"The Plejaren Contactee" · b. 1937
Eduard Albert "Billy" Meier was born on 3 February 1937 in Bülach, Switzerland. He had a difficult early life — raised in an unhappy household, he left home as a teenager and spent years travelling through Europe, the Middle East, and India, working as a farmhand, merchant sailor, and in various other occupations. He lost his left arm in a bus accident in Turkey in 1965. He eventually settled in Hinterschmidrüti, a small village in the Swiss canton of Zurich, where he established a commune-like community called FIGU (Free Community of Interests for the Border and Spiritual Sciences and Ufological Studies).
Meier claims to have had regular, ongoing contact with beings from the Plejares star system (he uses the term "Plejaren" rather than "Pleiadian," asserting they come from a different dimension of the cluster) since childhood — beginning with a guide he called Sfath, followed by a feminine guide named Asket, and from 1975 onwards primarily with a being named Semjase. He claims to have taken hundreds of photographs of their craft, made audio recordings of beamship sounds, collected metal alloy samples, and documented over 1,000 "Contact Reports" — written records of his conversations with the Plejaren.
The Meier case is unusual in the UFO literature for the sheer volume and diversity of alleged physical evidence: hundreds of daytime photographs of disc-shaped craft in various positions and orientations; 8mm film footage of craft in flight; audio recordings of "beamship" sound effects; metal alloy samples allegedly given to him by the Plejaren; physical ground marks; and the testimony of dozens of witnesses at his commune who claim to have seen the craft themselves.
An investigation conducted in the 1970s–1980s by a team including Wendelle Stevens, Lee and Brit Elders, and Gary Kinder (documented in Kinder's book Light Years, 1987) subjected the photographic and physical evidence to independent analysis. Some analysts — including Marcel Vogel of IBM's San Jose research laboratory — concluded that certain metal samples were anomalous, showing an unusual crystalline structure inconsistent with known manufacturing processes. The photographs were analysed by analysts at IBM and JPL who could find no evidence of photographic manipulation.
Detractors have argued that multiple Meier photographs can be explained as models — one allegedly showing a landscape from another planet was found to resemble a magazine photograph; several "alien" women photographs appear to be of earthly models. The community surrounding Meier has also attracted allegations of cult-like dynamics. Meier himself acknowledges that some fraudulent materials were introduced by enemies seeking to discredit him.
Beyond physical evidence, Meier claims that the Plejaren have provided him with prophecies and predictions — some of which he and his supporters argue have been fulfilled, including statements about the AIDS epidemic, specific geopolitical events, and environmental changes. The Contact Reports also contain extensive spiritual and philosophical teaching attributed to the Plejaren — a comprehensive cosmology covering reincarnation, consciousness evolution, the nature of creation, and the history of humanity's involvement with off-planet intelligences spanning hundreds of thousands of years.
Meier remains uniquely controversial: the physical evidence is more extensive than in virtually any other case, yet the social context — a community wholly dependent on his authority, isolated in rural Switzerland — raises legitimate questions about the dynamics of verification.