Billy Meier

Eduard Albert "Billy" Meier
File:Billy meier.jpg
Born	Eduard Albert Meier (1937-02-03) February 3, 1937 Bülach/ZH, Switzerland
Nationality	Switzerland
Ethnicity	Swiss
Occupation	Author
Organization	Freie Interessengemeinschaft für Grenz- und Geisteswissenschaften und Ufologiestudien (Free Community of Interests for the Border and Spiritual Sciences and Ufological Studies) (FIGU)
Known for	Contactee
Children	4
Parent(s)	Julius Meier Berta (Schwengeler) Meier
Website	www.figu.org

"Billy" Eduard Albert Meier (born February 3, 1937) is a Swiss citizen who is the source of many controversial photographs of alleged UFOs, which he presents in support of his claim that he is in contact with extraterrestrial beings. In addition, he has also presented other controversial material during the 1970s such as metal samples, sound recordings and film-footage. Meier reports regular contacts with extraterrestrials he calls the Plejaren. Meier claims that the Plejaren look similar in appearance to humans, that the Plejaren homeworld is called Erra, and that is located in a dimension which is a fraction of a second shifted from our own dimension, about 80 light years beyond the Pleiades, an open star cluster. The Plejaren were given the name Pleiadians by Meier up to 1995.

Background

India, 1964

Born in the town of Bülach in the Zürcher Unterland, Meier joined the French Foreign Legion in his teens, but says he soon left and returned home. In 1965, he lost his left arm in a bus accident in Turkey. In 1966, he met and married a Greek woman, Kalliope Zafiriou, with whom he has three children. The nickname "Billy" came by way of an American friend who thought Meier's cowboy style of dress reminded her of "Billy the Kid." This anecdote was told by Meier himself in an interview with Bob Zanotti of Swiss Radio International in June, 1982.

Meier has accumulated a large collection of photographs showing alleged spaceships that he calls beamships as well as alleged Plejaren. Meier says that the Plejaren gave him permission to photograph and film their beamships so that he could produce some evidence for their extraterrestrial visitations. Meier's claims are both believed and disputed by UFO skeptics and enthusiasts.

Meier began publishing his collection of photographs in the 1970s. His photographs were featured in various newspapers and magazines from around the world, such as the Quick, Blick, Argosy UFO, and Il Giornale dei Misteri.

Topics

"Billy" Eduard Albert Meier's claimed his first extraterrestrial contacts occurred in 1942 at the age of five with an elderly extraterrestrial man named Sfath. Contacts with Sfath lasted until 1953, shortly before Sfath died. From 1953 to 1964, Meier's contacts continued with an extraterrestrial woman called Asket, who is not a Plejaren. Meier says that after an eleven-year break, contacts resumed again (beginning on January 28, 1975) with an extraterrestrial woman named Semjase, the granddaughter of Sfath. Meier says that he has also had many contacts with another Plejaren man called Ptaah, starting in 1975 and continuing right up to the present day.

He has claimed that he has also visited other worlds and galaxies along with another universe with these extraterrestrials. Meier claims that he was instructed to transcribe his conversations with the various extraterrestrials, most of which have been published in the German language. These books are referred to as the Contact Notes (or Contact Reports). Currently, there are twenty-six published volumes of the Contact Reports (titled Plejadisch-Plejarische Kontaktberichte). Some of the Contact Reports were translated into English, extensively edited and expurgated, and published in the out-of-print four-volume set Message from the Pleiades: The Contact Notes of Eduard Billy Meier by Meier case investigator Wendelle C. Stevens. There are also many contact reports translated into English (unedited) by Benjamin Stevens.

Meier's discussions with the Plejaren are highly detailed and wide-ranging, dealing with subjects ranging from spirituality and the afterlife to the dangers of mainstream religions, human history, science and astronomical phenomena, ecology and environmental dangers caused by global overpopulation, in addition to prophecies and predictions of future events.

An additional aspect of the Meier case is the highly controversial book, the Talmud Jmmanuel. Based on the translation of ancient Aramaic scrolls purportedly discovered in 1963 in a tomb just south of the Old City of Jerusalem by Meier and Isa Rashid, the book claims to be the original teachings and life events of the man named Jmmanuel (called Jesus Christ by historians and Christians).

Photographs and films

Some of the most important evidence for Meier's claims come from his large collection of photographs. These include images of metallic discs floating above the Swiss countryside, the 1975 docking of Apollo–Soyuz, pictures of celestial objects from a non-Earthly vantage point, pictures of apparent extraterrestrials, prehistoric Earthly scenes, and scenes of a devastated future.

The photographs, films, sound recordings and Meier himself were the subject of an investigation lasting more than five years by Wendelle C. Stevens and his American team of analytic experts. The investigation was the subject of Larry Savadove's 1982 documentary film Contact. Stevens and his team employed a wide range of investigative techniques such as photogrammetric and computer analysis of photographs, tonal and dynamic analysis of recorded sounds, recreation of models, and extensive polygraph tests on Meier and his acquaintances.

