The Vanishing Fir Tree

Witnesses' Reports by Wendelle Stevens
in UFO...Contact from the Pleiades: A Preliminary Investigation Report (Tucson, AZ: UFO Photo Archives, 1982)

From pp. 126-7:
One of these witnesses reports his experience as follows:
"Last Saturday, 3 April 1976, I was with Mr. Meier in Hinwil. At the same time there was a small group of other people who often meet with him. Since the weather was good, Mr. Meier suggested that we visit some of the places where he had met Semjase during his contacts. He took us to the site of a remarkable occurrance when Semjase flew her spacecraft around an old Weatherpine tree [on 9 July, 1975, and the tree has been identified as a European fir (abies alba)], which later was found to have damaged the tree. The cosmonaut circled the tree close enough to the trunk to separate the branches as the ship passed through, about 1/5th the way down from the top. The branches in close contact with the spacecraft withered and began to die. It looked dehydrated and turned brown. Another strange effect noticed was that the upper part of the tree glowed in the dark after this incident."

Ms. Margarite Rufer went back to the site later with Jacob Bertschinger, and they noticed that the whole tree was dead. They went back again 3 days after that and found the tree had disappeared completely. There was no hole in the ground or any other evidence that the tree had ever been there.

When Meier's pictures of this contact first came back from the developers, one of Meier's friends went out to the site and located the very spot from which the pictures were taken. From p. 48: He found that the grass here was 20 to 30 centimeters higher than the other grass around. The whole tree itself had just disappeared without a trace.

And from p. 333: One of the strange effects observed -- the top of the tree glowed in the dark for some time after the photo was made. No radiation measurements were ever made for lack of equipment. One of Meier's friends who examined the tree estimated it as 28 meters tall by 33 centimeters through the trunk as high as he could reach. It is a hermit species and does not grow in clumps. It is also less conical in shape than most pines [firs]. On a subsequent trip to the site the tree was found to have disappeared, leaving no trace of its former existence. When Meier asked about this, he was told that it still carried some harmful radiation and was removed. He was later given a demonstration of how the tree was removed [See references in Table 2 under 17 July 1976].