Trashcan-Lid Theosophy: Eduard 'Billy' Meier's Cult Of Alien Contact
An essay in a series on the history of the idea of extraterrestrial visitation
Canton Zurich, the western, German-speaking part of Switzerland, is gorgeous. A photo viewer is so distracted by the surreal scenery that the spaceship hovering weightless above the landscape seems almost a natural phenomenon. William Eduard “Billy” Meier entirely owes his success as a flying saucer photographer to the land he inhabits, for when he has pointed his camera into picturesque scenes like this, his spaceships have been the most compelling. The successful Meier compositions — the photos that Sotheby’s likes to sell at auction — capture the “Pleiadian beamships” right on this happy boundary, in a liminal relationship to earth.
Whenever Meier’s lens has focused too closely on supposed beamships next to trees, or buildings or vehicles that are in frame, however, his photographic fakery has been too obvious. Even his best photographs have been utterly rubbished by real photographic experts; now 88 years old, Meier is undoubtedly the most well-documented and thoroughly-debunked fraud in the history of ufology. Still, the best of his pictures are admittedly amazing.
Like so many prophets of New Age religion before him and since, Meier’s artistic theosophy has not aged well, though. It dates him, over time; dispels his illusions. We still recognize the original, iconic X-Files poster-image flying saucer because of that magical-seeming balance between earth and sky, but the magic has faded. Per the poster in Agent Fox Mulder’s FBI basement office, many people still want to believe in Meier’s photography. His photos have won him worldwide fame, but his message has earned occult acclaim.
Wendelle Stephens, the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who imported the cult of Billy Meier into the United States in 1980, was already a great collector of UFO photography and thought Meier’s were the clearest pictures ever taken. Photos with natural settings abound in the two-volume coffee table book UFO... Contact from the Pleiades produced by Stevens’s investigative team, Genesis III. An uncle gifted me a copy for Christmas in 1983, and although it stirred my imagination, it left me with doubts about Meier. Reading that book, and moreover rereading it over the next few years, helped shape the younger me into the skeptic that I am today.
In 2025, with ‘AI deepfakes’ being a household term, we are perhaps less trusting of images than we were in the 1980s. Moreover, with the internet at our fingertips, it is easier than ever for someone to research Rolls Royce Camargues and make a YouTube video (see above) proving that Meier used forced perspective with a toy model car for a photo series featuring one of his ridiculous trashcan-lid “wedding cake” spaceships.
Digital cameras have replaced film. Photo analysis tools are now available to millions more people who know how to use them, so fake images can be unmasked in a matter of minutes on social media. But in 1982, when no household on the planet had a computer or a digital camera, it was much easier to convince television viewers that computer technology was magic, capable of anything. Genesis III set out to convince the public that a computer could tell the ‘real’ flying saucer photo from a fake one when humans could not.
Working with Meier, Stevens and the Genesis III team duplicated his technique for faking landscape photos in their 1980 television ‘documentary’ Contact From The Pleiadians. Disturbed when their pictures had the same quality as Meier’s, the filmmakers faced a dilemma. Science was no help, so they used pseudoscience. Genesis III wrote a script about “pixels,” which were a wholly new concept to almost all Americans, and presented a fancy-seeming digital image analysis that was nothing of the sort. We are more used to this sort of flimflam presentation nowadays. Here is that clip from the longer ‘documentary,’ which is available at Bitchute. The man presenting the pixels is Jim Dilettoso. He is of course not an actual scientist, let alone a computer scientist.
As Kal Korff emphasizes in his landmark debunking of Meier, Spaceships of the Pleiades: The Billy Meier Story, Meier had never provided any film negatives or source materials for his photography to anyone. “Without an original negative to study, any photograph of a ‘UFO’ (regardless of what it purports to show) is worthless and cannot be accepted by science as evidence,” Korff writes. “Indeed, according to Meier proponents, the original negatives and other photographic source material have all either been ‘lost’ in the mail or ‘stolen’ by everyone from souvenir hunters to nebulous and nefarious intelligence operatives. Still others have been ‘recalled’ by the Pleiadians, meaning that Meier was ordered to turn them over to the aliens.”1 Indeed, the authors of Contact from the Pleiades seem all too gullible on this point, suspending their disbelief to the breaking point as CIA, KGB, and other shadow organizations all reputedly converged on Meier in the late 1970s to steal his negatives.
Despite Korff’s exhaustive work, Meier still has believers, emphasis on belief. Seekers from around the world come to Meier for the photos, but they stay for his teachings. In fact, Meier’s cult organization, the Freie Interessengeneinschaft für Grenz-und Geisteswissenschaften und Ufologie-Studien (Free Community of Interests in the Border and Spiritual Sciences and UFO Studies, referred to hereafter as FIGU) remains active worldwide today. “It was to this study group in 1975 that Meier began to reveal his lifetime of contacts with space beings and to whom he had showed the photographs of flying saucers he had taken,” explains the Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology.2 Spiritual seekers learn German in order to read Meier’s books, most of which have not been translated. Much of this essay relies on his exegesis by English-speaking North Americans.
“The combination of pictures and spiritual message has had a marked influence on the continuing New Age movement with its emphasis on spiritual emergence,” the Encyclopedia notes. “As early as 1989, channelers in North America also began to claim contact with the Pleiadians,” with many embracing FIGU teachings. As we have learned in this essay series, the so-called ‘New Age’ is in fact a very old body of alternative religious beliefs, and extraterrestrial visitation has always been one of those beliefs.