One of Meier's photographs of a beamship floating beside a tree

Some UFO researchers such as Stanton T. Friedman and Jacques Vallée publicly dismiss the Meier case, while others believe the Meier case to be the most thoroughly researched and validated UFO case in our history. Some critics have provided examples of faked photos similar to what Meier produced and have pointed out that some of his photos correspond to scenes that were subsequently found in science fiction books, paintings and television programs. Meier claims that some of his photos were altered by intelligence agencies and slipped into his collection in order to discredit his UFO testimony. Kal K. Korff has been particularly vociferous in dismissing the Meier case, pointing to proof of Meier's fakery obviated by finding light-direction and focal discrepancies consistent with cut-and-paste and model techniques.

Photographic analysis was performed on Meier's photographs and films in the late 1970s when Meier first started to publish his photographs. In 1978, a report titled "Preliminary Photo Analysis," written by physicist Neil M. Davis at Design Technology in Poway, California, provided test results of an analysis of one of Meier's controversial photographs. Using microscopic examination, density contour plots, examination for evidence of double exposure, photo paste-up, or a model at short range suspended on a string. They state "Nothing was found to indicate a hoax" and concluded, "Nothing was found in the examination of the print which could cause me to believe that the object in the photos is anything other than a large object photographed a distance from the camera." They also recommended that the print was a second generation photograph and a more detailed analysis of the photo can only properly be made on the original film negative.

Recreations of Meier's images were created by photographic effects specialist and stop-motion animator Alan Friswell for the June 2005 issue of Fortean Times magazine. Friswell had employed techniques used in the pre-digital age of film special effects, as modern processes would, in Friswell's opinion, have been "unsporting." Using "old fashioned" tricks, such as foreground miniatures and photographic cutouts, Friswell crafted copies of Meier's UFO pictures, but claimed that his pictures did not in any way confirm that Meier was a hoaxer, as without personal experience of the events, he had no right to draw conclusive opinions one way or the other.

Meier's relationship with his wife Kalliope ended acrimoniously and in 1997 Kalliope stated in an interview that the UFO in the photos looked like models that Meier had made himself with items like trash can lids, carpet tacks and other household objects, and that the stories he told of his adventures with the aliens had been entirely fictitious. She agreed when asked by an interviewer that the infamous "wedding cake" UFO looked like the lid to a trash barrel. She has also claimed that one of the pictures taken of an "extraterrestrial female" with a supposed ray gun in her hand, was actually an acquaintance covered in a gold-colored tanning foil. Also, in a later interview in 1998, she confirmed that photos of the extraterrestrial women Asket and Nera were really photos of Michelle DellaFave and Susan Lund, members of the singing and dancing troupe The Golddiggers.

A study conducted by the IIG concluded that Meier could have created the photographs using household items. Contrasting this research, in a report titled "Analysis of the Wedding Cake UFO," a researcher who calls himself Rhal Zahi attempted to determine the size of the UFO in one of Meier's photographs by analyzing the reflections of surrounding objects on the metallic surface of the UFO. With the aid of Blender, a 3D modelling program, satellite imagery and a scale model of Meier's property, the author determined that the UFO in the picture is an object greater than 3 meters in diameter.

Recent evidence shows a large number of Meier's photographs of space and time travel to have been taken from other sources. [1]

Metal samples

In Savadove's documentary Contact, a metallurgist's examination of Billy Meier's metal revealed: "We have little marker bars here that we can line up on each peak as they come up. This one indicates that we have silver there. Over here, let's see, we've got some copper. A small amount of copper. That looks about all that's in here at the moment."

In 1979, Meier sent Marcel Vogel, a chemist working at IBM, crystal and metal samples Meier claimed to have received from the Plejaren. Vogel examined these samples with a scanning electron microscope and reported: "When I touched the oxide with a stainless steel probe, red streaks appeared and the oxide coating disappeared. I just touched the metal like that, and it started to deoxidize and become a pure metal. I have never seen a phenomenon like that before." Vogel also claimed that another metal sample he examined contained nearly every element in the periodic table stating, "Each pure element was bonded to each of the others, yet somehow retained its own identity." At 2500x magnification, Vogel claims the sample was, "... metal, but at the same time ... it is crystal!"

A piece of text transcribed from a video file from an interview of Vogel goes, It's a very unusual combination from an metallurgical standpoint. I've shown these to metallurgists and they shake their heads. The most unusual thing you'll see, purity of these metals in adjacency to one another without their cross contamination. They're very sensitive to marking, the soonest I've exposed them to intense light from my microscope the metal oxidizes very rapidly and just breaks down. I've never seen that.

File:Marcel Vogel sample 1.jpg

Front view of sample under microscope

File:Marcel Vogel sample1 rear.jpg

Rear view of sample under microscope

On the right side there are two screen captures from the same video file, front view and rear view of one of the three samples he claims he received.

