Billy Meier

Swiss author and founder of a UFO religion

Beginning in 1942, Swiss contactee Eduard Albert "Billy" Meier (born 3 February 1937) has reportedly maintained five decades of ongoing contact with a group of Nordic-type beings he designates the Plejaren, allegedly from a planet he calls Erra in orbit around Taygeta in the Pleiades star cluster. Meier is the author of the multi-volume Pleiadian Mission contact-report series (the Kontaktberichte) and founder of the Freie Interessengemeinschaft für Grenz- und Geisteswissenschaften und Ufologiestudien (FIGU), a UFO religion and non-profit association that administers his claims, publications, and community from his farm at Hinterschmidrüti, Switzerland.

Meier has also allegedly presented photographic stills, 16 mm film footage, sound recordings, metal samples, and thousands of pages of contact-report transcripts purporting to document his encounters with the Plejaren. Meier further claims to be the seventh reincarnation after six prophets common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Enoch, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Immanuel (Jesus), and Muhammad. Because the case rests on a vast and partly checkable evidence base whose most testable items — the photographs, the films, and the metal samples — are precisely the most contested, it has generated one of the largest skeptical literatures in ufology: Meier's photographic, film, and physical-sample evidence has been widely characterized as fraudulent by skeptics and most ufologists, who have suggested that he used models to hoax photographs claimed to show alien spacecraft, while his supporters point to laboratory examinations by IBM metallurgist Marcel Vogel, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the University of Arizona that they say found no signs of fakery, and to the difficulty of a one-armed man with a sixth-grade education producing such images in the era before computer-generated imagery, as evidence of authenticity. Meier's published prophecies have additionally been read by some observers as repeatedly blaming Jews — whom Meier allegedly refers to as "gypsies" — for future atrocities.

Background

Meier was born in the town of Bülach in the Zürcher Unterland. He left public schools before finishing 6th grade. In his teens he was convicted multiple times of minor offenses; in 1953 he was convicted of thievery and forgery and sentenced to a prison term in Rheinau. After escaping from the facility, Meier illegally crossed the border and joined the French Foreign Legion. He went AWOL from the Legion to return home. In 1965, he lost his left arm in a bus accident in Turkey. Some time later, he met and married a Greek woman, Kalliope Zafiriou, with whom he had three children. The nickname "Billy" came by way of an American friend who thought Meier's cowboy style of dress reminded her of Billy the Kid.

Residence and FIGU

Since the 1970s, Meier has lived and worked at the Semjase Silver Star Center — a farm known as Hinterschmidrüti in the canton of Zürich — which also serves as the headquarters of FIGU, the non-profit, tax-paying association he founded in the late 1970s to preserve, translate, and distribute the contact reports and associated teachings. FIGU has published thousands of Meier's alleged UFO photographs, film footage, audio recordings, metal samples, and the written transcripts of his alleged conversations with the Plejaren.

Alleged Plejaren contacts

From 1942 onward, Meier has reported a continuous, multi-decade series of encounters with the Plejaren — said to be originally from the Lyran star system and, following a cataclysmic war on their homeworld, relocated to Erra in orbit around Taygeta in the Pleiades star cluster. The sequence allegedly began with an entity named Sfath during Meier's early childhood, continued with a being called Asket in the 1950s and 1960s, and reached its most extensively documented phase with Semjase from 1975 onward and her father Ptaah thereafter.

Early contacts (1942–1964)

Meier has reported that his first contact occurred in 1942, at age five, with a Plejaren elder designated Sfath, who appeared to him in the fields near Bülach. According to the contact reports, Sfath served as a tutor and guide through Meier's childhood, introducing him to a body of cosmological and ethical teachings that would later be formalised as the Geisteslehre (spiritual teaching). From approximately 1953, contact purportedly continued with a female being named Asket — described as originating not from the Plejaren's home region but from a parallel DAL Universe with which the Plejaren maintained relations — and these encounters are said to have continued intermittently until 1964. Because this earliest phase produced no photographs or physical samples and is attested only by Meier's own much-later recollection of his childhood, it carries the weight of the case unevenly: supporters read the decades-long arc beginning at age five as establishing Meier as a lifelong contactee groomed from infancy for the Geisteslehre, the absence of early evidence being unremarkable for a small boy in 1940s rural Bülach. Critics — pointing to the same lack of contemporaneous documentation — read the Sfath and Asket episodes instead as a frame constructed retrospectively to backdate and dignify the photographable 1975 contacts, noting that the witnesses are gone and the events cannot now be cross-examined.

