BILLY MEIER

Opening

Eduard "Billy" Meier is a Swiss farmer and handyman who says that since 1975 he has been in regular contact with a human-looking people from the Pleiades star cluster, whom he calls the Plejaren. He has produced hundreds of photographs and films of what he says are their "beamships" over the hills of the Zurich Oberland, along with sound recordings, metal samples and a mass of writings. His followers run an organisation, FIGU, from a settlement in the village of Hinterschmidrüti.

For a few years in the late 1970s and the 1980s the Meier case was one of the most talked about in ufology, and an influential book called it the case that offered more evidence than any other. Almost all of it has since been dismissed by sceptics and by most UFO researchers, and his former wife has said the pictures show models. It is nonetheless one of the largest bodies of claimed UFO photography ever made, and the argument over it has not finished.

Timeline

3 February 1937Eduard Albert Meier is born in Bülach, Switzerland. He is called "Billy" after an American friend compares his cowboy-style clothes to Billy the Kid's.

1942By Meier's account, contact begins when he is five, with an elderly Plejaren man named Sfath.

1953He is convicted of theft and forgery and sent to Rheinau prison. He escapes, crosses the border, joins the French Foreign Legion and deserts to return home. After Sfath's death in 1953 he says he talks with a woman called Asket.

1964Meier says the contacts stop.

1965He loses his left arm in a bus accident in Turkey.

28 January 1975Contact resumes, he says, with Semjase, Sfath's granddaughter, and later Ptaah.

Late 1970sHe founds FIGU, based on his contacts with Semjase.

Fall 1983The writer Gary Kinder begins two years of research on the case.

1987Kinder's book Light Years is published. The film Contact, by Larry Savadove, presents Meier's story through him and his supporters.

1997His former wife, Kalliope, tells interviewers that the pictures show models and that the stories are fiction.

Key figures

Billy Meier left school before finishing the sixth grade and had convictions as a teenager and young man. He married a Greek woman, Kalliope Zafiriou. Sources differ on whether they had three children or four.

Gary Kinder, an American writer, spent two years on Light Years. He reported that no case had ever offered so much evidence, citing colour photographs, 8mm film, sound recordings, landing tracks and metal samples. Critics answered that the book named few people and quoted few reports.

Wendelle Stevens, a retired Air Force officer, and Lee and Brit Elders championed the case. Marcel Vogel, a scientist formerly at IBM, is said by supporters to have found that metal samples were anomalous.

Kal Korff, a sceptic, travelled to Switzerland and wrote a book, Spaceships of the Pleiades, with previously unpublished Meier photographs and criticism of the claims.

Kalliope Meier made the 1997 statements about the pictures.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: Meier's photographs and film, the sound recordings, the metal samples, his contact notes, FIGU's publications, Kinder's book and Korff's critique. Supporters say examinations in the 1970s found the photographs had not been doctored. A 2017 exhibition curator said much the same, and added that this does not establish what the pictures show.

Meier himself told Kinder that he had used models, after his wife showed him photographs of incomplete models he had thought he had burned. In 1997, Kalliope said the photographs showed models made from household items. She also said the pictures of the Plejaren women "Asket" and "Nera" were in fact of two members of the Golddiggers, a dance troupe, and it was later confirmed that they had appeared on The Dean Martin Show. One Meier photograph was used as the background of the "I Want to Believe" poster in The X-Files until a lawsuit led the producers to change it.

What is missing is any physical object that independent laboratories have shown to be non-terrestrial, and any witness to the beamships other than Meier and his circle. The claims about the metal come from his supporters, not from published independent analysis.

Things you might not know

• He lost an arm in Turkey. A bus accident in 1965 cost him his left arm.
• The nickname is from a cowboy. An American friend compared his style of dress to Billy the Kid, and it stuck.
• The women in the photographs were dancers. The Dean Martin Show's Golddiggers are the subject of the 1997 claim about "Asket" and "Nera".
• A Meier photo became a poster. It ran behind the X-Files "I Want to Believe" image until a lawsuit.
• He says he is a reincarnated prophet. Meier says he is the seventh in a line that includes Enoch, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jesus and Muhammad.
• The film had no sceptics in it. Contact, narrated by David Warner, features Meier and his supporters, with Lee Elders and Wendelle Stevens, and no critics.

Competing explanations

A hoax using models. The strongest reading. Meier has said he used models, his former wife says the photographs show household objects and that the women were dancers, and the stories have not been confirmed by any independent witness. This is the view of sceptics and of most ufologists.

A sincere belief. Some who studied him thought he believed what he said. That would not make the photographs genuine, and it would not explain the models.

A real contact. His supporters hold that the photographs were not faked, that the metal was anomalous, and that the claims about the Plejaren are true. They have not produced independent confirmation.

Later life of the case

Meier's followers continue to promote the contacts and publish the Plejaren material. A German-language scholarly source describes his writings as repeatedly blaming Jews for future atrocities, which has made the movement controversial beyond its UFO claims. Among serious researchers the case is generally treated as a closed hoax.

Finding

The Meier case is built on photographs and testimony that no one independent has confirmed, and on a body of claims that his own former wife has disowned. The strongest reading is a staged series of pictures, with models. What survives is a large archive of claimed evidence and a community of believers that has outlived the sceptics' refutations.

What still will not resolve: why a case that offered so many photographs and samples never produced a single object that independent laboratories could test and agree on.