Photo by Meier on 3 July 1964 of the ashram showing Asket's UFO. Meier's photo #136 in his Photo Verzeichnis. Courtesy of E. Meier and M. Hurley. Click on the photo for full-size view of the saucer craft with brightness enhanced.

Billy Meier's first UFO sighting, followed by contacts from an elderly alien named Sfath, occurred as a child. As a young man they were superseded by further contacts under the tutelage of an alien woman called Asket, in the 1950s and early '60s. It was during this period that he was first told he would acquire a document of Jmmanuel's ministry and teachings; then later, at an appropriate time in 1963, he was prompted telepathically to be the co-discoverer of the Talmud of Jmmanuel (TJ). Only a dozen or so of the nearly 300 photographs he took during this period, many of them showing the aliens' spacecraft, have survived. These are shown in Wendelle Stevens' UFO Contact from the Pleiades: A Preliminary Investigation Report (1982), in his Message from the Pleiades: The Contact Notes of Billy Meier, vol. 4 (1995), and in Meier's own photo collection (F.I.G.U., CH-8495 Schmidrüti ZH, Switzerland). One of them is shown on the left.

During 1963-64 he worked at various odd jobs to earn his keep while traveling through the Near East and Asia. He spent about eight months working at the Ashoka Ashram in Mehrauli, India, near New Delhi, and learning Buddhist meditational practices from its leader, V.B. Dharmawara,

Photo of Meier in 1963 at the ashram, with monkey which befriended him. From FIGU Bulletin No. 29 (Sept. 2000).

who is also known as Ananda Mahatma. The Buddhism he taught Meier there is from the oldest existing Buddhist school dating back to the 3rd century B.C.

An interview of Meier on his UFO experiences up to 1964 appeared in The Statesman of Sept. 30, 1964—the Delhi, India, newspaper. Extensive videotape testimony from two eye-witnesses affirming Meier's UFO contacts with Asket in India during 1963-65 is available from the conveners of the 8th Annual International UFO Congress (1999).

Passport photo of Billy's visa for Jordan issued by the Swiss consulate in Amman in 1963. From FIGU Bulletin No. 29 (Sept. 2000).

A summary of the account of the key witness, Phobal Cheng, is given here in the report by ufologist Michael Hesemann, and a transcript of her full account here. Meier's photos from this time period were all confiscated by the secret police of Jordan when traveling through there circa 1965, but much later he managed to obtain copies of a few of them from friends to whom he had given some of them at the time. A passport photo of Billy at age 26, taken in 1963, is shown on the left.

Meier as a UFO contactee did not gain the attention of ufologists (UFO investigators) until after 1975, when his Swiss contacts commenced and he was allowed to take many "beamship" photos and 8mm movie-film segments of them, upon

Meier at the F.I.G.U. Center in 1977. From FIGU Bulletin No. 29 (Sept. 2000).

abiding by the conditions laid down by these ETs. These conditions included not bringing anyone else along too close to where his contacts or photo-sessions took place, and not photographing these aliens themselves—restrictions designed to cause Meier to be more easily debunked by skeptics. Wendelle Stevens, and collaborators Tom Welch and Lee & Brit Elders, were the first to explore the matter seriously and in depth, and their investigations extended from late 1976 through 1981.

Meier during inteview by Nippon TV in 1979. From Genesis III "Beamship: The Movie Footage."

(Stevens had been alerted to the case by the late Swiss ufologist, Ms. Lou Zinsstag.) Soon after, Japanese ufologist Jun-Ichi Yaoi also spent much time looking into Meier's experiences and photo evidence, and interviewing witnesses.

In 1978 Stevens brought Jim Dilettoso in on the Meier case to head their computer-related photo analyses. His summary of being involved in the investigation is given here.

Later, historical author and attorney Gary Kinder investigated the case, from 1983-1985, documenting his findings in the book Light Years. There is an interesting, lengthy open letter that Kinder wrote to the ufological community explaining why his book about the Meier case needed to be published. A comprehensive content summary of his 1987 book, which one may search using a key word, is available on line, courtesy of J. Jansen.

