Page 13 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - April 2024

Silicon Valley’s Flying Saucer Man
The Forgotten Legend of
Silicon Valley’s Flying
Saucer Man
Continued from Page 12
As he left, he gave me some Discopter
stickers, pamphlets about Weygers, and
one of the posters, which he insisted I
mail to Musk.
Hunter’s gallery was tucked down a
side street in Santa Cruz, in a single-story
industrial building behind a wall of cafes
and surf shops. He said he had a “touch”
of obsessive-compulsive disorder. The
gallery showed a touch and a For the first
decade of his professional life, Hunter
worked at and then took over his father’s
painting contracting business. A broken
marriage sent him to Hawaii, where he
began selling art at a high-end gallery on
Maui. “In the first month, I was the No. 1
salesman,” he said. “I got lucky, hit a
whale, and sold a couple hundred grand.”
Soon after, he seized on the works of
Robert Wyland, who’d become famous
for his ocean-themed murals, and went on
to sell millions of dollars of the art. “He
was a hustler for sure,” Wyland says. “He
always loved the arts and had a good
eye.” Hunter grew his hair and beard
long, enjoyed a joint and a surf on the
beach in the evenings, and soaked it all
in. “I was selling art, while a new batch of
pretty tourist girls would arrive every
Monday,” he said. “I loved it.”
When the internet took off in the 1990s,
Hunter started gobbling up domain
names tied to well-known artists and the
arts in general. This helped him build
markets for such sculptors as M.L.
Snowden and Frank Eliscu, who
produced the Heisman Trophy, and to sell
to celebrity clients including George
Foreman and Tanya Tucker. Hunter
eventually returned to the Bay Area,
running his websites and setting up the
gallery in Santa Cruz. The art business
did well, but it never offered him the
fortune or fame of his dreams. “That’s
been the personal challenge for me,” he
said. “Can I take a guy that nobody has
ever heard of and make him a national
story?”
Dozens of Weygers’s sculptures filled the
main room: big ones on large black
pedestals arranged symmetrically in the
center, and smaller pieces ringing the
13
edges. Glass displays held Weygers’s brothers and sisters were home-schooled
books, tools, and scale-model Discopters, and ambled barefoot around the
and photos from his life dotted the walls. countryside dressed in white tunics. The
On a long table at one end of the room, family was well-off, but there was much
dozens of folders meticulously cataloged to do to keep the farm and hotel running.
information from Weygers’s life. There Alex often helped out in the blacksmith
was a mathematical precision to the studio.
room, everything finely spaced and
pristinely maintained, like a shrine. A At 15, he traveled to Holland for
small closet in the back had been turned education at a prep school and then
into a UFO museum. There were college. He studied mechanical
hundreds of books (The Roswell engineering and naval architecture while
Incident, Flying Saucers—Serious continuing to hone his blacksmith skills.
Business, Is Another World Watching?) As part of his training, Weygers took long
and old magazines with some of the trips at sea and forged precise bits of
earliest mentions of flying saucers (Life, machinery while bobbing around on the
Reader’s Digest). Hunter spent hours on rough waters. “If parts wore out, there
auction and collectors’ websites to snag was no one there to save you,” he liked to
as many copies as possible, like a UFO say, according to an interview found in
hoarder. The room was packed with UFO the vast trove of records dug up by
toys, beer, ray guns, DVDs, journals, and Hunter. “You were alone at sea. You were
board games. “Thank god for EBay,” he expected to make and design their
said. replacements with whatever was at
hand.”
None of this really surprised the people
who knew Hunter well. Born in 1958, In 1926, Weygers moved with his young
he’d grown up in nearby Santa Clara wife, Jacoba Hutter, to Seattle, where he
back when Silicon Valley was still called pursued a career as a marine engineer and
the Valley of Heart’s Delight, after its ship architect and began inking drawings
bountiful fruit and nut orchards. As a kid, of the Discopter in his notebook. By
he spent weekends woodworking in his 1928, however, he’d fallen into a deep
dad’s garage or going to flea markets depression, after Hutter and the couple’s
with his mom. Even then, he collected son died during childbirth.“This was the
things—Hot Wheels, coins, stamps, car start of a downward spiral,” Weygers
parts, pins, guns. “The last name is wrote to his parents after Hutter’s funeral.
Hunter, you know,” he said. “Everything is so awful now.” He gave
up shipbuilding and threw himself into
Weygers was born in 1901 on the sculpting, traveling throughout the U.S.
Indonesian island of Java and grew up on and Europe to study under several
a sugar plantation owned by his Dutch masters of the period.
parents. The family also ran a hotel on the
tropical property, a tangle of mango trees (Continued on Page 14)
and sugar cane fields. Alex and his six