From: ur-valhalla!cts.com!density4 (That 4th Density Dude)
Subject: Eduard Meier: Con
Message-ID: 
Date: Sat, 11 Nov 1995 20:58:05 GMT

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             "The Farmer and the Cosmonauts"

  ----------------------------------------------------
    ORBIS Publications Ltd.  London.  1984>
  -----------------------------------------------------

Meier had begun having unusual and anomalous experiences at the age of
five, when he saw a 'large circular craft' fly over the local church.
From about that time until the age of eight he heard voices in his
head.  Then a new voice took over and apparently acted as a guide --
"tutoring" him, according to Stevens.  Which was perhaps just as well,
for Meier left school at the age of 12 to begin a life of odd-jobbing
and oddity, which included car-racing, a short period in jail for
thieving, a spell of service with the French Foreign Legion and a
couple of years in an Indian ashram -- followed by employment in an
Indian village as official snake catcher.  He worked his way to
Turkey, where he claimed to have acted as an informer for US drug-
smuggling investigators and so paid his way back to Switzerland.

While at the ashram, Meier had started to hear voices again.  This
time they were female and said they were from 'the Dal universe'.
While in India he also saw 'spacecraft' once again and took
photographs of them -- as he also did, apparently, of his female 'Dal'
contact.  These experiences with the Dals lasted some two years --
until, Meier says, their mission to Earth was complete.  Then, until
1975, there was silence.

Swiss farmer Billy Meier's claim to have had over 130 meetings with
cosmonauts from the Pleiades star cluster between 1975 and 1978 is
perhaps the most elaborately documented case in the literature of
ufology.  For Meier supported his story not only with a mass of
photographs but with samples of metal allegedly given him by the
Pleiadeans, with tape recording of their craft in flight and,
according to Colonel Wendelle Stevens (who first investigated the
affair), produced other witnesses to the remarkable events he
described.  All this evidence was, Stevens says, subjected torigorous
scientfic testing -- and was passed as authentic.  The results of
Stevens's investigations were published in the United States in 1979
in a lavish book called "UFO...contact from the Pleiades".

Material that has surfaced since then, together with further
revelations by the seemingly irrepressible Billy Meier, may lead one
to wonder just what Meier's purpose is in all this.  For his story has
now become so bizarre that even the most gullible devotee of the
extra-terrestrial hypothesis ought to be feeling just the teeniest
twinges of doubt...

The most startling of Meier's later claims is to have been taken in
one ofthe Pleiadean spacecraft (known as variation Type-4) on a
journey through time.  On this trip, says Meier, he went back to the
age of the dinosaurs and photographed them; he also visited Jesus
Christ, who was so impressed with Meier that he appointed him a
disciple.  Meier says he returned to this day and age in order to
avoid being crucified.  He also claims to have visited other planets,
to have photographed the link-up between the Apollo and Soyuz
spacecraft as he flew by, and, most extravagant of all, to have taken
a photograph of the eye of God.

Meier also was taken into the future by the Pleiadeans to see San
Francisco come to a sticky end, sinking into the bay as the San
Andreas fault at last produced its much-heralded catastrophe.

These tales have naturally attracted some laughter, and Meier's
responses to his critics have scarcely helped his case.  When asked
why he failed to photograph both eyes of God, for example, he replied
that the other was closed: the Lord was winking at his companion (who
was, needless to say, the shapely Pleiadean Semjase).  Other
"evidence" is so peculiar as to needno comment --such as the
photograph of a pterodactyl that shows a pyramid in the background!

The Pleiades, the star cluster that is the home of the space people
with whom Billy Meier claims to meet so regularly... The haze of gas
and dust indicates the comparative youth of the clster, for as the
group matures the interstellar matter will disperse.  The few hundred
stars of the cluster were born together a mere 60 million years ago --
by contrast with the 5000 million years of the Sun's existence to
date.  This time is too short to have permitted the formation of any
planets or the appearance of indigenous life.  According to Meier, the
space people migrated to the Pleiades from their original home in the
constellation of Lyra.  But how do they survive there?  Is 'Erra', (in
the system of 'Taygeta') their supposed home, an artificial planet
constructed by the migrants?

