by Charles Lear
When it comes to having an interest in the subject of UFOs, there are those who enjoy it casually, those study it more deeply, and those who become active as investigator/researchers. As for the latter type, some, such as Max B. Miller, start young. Miller was the president of the Junior Flying Saucer League at age 15 in 1952, and in 1953, was the editor of Saucers, a magazine he and his group, Flying Saucers International, put out until 1960. In 1953, Miller came up with the idea to organize a convention and FSI organized what was billed as “The World’s First Flying Saucer Convention.” It was held at the Hollywood Hotel from August 16–18, 1953, and was moderated by FSI member Jeron King Criswell, whom some readers may know as the narrator for Ed Wood’s masterpiece, Plan 9 From Outer Space. Another precocious UFOlogist, Hayden Hewes, started the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma at the age of 13 in 1957. Hewes may not be as well known as Miller is to some readers, but he and his group were involved in some cases that should be.
Hewes passed away in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on September 13, 2017. There is an article about him by David Farris headlined “Remembering a Man Who Investigated the Unusual” that was posted October 10, 2019 on the Edmund Life and Leisure website. According to Farris, Hayden Cooper Hewes was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri on December 29, 1943. His family moved to Oklahoma City, which is where he founded the International UFO Bureau in 1957.
Hewes organization attracted members throughout the U.S. and internationally and included members of the scientific community. He gained friends among the police and the media who kept him informed and referred witnesses to him.
An early incident of note is when Hewes wrote a letter to Soviet Premier Nitika Khrushchev asking him for information about Russian UFOs. Khrushchev wrote him back and told him of his country’s interest in the subject. Soon after, young Hewes was visited by two FBI agents.
Hewes got the opportunity to witness a UFO for himself in 1965. At around 9 p.m., on August 1, local reporter Mike Buchanan called him to tell him that the Oklahoma Highway Patrol was responding to calls from over 20 people who reported seeing a UFO. Hewes drove to the highway patrol communications tower and watched the sky while calls continued to come in. At around 11:30, a call came in that there was a UFO north of El Reno, 20 miles north of the tower. It was then that Hewes saw his first and only UFO in the company of six patrolmen. As Hewes recalled, “I saw a multicolored flashing light and it hovered above the horizon to the west of Oklahoma City. While we were observing it, the highway patrol north of El Reno were also reporting the same object in our direction, so we had a triangular fix.”
The object flew over Tulsa and a 14-year-old boy got a picture that Hewes sent into Project Blue Book. Their analysis was that the photo was authentic and that the image was unexplained.
Loren Coleman wrote a remembrance of Hewes, “Investigator Hayden Hewes Died in 2017,” that he posted May 18, 2018, on his website Cryptozoonews. Besides his interest in UFOs, Hewes had an interest in Sasquatch and formed an offshoot of the International UFO Bureau called Sasquatch Investigations of Mid-America. In 1972, there was a rash of sightings of a Sasquatch-like creature along the River Road and at the foot of Marzolf Hill, Louisiana, Missouri. The creature became known as “MOMO,” and according to Coleman, “Hewes was there.” Coleman describes him as saying he was “impressed with the witnesses’ sincerity.” There was a lot of excitement in the media about the case and Coleman quotes Hewes describing the scene: “I did close to 75 television and newspaper interviews. They flew me to Chicago to do some television there. There were people around us shooting documentaries. We haven’t had a case that well-documented since.”
Documents concerning a rather famous UFO sighting Hewes looked into are available at theblackvault.com. On page 15 of the pdf file, there is a letter on International UFO Bureau stationery, dated September 14, 1973, from Hewes to then Governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter. Hewes wrote to say that his organization was interested in sightings recently reported in the area and that they had field investigators there looking into them. Hewes wrote that he’d had reports that Carter had “observed the objects” himself and asked if he’d be willing to supply details and fill out the enclosed sighting form.
Carter responded quickly and th
e returned form on page 4 of the pdf is dated September 18, 1973. According to the form, Carter, along with ten members of the Leary, Georgia Lion’s club, saw an object as bright as the moon in October of 1969 that moved towards him and then stopped. It moved “partially away” and then left. He described it as “Bluish at first then reddish. Luminous. Not solid.”
Not long after this, according to Farris, Hewes met with a man and a woman who called themselves Herf and Bonnie, who were also known as Bo and Peep. They had been speaking in the area around Dallas, Texas, and had stopped by his office in Oklahoma City on July 13, 1974. They claimed to be aliens whose mission on Earth was to show us that death could be overcome and that they were, in Farris’s words, the “Two Witnesses from Revelations XI in the Bible, who would lie dead for two-and-a-half days before being resurrected.”
According to Farris, Hewes arranged another meeting, and along with Bureau member and Oklahoma City Police Officer Dan Garcia, interviewed the couple on tape for 90 minutes. Hewes seemed to have had some sort of belief in the couple’s claims as he reported that after he walked them out to the street, he turned around after taking two or three steps and saw the couple had seemed to have vanished. He also said that Herf had given him a “thought code” he could use whenever he wanted to talk to him. He said that it worked on two occasions. He used it and received a phone call from a member of the group that had gathered around the couple.
Hewes, along with author Brad Steiger, met with the couple again, and in 1976, they co-authored a book about them titled UFO Missionaries Extraordinary. Peep, whose name was Bonnie Nettles, died of cancer on June 19, 1985, negating the claim that she would be resurrected. Herf, whose name was Marshall Applewhite, negated his claim on March 26, 1997, when he took part in a mass suicide with 38 of his Heaven’s Gate group followers. Soon after, Hewes’s and Steiger’s book was re-released under the title, Inside Heaven’s Gate.
Another case Hewes investigated was the alleged 1897 UFO crash in Aurora, Texas, in which the pilot was said to have died, that was described in the April 19, 1897 edition of The Dallas Morning News. According to the article, enough of the pilot’s “badly disfigured” remains were “picked up” to show that he had not been “an inhabitant of this world.” The article ends with the news that a funeral for the pilot was scheduled for noon the next day. Coleman includes a March 24, 1973 UPI article describing Hewes’s efforts. Hewes told the reporter that they had checked the graveyard using metal detectors and had spent three months “gathering facts.” Hewes and his group were convinced there was an alien pilot buried in the graveyard and had initiated proceedings to have the body exhumed. Permission was denied to Hewe’s group and others who would seek it in the future. An article in the March 12, 1979 issue of Time offers an explanation for the original report. According to then 86-year-old Etta Pegues, the reporter, S.E. Haydon, “wrote it as a joke and to bring interest to Aurora. The railroad bypassed us, and the town was dying.”
Hewes was one of many unsung investigators who have been responsible for bringing UFO cases into the public forum. While many may know the history, the people who helped write it are often forgotten.
Charles Lear is the author of The Flying Saucer Investigators.