Following a personal crisis in the 1960’s, Bent Steen Olsen transforms into an eccentric UFO prophet, claiming communication with otherworldly beings and advocating for interplanetary fellowship
Finding salvation in the saucers
Bent Steen Olsen was born in 1943. Throughout his adult life he worked as a sailor, a factory worker, and a farmhand before getting a regular job as a heating system technician in a small town outside Copenhagen named Skovlunde. In the mid-1960’s, he read an interview with H. C. Petersen, the founder of SUFOI (Scandinavian UFO Information — the oldest, still-existing UFO organisation in Denmark), in a weekly magazine and saved the article.
A couple years later, when Olsen was going through a divorce, he decided that he needed a new purpose in life. He retrieved the aforementioned article and made a subscription to SUFOI’s then monthly magazine UFO-Nyt (UFO News). He also contacted H. C. Petersen personally, requesting more information about UFO’s. Petersen accordingly sent him more material, including writings by the Polish-American UFO-contactee George Adamski.
Around this time, most of SUFOI’s then members had actually become increasingly skeptical towards George Adamski’s claims, which eventually resulted in H. C. Petersen leaving the organisation to instead lead the Danish branch of IGAP (International Get Acquainted Program), the official organisation of George Adamski, formed to promote his teachings.
Bent Steen Olsen in the trademark garb that would eventually become his everyday clothing
Internal group dynamics aside, Bent Steen Olsen’s discovery of George Adamski’s books spurred a religious awakening in him, since Adamski’s books argued that the stories in the Bible about encounters with angels were in fact how contact with extraterrestrials had been misunderstood by ancient humans. Olsen had not been particularly religious until then, but after he began reading the Bible more regularly, he found valuable messages beyond what he understood as early accounts of UFO sightings.
Later in the 1960’s, Bent Steen Olsen joined Frederiksberg UFO Study Group, later renamed Frit UFO Studium (Free UFO Study) or FUFOS for short. FUFOS was the one UFO organization in Denmark at the time which did not have an official standpoint, in contrast to SUFOI’s increasingly scientific and critical stance and IGAP’s explicit purpose of promoting Adamski’s message. Within FUFOS, Olsen formed a Bible study group, and in 1970 he published a book on FUFOS’ imprint titled Tidløst Liv for Tidsløse Mennesker (“Timeless Life for Timeless People”) in which he argued for particular passages in the Bible describing sightings of extraterrestrial spaceships and encounters with their crew.
Bent Steen Olsen’s “Timeless Life for Timeless People”, published by FUFOS in 1970
The “Haunted” Sawmill and a voice from beyond
Something else strange happened in 1970, at the Nøbbet sawmill in the remote Danish town of Nakskov. Fuses blew, engines overheated and lightbulbs exploded. The sawmill’s owner Hans Thustrup Nielsen summoned experts from all over the country to explain the mysterious accidents and refit the sawmill with new equipment. No satisfying explanation could be found for the strange accidents. Thustrup Nielsen issued a press release that he did not believe the accidents were the fault of ”flying saucers, goblins or little green men”.
Around this time Bent Steen Olsen received a telepathic message. A voice commanded him to tell Thustrup Nielsen that the day he recognized the existence of flying saucers, the sawmill would go back to working as usual. Olsen wrote a letter to Nielsen with this exact message. A few days later, the Danish tabloid magazine Se & Hør (“Look and Listen”) ran an article containing an interview with Thustrup Nielsen’s family. The family disclosed in the article that they had actually been visited by flying saucers several times over the last year and a half, describing each of the UFO encounters in great detail.
After Se & Hør printed the article about the Nielsen family’s UFO encounters, the mysterious accidents at the Thustrup Nielsen sawmill stopped.
Hans Thustrup Nielsen holding some of the more than 140 lightbulbs that had inexplicably died during just one night at the sawmill
A warning to the skeptics
Following the Nøbbet sawmill incident, Danish energy company NESA launched their own investigation into the case. They concluded that it was all a result of sabotage by Hans Thustrup Nielsen himself as part of an insurance fraud scheme! In 1971 Bent Steen Olsen declared in a letter to the alternative Copenhagen newspaper, Hovedbladet, that he did not accept such an explanation.