Semjase and the modern contact period (1975)

The first modern physical contact occurred on 28 January 1975, when Semjase — described as a blonde, fair-skinned, blue-eyed female indistinguishable from a Northern European human, and identified as the granddaughter of Sfath — allegedly landed a beamship in a forest near Hinwil, Switzerland and introduced herself as being from the Pleiades. Semjase reportedly explained that the Plejaren had originally come from the Lyran star system, that their world had been destroyed in catastrophic wars analogous to a nuclear exchange, and that survivors had escaped by ark ship and terraformed new worlds in the Pleiades. Semjase is identified in Elena Danaan's taxonomy as a member of the Ahel people of Taygeta. That the Plejaren are described as Nordic beings physically indistinguishable from fair-skinned Europeans, and as hailing from the Pleiades by way of a war-shattered Lyran homeworld, sits at the centre of the origin dispute. Supporters read the human likeness as consistent with a shared ancestral lineage between the Plejaren and Earth humanity and read Meier's naming of the Pleiades — a source not claimed by earlier contactees such as George Adamski or Howard Menger — as an original revelation rather than a borrowing. Critics, working from the same descriptions, read the convenient resemblance and the relocated-Lyran backstory as recycled tropes of the 1950s contactee tradition and of science fiction, a derivation-from-fiction that would explain why beings from across the galaxy look, dress, and speak so much like the people photographing them.

Subsequent contacts expanded the cast of reported Plejaren interlocutors to include Semjase's father Ptaah, described as a commander of a Plejaren fleet, alongside Quetzal, Menara, Pleija, and others. The stated purpose of the ongoing contacts, per the contact reports, was to convey that humanity is not alone in the universe and to prepare humans for eventual awareness of other intelligent civilizations before humanity itself reached other star systems. The Plejaren are described in the reports as technologically advanced but not uniformly spiritually superior to humans, and as having severed contact with previous Earth civilizations that failed to use their knowledge constructively. According to Meier and his circle, the dialogue with the Plejaren continues to the present.

Contact reports and philosophy

The Kontaktberichte were reportedly compiled via post-contact telepathic recall: after each meeting Meier returned home and typed out a complete account of the dialogue, filling notebooks over many years. The resulting corpus, maintained through FIGU at Hinterschmidrüti, describes a philosophy of human spiritual development, cosmic law (the Creational Laws), and warnings about environmental destruction and political extremism conveyed by the Plejaren. The sheer scale of this output — thousands of pages typed up alone, from memory, by a one-armed man over decades — is itself read in opposite directions. Supporters treat the volume and internal consistency of the Kontaktberichte as beyond the reach of a lone hoaxer and as the natural product of a genuine half-century dialogue. Critics read the same vast, self-published, and largely uncheckable corpus as a structural advantage for fabrication: a body of text so large that contradictions and revisions can be absorbed into it, and one that — being attested only through Meier and FIGU — restates the contact claim at length rather than independently testing it. Within the wider contactee tradition, commentators have noted that Meier and Howard Menger independently described "many, many, many black space-faring races" among the intelligent civilizations they encountered — a claim that did not appear in other prominent 1950s–1970s contactee accounts and that multiple independent researchers found notable as a point of convergence. Meier was reportedly the first modern contactee to identify his contacts specifically as coming from the Pleiades; earlier contactees including George Adamski and Howard Menger had not named the Pleiades as the source of their contacts.

Photographs, films, and physical samples

One of Meier's photographs of "a beamship floating beside a tree".

