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Some of the most important alleged evidence for Meier's claims comes from his large collection of photographs and a few films. These claim to include images of metallic discs floating above the Swiss countryside, pictures of celestial objects from an alleged non-Earthly vantage point, pictures of apparent extraterrestrials, prehistoric Earth scenes, photos of the controversial "Wedding Cake UFO" (WCUFO), and photos of "Energy Ships" changing shape. His films purport to show UFOs disappearing in front of the camera, dancing around a tree and moving its treetop without touching it, and a UFO emitting flashes of light.
Some of the most important alleged evidence for Meier's claims comes from his large collection of photographs and a few films. These claim to include images of metallic discs floating above the Swiss countryside, pictures of celestial objects from an alleged non-Earthly vantage point, pictures of apparent extraterrestrials, prehistoric Earth scenes, photos of the controversial "Wedding Cake UFO" (WCUFO), and photos of "Energy Ships" changing shape. His films purport to show UFOs disappearing in front of the camera, dancing around a tree and moving its treetop without touching it, and a UFO emitting flashes of light.

In the documentary ''Contact'' (1987) by Larry Savadove, retired USAF Lt. Col. Wendelle Stevens led a team of American investigators into the examination of Meier's claims, which lasted from 1978 to 1982. Stevens and his team, with the help of contractors and laboratories including the [[United States Navy|US Navy]], [[IBM]] and [[NASA]]'s Jet Propulsion Laboratory performed analysis on Meier's photographs, films, sound recordings and metal samples. Meier's acquaintances who attested to Meier's claims, were also subject to the investigation by use of techniques such as [[Polygraph|Polygraph tests]]. The result of the photographic analysis showed that Meier's photographs were not produced by trick photography such as paste-up techniques or play of perspectives with small models on a string. The result of these analysis concluded that the UFO in the photograph was a large object photographed some distance from the camera<ref>{{Citation|last=The Billy Meier UFO Case-2|title=Billy Meier - Nippon TV UFO documentary (Japanese, 1980)|date=2012-10-01|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgKjEhx-e4Y|accessdate=2017-04-03}}</ref><ref>{{Citation|last=Elders|first=Brit|title=Contact|date=2000-01-01|url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266426/|last2=Elders|last3=Meier|last4=Stevens|first2=Lee|first3=Billy|first4=Wendelle|accessdate=2017-04-03}}</ref>.


Some UFO researchers such as [[Stanton T. Friedman]] and [[Jacques Vallée]] publicly dismiss the Meier case,<ref>[[#Sheaffer 1998|Sheaffer 1998]], p. 34</ref> while others {{who|date=March 2017}} believe the Meier case to be the most thoroughly researched and validated UFO case in our history. Some critics {{who|date=March 2017}} have provided examples of faked photos similar to those that Meier produced<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.iigwest.com/investigations/meier/meier.html |title=Billy Meier 101 |website=Independent Investigations Group (IIG) |publisher=Center for Inquiry-Los Angeles |location=Hollywood, CA |accessdate=October 17, 2013}}</ref> and have pointed out that some of his photos correspond to scenes that were subsequently found in science fiction books, paintings and television programs.<ref>[[#Korff 1995|Korff 1995]], pp. 245–247</ref> Meier claims that some of his photos were [[conspiracy theory|altered by intelligence agencies]] and slipped into his collection in order to discredit his UFO testimony.<ref>[[#Korff 1995|Korff 1995]], pp. 297, 307–309</ref> Kal K. Korff has been particularly vociferous in dismissing the Meier case, pointing to evidence of fakery in his photos, including light-direction and focal discrepancies consistent with cut-and-paste and model techniques.<ref>[[#Korff 1995|Korff 1995]], pp. 169–193, 208–213, 245–247</ref>
Some UFO researchers such as [[Stanton T. Friedman]] and [[Jacques Vallée]] publicly dismiss the Meier case,<ref>[[#Sheaffer 1998|Sheaffer 1998]], p. 34</ref> while others {{who|date=March 2017}} believe the Meier case to be the most thoroughly researched and validated UFO case in our history. Some critics {{who|date=March 2017}} have provided examples of faked photos similar to those that Meier produced<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.iigwest.com/investigations/meier/meier.html |title=Billy Meier 101 |website=Independent Investigations Group (IIG) |publisher=Center for Inquiry-Los Angeles |location=Hollywood, CA |accessdate=October 17, 2013}}</ref> and have pointed out that some of his photos correspond to scenes that were subsequently found in science fiction books, paintings and television programs.<ref>[[#Korff 1995|Korff 1995]], pp. 245–247</ref> Meier claims that some of his photos were [[conspiracy theory|altered by intelligence agencies]] and slipped into his collection in order to discredit his UFO testimony.<ref>[[#Korff 1995|Korff 1995]], pp. 297, 307–309</ref> Kal K. Korff has been particularly vociferous in dismissing the Meier case, pointing to evidence of fakery in his photos, including light-direction and focal discrepancies consistent with cut-and-paste and model techniques.<ref>[[#Korff 1995|Korff 1995]], pp. 169–193, 208–213, 245–247</ref>