The teachings of the Pleiadians transmitted to earth by Eduard ‘Billy’ Meier are virtually indistinguishable from any other UFO cult ‘bricolage’ because they are formed from the same material, acknowledge it, and comment upon it. Meier is a flying saucer prophet of an Old Time religion and ‘Genesis III’ was his media vanguard in the United States. Meier has “a distinctly religious message,” the Encyclopedia notes. The beamship photos are mere icons of Meier’s faith.
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As far as this writer can tell, nothing has been altered from the original UFO...Contact from the Pleiades in its 45th anniversary edition. Some additions, such as the new foreword by New Age guru Shirley MacLaine, are to be expected. Delicate doubt creeps in at the end of the original text and has been amplified in the anniversary afterword by Lee Elders. “With all that we learned over the years, perhaps the most valued lesson was that proof is an individual’s perception,” Lee Elders now concludes.3 Stevens and his partners were far too accepting of Meier’s “proof,” each finding their own reason to dismiss contrary evidence.
The excuses for Meier become impossible to credit. For example, the supposed eyewitnesses are defined by what they did not see. “Although no one but Meier was present during the contacts, some had seen the craft, some had heard the beamship, some had seen landing tracks, some had seen unusual lights that moved erratically through the skies, and some had been present when Meier ‘disappeared’ or ‘reappeared’ before them,” Elders wrote in 1983, on page 173 of a book that is 183 pages long in its present edition.
By press time, it was already apparent that some of Meier’s photographs, especially his “time travel” series, were obvious fakes. “Why would the contactee fake certain aspects of the evidence while other forms were testing as valid? Logically the two elements were contradictive and will remain one of the unanswered questions,” Elders wrote, pulling the wool over his own eyes. Too many “coincidences” had convinced him that Meier knew too much for a simple Swiss farmer, that he must have knowledge of the future, after all.
Meier had, for example, declared the imminent death of 86-year-old Yugoslavian dictator Josef Broz Tito, who did indeed die a year later at the age of 87, to no one’s surprise. Meiers also declared that the earth was developing a hole in the ozone layer in 1975, knowledge supposedly relayed to him by the Pleiadians, and Genesis III credited Meiers with foresight for this, since like the rest of the public, they were unaware of the issue until the 1980s. In fact, Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland first published their hypothesis on ozone depletion by CFCs in 1974 and it was reported in the popular press. Yet these prognostications were enough “proof” to Lee Elders that he dismissed evidence of outright fraud in 1983.
Photos of flying saucers were just the bait. Meiers wrote down extensive “contact notes” after his meetings with the “cosmonauts,” and these contact notes were the hook. Rather than spark critical thinking, Meier’s narrative of interdimensional time travel and hyperspace “swayed Col. Stevens and others into believing everything about the case was real and valid,” Elders writes. Meier was selling a story, not just limited edition photo prints. “Col. Stevens, who had always been a hopeful but open-minded investigative collector, lost all objectivity.” A surprising number of people did conclude that Meier was a fraud, after all, but that the flying saucers were real, regardless. “There were several that had a falling out with Meier or the group around him and went their different ways, yet those we spoke to still believed the contacts were real,” Elders writes. They all wanted to believe.
Lee Elders was not blind to the gathering cult of the Pleiadians. “People from all around the globe came to visit Meier. Many of them viewed the contactee as a sort of messiah, someone who could solve all problems of the world and save them,” Elders wrote in his closing pages. “They were from various career paths, and they seemed to be attracted to something they deemed unique and greater than themselves.” Meier was a “repeater case,” someone in continual contact with extraterrestrials, which made him suspicious to many seekers but auspicious to others. “Since Meier was one of the very few contactees of the time, he fit that need” for someone to channel the aliens on a regular basis during a time of constant change.
These observations come 175 pages into the new, 183-page edition of the book. Much earlier in the text, the authors note that “1980 and 1981 witnessed a Native American exodus to the lush green hills of Canton Zurich” in a burst of New Age spirituality. This event is supposed to buttress Meier’s claims to special knowledge of the past through the Pleiadians. “Tribal leaders and medicine men from across the continental US had caught word of the ongoing experiences and sought out the contactee (Billy Meier). They came to congratulate him for his courage and to compare their histories and prophecies to those of the visitors from the Seven Stars,” Contact reads at pages 94-95, right halfway through the book. It is just one of many examples of explicit appeal to spirituality throughout a text which draws on diverse examples of ancient lore about the Pleiades constellation.
Meiers puts the Pleiades at the center of human history. Humans on earth are in fact descedendants of the Pleiadians, according to Meier. In a series of recordings preserved on the Gasmeter YouTube channel, J. Randolph Winters makes it clear that according to the contact notes, “humans did not evolve from monkeys.” In fact, he says, monkeys were made from human DNA. “Our ancient ancestors, the Pleiadians, have come from a small cluster of stars called the Pleiades to guide and awaken us to the knowledge of life and lessons of spirit that we will need to enter the New Age of consciousness,” reads the first sentence of the sales copy for Winters’s 1994 book, The Pleiadian Mission.
