<>#8THE FARMER AND THE COSMONAUTS@1 Cousins of the human race dwell in the Pleiades star cluster - and a Swiss farmer is their confidant on Earth. PETER BROOKESMITH analyses his claims, and the remarkably detailed photographs that back them up.@7 EARLY ONE JANUARY AFTERNOON in 1975, a Swiss Farmer, Billy Meier, was out walking near his home at Hinwel, in Zurich canton. He looked across the empty road to the meadow opposite and reflected on how remote this stretch of countryside was. Just then, however, he realised that he was not alone: a peculiar hum filled the air. He looked up and saw a classic UFO - a silver disc-shaped craft - circling slowly above him. By unusual good fortune Billy Meier was carrying a camera. He managed to take a number of pictures of the craft before it 'swooped down' and landed about 300 feet (100 metres) away from him. He judged it to be about 23 feet (7 metres) in diameter. He began to run towards it, but was stopped by 'an unknown force' some 150 feet (50 metres) from the craft. Then, as Meier looked on amazed, a figure appeared from behind the grounded disc and approached him. So began the first of more than 100 meetings with cosmonauts from the Pleiades star cluster. In the course of them Meier took some 3000 pages of notes and hundreds of photographs. From his experience came a book: UFO...contact from the Pleiades. And the whole strange business set off a major controversy among ufologists. Meier's story was first investigated - and publicised - by Wendelle Stevens, a retired USAF colonel living in Tucson, Arizona. According to Stevens he first heard of the Meier contacts through a niece of the psychologist C.G. Jung, with whom he had been swapping pictures of UFOs for some years. (Stevens is said to have one of the largest collections of UFO photographs in the world.) In 1975 she learned about Meier's pictures, taken only some 35 miles (55 kilometres) from her home, and went to visit Meier. Stevens says that she met eight other witnesses to the Pleiadean contacts during her two-day stay and collected more pictures. Copies of these were sent to Stevens, and in due course the lady arrived in Tucson to see him, bringing some 16 more photographs with her. 'The pictures were super fantastic. I had never seen anything like them before,' said Stevens. A correspondence then grew up between Stevens and Meier, with Jung's niece acting as courier and translator. 'This went on for eight or nine months before I decided I'd better go and look this guy in the eye. He was taking more and more pictures and they all looked really good.' Not everyone who looks at Billy Meier's photographs is as impressed by them, but Stevens duly flew to London and went on to Switzerland by train. There he learned that 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. @7Which 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 gainful 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. When the Pleiadeans came, there were three of them - Semjase, Ptaah and Asket - and two of them were distinctly female. They had much to tell him. Their home planet is called Erra, and it circles a small sun 'in the system of Taygeta' in the Pleiades cluster. However, this was not their original home: their civilisation had reached great heights on a planet of a star in the constellation of Lyra millions of years previously, but had been unable to cope with its own technological prowess. Before this society finally tore itself apart in a thermonuclear war, a Lyran named Pleione led a mass exodus into space to colonise planets in the Pleiades, in the Hyades cluster and on a planet of the star @7Vega. One the colonists were safely established, space exploration was renewed - bringing the Pleiadeans in due course to our own solar system, which they first reached some thousands of years ago. The cosmonauts told Meier that they reckoned their civilisation was 3000 years in advance of ours on Earth and that 'our sector' of the Universe is governed by the 'Andromeda Council'. The Pleiadeans are also members of a union of planets whose inhabitants number 127 billion people - not superhumans 'but men, like us, benefiting from greater time, and greater knowledge'. The Pleiades is a group of stars in the constellation of Taurus. To the naked eye it appears to be made up of six or seven stars. The telescope reveals that these are part of a cluster of many hundreds of stars, 430 light years distant from the Earth. How then, did the cosmonauts ever reach us? According to them, the journey takes about seven hours and is made in a variety of craft. The barrier posed by the speed of light is broken by a 'hyper-space drive system', and the ships equipped with it are known as 'beamships'. The hyper-space drive apparently works on a 'tachyon system' (tachyons are hypothetical faster-than-light particles). Propulsion below the speed of light is effected by a light-emitting drive. When pressed for more details the cosmonauts told Meier that terrestrial scientists were working on similar systems, known by other names but using the same principles. Five types of craft are used by the Pleiadeans, four of which have an @7interplanetary capacity - and one of these also has a time-travel mode. The fifth type of craft is used solely for subatmospheric