The photographs, films, and metal samples are the most testable part of the Meier record and, for that reason, the most fiercely contested: every item offered as proof of authenticity has a corresponding reading as a household fake, and the two interpretations rest on the same images and laboratory reports. Meier's photographs and films are claimed by him to show alien spacecraft floating above the Swiss countryside. He calls the alleged spaceships "beamships" from the Plejaren. According to Meier, the Plejaren gave him permission to photograph and film their beamships so that he could produce evidence of their extraterrestrial visitations; some of his photos are claimed to show prehistoric Earth scenes, extraterrestrials, and celestial objects from an alleged non-Earthly vantage point. Over the following decades Meier has produced an evidentiary record that also includes 16 mm film footage, audio recordings, and metal samples purportedly derived from the skin of a Plejaren beamship. American investigators Brit Elders and her husband Lee — who came to the case through researcher Wendelle Stevens in 1975 — submitted the materials in the 1970s and 1980s to laboratories including IBM (where metallurgist Marcel Vogel examined them), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Scripps Institute, the Groton Naval Facility, MIT, and the University of Arizona for analysis. Michael Malin at the University of Arizona reportedly digitized the photographs; audio engineers at the Groton Naval Facility reportedly could not identify or replicate the craft sounds, finding them to consist of a variety of frequencies underlying the Schumann resonance. The crispness of the images that supporters cite as their strongest point is, for critics, exactly what they would expect from a close-up model: Joe Nickell and the Independent Investigations Group read the very clarity and steadiness of the "beamship" photographs as the signature of a small object photographed near the camera — a disc suspended on a thread or held against the treeline — rather than of a craft at distance, so that an image being undoctored (a real exposure on real film) settles nothing about what it depicts. Supporters answer with the same fact from the other side: that no analyst examining the originals located the strings, supports, or compositing seams a model fake should reveal, and that a one-armed man with a sixth-grade education would have struggled to stage, suspend, and photograph such scenes convincingly in the era before computer-generated imagery.

Marcel Vogel of IBM reportedly analysed the metal samples under a scanning electron microscope and reported that they appeared to have been produced by a cold fusion-like process rather than conventional metallurgical casting, with crystals of separated metals throughout — a process allegedly not achievable by terrestrial metallurgy at that time. According to investigator Brit Elders, the metal specimens reportedly contained thulium, a rare-earth element described as extraordinarily difficult and costly to extract and not known to be processable into such alloys by civilian techniques of the period — raising the question of how a Swiss farmer with a sixth-grade education and one arm could have obtained and incorporated it. Supporters read Vogel's finding of an apparently non-cast, cold fusion-like structure containing thulium as the single most anomalous datum in the case — a result that points to a manufacturing process the man producing it could not have commanded. Critics — including Meier biographer-investigator Kal Korff — rest on the same chain of custody to read it the other way: Vogel's observations were never formally published or peer-reviewed, the original specimen was, on the supporters' own account, removed and not returned, and an anomaly that cannot now be re-examined or independently replicated functions as an unrepeatable claim rather than a standing test, leaving open the more prosaic possibility of an exotic but terrestrial alloy or industrial slag.

The Elders alleged that intelligence-community actors seeded forged photographs into Meier's photo-processing shops to introduce fakes that could then be used to discredit the authentic material. A substantial portion of the original evidence — photographs and physical samples — was reportedly taken by individuals claiming to investigate the case and never returned. This seeded-fakes account is itself the hinge of the staged-hoax dispute: supporters read it as explaining how demonstrably faked images came to be mixed into a genuine archive — fraud committed against Meier rather than by him — and treat the disappearance of the strongest originals as the predictable work of those same actors. Critics read the same two claims as a pre-emptive defence that converts every exposed fake into evidence of persecution and conveniently places the best material permanently beyond independent examination, so that whatever is checkable is dismissed as planted and whatever would settle the matter is gone.