Revision as of 18:13, 3 April 2017

Eduard Albert "Billy" Meier
Born
Eduard Albert Meier

(1937-02-03) February 3, 1937 (age 87)
Bülach/ZH, Switzerland
NationalitySwitzerland
OccupationAuthor
Organization(s)Freie Interessengemeinschaft für Grenz- und Geisteswissenschaften und Ufologiestudien (Free Community of Interests for the Border and Spiritual Sciences and Ufological Studies) (FIGU)
Known forContactee
Children4
Parents
  • Julius Meier
  • Berta (Schwengeler) Meier
Websitewww.figu.org

Eduard Albert Meier (born February 3, 1937) is a Swiss citizen who is the source of many controversial photographs of alleged unidentified flying objects (UFOs), which he presents in support of his claim that he is in contact with extraterrestrial beings. He 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 it 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.[1]

Meier has been widely characterized as a fraud by skeptics and ufologists, who suggest that he used models to hoax photos claimed to show alien spacecraft.[2][3][4][5][6]

Background

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,[verification needed] 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.[7]

Meier has accumulated a large collection of photographs[8] 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 believed by UFO enthusiasts and disputed by skeptics and scientists.[9][10]

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,[11] Blick,[12] Argosy UFO,[13][14] and Il Giornale dei Misteri.[15]

Alleged extraterrestrial contacts

Meier said his extraterrestrial encounters began in 1942, at the age of five, when he met an elderly Plejaren man named "Sfath".[16] After Sfath's death in 1953, Meier said, he began communicating with an extraterrestrial woman (though not a Plejaren) called "Asket". All contacts ceased in 1964, he said, then resumed on January 28, 1975, when he met "Semjase",[16] the granddaughter of Sfath, and shortly thereafter another Plejaren man called "Ptaah". Other Plejarens, including a woman named "Nera", have since allegedly joined the dialog as well.[citation needed]

Photographs and films

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

Some of the most important alleged evidence for Meier's claims comes from his large collection of photographs and a few films. These claim to include images of metallic discs floating above the Swiss countryside, pictures of celestial objects from an alleged non-Earthly vantage point, pictures of apparent extraterrestrials, prehistoric Earth scenes, photos of the controversial "Wedding Cake UFO" (WCUFO), and photos of "Energy Ships" changing shape. His films purport to show UFOs disappearing in front of the camera, dancing around a tree and moving its treetop without touching it, and a UFO emitting flashes of light.

In the documentary Contact (1987) by Larry Savadove, retired USAF Lt. Col. Wendelle Stevens led a team of American investigators into the examination of Meier's claims, which lasted from 1978 to 1982. Stevens and his team, with the help of contractors and laboratories including the US Navy, IBM and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory performed analysis on Meier's photographs, films, sound recordings and metal samples. Meier's acquaintances who attested to Meier's claims, were also subject to the investigation by use of techniques such as Polygraph tests. The result of the photographic analysis showed that Meier's photographs were not produced by trick photography such as paste-up techniques or play of perspectives with small models on a string. The result of these analysis concluded that the UFO in the photograph was a large object photographed some distance from the camera[17][18].

Some UFO researchers such as Stanton T. Friedman and Jacques Vallée publicly dismiss the Meier case,[19] while others [who?] believe the Meier case to be the most thoroughly researched and validated UFO case in our history. Some critics [who?] have provided examples of faked photos similar to those that Meier produced[20] and have pointed out that some of his photos correspond to scenes that were subsequently found in science fiction books, paintings and television programs.[21] Meier claims that some of his photos were altered by intelligence agencies and slipped into his collection in order to discredit his UFO testimony.[22] Kal K. Korff has been particularly vociferous in dismissing the Meier case, pointing to evidence of fakery in his photos, including light-direction and focal discrepancies consistent with cut-and-paste and model techniques.[23]

Photographic analysis was performed on Meier's photographs and films in the late 1970s 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." However, they also pointed out that the print was a second generation photograph and that a more detailed analysis of the photo could only properly be made on the original film negative.[24]

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.[25] 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.[citation needed] She also claimed that photos of purported extraterrestrial women "Asket" and "Nera" were really photos of Michelle DellaFave and Susan Lund, members of the singing and dancing troupe The Golddiggers. Multiple investigators later confirmed that DellaFave and Lund were in fact the women in the photographs.[26][27]

