extraordinary%20encounters

168 Meier, Eduard “Billy”
sem-ya-see). Meier would produce many
more photographs, claim more contacts, recount
trips into space and through time, and
become the most controversial contactee since
George Adamski.
Meier’s aliens came from the Pleiades star
system and from a planet named Erra, one of
ten planets in orbit around a sun known as
Tayget. The aliens got there from another
planet in the constellation of Lyra, where
thousands of years ago a war forced much of
the population to flee to other worlds. At one
point 2.8 million years ago, as they were exploring
the new galactic neighborhood, the
new Pleiadians found Earth, then housing
primitive human beings. Some Pleiadians intermarried
with humans, but their educational
efforts only led to a war with earthlings,
who used the newly supplied extraterrestrial
technology against the Pleiadians. A second
wave of Pleiadians was destroyed in the same
way. Semjase was part of a third wave. She and
her associates hoped to move human beings in
a positive direction, and they selected Meier as
their earthly agent.
Unlike nearly all other contacters, Meier’s
space friends were hostile to religion, though
apparently not to the notion of God as such.
Once, when Meier was aboard a spaceship
(“beamship” as the Pleiadians called them) he
was able to photograph the “Eye of God” in
deep space. He also traveled to the Pleiades
and into another dimension and secured pictures
of dinosaurs, cavemen, and a future
earthquake in San Francisco. A virtual industry
of Meier-related publications, photographs,
videos, and other materials found an
audience around the world. Wendelle C.
Stevens, an American, energetically promoted
Meier, till then little known to Americans. He
published books supporting Meier and had
the non-English-speaking Meier’s work translated.
Stevens’s efforts encouraged an independent
journalist, Gary Kinder, to write a surprisingly
sympathetic book for a mainstream
publisher.
To conservative ufologists, Meier seemed
like a shameless hoaxer. He became a particu-
lar obsession to a young California man, Kal
Korff, who spent years investigating Meier’s
claims. He published two intensely critical
books published between 1981 and 1995. Independent
analyses suggested that the “beamships”
in the photographs were in fact small
models, some suspended on fishing wire, others
apparently held in hand. Investigators
traced other images in Meier’s photos to
NASA footage and (in the case of Semjase) a
picture in a European fashion magazine. In
the mid-1990s, after Popi Meier divorced her
husband, she told European ufologists that
her former husband’s claims were bogus.
According to Meier, the Pleiadians—who
call themselves Plejarans—withdrew all of
their bases on Earth in February 1995 to
protest the proliferation of phony claims of
contact with them. Since then Meier has experienced
approximately four contacts a year
with Ptaah, who is Semjase’s father. He claims
more than 250 contacts with Pleiadians, in
general, since 1975.
See Also: Adamski, George; Contactees; Semjase
Further Reading
Elders, Lee J., Brit Nilsson-Elders, and Thomas K.
Welch, 1979. UFO . . . Contact from the Pleiades,
Volume I. Phoenix, AZ: Genesis III Productions.
———, 1983. UFO . . . Contact from the Pleiades,
Volume II. Phoenix, AZ: Genesis III Productions.
FIGU—Los Angeles Study Group, n.d. The Official
Billy Meier Web Page. http://www.billymeier.
com/index-alt.html.
Kinder, Gary, 1987. Light Years: An Investigation into
the Extraterrestrial Experiences of Eduard Meier.
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.
Korff, Kal K., 1995. Spaceships of the Pleiades: The
Billy Meier Story. Amherst, NY: Prometheus
Books.
Korff, Kal K., with William L. Moore, 1981. The
Meier Incident—The Most Infamous Hoax in Ufol -
ogy. Fremont, CA: self-published.
Maccabee, Bruce, 1989. “Pendulum from the
Pleiades.” International UFO Reporter 14, 1 (January/February):
11–12, 22.
Stevens, Wendelle C., 1983. UFO . . . Contact from
the Pleiades—A Preliminary Investigation Re -
port—The Report of an Ongoing Contact. Tucson,
AZ: self-published.
———, 1989. UFO . . . Contact from the Pleiades: A
Supplementary Investigation Report—The Report of
an Ongoing Contact. Tucson, AZ: self-published.