After some discussions with Wendelle Stevens, Lee Elders and Gary Kinder, I traveled to Switzerland in 1985 to briefly meet Meier for myself, interview a few of the witnesses who could not deny the reality of his extraterrestrial (ET) experiences, and notice their sincerity. I could only agree with the forenamed investigators, and the experts they had consulted, that there was no way the case could be any hoax. My own further examinations of some of his photographs, films and videos of "beamships" disclosed only further reasons why the case was genuine and no hoax. A schoolteacher from Vienna, who became a good friend of Meier's since 1976, and who learned all about Meier's experiences and contacts, sometimes from having been in close proximity to the latter, wrote his own book about it all; this is Guido Moosbrugger. And in the 1990's, the case was re-investigated by German ufologist Michael Hesemann, who was impressed by all the evidence indicating its genuineness.

Stevens collected statements from many witnesses in 1976-1980 who had observed the beamship, usually at night but once in the daytime, mostly in connection with their having accompanied Meier to secluded spots close to where he had been told to proceed alone a considerable distance further and wait either for a beamship to land or to be "beamed up" for a contact. Even in 1998, Hesemann was able to still locate and interview 14 witnesses whose observations and latter statements strongly support the reality of Meier's contacts during 1975-1987, and also 1963-64.

Reproductions of some of Meier's UFO photos can be seen at the FIGU web site which members of Meier's (FIGU) support group maintain.

Eduard "Billy" Meier              1980

For film segments on video from Meier's movie-camera footage, try Michael Horn's website. For further information about the Meier case, and in particular for information on ordering English translations of some of Meier's written materials, check into the web site of the Los Angeles Study Group. For Hesemann's conclusions on the Meier case, read this discussion and this article. Unfortunately most of Wendelle Stevens' books on the Meier case are out of print. However a summary of Stevens' book UFO Contact from the Pleiades, A Preliminary Investigation Report (1982), is found at the website of J. Jansen. The book by Moosbrugger, And Yet...They Fly, whose German version came out in 1991 and English version in 2001, includes color photos of "beamships" taken by Meier as well as much other information. A still later English version, called And Still They Fly, came out in 2004.

In Meier's photo series below, taken on 9 July 1975 between the communities of Fuchsbüel and Hofhalden, near

Click on thumb- nail to view enlargement

Wetzikon, Switzerland, the beamship, as it is called, posed for him on all sides of the tree. In this series, 11 photos of which have survived, there are several indicators that force the skeptic to conclude that the beamship was an actual craft at a considerable distance from the camera. First, in the left-hand photo, one sees that the tree on the right is in poor focus because it is just a few meters away. The UFO and the tree adjacent to it are in very good focus, being many meters away. Consistent with this, Wendelle Stevens found that the focus setting on Meier's camera, with which he took his pictures in 1975 and 1976, was stuck just one notch short of infinity; thus he could not take clear close-up shots, but objects at distances of some 30-300 meters were in very good focus.

Equally important is the fact that one may take these photos, including the one best showing the tree's trunk (the 2nd one from the left), to experts in forestry and ask them to identify the kind of tree. Those with any knowledge of fir trees in western Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere will probably inform you that it is an abies alba, i.e., a European silver fir, or at the least, a mature conifer. It is no potted "baby" tree and no model tree. If you look closely at the trunk you will see two protuberances where limbs had once grown before being shed or pruned off. These facts can be determined from these photos even though the ones displayed here are much-handled copies of copies. In the first four of these photos, counting from the left, three or four nearly square "portholes" can be discerned, regularly spaced around an upper circumference of the craft.

Since the craft posed on all sides of the tree, and cannot have been a small model if the tree was a mature fir, the evidence pointing towards the tree's maturity deserves more analysis. Therefore much more is discussed, shown and analyzed about it here, with the inescapable conclusion being that this UFO or IFO was real—a beamship.

In the summer of 1975 at Ober-Sädelegg, Meier took 8mm movie footage of the beamship in the distance while he climbed up a path towards it, in view of the tripod-mounted camera. Here it is shown that if he had used a model UFO, in order that the length of a supporting pole not exceed 20 ft the model would need to be as small as 1 inch in diameter.

Another of Meier's filming opportunities also resulted in strong evidence that the UFO or beamship was a large object in the distance and no model, without requiring that the original film be checked by experts. This was his photo opportunity on 8 March, 1976, at Bachtelhörnli-Unterbachtel, in which he took 8mm movie footage of a beamship while it jumped from one location to a neighboring location with essentially no lapse of time, after which the craft moved close to the brow of the hillside Meier was standing on until it became partially eclipsed behind the brow of the hill; then it moved upwards. The evidence is shown here that this positional jump could hardly have been due to hoaxers moving one or two model UFOs around, stopping and restarting the movie camera, and later cutting and splicing the movie film; it's also shown that at one point the brow of the hill did indeed eclipse a portion of the craft.