Eduard Meier has been telepathic since the age of 5, according to Eduard Meier. He had special spiritual training from a Pleiadian named Asket while he was in India as a young man, Meiers says. They have been watching his spiritual development all his life, although for some reason they did not foresee or prevent the 1965 bus accident that took his arm. Shortly after his “contacts” with Pleiadians “resumed” on Tuesday, 28 January 1975, according to Contact From The Pleiades, the beautiful, angelic interlocutor Semjase (pronounced sem-YA-see) told Meier “we feel duty bound to the citizens of Earth, because our forefathers were your forefathers.”
Meier has met our makers. He knows where we have been and where we are going. He has been taken to see the past and he knows the future on a galactic scale. “They were telepathic,” UFO… Contact From The Pleiades says. “But they also spoke to him in his native Swiss-German dialect, with an unusual accent.” Being the ancestors of humans, they were themselves human. “Since they were Nordic-looking with few physical differences from our own form, Meier felt very comfortable” with the Pleiadians. Meier’s choice of “border sciences” in the title of his organization, FIGU, is suggestive of a German imaginarium shared with fascist Theosophy.
“By April 4, 1978, he had a total of 105 meetings with the Pleiadian cosmonauts,” Genesis III records. During these meetings, Meier learned that a cosmonaut named Pleione led a people from the star Lyra to the Pleiades and then the earth. Semjase herself hailed from the planet Erra in a star system they call Taygeta. Earth, Meier is pleased to announce, is subject to “the Andromeda Council governing our sector of the universe and the union of planets they belong to,” a polity of 127 billion beings, according to UFO… Contact From The Pleiades. This Andromeda Council has directed the spiritual development of earth for the last 13,500 years.
It is all very like George Adamski, which is perhaps why Meier goes out of his way to denounce the world’s first ‘UFO contactee’ as an obvious fraud. Like Adamski, however, his work bears the unmistakeable, universalizing stamp of Theosophy. As we have established in this series, reincarnation on other worlds — interplanetary metempsychosis — was a key belief of the interwar Theosophists who created the postwar UFO religions.
Meier continues this tradition. “Billy, who personally felt that reincarnation was a probability, asked his friend Semjase her beliefs on the subject,” according to the Genesis III reading of the contact notes. “To the cosmonaut, one soul living multiple lives was not a belief but a reality.”
From their childhood, she explained that they are taught life — from its beginning until its goal — is divided into seven major periods: primary life, reasoned life, intellect life, real life, creational life, spiritual life, and Creation’s life. Each of these seven levels are divided into seven sub-periods, which can be compared to grade levels in school, except that they are not calculated in months or years but instead by lessons, and sometimes it may take several lives to learn one lesson. Each sub-period provides knowledge for a specific form of development with a very distinct goal.
Seven is the magic number in numerology and Meier has seven of everything. There are seven layers to the universe, each subdivided into seven levels, say the Pleiadeians, who have mapped them all during adventures through time and space. Like humans, the “ur-universe” has also been through seven cycles of growth, alternately expanding and contracting seven times. The seventh level of reality is only known to the border and spiritual sciences because astrology is needed to unlock the secrets of the universe. Our rude horoscopes are unable to guide us, whereas the Pleiadians have far superior and advanced astrology, Meier reports. Someone alert Elon Musk.
During the 44th contact, Meier asked Semjase about the so-called ‘Count of Saint Germain’ celebrated in Christian Theosophy as an equal to the risen Jesus. Saint Germain was reputedly immortal. Semjase confirmed the rumors that his real name was Rákóczi. Born in 1711, he was “a liar, swindler, and con man” according to the Winters exegesis. Helpfully, Semjase was able to recognize a reincarnation of the infamous mountebank duke and help Meier avoid contact with him.
The Rosicrucians, “an old order of science and knowledge,” used Rákóczi as their sinister agent to control the minds of aristocratic women through hypnosis, Meier says. Rosicrucians also used chemicals on Rákóczi’s face to make him appear younger, and they have continued to keep his legend alive by recruiting new actors to have their faces changed to resemble him, so that people can encounter him, rather like a conspiracy to engineer Elvis sightings. This explains why so many Spiritualists and Theosophists claimed to have met the Count of Saint Germain, including the founders of the infamous ‘I AM Activity’ in the Depression-era United States.
Through this interplanetary revelation, Eduard Meier neatly avoids association with other, better-known frauds in European and American esoteric religion, ditching the baggage of previous occult movements. Meier has the supreme truth from the Pleiadians themselves. “Thought transmission is the purest form of communication, as the conversation may not be manipulated into something it is not,” says Ptaah, the stoic elder supervisor of Semjase in the galactic organizational chart. Meier’s notes are in fact transmitted to him telepathically after every meeting with the Pleiadians so that he can write them down as he sees fit. According to Winters, “the device on the ship reads Semjase’s subconscious and sends them to Billy as symbols used by the spirit in telepathy,” then “he converts them into language,” therefore the contact notes are “all his interpretation.”
In his collection Message From The Pleiades: The Contact Notes of Eduard Billy Meier, Stevens says that during Meier’s encounters, “the dialogue was in fact recorded by the extraterrestrials and was being mechanically/telepathically played back to him from a computer-like device on the spacecraft, and he was receiving it in the form of automatic writing” via a typewriter.4 The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology calls this “the traditional contactee fashion” of extraterrestrial revelation: messages received from beyond, written down. A form of magic that is centuries old.