Metal samples

In Wendell C. Stevens' book UFO—Contact from the Pleiades: A Preliminary Investigation Report (1982), page 424, presented the results of an investigation by Marcel Vogel, research scientist working at the IBM San Jose Research Center: "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."[citation needed]

The Independent Investigations Group (IIG) analyzed data from Marcel Vogel presented in the 1985 video Beamship: The Metal Analysis and in Wendell Stevens' book mentioned above.[28] 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.[28] The IIG said it did not find data supporting the presence of rhenium or any other rare earth element.[citation needed]

Sound recordings

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."[29]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Moosbrugger 2004, p. 280
  2. ^ James R. Lewis (2002). The Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religions. Prometheus Books, Publishers. pp. 653–. ISBN 978-1-61592-738-8.
  3. ^ Paul Kurtz. Skepticism and Humanism: The New Paradigm. Transaction Publishers. pp. 57–. ISBN 978-1-4128-3411-7.
  4. ^ Joe Nickell (29 September 2010). Camera Clues: A Handbook for Photographic Investigation. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 165–. ISBN 0-8131-3828-0.
  5. ^ Kal K. Korff. Spaceships of the Pleiades: The Billy Meier Story. Prometheus Books, Publishers. pp. 195–. ISBN 978-1-61592-441-7.
  6. ^ Catherine L. Albanese (1 December 2006). A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion. Yale University Press. pp. 502–. ISBN 0-300-13477-0.
  7. ^ Zanotti, Bob (Interviewer) (June 1982). Billy Meier – UFO Contactee (MP3). Switzerland in Sound (Audio recording). Biglen, Switzerland: Bob Zanotti. Event occurs at 0:17:35. Retrieved October 12, 2013.
  8. ^ "Strahlschiffe (UFOs)". FIGU Switzerland. Schmidrüti, Switzerland: FIGU. Retrieved October 17, 2013.
  9. ^ Nickell, Joe (March–April 1996). "Spaceships of the Pleiades: The Billy Meier Story". Skeptical Inquirer (Book review). 20 (2). Amherst, NY: Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal: 48–49. ISSN 0194-6730.
  10. ^ "Photo Comparison". Independent Investigations Group (IIG). Hollywood, CA: Center for Inquiry-Los Angeles. Retrieved October 17, 2013.
  11. ^ von Jacobi, Ilse (July 8, 1976). "Die Frau, die von einem anderen Stern kam". Quick (29): 86–88.
  12. ^ Schüler, Zwei (September 26, 1976). "Ein altes Buch und neue Spuren". Blick. Zürich: Ringier.
  13. ^ Stevens, Wendelle C. (March 1977). "In Canton Zurich, Switzerland, ARGOSY Discovers: A Most Remarkable Recurring UFO Case!". Argosy UFO. 2 (2): 34–37, 54. (Part 1)
  14. ^ Stevens, Wendelle C. (May 1977). "In Canton Zurich, Switzerland, ARGOSY Discovers: A Most Remarkable Recurring UFO Case!". Argosy UFO. 2 (3): 34–41. (Part 2)
  15. ^ von Jacobi, Ilse (August 1976). "Semjase l'amica delle Pleiadi". Il Giornale dei Misteri (65): 16–21.
  16. ^ a b "Portraits der Kontaktpersonen". FIGU Switzerland. Schmidrüti, Switzerland: FIGU. Retrieved October 17, 2013.
  17. ^ The Billy Meier UFO Case-2 (2012-10-01), Billy Meier - Nippon TV UFO documentary (Japanese, 1980), retrieved 2017-04-03{{citation}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  18. ^ Elders, Brit; Elders, Lee; Meier, Billy; Stevens, Wendelle (2000-01-01), Contact, retrieved 2017-04-03
  19. ^ Sheaffer 1998, p. 34
  20. ^ "Billy Meier 101". Independent Investigations Group (IIG). Hollywood, CA: Center for Inquiry-Los Angeles. Retrieved October 17, 2013.
  21. ^ Korff 1995, pp. 245–247
  22. ^ Korff 1995, pp. 297, 307–309
  23. ^ Korff 1995, pp. 169–193, 208–213, 245–247
  24. ^ Stevens 1982, p. 277
  25. ^ Friswell, Alan (June 2005). "Faking it..." Fortean Times (197). London: Dennis Publishing: 38–41, 43. ISSN 0308-5899. Retrieved October 19, 2013.
  26. ^ Outer Space Pictures – Asket-Nera-Semjase – Summary billymeieruforesearch.com, retrieved March 20, 2017.
  27. ^ Billy Meier at alienscientist.com, retrieved March 20, 2017.
  28. ^ a b "Metal Analysis Deconstruction". Independent Investigations Group (IIG). Hollywood, CA: Center for Inquiry-Los Angeles. November 2011. Retrieved October 17, 2013. (Updated report.)
  29. ^ Stevens 1989, pp. 457–459

References

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