The Ober-Sädelegg photos

These photos were taken by Meier around 5:40 pm on 8 March, 1975 at a relatively unpopulated spot a couple miles southeast of his later residence at Schmidrüti. The closest location to it was called Ober-Sädelegg. According to what Wendelle Stevens learned (UFO...Contact from the Pleiades: Preliminary Investigation Report, (1982), p. 311), Meier shot two rolls of colored-slide film, of which copies of eight from the 2nd roll survive, as the craft moved slowly across his view generally from right to left. At his location alongside the dirt road an incinerator had been under construction, and Meier rested his arm on its bricks while taking some of the pictures. The images below were taken from Stevens' mini-CD "UFO Photographs in Color."

This first one, below, is known as the "logpile scene."

The logpile scene is derived from one of Meier's original color slides that Stevens, along with Meier's trusted secretary, Bernadette Brand, had internegatives made from, in early 1978, at a photo shop in Winterhur. A copy from it was later loaned to a physicist, Neil Davis, at Design Technology, Poway, CA, for analysis. His conclusion, on 13 March, 1978, was that "Nothing was found in the examination of the print which could cause me to believe that the object in the photo is anything other than a large object photographed a distance from the camera."

The other seven photos follow below.

 

 

 

 

 

An attempt at debunking this series was made by Jeff Ritzmann, see the upper photo below, which is his photo of a model suspended by a monofilament line.

 Using the F.I.G.U. version of the 4th photo from the top, he claimed, on the Kevin Smith Show of 8 Dec. 2006, that the underside of the craft was much too dark to be an object in the distance. Ritzmann compared its darkness to the closest dark area (red arrow on right of lower photo) and the more distant dark area (red arrow on left), and claimed that it was darker than either, and therefore a model UFO close to the camera. Although such a claim should be based upon light-meter measurements made upon the original color slide, perhaps a relative comparison on a print of unknown generation can still be useful. Upon enlarging the beamship and extracting its blackest row of pixels from it, doing the same with the dark forest region above the right-hand arrow, and placing them next to each other upon a white background, one obtains:

They’re essentially the same degree of blackness, by my eye. Only from the original color slide could a meaningful result be obtained. I believe Ritzmann was counting on the “contrast effect” to give an initial impression that the beamship’s underside was extra dark, being surrounded by adjacent bright sky, unlike the darkest forest area. Iconclude that his debunking attempt failed.