught or studied craft or aliens. But this Sunday the territory is hosting its first symposium for UFO enthusiasts at the Hong Kong Stadium with Colonel Stevens given top billing. The Royal Observatory keeps some reports, but few sightings are known in pragmatic Hong Kong. Colonel Stevens says he has a photo of a UFO over the South China Morning Post, November 8, 1996 Peak. Evidence from elsewhere is even more dramatic, he says. "The US Government has at least 16 crashed vehicles and probably 35. We (the United States Government) have a number of bodies dissected and investigated. I've held a university medical report in my hand that described one such alien body. "It was about four feet three inches tall (about 1.3 metres), the size of a 12 -year-old boy. The head was disproportionately big for the body, quite weak, a frail body. It had large eyes and the fingers reached below the knees, and there was webbing in the joints between the fingers . . ." There are many different aliens, he continues. "Their appearance is not identical. Some have larger ears, shorter ears, no ears at all, faces with no mobility, different noses, great differences in eyes." One type that comes, he says, has no gastro-intestine, no anus or urinary tract. They take in nutrients through folds of tissue in their mouths and spit out the waste. South China Morning Post, November 8, 1996 "Now isn't that a marvellous system? Why don't we have a system like that? True, they release some waste through their skin, which makes them smell rather sulphurous after a while . . ." It would be easy to dismiss statements like these as more tall tales or the workings of a troubled mind. But Colonel Stevens says he began his 43 years' research into UFO sightings as a US Air Force pilot, directly because of work he carried out in Alaska.

"I supervised a group of civilian technicians installing high-tech equipment on the B29 (jets) of the Ptarmigan project," he says. The aim was to map electronically and photograph every centimetre of the Arctic. The equipment was designed to record all electromagnetic emissions and take movie and still photos of all anomalous phenomena - "we measured everything we could think of", he says. Colonel Stevens is convinced the US Government was looking for UFOs - despite his admission that he never saw any of the data collected. "Rolls of film were couriered directly to Washington every night. We never got to develop the films. But I heard some stories," he said. South China Morning Post, November 8, 1996 There are accounts of a 33-metre circular object sitting on the ice which took off, straight up, leaving no support equipment; of objects that "were coming straight up to a B29, stopped, reversed at the speed of the B29 and lost the pilots who chased them"; of saucers that submerged underwater; of vehicles travelling at well over 6,000 km/h.

"As soon as pilots landed we would separate them and debrief them. If their stories were substantially the same then we would report them. There were two schools of thought - we were seeing a new Russian development after the capture of scientists during the war, but there was no evidence before that," he says. "The other theory was that they were extraterrestrials. I was sure they were." It seems a leap of imagination to suggest these are the only two explanations. But Colonel Stevens is confident: he has seen too much evidence, he says, which cannot be explained away. He is quiet-spoken and a confident speaker. Little about him suggests he is mad. South China Morning Post, November 8, 1996 True, he does enjoy recounting in great detail the stories he has been told - in one case, recounting one twice - but even then he checked himself, realising his mistake. Another explanation is that he does it for money and fame. But he has his US Air Force pension since he left the service in 1963 after 40 years, plus the cash he earns as a businessman delivering mothballed US planes to buyers around the world. "A lot of people think I'm crazy," he says. "But that's because they don't have the knowledge I do. Most people are not prepared to believe it, it's too far out." People also fear the challenge to religion, but there is no reason why there should not be civilisations other than ours, he says.

He is careful to remain independent and prides himself on his scientific investigations, often spending months at a site. He distances himself from what he calls "the woo-woo element" or in-fighting UFO groups that give the subject a bad name. He is a believer in the Roswell incident - the capture and autopsy of an alien by the US Government. He reckons the mysterious and carefully guarded South China Morning Post, November 8, 1996 Area 51 in Nevada does indeed contain flying saucers. "I go all over the world investigating these things. I have two bedrooms full of documents. I check and verify everything. I do not publish sightings until I can publish names of corroborative witnesses unknown to the first witness." Photographs are checked with top laboratories to see if they are fake, he says.