Ole Henningsen, a SUFOI member living in Nakskov, wrote a letter to Hovedbladet pointing out several factual errors in Olsen’s accounts of the events surrounding Thustrup Nielsen: Olsen had written his letter to Nielsen a week after the issue of Se & Hør, where the Nielsen family related their UFO experiences, went into print. The mysterious accidents at the sawmill did not stop until January of 1971, two months after the Se & Hør article interviewing the Nielsen family. Ergo, the accidents at the sawmill could not have stopped as a consequence of Olsen advising the Nielsen family to go public about their UFO sightings.
Olsen then replied to Henningsen, pointing out that he had not been informed about Thustrup Nielsen’s UFO sightings until after he had received the telepathic message. Nor did he know about the Se & Hør article until after he had written a letter to Nielsen. Olsen also criticised SUFOI for ”damaging the UFO case” by explaining observations as weather balloons, planets and shooting stars. Olsen even warned Henningsen that his house could be the next to be hit by short-circuit incidents, just like the sawmill!
In his reply to Ole Henningsen, Olsen called extraterrestrial visits to Earth a ”demonstrable fact”. He referred to sightings of flying saucers landing near military bases, as well as an incident where a Danish naval vessel near Bornholm attempted to open fire on a UFO only for the crew to find that the ship’s engine and weapons stopped working. The ship’s systems did not start working again until after the UFO had flown out of sight. Olsen also credited ”the space brothers” with having prevented nuclear war and he predicted that if World War 3 would ever happen, then the space brothers would arrive to stop it just in the nick of time. He made the argument that if Earth humans could land on the moon, it was just as possible that Earth was being visited by spacefarers from other planets. This letter ended with a flippant remark wishing that Ole Henningsen would get hit by a crashing flying saucer, in the hope such an accident would convince him of the reality of extraterrestrial contact!
Ole Henningsen (right), UFO researcher and author still very active in Danish ufology, here being handed a binder of the Danish Air Force’s UFO files
Meeting spacemen at the local pub
1971 would go on to become a very eventful year for Bent Steen Olsen overall. Early that year, he finished the manuscript for his second book, Budskabet fra verdensrummet (“The Message from the Cosmos”) which originally was planned to be printed on FUFOS’ own imprint. The plans fell through, however, so Olsen had to self-publish it. FUFOS’ other members had also become increasingly critical towards Olsen’s claims, which resulted in him leaving the organization later that year.
Olsen also had an apparent encounter with a man from another planet in 1971. One evening, Olsen suddenly got an irresistible urge to visit the local pub in his home town Skovlunde. When he had been at the pub for an hour, a mysterious stranger entered the building. The stranger was unusually graceful-looking and had dark skin and dark hair. He appeared to be around 25–30 years old and wore then-modern clothing. This man walked up to the counter and lit a cigarette. It then struck Olsen that this stranger was ”obviously” not of this earth. Olsen accordingly attempted to use his gift of telepathy to ask the stranger whether he came from Venus. The stranger then looked at Olsen and shook his head. Olsen posed the stranger another question by telepathy, asking him whether he came from Mars. The stranger looked at Olsen but did not say anything. After 10 minutes, the stranger left, walking backwards the whole time while maintaining eye contact with Olsen!
The Prophecies Begin
On the 28th of January 1972, the radio programme Trolddom og Overtro (”Sorcery and Superstition”) interviewed Bent Steen Olsen, who would talk at length about the 1971 incident at the local pub. Olsen spent the rest of the interview talking about such matters as: Meetings with people from the Sirius constellation; study of the hidden references to UFO sightings found in the Bible; his own telepathic contact with Jesus Christ, who had re-incarnated on Venus; and last but not least World War 3, which Olsen was convinced would start in 1974. When that came to pass, Olsen promised, extraterrestrials would descend from the sky to end the war.
Hovedbladet, the one magazine that Olsen regularly wrote to in order to promote his message, would eventually close in 1972. Before that, he claimed in its pages that he had met a man from the Sirius star system (whether or not that was the mysterious stranger from the pub remains unclear) and criticised an article by machine engineer Per Draminsky which argued that UFOs and astrology were somehow connected to each other.
At some point along the way in his new “career”, Bent Steen Olsen had also started an organisation named Storlogen af Stjernen i Nord (“The Grand Lodge of the Star in the North”), growing out of a self-sufficient hippie commune of which he was one of the founding members. When exactly, is unclear: some sources say 1971, others as early as 1968. Whatever the case may be, this organization would increasingly become the main base and vehicle for spreading Olsen’s message to the broader public.