The Pleiades of Greek myth were seven sisters, named Aleyone,
Asterope, Electra, Celaeno, Maia, Metrope and Taygeta.  They were
daughters of Atlas and Pleione.  As it happens, the leader of the
migration from Lyra was called Pleione, according to Meier. Was the
mythical name a faint memory of the space traveller?  Or was the space
traveller's name suggested to Meier by the half-remembered mythical
name?

The chief critic of the Meier case has been Kal Korff, and the title
of his book on the subject sums up his attitude more than adequately:
"The most infamous hoax in ufology."

One instance of self-contradiction on the part of Meier and his
defenders concerns a sequence of photographs purporting to show a
Pleiadean spacecraft circling a tree.  An unfortunate aspect of this
series is that when independant investigators visited the site, no
tree was to be found.  Meier's explanation for this was that the
spacecraft had subsequently disintergrated the hapless arboreal
specimen.  Wendelle Stevens told Korff that the tree vanished because
it had been teleported into "another time frame".  Kal Korff's
suspicion is that neither of these things happened, since a close look
at the pictures -- reputedly taken within seconds of one another --
reveals markedly different cloud patterns from frame to frame.
Genesis III's claim that the day in question was particularly windy is
not borne out by the weather ecord, which shows wind speeds reaching a
maximum of 15 miles per hour (25km/h).  Korff reasons that a model UFO
and model tree were superimposed on pictures of the site.  And indeed
models of Pleiadean craft have been found on the Meier farm -- though
Meier says that they were inspired by his actual encounters.

Possibly the least plausible of Meier's defender's is Jim Dilettoso,
of Genesis III.  Kal Korff prints a long interview with him...in which
he says that in the 1950s Wendelle Stevens and another ufologist,
Richard Miller, performed something called 'transchanneling' on aliens
for the US Air Force: "They would fly up to Alaska because they were
told that the magnetic fields there were proper for resonance
induction, and we have hundreds and hundreds of audio recordings of
Richard and other CIA officers doing transchannelings of aliens....Two
of these CIA officers...have developed serious personality
aberrations...

The paucity of photographs of the Pleiadeans themselves is explained
by Wendelle Stevens thus: "They are afraid of being hurt...they do not
want to be recognised.  Supposedly, they do walk the streets in Europe
and don't want to be compromised."  Billy Meier, on the other hand,
has happily admitted to the strong resemblance between Semjase and his
own girlfriend -- so who is really worried about being recognised on
the streets of Europe?

Less edifying are the claims made by Meier and Genesis III concerning
the sample of metal and crystal given Meier by the Pleiadeans as
examples of their technological wizardry.  Meier actually produced
these while Stevens and his team were in Switzerland.  They called on
him one morning and were told that he had his 105th contact during the
night and "had a surprise" for them.  This turned out to be a package,
handed over by the cosmonaut Quetzal, of four metal, one biological
and nine mineral and crystal specimens.  According to Stevens's book,
the scientists who conducted "in-depth, highly sophisticated
examination" of these saples found them to have unique qualities and
said they had "never seen anything like it before".  The level of
purity in the metal was not "immediately explainable" while the
general characteristics "seemed to indicate a non-electrolytic, cold-
fusion synthesis process not generally known to earth technology".

Kal Korff found rather less to be excited about.  He interviewed Dr.
Marcel Vogel, who had analysed the samples for Genesis III -- and had
drawn rather different conclusions from those published in the book.
Only the first sample was unique, said Dr Vogel, consisting of
aluminum, silver and thulium, each having a high degree of purity.
The other samples were ordinary crystals of quartz, citrine, amethyst
and silver solder, and there was no reason to believe they are of
extra-terrestrial origin.  Jim Dilettoso characteristically failed to
further the cause by claiming that Genesis III hold a 10-hour
videotape of "the entire lab proceedings" (which Dr. Vogel denies
having made), "And...we have about an hour of him discussing why the
metal samples are not possible in earth technology, going into
intrinsic detail of why it is not done anywhere on earth, that type of
chemistry."

