[1] Owen served in World War I as a lieutenant with the 1st Canadian Division and with the 14th Battalion of the 3rd Brigade of the Royal Montreal Regiment.

On this trip he worked with Martin Heinrich Gustav Schwantes of the University of Kiel at sites associated with the Pre-Roman Iron Age.

[8] In 1938, Owen wrote a series of articles for the Edmonton Journal analyzing Mein Kampf, where he predicted that Adolf Hitler would start another world war.

[12] In the spring of 1939, Owen predicted a future alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union,[13][14] and became a strong opponent of the policy of appeasement.

[16][17] Owen correctly suspected that the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact had contained a secret protocol dividing Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence.

[2] During World War II, he was a major (1940–45) and later served as lieutenant colonel officer-in-command (1945–47) of the University of Alberta Division of the Canadian Officers' Training Corps.

Following his retirement, he settled in Hanover, Germany and dedicated himself to continuing his research on the early history and culture of the Germanic peoples.

[25] Drawing upon a combination of anthropological, archaeological, historical and linguistic evidence, his magnum opus was published in 1960 as The Germanic People.