In Wendell C. Stevens' book UFO—Contact from the Pleiades: A Preliminary Investigation Report (1982), page 424: "Looking at the piece by x-ray diffraction, for elemental analysis, he found a single element deposit of Thulium (Tm, Atomic Number 69, Atomic Weight 168.934), a rare transition element in the Lanthide series, and also of Rhenium (Re, Atomic Number 75, Atomic Weight 186.2), another rare metal." Further down the page is also the following paragraph: "Looking at that part spectrographically, the Thulium, remarkably, showed only the primary band spike for that element — no secondary bands existed. All of the elements examined spectrographically had missing bands in their spectrums which should have been there if they were normal atomic spectra. This indicates that the elements are put together in a very unusual way from normal Earth technology. The spectrographic bands are entirely different, beyond what one would consider an isotope. The bands showed a very high elemental purity and no secondary bands and no catalyst. Most of the elements studied showed the same un-Earthly characteristics." Due to the disappearance of the metal samples and no peer review process being adhered to, it is not possible to scientifically verify Vogel's claims today. On page 426 is an explanation of the disappearance of the specimen: "... the specimen was being carried on Vogel's person, in a small plastic envelope, to Ames Research Laboratories for still more exotic tests, when the metal specimen simply disappeared leaving the envelope completely undisturbed."

The Independent Investigations Group (IIG) analyzed the data from Marcel Vogel presented in the 1985 video Beamship: The Metal Analysis and in Wendell Stevens' book mentioned above. The IIG concluded the following: the element found was aluminum and not thulium, the evidence for the presence of all elements in the sample is in fact Bremsstrahlung radiation with no bearing on element composition, the structure that suggests exotic micro-manipulation can be found on the surface of metals machined by ordinary cutting tools in a machine shop, and the evidence of crystal birefringence detected using Nomarski and Cross-Polarized microscopy can be reproduced by the topography of a simple metal structure with no birefringence associated to it. The IIG said it did not find data supporting the presence of rhenium or any other rare earth element.

Notwithstanding its scarcity and high cost, rhenium is a Transition Metal, not a Rare Earth Element. Basically, REEs are lanthanides. Some writers also consider scandium and yttrium to be REEs.

Sound recordings

Another controversial aspect of Meier's claims of contacts is the sound recordings he claims to have made of UFOs.
On April 14, 1976, Meier claimed to have made a six-minute sound recording of a UFO in flight that was at the same time being pursued by a Swiss Air Force Mirage jet fighter. In the documentary Contact, Wendelle C. Stevens and his investigation team received a copy of this controversial sound recording from Meier and subsequently sent it off for analysis to various sound laboratories in the United States. One of the sound engineers reported:

• Naval Under Sea Sound Center in Groton, Connecticut: "They first identified all sounds not originating from the target object. Three conventional aircraft were detected, two of which were propeller driven. The third was a single-engine jet. Frequency graphs were prepared and a match was looked for in the 'sound bank' archives... The third airplane was a Mirage single-engine jet fighter. No unusual characteristics were detected with respect to the conventional aircraft sounds. Additional background noises detected included a small barking dog, a crow cawing, a European police siren, and some clicks and vibrations, possibly the clicking of the shutter on the camera. No match was ever found in the 'sound bank' for the target sounds of the spacecraft in this study."

Reported attempts on Meier's life

In a television interview conducted by Nippon Television (Japan) in 1980, Meier and Stevens recount what they say was a life-threatening event. They said that on the evening of May 10, 1980 at 10:01 p.m., while Stevens was investigating on site at Meier's property, a gunshot was fired and a bullet nearly hit them. It missed Meier's head by only 8 inches (203 mm). In this interview, they re-enacted the events that transpired that night, showing the remains of the bullet they found later that evening and how it landed on a concrete wall directly behind the couch they were sitting on. Meier claims in this interview that this was not the first attempt on his life. Meier further claims two other incidents in the interview, one occurring in Hinwil in the Winter time between 7 and 8 p.m. where a bullet was shot through his office window, closely missing his head and the other at 4 a.m., where he was shot in the chest.

See also

• List of alleged extraterrestrial beings

External links

• FIGU – Billy Meier's official website
• TheyFly.com – Michael Horn, Billy Meier's "Authorized American Media Representative"
• The Future Of Mankind – James Moore's Billy Meier wiki, providing English-language translations of FIGU literature including contact reports
• Exposing PseudoAstronomy Episode 32: Interview About the Billy Meier UFO Case with Derek Bartholomaus - Interview with longtime critic of Billy Meier.
• Exposing PseudoAstronomy Episode 49: Billy Meier, Michael Horn, and Asteroid Apophis
• Exposing PseudoAstronomy Episode 90: Investigation into Billy Meier's Alleged Foreknowledge About Jupiter and Saturn