if it's in the outliner then it's probably there but you just can't see it, select it on the outliner and in the perspective view press f to frame the selection, it should appear
the reason why you're not seeing it is maybe when you imported it from another software, the object's coordinates were not 0,0,0 so it wasn't on the center of the grid in maya
Last edited by hamidz90; 18-02-2011 at 09:30 PM.