Of course Dr Vogel may not be the only scientist to have analysed the
samples (no mention is made by either party of the biological
specimen), but then Genesis III are notably coy about naming any of
the 200 scientists they say have verified Meier's remarkable story...

But why was it that Meier was chosen?  Wendelle Stevens believes he
knows the answer: "They told him that they had been in contact with
him before in other lifetimes."  Such an idea might, of course, occur
to someone who had spent two years listening to the kind of
conversation that takes place daily in an ashram.  But Meier's belief
is a little more elaborate, according to Stevens's testimony:

"They said that their ancestors had contacted him during prior
incarnations on Earth.  They told him that he was one of them who had
been caugh in an Earth evolution by his own choice several thousand
years ago.  Since his soul patterns were more akin to them it was
registered in their computers.  Supposedly, they could find him
wherever he was.  As he was one of them and familiar with their
mission, his soul could understand ideas communicated to him better
than our souls could."

The Pleiadean computer, it will be noted, is obviously a remarkable
piece of machinery, able to record 'soul patterns'...

Genesis III do not mention any analysis of the notes made by Meier
ofhis contacts with the Pleiadeans.  But Jim Lorenzen of APRO quotes
Dr. James Hurtak, a language specialist who has taken the opportunity
to read most of the 3000 pages of the "Semjase correspondence" in the
original German.  "The linguistic use of Egyptian-Aramaic and
Egyptian-Hebrew names...is latterday patchwork," he says.  "All this
shifting play of correspondence by which everything...is cheated of
its individual logic creates a mood of pensive jesting...and even
sublime travesty.  By all the standards of genuine 'ancient
knowledge'...this civilization which lays claim to being 3000 years
into the future has not offered much in the way of a quantum jump over
what our ancestors had 5000 years ago (in the way of intellectual
transformation)."

(The Pleiadeans display) a Zen-like combination of fierce moral
comment and studied indifference (which) is driven home by various
quasi-mystical utterances by the cosmonauts.  Some examples:

'Man should know that the God force is quite simply that of creation,
and that man also...is subject to creation and respectively
complementary to it.'  'Material life on Earth is only a passing
event, a phenomenon vanishing after a time.  However, before him and
after him there continues to exist the creative presence of the
universe.'

'When the spirit, this universal self, manifests itself in the human
being through constant love, wisdom and truth, then a major
breakthrough occurs in the surrounding self-veils which eliminates the
physical-material urge of greed, anger, hate, averice, war...'

"The aliens gave Meier the most sought after prize of all --wisdom,"
remarks Kal Korff, adding: "It was very basic wisdom indeed."
Certainly, reading through the pronouncements on life, the Universe
and everything that Semjase condescended to give Meier, one is
embarassed by their halt-familier triviality.

Te photographs taken by "Billy" Meier of Pleiadean spacecraft as they
flew around the valleys near Hinwell, Switzerland, are among the most
striking UFO pictures ever published...on closer look, certain
patterns in the pictures emerge -- and certain suspicions are aroused.

Is it coincidence, for example, that so many pictures seem to show the
flying disc at exactly the same angle to the camera, despite the very
different locations and times of day at which the photographs were
supposedly taken?  Why do the reflections and shadows on the Pleiadean
spaceships appear the same, too, despite the various backgrounds?  Why
are the undersides of the craft so dark -- as they would be if they
were models, say, close to the camera?  Is there any significance to
the massive preponderance of shots in which the craft are shown
against a clear, light sky -- the best type of background on which to
superimpose a UFO image?

