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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