Cropped section of Meier's photo #174, taken March 29, 1976. Acquired from W. Stevens' 1990 calendar photos.

Still another of Meier's beamship-photographing sessions is entirely consistent with the conclusion of genuineness. On the right is the most famous of the Hasenböl 35mm photos of 29 March 1976, during which occasion Meier took many other photographs of the beamship, of which 33 still survive. The analysis and discussion may be accessed here. It includes thorough refutations of Kal Korff's claims that the photograph must be a hoax.

On the same date and location Meier had his movie camera with him also, and shot two short reels of super 8 movie film. These also show features that make the scene impossible to have been hoaxed, short of having constructed a Hollywood-like edifice from which to manipulate a high-tech UFO model.

Meier's Ober-Sädelegg series of beamship photos is shown here. There, one may read of a failed attempt at debunking one of them by J. Ritzmann.

A sound track of the noise one of the beamships can produce was taped by Meier and several others on July 7, 1980, at a location near Ober-Sädelegg. The craft was hovering invisibly overhead, apparently about 70 meters up. There were 15 known witnesses (Stevens, UFO Contact from the Pleiades: Supplementary Investigation Report, pp. 459-461). Sound specialists later found the recording to be unique in several respects, and well beyond the capability of contemporary state-of-the-art sound equipment.

There were some dozen other occasions in 1975-76 on which Meier was summoned telepathically by his ETs to collect his camera equipment and travel on his moped into the hills out east of his home in Hinwil and wait for his contactor and her beamship to show up for photographing, provided no one else had followed him there or was in the near vicinity. After that, until late in 1980, he was not permitted to have more photo opportunities, since Semjase, the Pleiadian/Plejaren most involved in his contacts at this time, apparently felt that the hundreds of photos Billy had already been allowed to take of their beamships should have sufficed.

Brightness-enhanced copy of Meier's photo #799, taken by him on Oct. 22, 1980.

But since they were assumed to be photos of model UFOs by most ufologists, by October of 1980 he was able to convince Semjase that he needed more. So on Oct. 22 of that year she came out with the so-called wedding-cake variety of beamship. The photo on the left shows it hovering down low in front of the F.I.G.U. Center at Hinterschmidrüti that Wednesday morning when no one but Meier was around; Meier has lived at the Center since 1977. He snapped the picture, along with at least 10 more, with a Ricoh Singlex TLS camera, focal length 55mm, which he had acquired by then. This particular craft is believed to be a later version 7m-diameter ship of Semjase's, and exhibits the utmost in gaudiness and fine-scale structure. It would seem to be such a complex structure that a hoaxer could scarcely have fabricated any such monstrosity. Certainly a one-armed hoaxer would not be able to, and consistent with this, no model of this sort was ever discovered around Meier's residence or elsewhere—it was far too complicated a structure for any acquaintance of Billy to attempt to replicate in model form and give to him as a souvenir; and no hoaxer has been discovered or has come forward to claim credit. As we discuss the various wedding-cake craft further, we shall see several "smoking gun" indications of their genuineness, along with charges of fraud from negative skeptics that just don't stand up to scrutiny. It turns out that there is no way that the spectacular "wedding-cake" craft seen in the photos could have been a small, model UFO positioned close to the camera. This much is absolutely clear even without having access to the original camera film.

Meier's ETs seem to have been just as careful as other aliens to ensure, through covertness and other means, that some measure of plausible deniability be provided to those skeptics who would be devastated if confronted with absolute evidence of the alien reality. The conditions Meier had to follow in order to be allowed to shoot the photos (to be alone, not to photograph the aliens themselves) constitute but one set of these measures of plausible deniability.

Ufology and its Relation to the Meier Case

Anyone who studies the Meier case will need to investigate the UFO phenomenon as a whole to see how this case fits in with it. There is much reading to be done of UFO case studies and reports of sightings, much interviewing of UFO witnesses and abductees, and much attending of UFO meetings before one gains a comprehensive view of the phenomenon overall. Nowadays, thanks to the Internet, much of this can be done quite conveniently, using due caution and discrimination to weed out false claims.