Olsen in the lodge, holding one of his many publications
By 1976, World War 3 had obviously not started yet. Nor had spaceships landed in front of the United Nations to bring world peace. That year, the aforementioned gossip magazine Se & Hør got around to interviewing ”Prophet Olsen” (as he was now popularly known), and so did another magazine named Ugens Rapport (“Weekly Report”) — a rather bland sounding name, but in fact a pornographic publication with some “mainstream” content appearing regularly in between the nudity and erotic novels.
Both magazines printed in depth articles that year about Olsen — complete with photographs of the long-haired, bearded UFO prophet in a white outfit that made him look like part mediaeval Middle Eastern mystic, part human cannonball, as well as snapshots of his apartment that had been converted into a temple decorated with Buddha statues and paintings of scenes from the Bible. Olsen proclaimed in these interviews that the materialistic modern civilisation would soon collapse. From the wreckage would emerge a ”world collective” where neither nation-states nor capitalism existed.
This, Olsen reassured the tabloids, was the will of God himself. Olsen talked at length about how The Almighty himself had selected Olsen as his representative on Earth complete with a white dove landing outside Olsen’s window on the day he formed the Grand Lodge of the Star in the North.
Prophet Olsen and some fellow lodge members ca. 1976 (note the snake on the left)
“We are all gods in disguise”
The Grand Lodge of The Star in the North’s (alleged) 300 members supposedly included not just UFO enthusiasts but also Freemasons and Rosicrucians, as well as Prophet Olsen’s pet boa constrictor named Eternity, who took part in every single mass that was conducted. Olsen famously proclaimed that we humans were all gods in disguise, going through a process of spiritual evolution that would conclude in a race of androgynous ”universal humans”. Olsen also described his belief that after death the soul would live on and re-incarnate — sometimes on different planets, Olsen himself recalled many previous lives here on Earth since its creation. Olsen furthermore called himself a practitioner of white magic, in contrast to black magic, naming Adolf Hitler as a famous practitioner of the latter.
Prophet Olsen also announced in interviews that he lived a celibate lifestyle, avoiding any stimulants such as alcohol or drugs, having been both a former womanizer and alcoholic. In his ideal society, created under the guidance of Jesus Christ and the space-brothers, substance abuse and sexual promiscuity would be much less widespread. The consumption of meat, the money economy, use of colour television (!) and the operation of private motor vehicles, a major source of air pollution, would also be banned. As a matter of fact, Olsen himself preferred to travel by a horse-drawn cart, owning two horses kept on a farm near Skovlunde for the purpose of pulling a wagon that Olsen had converted into a mobile temple! Olsen also announced his plans to relocate the members of the Lodge to a self-sufficient agricultural compound that would function as a model for his utopian future society.
As outré as Olsen’s beliefs and visual aesthetic seemed, he nonetheless reassured his readers that even Jesus Christ was maligned in his lifetime as a dangerous cult leader. However, Olsen noted that in the 1970’s society had marched on to ridiculing the leaders of new religions instead of executing them — so some degree of progress had obviously been made since Jesus Christ’s lifetime.
Olsen with his pet snake “Eternity”
The further adventures of Prophet Olsen
After the 1970’s, Bent Steen Olsen made significantly fewer appearances in the media, perhaps as a result of the type of new religious movement he headed no longer being popular.
By coincidence, while this article was being written, HidDenmark’s Thomas Brisson Jørgensen talked with a colleague at work about Olsen. She remembered him well growing up in the 1980’s in Skovlunde. He was an acquaintance of her mother and often came around the house to visit, where he did “levitations” and other party tricks to amuse the children. My parents also remember Olsen from back in the hippie days, when they came in the same circles, although they do not have any real anecdotes to share about him.
On his 50th birthday in 1993, the magazine Paranyt (“Paranormal News”) printed an article about Olsen. The Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet also published an article on the 31st of March 1997, after their journalists had tracked him down in the town of Hornbæk, near Helsingør (Elsinore). This newspaper article described that he now lived in a trailer there, regularly delivering sermons to the neighbourhood while wearing his trademark attire.
Later that year, Olsen wrote a letter to UFO-Kontakt, the magazine published by IGAP. In the 5th issue of the 1997 run of UFO-Kontakt, subscribers could read Olsen declaring that the Earth would be struck by massive catastrophes within the next 5–10 years as prophesied in the Bible by the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 24, verses 6–42. The same extraterrestrials whom ancient humans had mistaken for angels would then arrive in spaceships to rescue humanity.