Meier rejects existing organized religions. “Traditional religon is denounced for its detrimental effect on humanity, but in its place the Pleiadians advocate the following of the ‘Ten Bids,’ the things which nature bids us to follow,” the Encyclopedia notes. Nature is smart. Nature itself has a plan for us. Meier’s cosmology, according to Winters, consists of “fine matter” and “coarse matter” imbued with knowledge of their own creation (the “absolutum”) that “find their way, through reasoning and understanding” to cohere as planets and stars and people and plants and animals. Nature is a superior god to the one in the bible, Meier says.
Meiers takes a dim view of Christian churches. This has always made him controversial among ufologists. In a videotaped interview at the 1999 International UFO Congress in Laughlin, Nevada, Wendelle Stevens explained that Lou Zinsstag, the woman who introduced him to Meier’s photos, expressed doubts about Meier because there was “not enough Christianity” in his message. Retired atmospheric research scientist James Deardorff, who left his career early to become a Meier apologist, acknowledged in his 1989 article “The Meier Case and its Spirituality” that “some were offended to learn that the Pleiadeans espouse a spiritual philosophy which is largely at odds with Judeo-Christian concepts.”
A jealous Abrahamic god does not deter Meier from making his proclamations. “Man should know that the God (force) is quite simply that of creation and that man also, either coming from the higher spiritual spheres or being elevated to those spheres after numerous terrestrial lives, is subject to creation and respectively complementary to it,” Semjase tells Meier on page 27 of Contact.
Like generations of alternative spiritualists before him, Meier has a progressive view of heaven and reincarnation. “The higher [man] soars, the greater becomes his power,” Semjase tells him. We all become gods, eventually, in the grand cosmic system. “However, one can never identify God separately from the creation because God itself is a part of it, with all the rest of the ‘Gods’ who coexist with it in various states of being, stages of instant celestial substance which are perfectly adapted to them.”
Nature is greater than God; the earth itself is a divine being, a goddess; this is a direct challenge to monotheism.

Jesus was not really named Jesus, Meiers says, but “Jmmanuel” spelled with a J. His father was not God, either, but the angel Gabriel, who was in fact a Pleiadian from the Alcyone star system disguised as an angel. Mary too was from another planet, Illyria, which is also the original homeworld of the human-aliens who settled Easter Island and Tihuanaca after the nuclear war that destroyed Atlantis and Mu. Gabriel and Mary didn’t do anything magical to make Jesus/Jmmanuel, either, they simply had sex.
Meiers knows this to be true because he went back in time to observe it happening. He also watched Semjase make Adam and Eve, who were “of the white race,” according to Winters, bluntly restating the contact notes. Casual racism aside, the Pleiadians seem to be riffing on Charles Fort, W. Raymond Drake, and his more famous imitator, Erich von Däniken, the literary progenitors of the ‘ancient astronaut’ trope.
Meiers has offered a complete rewrite of history and scriptures. As part of his early revelations, Meier produced The Talmud of Jmmanuel, a New Testament fan fiction novel. Appearing alongside Wendelle Stevens, James Deardorff gave an exegesis of the Talmud at the 1997 International UFO Conference in Laughlin, Nevada. A VHS-to-digital transfer of Deardorff’s presentation has been preserved at the Gasmeter channel on YouTube.
Meier claims to have met a Catholic priest named Isa Rashid during his travels through the Middle East in 1963. This Rashid was a telepathic contactee of the Pleiadians, and known to Asket, his spiritual guide. Acting at her instruction, the two men dug up the Talmud scrolls together. Rashid then slowly translated them from Aramaic, updating Meier on his progress until he was forced to flee to a refugee camp in Lebanon during a war with the Israelis. There, the Talmud was allegedly targeted and destroyed by an IDF bombing raid. Rashid was nevertheless able to supply Meier with a partial translation before his reputed assassination in Baghdad in 1976, probably by Mossad agents. Meier is of course the only person who can attest to Rashid’s existence.
Parts of the Talmud of Jmmanuel are available online. It is both heretical and utterly batshit. “Over the course of incarnations you shall train your spirit and your consciousness and allow them to develop to perfection,” Jmmanuel says in the new version of the Sermon on the Mount, “so that you become one with Creation.” Meier’s revised Jesus is very into reincarnation, man. He also rejects the trinity as “erroneous and falsified, because it is not taught in accordance with the laws of Creation,” whereas capital-C Creation “stands above humanity, above god and above everything.” God doesn’t even rate a capital G, now, for he is less than his own creation.
Jesus did not die and rise again in three days, the new Talmud informs us. In fact, he did not actually die at all during his crucifixion. Having survived execution, Jesus fled to Damascus, where he later encountered Saul on the road and yelled at him, inspiring the persecutor of Christians to convert, become Paul, and preach the gospel to the gentiles.
Jesus — Jmmanuel — then traveled to India with Mary and his fourth brother, the disciple Thomas, who had visited the subcontinent with Jesus during the lost years of their youth. Thomas later returned to Jerusalem in order to bury a copy of the Talmud where Meier and Rashid found it. Judas Iscariot, another brother of Jesus/Jmmanuel who shares a name with the Judas of thirty silver coins, is the supposed author of this Talmud.