reconnaissance. So, what are the Pleiadeans doing here? And, perhaps a more intriguing question, why was it Billy Meier, a small-time farmer and one-time thief, that they chose to contact? According to the cosmonauts, their purpose was quite simply to make us aware of the existence of extra- terrestrial life - which was both good and bad by earthly standards, and both human and non-human. Semjase, the elegant lady Pleiadean, put it like this in an early encounter: 'We, too, are still far removed from perfection and have to evolve constantly like yourselves. We are neither superior or superhuman, nor are we missionaries...We feel duty-bound to the citizens if Earth, because our forefarthers were your forefarthers.' Semjase did not reveal who those common ancestors were, nor was she entirely clear about the nature of the Pleiadean mission: We have taken on certain tasks, such as, for example, the supervision of developing life in space, particularly human, and to ensure a certain measure of order. In the course of these duties we do here and there approach the denizens of various worlds, select some individuals and instruct them. This we do only when a race is in a stage of higher evolution. Then we explain (and prove) to them that they are not the only thinking beings in the universe. The Pleiadeans, however, in common with other aliens who have @7purportedly communicated with people on Earth, are not greatly impressed with the way we are managing our affairs. In the course of their contacts they let it be known to Meier that in their opinion, we terrestrials were not capable of changing mass consciousness, that we were an insane society rushing headlong to our own destruction, that we were not only content with exterminating each other, but we now are bent on destroying all forms of life on this planet as well as the critical life support systems. Such a state of affairs once pertained when the Pleiadeans inhabited their home system in Lyra, of course: but unlike them, we do not take our world crisis seriously, and no one has made suitable preparations for escape from our doomed planet. Even so, the Pleiadeans refuse to interfere with our way of life or our power structure. We, and we alone, are responsible for our own destiny. This Zen-like combination of fierce moral comment and studied indifference 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. @7When 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, avarice, war.... And neither is it consistent with the truth that our brothers and sisters come from other parts of space on behalf of a God to bring to the world the long awaited peace. In no case do we come on behalf of anybody, since creation, by itself, confers no obligation. It is a law unto itself, and every form of life must conform with it and become a part of it. Thus spoke Semjase, Pleiadean cosmonaut, to Billy Meier during 1975. But why was it Meier that 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 caught 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 @7their 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'. But then, it is not clear how material the cosmonauts are themselves. The delectable Semjase told Meier that when coming to Earth the Pleiadeans 'are forced into making "slight adjustment" which allows us to function properly within your dimensional world'. Without such an 'adjustment', no extra-terrestrial could make contact with people on Earth. It ensures 'a correct state of mind and corresponds with the human vibrational pattern'. This may (or may not) have something to do with the high level of spiritual development claimed by the Pleiadeans. Using their telepathic powers, they are apparently able to think in concert, 'exercising their astute powers of purity of thought' to control their tendencies to discord and strife. Thus freed from bickering, their technology has flourished and so has their medicine, giving the Pleiadeans an average life expectancy of 1000 years. Despite these talents, Meier observed, the cosmonauts spoke in an oddly accented form of Swiss-German. The remarkable nature of the Pleiadean computer is seemingly responsible, as Semjase explained: We are in possession of all Earth languages which are spoken at the moment or have ever been spoken in past ages. We have exact data on them from which we have developed language @7courses. This happens through computer-like apparatus under the supervision of language experts.... Other types of apparatus may serve to connect us to the 'computer' in such a way to make it virtually possible for the languages to be inspired into us....Such a process, it seems, is still unable to induce a perfect accent. And the question is still unresolved as to quite what the Pleiadeans expected Meier to DO with all this information - unless they foresaw his contact with Colonel Stevens and the resulting publicity. Once familiar with the outlines of the case, Stevens certainly lost no time in gathering the evidence: photographs, metal samples given Meier by the cosmonauts, physical traces of the landings, film, tape recordings, computer analysis of pictures, statements from other witnesses, all gathered in a total of 62 days spent with Meier in Switzerland. But what is the significance of that investigation? end.