A web site that gives a comprehensive overview of the history of the UFO phenomenon, along with many outstanding cases, is that of NICAP. Their cases that include radar observations of UFOs, for example, can be viewed here . The best web site for keeping up on UFO sightings in the U.S. is that of Peter Davenport's National UFO Reporting Center; another with a nice set of archives is that of George Filer; archives of UFO sightings worldwide may be found at Joseph Trainor's website. For keeping up on related UFO phenomena, visit the website of Linda Howe or of "Farshores". Visit the website of a leading ufologist, Bruce Maccabee, to learn of the details of particular cases, such as the Trent UFO sighting/photos of 1950 near McMinnville, Oregon. For looking through a UFO data base consisting of 1,563 cases, see the website of Daniel Guenther. Accounts of UFO events from countries worldwide are also available, such as reports from British Columbia, from Israel, from Italy, from Mexico, from Australia, and from Scotland. For some 80 of the better UFO photos taken by camera, during the past 72 years, check here. UFO photos taken recently may be viewed here. There is also an excellent web page detailing the UFO sightings by astronauts.

For learning about alien abductions, visit this web site, and to learn most specifically of the travail experienced by many UFO abductees, view the web site of Dave Jacobs.

An excellent website regarding the Roswell case is that of David Rudiak. To learn of another well researched UFO crash, one near Kecksburg, PA, in 1965, visit the website of Stan Gordon.

To learn about the many cases where UFOs have left behind physical traces of their presence, see Ted Phillips' web site. For the evidence that a particular recovered object, witnessed to have been ejected from a UFO, was manufactured and is non-terrestrial, see the website of Bob White.

Visit here or here to view crop-circle formations. Supplementary information is also available. Good documentation may also be found on Canadian crop circle formations.

At Grant Cameron's website you may read comprehensive research into the level of UFO awareness of the U.S. presidents since 1947 — their interest and knowledge on the subject, past sightings if any, briefings received, and more.

To learn of some of the UFO sightings or awareness that existed in past centuries, visit the site of Matt Hurley and view paintings from past centuries in which UFOs are depicted.

For current UFO topics of discussion, try the web site of Jeff Rense, of CAUS (Citizens against UFO secrecy), or of the National Institute for Discovery Science. For making a detailed search for UFO word descriptors within the comprehensive summaries of a 1600-case UFO database, visit the website of Mark Cashman. One may view UFO video footage from a particular series of sightings or from many cases worldwide.

In comparing the Meier case against any or all of the rest of ufology's cases, one finds that it is entirely unique. The amount and quality of the UFO evidence he was allowed to gather—photographic, UFO sounds on tape and unearthly metal samples, exceeds anything that occurred before or since, as of this writing update in 2004. However, this was upsetting to most ufologists who valued their reputations as leaders in their field. They went along with those who pronounced the Meier contactee case to be a hoax despite all the evidence to the contrary, largely because they assumed all contactee cases to be non-genuine, and also because the quality and quantity of "beamship" photographic evidence Meier was allowed to acquire, seemed to be too good to be true. So they assumed the case to be a hoax by assuming all investigators of this case who concluded otherwise to be incompetent, without arriving at valid explanations of how any or all of it could have been hoaxed. By taking this stance they could bolster their own reputations as hard-nosed ufologists who were doing their best to attract mainstream scientists into treating their field seriously. However, it has only been since the mid-1980s that these ufologists have been forced to treat UFO abductions as worthy of study, due to the large number of such cases that had surfaced by then and due to their traumatic character. Before then, most ufologists dismissed alien abduction cases as being imaginary or psychotic in nature. Since contactees are treated more humanely than abductees by the ETs involved, contactees are still all dismissed by these ufologists as being self-aggrandizing or self-deluded hoaxers. Such a sweeping assumption actually makes no scientific sense; i.e., aliens or ETs need not all be assumed "bad," when the possibility exists that some could be diverse in character and some neutral or quite moral in their ethical levels. Rather, Nature teaches us that we have to stay prepared for all kinds of animal behavior, and the UFO/ET phenomenon seems to be trying to teach us that the same carries over into the realm of extraterrestrial intelligence.

There are other web sites that deal with other contactees or alleged contactees, for example, George Adamski.

Both Meier's identity as a contactee, the uniqueness of his experiences and evidence, and their elements of plausible deniability have of course caused ufologists to debunk the case. The debunking attempts by Kal Korff in his 1995 book are refuted within links from this and other sections of this website. An informative debunking attempt by a highly respected ufologist, Bruce Maccabee, is refuted here.

The TJ's UFO Connections

Thus, Jmmanuel was a very special contactee of these aliens. He is reported, in the TJ, to have received much instruction from them during the forty days he was taken with them (not with the devil!) before he was returned to Galilee. Now, nearly 2000 years later, we find that Eduard Albert Meier, born in 1937, is also a contactee of aliens of this same group.

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