In his presentation, Deardorff cites Elizabeth Claire Prophet of the Church Universal and Triumphant, a Christian Theosophical movement, to support this revision of the bible. Deardorff finds the story more compelling than the stale Lutheranism he used to practice — and deems it more credible than other automatic writers and mediums communicating with aliens. “I read ten or twelve of the supposed ‘ministries of Jesus’ that you get through channeling and other means, and none of them can come close to the Talmud of Jmmanuel and its realism and its tie-in with the historical data,” Deardorff said. It is clear from his 1997 presentation, however, that Deardorff is confusing textual criticism of the Book of Matthew with “historical data.” Moreover, this Talmud bears striking resemblance to Jesus Lived in India by German historian Holger Kersten, a book which Meier has read, according to Winters.
Establishing some sort of ancient, avowedly Christian source to support belief in reincarnation seems to be the chief concern here, as it is the defining departure from canon gospels, or even the so-called gnostic gospels. It is certainly what seems to attract Meier’s apologists to his gospel, for they defend and explain it with great conviction.
In “Reincarnation and the Evolution of Consciousness,” a 2015 presentation at the Lillian Smith Library in Toronto, Ontario that has been perserved at YouTube, Michael Uyttebroek explains that the universe creates our “spirit-form” of “fine energy,” that it connects to the human fetus when the heartbeat begins at 21 days, and that the “consciousness-block” leaves our body at death to be reborn upwards. Contrary to Buddhism and Hinduism, which have “falsely taught” that the personality survives death and that humans are reincarnated as plants or animals due to their karma, Meier teaches that human souls can only ever evolve as humans.
Instead, our personalities are kept in storage banks after we die. There are of course seven levels of administration for this — local storage banks, planetary storage banks, galactic storage banks, and so on — which can be accessed for memories of past lives through “meditation,” Uyttebroek says. Overpopulation is a problem, he explains, because too many people living too long means their “consciousness blocks” do not spend enough time re-buffering before rebirth. As a result, people today are “too soft, prone to addiction” and “need more support from the parents.”
“According to Billy, he says that this planet should have about five hundred and twenty eight or twenty-nine million people,” or perhaps “up to a billion, which would enable their sustainability, that there would be enough room for the flora and fauna to flourish as well as the human being.” FIGU devotees have churned out any number of social media videos about the looming threat of overpopulation. Meier, who has three adult children, instructs his believers to have no more than one child in order to save the earth and its resources for future generations of reincarnated soul-beings from the past.
After all, everyone will need billions of years to progress through the “pure spirit-levels,” according to Meier. Humanity has to stop reproducing so much so that our individual souls can have more time to evolve. See how that works?
Meier’s contacts with the Pleiadians have contined since 1975, explaining ever more of earth’s own lore along the way. Most of his standout predictions — supervolcanoes, global flooding, catastrophic earthquakes that result from oil drilling, and so on — have not come to pass. The timing of some pronouncements has been interesting. In 2008, for example, Semjase told Meier that Merlin, the magician of King Arthur’s court, was an alien conduit of spiritual energies created by Keridwena (alternate spelling Ceridwen), an agent of the High Council in the Andromeda galaxy. This surely had nothing to do with the ballyhoo and premiere of the BBC television series Merlin starring Colin Morgan that same year, surely?
Reading the contact notes in the Stevens collection, a reader is struck by the sheer familiarity with which Meier greets his interstellar interlocutors on a regular basis. In one touching scene, he delivers a teddy bear a member of the group has gifted to Semjase. He learns “secrets” of the past with the same level of trust. In the very first interview, Meier learns about a global conspiracy to conceal the lineage of the true pope from the world. In another contact, Meier asks a Pleiadian named Quetzal “have you found out anything concerning my colleage K.?” and receives a psychoanalytic report. “It was found that his behavior can be traced back to his own negative psychic influence,” Quetzal replies, since he is apparently able to read any earthling’s mind. At one point in the contact notes, Quetzal takes weeks of vacation time, European-style. Meier’s “transcripts” are scenes in a science fiction setting that lurches towards absurdity at times. His universe has an interstellar bureaucracy that secretly listens to our thoughts, judges us for them, and then goes somewhere sunny for three weeks.
After Meier’s initial public claims have invited the expected amount of ridicule on earth, Semjase tells him the High Council has decided as a result that our planet will not get to meet extraterrestrial intelligence “in an official mode” for “200 to 300 years.” The whole revelation will have to be just between us friends. “To the inner core of your group, in the name of the High Council and all our nations, I want to convey our dear and sincere thanks,” Semjase tells Meier. They won’t get to meet her, sorry.
The most German thing about Meier’s narrative is bitter disappointment. Under Meier’s questioning, Semjase can expound on the entire history of the war between Atlantis and Mu for three pages. She seemingly knows everything in the universe, but she cannot recall how many elements exist in the universe, or the number of elementary particles.
Nor has anyone prepared the reader for the mental record-scratch of learning, at page 262 of the Stevens contact notes, that world peace will come when the Jews (“HEBREWS”) are “completely scattered.” The “Jews of today” are descendants of the followers of Jehav, an ancient astronaut conqueror. They “still dare to pretend” they are “the first-born people and the chosen ones.” This message from the Pleiades is disturbing, all the more so for being garbled in translation: “Peace on Earth will finally be then when, then [sic] this mightthirsty and murderous self-called Hebraon race-connection has become completely scattered.”