For instance, he shows a blurred, poor shot (as most UFO photos are) of the New York East River, in which a white disc appears to hang at an angle above the Empire State Building. At 1.20 pm on April 12, 1993, five people saw a rising hump in the water turn into a disc, which flew in an arc over the city. The snap was taken in a hurry by a photographer preparing to take other, rather more conventional shots. Though he has the names of the witnesses, they have asked that he does not make them public. Even Hong Kong's local representative for the world research group, the Mutual UFO Network, asks that his name not be released for fear of upsetting his bosses. South China Morning Post, November 8, 1996 Colonel Stevens finds the shyness of observers understandable, given the famous case of Billy Meier.

Mr Meier is a one-armed Swiss farmer with little education. He is also, he says, the chosen contact of Pleiadians from the star cluster Pleiades, having been visited more than 700 times, particularly by the female astronaut Semjase. Mr Meier has collected volumes of video and photo footage, plus Pleiadian rock and minerals. And he has been the subject of numerous assassination attempts from people he says are frightened of his claims, or, like his neighbour who shot him at point-blank range, annoyed by the unwanted attention he brings. In that case a notebook in his pocket deflected the bullet away from his body. Sceptics say the photos are faked with models. But not only does Colonel Stevens give credence to Mr Meier's claims, he says he was present when one deranged local tried to shoot him - and the Pleiadians saved him. "I was there, I saw the bullet hole behind where his head would have been if he hadn't fallen into my lap," he says. Mr Meier said he had a pain that wrenched him down. Both believe it was an alien rescue.

South China Morning Post, November 8, 1996 Such dangers and his inquiries also explain why he reckons there are roughly 10 times as many incidents seen as are reported. Even China's top UFO -studying professor, Sun Shili, did not escape sanction. He was arrested after his one talk abroad about the mainland's exploits, in which he described how the government was analysing crashed UFOs to design their own world-beating aircraft. Although Professor Sun's visit to Las Vegas in 1993 was approved, "my guess is he said too much", says Colonel Stevens. Professor Sun - former First Secretary for Commerce in Mexico City, another hot UFO -spotting site - is now able to travel again and Colonel Stevens hopes he can attend a world congress of UFO -watchers next year in the territory. The Pleiadians, it seems, explained to Mr Meier why their kind usually visit isolated people. If they come to large groups, factions form and the resulting in-fighting means their message does not get through. That has already happened, they told him, about 2,000 years ago - with Jesus Christ. Colonel Stevens says visits have been made to big cities. A group of discs flew over Mexico City in 1991, and before that over Beijing in 1979, which led to the setting up of the Chinese UFO Research Organisation headed by Professor Sun.

South China Morning Post, November 8, 1996 He himself has seen four UFOs, but no aliens and he has not been abducted. Most who are end up with blocked memories or are very traumatised, he says. People in Ecuador, by contrast, seem to take it all in their stride. Aliens allegedly appeared in a three-legged spaceship, and told one bemused farmer that they needed his (sterilised) wife to give birth to one of their youngsters because they were becoming too inbred. She agreed, they took both husband and wife on board their spaceship and injected a blue jelly substance through her belly, then promptly turned up four months and 10 days later to retrieve the foetus. No scars, no problem. The woman was now pregnant a second time and seven of her neighbours have magnanimously agreed to be surrogate mothers for this suffering race from another planet.

Does he believe it? "Well, the local doctor verified her pregnancy and then she was no longer pregnant. "I don't know what to make of the whole thing," he says. The tribe was totally isolated, with no TV, no newspapers, only their banana -leaf houses and small plots of land. South China Morning Post, November 8, 1996 Money would not be a motive, he says. "When I see people like this and I see how their lives have changed I have to believe something has happened." GRAPHIC: Photographic evidence . . . a picture taken in 1993 said to be of a UFO flying over the New York skyline. Colonel Wendelle Stevens, pictured left in Hong Kong, has no doubts about such sightings although, he admits, 'a lot of people think I am crazy'



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