by Charles Lear
Was the death of Frank Edwards, famous newscaster and UFOlogist, predicted by the space people? This story shows up in a lot of literature from the time and many people took it seriously. An additional oddity offered up in the account is that the time of Edward’s death was a few hours before midnight, June 23rd, 1967. This was almost twenty years to the day after June 24, 1947, which was the date of the sighting by Kenneth Arnold that many consider the beginning of the modern UFO mystery.
The story begins in New York City during the 1967 Congress of Scientific UFOlogists. It was billed as “New York’s first flying saucer convention” and took place over a weekend starting Friday, June 23rd and ending Sunday, June 25th. The chairman of the event was Jim Moseley and speakers included: Ivan Sanderson, John Keel, Frank Stranges, James Randi, Howard Menger Long John Nebel and Gray Barker. In the audience was Dr. Edward Condon, presumably researching for the Air Force funded University of Colorado UFO study. The organizers had arranged to have a court reporter, Bessie J. Gibbs present and a transcription of the entire convention was published and available for the price of five dollars.
The transcription of the night of Saturday, June 24th is on page 37. Jim Moseley gives some opening remarks and introduces Condon to the audience. He then announces the death of Frank Edwards and the crowd reaction was recorded as “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” It is just after this that he introduces Gray Barker as the first speaker of the night. Barker thanks Moseley and elicits a round of applause for Moseley’s efforts in organizing the convention. Then on page 39 of the transcript, Barker says this:
“I don’t know how well I am going to do tonight, ladies and gentleman. In fact, all day today I have felt like not even going on. Some of you perhaps heard the Long John Show last night, and you heard Jim’s announcement a while ago; and I am very, very sorry and regret deeply that a certain prediction which I received was read on the Long John Show or announced. We discussed it earlier, before this happened, and agreed that this should not be on the air, particularly due to my great friendship with Mr. Edwards who, if he wasn’t the greatest researcher into this subject, certainly was one of the greatest.”
It seems that a prediction was read on air prior to Edward’s death and that Barker and radio talk show host, John Nebel regretted it after the fact. How specific was the prediction and where did it come from? John Keel mentioned the prediction in his book, “The Mothman Prophecies”. The book was published in 1975, but the notes he used were written just after the convention. In his 1967 daily notes he wrote:
“Prior to the convention, Gray Barker of West Virginia received a set of prophecies from an unidentified ‘contactee’. I knew about these prophecies before the convention began. One of them stated that, ‘A well-known radio commentator in the mid-west would die suddenly during the convention.’”
Frank Edwards died of a heart attack in Indiana, and even though it doesn’t seem to have named him specifically, the fact that the prediction came from a contactee and the fact that Edwards was deeply involved in UFOlogy are interesting.
The story got out to a broader audience through a 1971 Saga article, “Liquidation of the UFO Investigators?” by Otto O. Binder. Binder lays out the premise of the article in the first two sentences:
“Over the past 10 years, no less than 137 flying saucer researchers, writers, scientists, and witnesses, have died – [sic] many under the most mysterious circumstances. Were they silenced, permanently, because they got too close to the truth?”
The very first example is Edwards. Binder describes the 1967 congress and how Gray Barker, “the chairman” (Jim Moseley was the chairman) had received two letters and a phone call saying that Frank Edwards “would die during the convention.” Binder discounts the predictions as being psychic and, instead, holds them up as evidence of premeditated murder. In Binder’s version of that night, Jim Moseley addresses the audience with, “Your attention please, we just heard some shocking news.” and then relates the news of Edward’s death. Binder describes a “single gasp” rising “from 2000 throats.” He then has Moseley saying:
“I need not remind you of the extremely odd coincidence of this news, … [sic] that Frank Edwards’ death occurred 20 years after – [sic] to the day – [sic] the UFOs first made big headlines in America. It was on June 24, 1947, that Kenneth Arnold made his famous sighting of nine flying saucers.”
None of this was in the transcript, which leaves one with the possibilities that the court reporter missed it, it was edited out or that Binder was embellishing. Binder then corrects the statement and informs the reader that Edwards actually “died on June 23rd, a few hours before midnight.” Even with the correction, Binder considers that it was close enough to June 24th to be significant and lists four others who died on that date, including Frank Scully, author of the 1950 book, “Behind the Flying Saucers.” The June 24th date has been noted by others and writer/researcher, Loren Coleman, attributes it to what he calls, “the anniversary syndrome” which is where a person dying close to a date holding significance for them will try to hold out until then. Interestingly, Jackie Gleason, well known to be enthusiastically devoted to the UFO subject, died on June 24, 1987.
After going through a list of deaths he feels are questionable, Binder brings up the Men in Black and references Robert S. Easley, author of, “MIB: A Report on the Mysterious Men in Black Who Have Terrorized UFO Witnesses and Investigators in All Parts of the Nation.” He talks of Gray Barker’s and John Keel’s experiences with the MiB and comes back to the predictions concerning Edwards as seen from John Nebel’s point of view:
“And radio personality Long John Nebel, in his recent book, The Psychic World Around Us, [sic] tells how Gray Barker, just before the convention, showed him two mysterious unsigned letters stating that Frank Edwards would die during that convention. “On Thursday afternoon,” continues Nebel, just a few hours before he was due at WNBC (for an interview), “Barker phoned again. ‘John’, he said, ‘something happened a few minutes ago that really shook me up! I got a phone call from a man who said that Edwards would not live to see the end of the convention. That’s all he said before he hung up. The tone of his voice scared me. It was like nothing I’ve ever heard before, like something not human!’”
John Nebel had a reputation for embellishing the truth and sometimes making it up as he saw fit so a researcher would need to find the actual letters to confirm
Nebel’s account. Unfortunately, even if one could find the letters, Gray Barker also had a reputation for embellishment as well as being a practical joker. That Barker would have stooped to using a friend’s death and a hoaxed letter to support the claim of a psychic prediction is very unlikely but it could remain an argument for skeptics. Therefore, the question remains: was Frank Edwards specifically named in the prediction? To answer that definitively, one would have to find a recording of the June 23, 1967 Long John Nebel Show and listen to it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be available, probably due to the fact that the show was broadcast from midnight until 5:30 A.M. from 1956 to 1978. That’s a lot of tape to store and tapes were often reused. In spite of all this, even if the prediction was as Keel related it and didn’t name Edwards specifically, it was close enough to be put in the file marked, “strange”.