Perhaps Meier picked up some casual anti-Semitic tropes on his spiritual travels through the Middle East, or perhaps this is some sort of sublimated Völkisch ethnonationalism. Notably, the Holocaust does not bear mention in the contact notes, though Meier does discuss the Talmud of Jmmanuel with Semjase. None of Meier’s exegetes has explained this passage.
In his argument for the existence of the Pleiadians who call him “prophet,” the flying saucer photos and the contact notes are the motte; the Talmud is the bailey; the belief in Meier himself is the fallacy. In Messages From the Pleiades, Stevens described Meier as “neither Christian not Theosophist, nor scholar, but a farmer with a limited education and much practical experience in the school of life, always at a very modest income level. His concepts are framed in the understanding he has developed based on these experiences.” An innocent one-armed prophet one-finger-typing sixty words a minute of telepathic recordings on an IBC Selectronic: the myth of Eduard ‘Billy’ Meier.

Kal Korff exploded this myth by visiting the sites where Meier made his pictures, taking samples from the beamship “landing tracks” that showed nothing unusual, and confirming that Meier had used camera tricks, such as forced perspective. Using a pseudonym, Korff visited Meier’s cult compound in Hinterschmidrüti, where he purchased a large number of copies of Meier’s photographs and encountered the prophet himself, though he was not allowed an interview.
Instead, Korff talked to Meier’s neighbors, some of whom joined his “metaphysical study group” in 1974 but left after the UFO encounters began, accusing Meier of fraud. At the time of Korff’s visit, the staff at the compound consisted of the neighbors who had stayed in the group. Today, their families reportedly carry on the tradition of protecting Meier in his dotage and selling merchandise to flying saucer tourists. Meier’s rural community was always solidly middle class, not at all impoverished as his apologists say.
The Semjase Silver Star Center too was much nicer than reported by Genesis III or its associates, who “prefer not to think of themselves as a ‘religious cult,’” Korff observes. Self-sufficient on 50 acres, it had locked gates, electric fences, an armory, security personnel, and a parking lot when he visited. In fact, it was Meier’s call for his metaphysical study group to purchase this expensive property, and not his flying saucer photography, that caused the schism among his followers in 1977.
It is true that Meier never finished a formal education. A sixth grade dropout, Meier was sentenced to correctional homes for “troubled boys” multiple times before he served a six-month sentence for “thievery and forgery.” This does not make him an ignorant rube, however. Korff also got to know the staff at Schnarwiler Books in Wetzikon, who provided him with Meier’s extensive reading list: a year-by-year encyclopedia series on the 20th century, photography techniques, science, astronomy, history: “he is interested in everything,” the store clerk tells him.
Members of the Semjase Silver Star Center tithe ten percent of their monthly incomes to Meier, meditate and pray according to a strict schedule, and volunteer monthly at the Center to answer questions, sell merch, and preach the gospel of the Pleiadians to visitors. During Korff’s visits to the center, these volunteers were eager to press the Talmud of Jmmanuel and copies of Meier’s magazine on him. It was “spiritual material…messages of the Pleadians and how to live a good life,” a senior member tells Korff. The UFO photos were “very pretty,” but the “spiritual messages” from the Pleiades, and the teachings of Billy Meier, were the more compelling evidence, in this woman’s opinion.
Meier arranged for many ‘eyewitnesses’ who saw what he wanted them to see. He would tell the friends and neighbors in his study group that the Pleiadians were planning a visit, “usually between the hours of 11:00 PM and 2:30 AM, when most people are asleep.” Korff notes that this timing “greatly reduces the odds of him or any confederate(s) being caught” in the act of hoaxing.
Meier always told his participants to stay 500 meters away while he met the Pleiadians behind a treeline, or otherwise obscured from view. The viewers would then photograph whatever Meiers sent aloft, some forty-five minutes or two hours later: flares, or balloons, or Chinese lanterns. Objects are never reported being seen at close range. A series of these blurry photos of indistinct light-streaks is included in the contact notes along with testimonials from these “eyewitnesses” to Pleiadian beamships leaving his meetings with the cosmonauts.
Rather than evidence of extraterrestrials, these photos and testimonials are evidence that Meier — who was by then nearing forty years of age — performed flying saucers as a ritual for his believers while he produced the contact notes and the Talmud of Jmmanuel. He had already named his children — Gilgamesha, Atlantis-Socrates, and Methusalem — for objects of his inspiration. His photography was a powerful means to spread his spiritual teachings to the masses. Members of FIGU make pilgrimage to Hinterschmidrüti from around the world, tithe their earnings, and evangelize the message of the Pleiadians. Meier has done extraordinarily well this way.
There have been costs, however. Korff encountered Kalliope Meier in Thessaloniki when he was twenty-eight and she was seventeen. When her parents opposed the marriage, they eloped. During his visit, Korff encountered Mrs. Meier, who “looked like an emotional wreck, her face that of a walking zombie. When I went to take a photo of her, she stared at me with a look on her face that seemed to be saying to me, ‘I beg you, please don’t take my picture.’” Korff did not take her picture. Afterward, his companion on the trip “also expressed surprise in seeing how Meier’s wife appeared.”