Wendelle Stevens and Genesis III -- who it seems fair to call both
investigators and publicists of the Meier case -- have their own
answers to some of these questions.  In an interview with ufologist
Timothy Green Beckley, Wendelle Stevens rather disarmingly remarked:

"First of all, photographs are poor evidence because there are so many
things that we can do technically to produce images.  However, there
are also so many ways we can detect a hoax.  We can tell if we are
dealing with superimposed overlays, reflected images, double
exposures.  We can tell by looking through special microscopes and
searching for grain density and grain patterns.  We can pretty much
tell if an object has been thrown into the air or suspended by
something in the air."

And in keeping with that skepticism, the book published by GenesisIII,
"UFO...contact from the Pleiades", shows computer-processedversions of
the photographs that appear to validate their authenticity.  It is
when Wendelle Stevens starts to explain some of the
computerenhancements that credulity is stretched.  Says the colonel:

"Wecan [analyse photographs] with a computer by studying the edges
around any given object.  In high magnification an edge is seen as a
series of shock waves.  There is a special formula for the spacing of
these shock waves that make up the edge.  How strong they are, how
apart they are, will tell you how far apart that edge of the object is
from the camera.  If the body is in motion, the shock waves are
compressed on the leading edge, and expand on the trailing edge."

In fact, nothing of the kind happens.  What this particular computer
process does is enhance the picture contrast in areas where the
imagebrightness varies -- especially at the edges of features, making
itpossible to make judgements about how far the object photographed
isfrom the camera.  In some cases, it is possible to intensify
otherwise hard-to-detect strings or supports attached to the object.
This has nothing whatever to do with shock waves, though Stevens has
repeated the idea more than once.

In Genesis III's book, the 12 or so pictures purporting to show
analytic enhancements of Meier's pictures are accompanied by details
of the various tests to which the photographs were subjected.  It is
claimed that the computer enhancements showed how the light values of
the landscape are consistent with those on the bottom of the craft.
Supposedly, the test eliminates double exposures or 'paste-ups',
splicing images from two different transparencies together.  So far,
perhaps, so good.  The name of a reputable computer company, De Anza
Systems, appears on the edge of one frame.

Kal Korff took the simple step of asking Mr. Wayne Heppler, manager of
De Anza Systems if an analysis had been performed for Genesis III.
Replied Mr Heppler:

"What these guys did was to come down to De Anza Systems claiming that
they wanted to BUY a computer from us.  So we took one of their
pictures, one showing the UFO, and enhanced it to make certain parts
of the picture stand out.  Then they took pictures of it, left, and
stated they woud get back in touch with us.  And we haven't heard from
them since."

Korff then asked if De Anza had the technical capability to analyse
the pictures.  The answer: "No. We are in no position to do an
analysis."

At a lecture at the UFO '80 Symposium held in Oakland, California, in
August 1980, Jim Diletosso of Genesis III said that 'Z-Scale
contouring 'and 'edge identification' tests were run on the pictures.
The only drawback to this is that these are simply color contouring
techniques(and can be used to analyse the 'density' at each point of
an image -- its lightness or darkness).  They are NOT light distortion
tests, such as edge enhancement, which might reveal the information
Genesis III claim to have gained by the techniques.

Diletosso also (perhaps rather rashly) took exception to a
GroundSaucer Watch (GSW) color contouring of one of the Meier
pictures.  This shows a similar level of light reflectivity on both
the ground and the Pleiadean spacecraft -- indicating that SOMETHING
is wrong with the photograph, since the materials, at the claimed
distance, should reflect (and so color contour) differently.
Diletosso's objection was unfortunate, since even Genesis III's
computer-generated picture shows both the craft and its background in
the same color contour.

According to Ken Dimwiddie, one of the technicians at De Anza Systems,
who was present when Diletosso appeared in the guise of a prospective
customer, it was Diletosso himself who assigned the colors on the
computer's read-out screen.  In other words, the colors may indicate
almost anything about the actual qualities of the original photograph.
They have little value except to satisfy Jim Diletosso's aesthetic
fancy.

