Wendelle C. Stevens

Military Background

Wendelle C. Stevens was born on January 18, 1923, in Round Prairie, Minnesota. After graduating high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, working initially as an airplane mechanic before rising through the ranks to achieve the rank of 2nd Lieutenant, and eventually retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. His military service took him across the Pacific theater and later to Alaska for classified polar survey and cartographic mapping projects—it was during these Alaskan assignments in the early 1950s that Stevens first encountered credible UFO reports from military personnel and began his lifelong interest in the subject.

The UFO Photo Archives

Following his retirement from the USAF in 1963, Stevens devoted the remainder of his life to systematic UFO research. He founded UFO Photo Archives, an independent research enterprise dedicated to collecting, analyzing, and cataloging UFO photographs and related documentation. Over several decades, Stevens assembled what became the world's largest privately held collection of UFO photographs—more than 4,000 images gathered from eyewitnesses, military personnel, and alleged contactees across multiple continents. His work was methodical and rigorous; he personally investigated over 100 UFO cases, conducted field research at remote locations, and interviewed hundreds of witnesses. Stevens authored or co-authored more than 30 books on UFO phenomena, contact cases, and extraterrestrial contact claims. Among his published works were UFO Photographs Around the World, Message From the Pleiades, and UFO...Contact from the Pleiades, which detailed his most famous investigation.

The Billy Meier Case

Stevens gained international prominence as the lead investigator of the Billy Meier contact case, one of the most controversial and extensively documented UFO contact claims in modern history. Beginning in the late 1970s, Stevens spent over a decade investigating the claims of Eduard "Billy" Meier, a Swiss farmer who alleged ongoing contact with beings from the Pleiades star cluster. Stevens acquired photographs directly from Meier and assembled an international team of private investigators to examine the physical evidence, including having materials analyzed at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. While the Meier case remained contested in mainstream scientific circles, Stevens' investigation was thoroughgoing and his documentation became a key reference point in UFO contact research. He interviewed Meier multiple times, examined the photographs under laboratory conditions, and gathered supporting testimony from witnesses.

Legacy and Archive

Stevens' archive—preserved at Rice University's American Heritage Center—represents one of the most comprehensive private collections of UFO documentation in North America. He appeared in multiple documentaries including UFO's Are Real (1979), Contact (1987), and Where Are All the UFO's? (1996). Stevens passed away on September 7, 2010, in Tucson, Arizona, at age 87, leaving behind a body of work that bridged military credibility with grassroots UFO investigation. His decades-long commitment to photo analysis, witness interviews, and case documentation influenced subsequent generations of independent UFO researchers and contributed significantly to the archival record of contact claims and sighting reports.