Kalliope finally left the compound in 1997 and spoke out a year later, explaining that her now ex-husband had used scratch models made from trashcan lids and other metal scrap.
Korff then arranged for her to compare the infamous photograph of “Asket” and “Nera” with Michelle Della Fave and Susan Lund of The Golddiggers appearing on the 1970 Dean Martin Variety Show Christmas Special. Parts of the interview are available on YouTube. “Yes, this is what I saw on TV at that time,” Kalliope responded. “I thought that I was in a circus. But now I realize: this has nothing to do with ETs!” With evident irony, she concludes: “My husband has done quite a good job here. Very well prepared!”
“The believers of Billy’s UFO community do their work,” she said. “They help him up there. And why not? If they believe it, they should just continue to do so.” But “one should also express criticism. Healthy criticism!” She says. Healthy criticism was not tolerated in the Meier household, nor in his cult, with the result that some early members, such as Hans Jacob and Luc Bürgin, broke away to denounce their former prophet. Jacob’s daughter and Bürgin have both been helpful to Korff, providing evidence of Meier’s fraud. “My husband told me: If Bürgin calls or comes here, then don’t open the door and don’t talk to him!”
There are many moments that beggar credulity in the contact notes. For many, it is when the time-traveling Meier meets Jesus, then saves his life, then impresses the Son of Man into becoming his disciple. The passage which stands out for this reader however is the scene where Quetzal has supposedly saved Meier’s life after he ran off the road on his motorbike into a ditch. Technology on board the beamship was able to heal Meier’s ribs so that they appeared never to have been broken in the first place.
With such advanced medical powers at their fingertips, it is remarkable that the Pleiadians never offer to replace his missing arm, and that Meier never asks them to, either. This miracle would surely convince the world that their prophet is an honest man.
Here is where the cult characterization, the hagiography, matters. Stevens et al would have us believe that Meier is too simple and unassuming and humble to ever make such a request. After all, the Pleiadians justify using Meier as their sole contact with the human race because if the rest of us saw the space-people, we would instantly fall on our knees to worship them as gods. Meier does not want to be worshipped as a god, either, Stevens et al would suggest, though he still insists that he is the only real prophet of the Pleiadians and no other channeler has the real scoop.
In the contact notes, Semjase chides Meier for failing to reach his potential as a spiritual leader. His heart is simply not in it, he says. The damage of schism has broken his heart. He works too hard to survive, to make a living. Heavy is the head that wears the telepathic crown.
Stevens and the Elders would have us worship the icons, the photographs. They minimize the spirituality, though it is present in their work. Indeed, this is the chief complaint that volunteers at the Semjase Silver Star Center made to Korff about Genesis III: that their books and television shows had not told the full story of the Pleiadians’ prophet, had made too much of the photography and not enough of the Talmud.
As noted, the Genesis III presentation of Meier’s photographs has not aged well. In 1983, Meier’s photos had been through “the most detailed and extensive analysis that science has had to offer,” UFO… Contact From the Pleiades excitedly tells us, appealing to absurd technological authorities. This was scientism, a call to faith in science, topped with a load of hype.
The radar-mapping techniques used for the red planet, Mars, were applied to the photographs to determine overlay and paste-up and no deception was found. The edge of the beamship was scrutinized by the same edge enhancement package employed in the examination of the rings around Saturn. The negatives were digitized with the same microdensitometer used on the Pioneer space mission, and still no deception was found!
Korff writes that Jim Dilettoso’s analysis of the Meier photos in UFO… Contact From the Pleiades is in fact a “verbatim reprint of a pseudoscientific paper [he] presented years earlier at the UFO ‘79 conference in San Diego!” Using image software, Korff was able to identify the fishing line suspending the flying saucers in photos that Dilettoso claimed to have proven free of deception. Korff has doggedly proven that Diletosso does not have a PhD from McGill University, as he claims, nor is he a real scientist.
In an exchange on the 1994 FOX TV show “Encounters,” Dilettoso complained that Korff’s presentation of the evidence was “not scientific,” but “an attempt to prove that the case is wrong in order to sell a book. This is wrong in UFO investigations, that a group of people who go out, analyze and test things can be just set aside because one person claims that there is ‘they,’ that there is a group, and that they are using testing procedures that have all the right words, but it is not scientific and he knows it.” Seldom has pseudoscience articulated itself so well: Jim Dilettoso and Genesis III are not scientific. They were just selling books and television syndication rights, and Kal Korff knows it.
UFOs and ancient astronauts had become a popular literary genre by the 1970s. Meier was among the most popular entrants in that genre. Genesis III was formed when marketing agent Michael Osborn (no relation to this writer) gave Wendelle Stevens and the Elders brothers a $40,000 book deal in the form of a “loan,” Korff explains. This connection is how Volume 1 of UFO… Contact From the Pleiades got published in November 1979, followed by the Contact From The Pleiadians ‘documentary’ in 1980. After issuing the two volumes, a single-volume version was released.
In 1987, Gary Kinder accepted a $100,000 advance from Atlantic Monthly Press to write Light Years: An Investigation into the Extraterrestrial Experiences of Billy Meiers. Again, the book sold briskly, but as Korff relates in Spaceships of the Pleiades, Kinder interviewed him under false pretenses and produced a risible piece of hackwork. Meier’s religiosity was much more evident in Kinder’s book than it had been in the Genesis III books, but this was still not enough for the believers in Pleiadian revelation. They wanted more.
