<>#8A MASS OF CONTRADICTIONS@3 Billy Meier's tales of meetings with space people are marked by restraint. This text recounts more of these amazing claims - and describes the intellectual contortions of Meier's supporters.@4 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 contactee 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 recordings of their craft in flight, and, according to Colonel Wendelle Stevens (who first investigated the affair), produced other witnesses to the remarkable events that he described. All this evidence was, Stevens says, subjected to rigorous scientific testing - and was passed as authentic. The results of Stevens's investigation 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. And that is without knowing the results of the independent scientific tests of the evidence that have been carried out. The most startling of Meier's later claims is to have been taken in one of the Pleiadean spacecraft (known as Variation Type-4, apparently) 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 (odd that neither NASA nor the Russians seemed aware of the Pleiadeans flitting past), 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 perculiar as to need no comment - such as the photograph of a pterodactyl that shows a pyramid in the background! As Meier's defenders - mainly the group known as Genesis III, who published Colonel Stevens's book on the Meier case - have attempted to come to the rescue, they too have @4fallen into confusion and contradiction. Or perhaps worse. 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 independent 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. When taxed with the same question, 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 a few 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 record, which shows wind speeds reaching a maximum of 15 miles per hour (25 km/h). Korff reasons that a model UFO and model tree were superimposed on pictures of the site. And indeed models of the 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 defenders is Jim Dilettoso, of Genesis III. Kal Korff prints a long interview with him (and dismantles most of his statements) in @4which he says that in the 1950s Wendelle Stevens and another ufologist, Richard Miller, performed something called 'transchannelling' 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 those CIA officers...have developed serious personality aberrations. Asked why, Dilettoso replied: ...It seems like something consistent in people that do channeling...that their cell-salt structures change, and they develop diabetes. There's also studies done that the last two Popes developed diabetes, as do a lot of Eastern gurus. So what's the correlation between transchanneling and cell-salts and diabetes, then diabetes going unchecked, developing into other neurotic and schizophrenic...behaviors that usually show up as olfactory and motor sense disturbances like Parkinson's disease. It's not where they become schizophrenic where their thinking is impaired, but where their body reactions are affected, and Billy (Meier) shows signs of that also. But that seems consistent in the, oh...some thousand contactee cases that are being studied. In that the vibrating field put out by the ship and by the beings themselves @4dominates the aura, the magnetic field that can be kirlian photographed, dominates it so much, that it appears to even get down and start reprogramming the DNA. One may be forgiven for suspecting that Steven's, and his associates who make up Genesis III, did start by believing Meier and accepting his evidence at face value. Then, embarrassed by the jeers, laughter and protests of more painstaking ufologists, they were forced into defending their lost cause. Meier, however, has simply continued to make ever more extravagant comments - not, perhaps, without a certain impish humour - which Genesis III have tumbled over themselves to make respectable. The results, after the fashion of tumbling, bear a close resemblance to slapstick, however. 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 wish to be compromised.' Billy Meier, on the other hand, has happily admitted 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 samples of metal and crystal given 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 had his 105th contact during the night and 'had a surprise' for the investigators. This turned out to be @4a package, handed over by the cosmonaut Quetzal, of four metal, one biological and nine mineral and crystal specimens. According to the book, the scientists who conducted 'in-depth, highly sophisticated examination' of these samples 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 aluminium, 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 is 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', Dilettoso incautiously persisted, '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 @4biological specimen), but then Genesis III are notably coy about naming any of the 200 scientists they say have verified Meier's remarkable story. They are no less reticent about the numerous other witnesses who, they say, saw - and in some cases photographed - the Pleiadean craft skimming around the Swiss valleys. No other photographs have surfaced, none are printed in the book, and none of these other witnesses are named. The best the book offers is a number of photographs of unidentified people sitting around Billy Meier's dining table and the assertion that tapes of conversations with the witnesses were subjected to psychological stress evaluation (PSE). The pictures by themselves prove absolutely nothing, while PSE is a notoriously unreliable method of lie detection, despite Genesis III's talk of 'special computers standing by in northern California' to perform the analysis. Genesis III do not mention any analysis of the notes made by Meier of his 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 correspondences 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 civilisation which lays claim to being 3000 years into the future has not offered much in the way of a @4quantum jump over what our ancestors had 5000 years ago (in the way of intellectual transformation).' '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 embarrassed by their halt-familier triviality. But of all the evidence produced by Meier, none is as controversial as his photographs of Pleiadean spacecraft. end.