Meier's photographs and films have nevertheless been widely characterized as fraudulent by scientists, skeptics, and most ufologists, who argue the images are hoaxes produced with models and household objects. In 1987, in interviews with author Gary Kinder, Meier reportedly admitted to using models to recreate scenes after his wife showed him photographs of incomplete models he had believed he had destroyed by burning. Critics read this reported admission as the case collapsing in the contactee's own words; supporters read the very same episode narrowly — as Meier conceding only that he built models to re-stage scenes he said he had originally witnessed, an account that, on their reading, leaves the authenticity of the earlier originals untouched and is consistent with the seeded-fakes claim that genuine and counterfeit images became mixed. In 1997, Meier's ex-wife Kalliope told interviewers that several of the purported extraterrestrial-female photographs, including those said to depict "Asket" and "Nera", were in fact of Michelle DellaFave and Susan Lund — members of The Golddiggers dance troupe performing on The Dean Martin Show — and that other photos were of spaceship models crafted from trash-can lids, carpet tacks and other household objects. For critics the Golddiggers match and the trash-can-lid models are the case's plainest demonstration of fabrication; Meier's defenders, taking the same identifications, treat them as isolating the fakes — the discredited "Asket" and "Nera" frames being precisely the seeded or re-staged images they concede are not genuine — while contending that the bulk of the beamship photographs and the metal samples, which carry no such match, remain unexplained. In February 2017, during a BBC art exhibit about conspiracies that displayed several of Meier's photographs, photography curator Gordon MacDonald commented on 1970s examinations which had found the images "weren't doctored," remarking: "Just because photographs are real – ie real images made with a real camera – doesn't mean they are of what the person says they're of." MacDonald's formulation captures the deadlock that runs through the whole evidentiary dispute: supporters and critics agree the films are undoctored exposures and divide only over what they are exposures of — a real beamship, or a real model.

One of Meier's photographs is also notable for having been used as the background of the "I want to believe" poster in The X-Files, before an intellectual-property lawsuit forced the producers to replace the background with a different image in the fourth season of the series.

Alleged prophecies

The prophecies turn entirely on provenance — whether a given prediction was demonstrably committed to print before the event it describes — and so divide supporters and critics along the question of who can vouch for the dating. Meier's Kontaktberichte are claimed by his supporters to contain dated, pre-publication prophecies that were subsequently borne out, including the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, the death of Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, the discovery of the ozone hole, and the AIDS epidemic. The Sadat prediction was reportedly recorded in Meier's blue contact-note binder before news of the event broke. Investigator Brit Elders has said she was present at the Meier farm when the assassination occurred: Meier retrieved the binder, found the relevant paragraph, and immediately stated that the initial media account of a single assassin was false; the following day, the involvement of multiple shooters was confirmed. According to Brit Elders, the Plejaren predictions were reportedly based on an event-chain predictive model — an "event clock" — rather than simple temporal foresight: if event A occurs and event B follows, event C is the certain result, but if B does not occur, C will not either. Meier's supporter Michael Horn has further claimed that a 1975 Meier contact-note described bromine gases damaging the ozone layer, a mechanism he says was only publicly acknowledged by mainstream atmospheric science decades later. Supporters read this record — and the Sadat episode in particular, where Meier is said to have named multiple shooters from the binder a day before the press did — as genuine foreknowledge that no cold reading or lucky guess can account for. Critics rest on the same fact that the binder's contents are vouched for only by Meier and his own circle, and that FIGU controls both the texts and their claimed dates of writing: with no independent custody establishing that a passage predates the event, a self-published prophecy "found" after the fact is indistinguishable from one back-dated or quietly amended, and the looser predictions (an "ozone hole", an epidemic, a leader's death) are vague enough that the conditional "event clock" can be fitted to whatever later occurred.

In UFO research discourse

The Meier case has been discussed within broader debates about the relationship between contactee testimony and government information management. One commentator noted the parallel between the Meier "sports model" disc — one of Meier's most iconic photographed craft designs — and a similar design described by Bob Lazar, suggesting that the appearance of certain craft designs across multiple contactee accounts may reflect an underlying reality rather than cross-contamination: "Maybe this Billy Meier sports model that he worked on was real. I don't know."

Media

Billy Meier's story is the subject of Contact, a 1987 documentary written and directed by Larry Savadove. The film is narrated by David Warner and features UFO researchers Lee Elders and Wendelle Stevens. A further documentary titled I Want to Believe, announced in January 2025, was publicized as a forthcoming feature exploring Meier's case.

See also

• Plejaren
• Semjase
• Ptaah
• Sfath
• Erra (planet)
• Galactic Federation of Worlds
• List of non-human intelligent beings
• Ahel contacts with Earth humans
• List of alleged extraterrestrial beings

References

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External links

• FIGU — Billy Meier's official website

This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Billy Meier", as of 2024-11-06, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.