Finally, in 1994, German publisher Michael Heseman copublished …und sie fleigen doch! (…And They Still Fly!) by Guido Moosbrugger. A close friend of Meier and a member of Silver Star Center, where Korff actually encountered him under an assumed name, Moosebrugger was at the time the only person in the world that Meier had officially appointed to spread his gospel around the world.
The success of the Meier cult is entirely thanks to publishers who “embellish and promote” him in pursuit of profit, to borrow Korff’s phrasing. The new exegetes were necessary because in 1982, Arizona indicted Wendelle Stevens on “ten felony counts of child molestation, four felony counts of furnishing obscene or harmful materials to minors; and two felony counts of filing or photographing minors engaged in sexual conduct which is obscene.” Stevens pleaded guilty February 1983. After learning of the plea, Korff relentlessly held a gaslighting Stevens accountable in the ufology community when he tried to minimize his crimes. Stevens simply would not do for an earthly media representative, anymore.

Most of Kal Korff’s painstaking work debunks the “proof.”
“Meier had received the metal samples during a contact in the late summer 1977, during his forty-sixth meeting with the cosmonaut Semjase,” Genesis III says. “It was explained at the time that each specimen represented a different, yet consecutive, stage of development in the process of making Pleiadian metal for use in spacecraft production. The alloy utilized had a very different bonding technique, which required seven different and difficult development stages and that by our twentieth-century understanding would be impossible to duplicate.”
It is all bunk, of course. Korff obtained copies of two scientific analyses which found mundane earth-metals in the sample and nothing alien. Moosbrugger has amplified a contrary report from Marcel Vogel, a senior research chemist for IBM who is not a metallurgist. Vogel in fact has no PhD and his conclusions are not supported by evidence. When Meier asked to see a metal sample that later “went missing,” Vogel produced it from a coin purse he carried in his pocket. Little wonder that the sample later “went missing,” Korff notes with irony.
It is all both useful for understanding the extent of Meier’s hoax and useless for understanding that his spiritual program is not at all unusual. Meier’s Pleiadians would banish the Jews from Judaism, then succeed where Theosophy has failed by containing the Kabbalah and Christianity and western magic traditions, alloyed with appropriated eastern mysticism associated with reincarnation. It is the same formula as George Adamski.
This message has changed over time, however, or else Stevens suffered from serious mistranslations. For “Meier himself has become a channel for at least two other intelligences known to him and the group around him as Arahat Athersata and a collective consciousness that calls inself Ptaah,” Stevens wrote in his annotated contact notes. Today, the Future of Mankind website, which is maintained by Meier believers in the UK, explains that Arahat Athersata is the plane of existence where advanced beings exist as pure spirit. By the time Genesis III produced its first book, Ptaah had resolved into the commander of the Pleiadian space fleet.
This is all more consistent with a science fiction novelist formulating an epic book series than a mere farmer. It is of a piece with the risible 1976 photographs of Meier posing with a toy gun, supposedly a “beamgun” loaned to him by Menara, who is “a native of planet Deron in the Vega star system” according to the Future of Mankind website. Set phasers to dumb.
Meier offered a spiritual solution for the emerging ecological concerns of the 1970s. “If we cannot solve our present problems brought on by the imbalance of our technological advances and ideological differences, we cannot be as fortunate” as the Pleiadians, Genesis III warns. Semjase ‘herself’ takes great pains to emphasize that the cosmonauts do not visit earth “on behalf of a God to bring to the world the long-awaited peace.” They serve the universe itself, and they are here to direct our spiritual evolution. Indeed, Semjase says that our conscious powers “are only utilized to their full extent through spiritual development.”
J. Randolph Winters, who recorded an exegesis of the contact notes on 90-minute audio cassettes and published a 1994 book The Pleiadian Mission — A Time of Awareness, was also a former spokesman for Meier. His coverage of Meier’s messianic ambitions is much more fulsome and forthcoming than what Genesis III produced and is considered preferable to it among the faithful. Winters, who died in 2018, called “the Billy Meier case” the “most well-documented UFO case ever.”
“If this is a hoax, there are no real cases,” Winters opined. This writer would agree, but Kal Korff would beg to differ. He wants to believe that UFOs might exist, that Eduard Meier is a fraud just like George Adamski, and that the would-be prophets of outer space are making it impossible to take the science of more ‘genuine’ reports seriously. This faultline has always existed within ufology because the spiritual belief in human-aliens living on other planets is older than the putative science of UFOs while the scientific evidence of flying saucers remains nil.
People want to believe. The photographs, however spectacular, are just icons of their deeper faith that the universe cares about them. That is what the spiritual seekers find in Pleiadian faith; the truth or falsity of the photography matters not, as long as the message rings true.
Korff, Kal. Spaceships of the Pleiades: The Billy Meier Story. Prometheus Books, 1995.
Gordon, Melton J. Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology. Gale Group, 2001. Pp. 607-608.
Elders, Brit; Elders, Lee. UFO...Contact from the Pleiades (45th Anniversary Edition): Volumes I & II. Beyond Words, 1980/2024.
Stevens, Wendelle C. Message From the Pleiades: The Contact Notes of Eduard Billy Meier 3. Genesis III Publishing, 1993.