Olsen spent that letter refining his idiosyncratic interpretation of Christianity even further: God the Father was the will to goodness and the life force present in everything from the smallest earthworm to stars and planets, the Heavenly Mother was the shared soul in us all manifesting in all physical life, and Christ the active creating nature that was the true self of all beings. Olsen also argued for all religions having the same message just presented in different symbolism, pointing out the similarities between Jesus Christ and the Egyptian god Horus as well as the Norse god Balder. Likewise he pointed out the similarities between Odin hanging on a tree for 9 days pierced by a spear to gain wisdom, Jesus Christ dying in the 9th hour on the cross before being resurrected, and the Buddha receiving his illumination under the Bodhi tree.
The same letter contained criticism of the European Union, as well as warnings against a false prophet arising among the Muslims as predicted by the Renaissance-era astrologer Nostradamus, and an interpretation of Hosea 4:1–4 as warning against overfishing.
Prophet Olsen in front of his home base “The White House” in Hornbæk (2000)
On the 13th of February 2000, Danish newspaper Politiken interviewed Prophet Olsen, still living in his trailer home in Hornbæk which he had converted into an intricately decorated temple just as he once had done with his Skovlunde apartment. By then, Olsen had started making a living as a practitioner of alternative medicine, and exchanged his white robes for a blue outfit decorated with golden patterns. He made it clear that he dressed like that even when going shopping in the local supermarket, and that he did not mind children pointing fingers at him. In this interview, Olsen announced his plans for moving to Tisvildeleje Strand later in February 2000. He had already driven his trailer there the year before — the high point of that trip being when Denmark’s current King (then-Crown Prince) Frederik paid him a visit!
In 2020, Bent Steen Olsen’s daughter Tine Diana Olsen informed Danish ufologist Willy Wegner that The Prophet sadly had passed away on the 10th of May that year, after having lived at her house for the past four months. The life of a unique and colorful personality had finally come to an end, leaving Denmark with one less original character from a time now long gone by.
R.I.P. Bent Steen Olsen (1943–2020)
Commentary
Prophet Olsen’s Grand Lodge of the Star in the North is interesting to analyze in the overall cultural context of the mid-1970’s: His prophecy of a future world revolution, where corrupt capitalist society and nation-states would be replaced by an environmentally sustainable civilisation with no militarism or nationalism, looks like a systematisation of the hippie movement ethos; except with the hedonism here being replaced by a focus on clean living and asceticism. Interest in finding a common truth in different religious traditions, as Helena Blavatsky had attempted in the 19th century, was also commonplace in alternative circles during the 1960’s and 1970’s.
A clear lineage from Theosophy can indeed be seen in Olsen’s Grand Lodge of the Star in the North using ideas and symbols from many different religions, and promising a race of spiritually enlightened superhumans to evolve in the future – a concept that the Theosophists referred to as the Sixth Root Race. The name Star in the North was also clearly borrowed from the Order of the Star in the East, an organisation headed from 1911–1927 by Indian philosopher of religion Jiddu Krishnamurti, himself a former member of Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society.
Specifically in regards to the 1960’s — 1970’s UFO culture, Prophet Olsen’s messages reflect widespread trends there in fine detail: The prediction of an impending World War Three, which the space brothers would intervene to stop, was something that Knud Weiking and his Universal Link had been proclaiming already back in 1967. However, Olsen and the Grand Lodge of the Star in the North did not get around to anything as drastic as building a fallout shelter for the purpose of surviving doomsday, like Weiking’s Universal Link movement did.
Select Sources
- Hovedbladet issue 34+36+38 (1971)
- Per Andersen — Dansk UFO-Litteratur 1950–1990, pp. 32–34
- Politiken, 13th of February (2000)
- Se & Hør: ”Vi er alle guder i svøb” (1976)
- Ugens Rapport, issue 12 (1976)
- UFO-Kontakt, issue 5 (1997)
- Willy Wegner — UFO’er over Danmark (Part 2) pp. 123–127 + article on Wegner’s blog https://www.skeptica.dk/?p=8042
Special thanks to Ole Henningsen for fact-checking and further correspondence about the history of UFO culture in Denmark.