Computer-aided analyses of the Meier pictures by Ground Saucer Watch,
however, are devastating by comparison.  They inspired two GSW
researchers, Fred Adrian and William Spaulding, to describe them as
"hoaxes, both crude and grandiose."

Even without the aid of computer enhancement the photographs are
ubious.  Shadows on the Pleiadean craft do not conform to the light in
the landscape, and the sharpness of the UFO images indicates that the
object shown is extremely close to the camera -- as a model would be.
(GSW's estimate is that the various "spaceships" are, in fact, between
8 and 12 inches in diameter.) Fuzziness that would result from
atmospheric effects is often lacking.

Where the images are more consistent with expectations, one is still
baffled by the testimony of Meier himself.  Despite the constant
contacts and the priceless photographic evidence he was gathering on
behalf of mankind, Meier never bothered to repair or replace his
allegedly broken camera, whose lens was stuck, focused on infinity.
Yet different focusings DO seem to have been achieved -- resulting in
'distant' objects coming out suitably fuzzy.

But then the testimony concerning Meier and his photographic
techniques occasionally leaves the disinterested enquirer gasping.  It
should be pointed out that Billy Meier lost his left arm in an
accident, which one would expect to make for difficulties with a
camera.  Wendelle Stevens never-theless has made the startling claim
that Meier shot all his pictures from the hip, because the mirror in
his camera had 'jammed closed' as well.  And yet he manages to center
his UFOs in every frame with amazing precision.

Jim Diletosso also says that a professional photographic expert
claimed he would need 'a million dollars' to duplicate the Meier
pictures.  Less excitably, Wendelle Stevens attempts to debunk the
claims that the UFOs are models by asking: "How many models can a one-
armed man carry on a moped when he is driving with the only arm he's
got?"  One might reply: "As many as will fit in a bag."

A Type-4 spacecraft over Mount Auruti, Switzerland, photographed by
Meier on 29 March, 1976, is reproduced.  Two computer enhanced images
from the photograph reveal a great deal about the picture. One picture
shows, in the words of Ground Saucer Watch who made the comuter
analyses, "evidence of a linear structure" above the craft -- in plain
English, a string or thin rod.  The structure is equally clear in the
computerised enlargement.  In addition, study of the focus of this
picture indicates the object is close to the camera and is therefore
small -- about 8 inches (20 centimetres) across, not 23 feet (7
metres) as claimed.  [A second picture of a Type-4 ship taken within a
few minutes of the previous picture shows the disc in the center of
the image hovering next to a bare tree].  The craft is said to be
hovering beyond the tree, which is about 165 feet (50 metres away).
Edge enhancement of the picture revealed, according to GSW,
inconsistencies between the shadows on the disc and on the tree.  This
suggests that the UFO and the landscape images have been superimposed.
The color-contoured image suggested to GSW that the UFO was actually
superimposed ON TOP of the tree image, as if the UFO were closer than
the tree -- indicating "very sloppy work", in Kal Korff's words.
Analysis of another picture of three ships over a hill revealed that
"the focus on the discs is much sharper than on the trees.  Again
there is evidence that the UFO images were superimposed on the
landscapepicture."

Genesis III have published some remarkable claims on behalf of Meier,
yet none of these claims has been validated by independant research.
Wendelle Stevens may attempt to disarm the ufologist Jim Lorenzen by
saying, "As you well know, Jim, the book was never designed to present
any hard facts," yet it gives every impression of doing just that.

As for Meier himself, it is possible that some SUBJECTIVE experience
lies behind the discredited material evidence.  If the stories of
voices in the head, going for rides in 'pear-shaped UFOs' with 'a very
old man' at the age of five, and the sightings he had from a very
early age are anything to go by, this may be the best explanation.  In
which case, the model spacecraft (whose existence Meier doesn't deny)
may well have been constructed as a result of an actual series of
contactee experiences, however unlikely it is that these represent an
attempt by any Pleiadeans to get in touch with us on Earth.  If so,
then Billy Meier has unfortunately allowed his experience to be turned
by others into something like an industry.


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