Subject: MEIER A SECOND OPINION

THE SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
June 24th, 1987

FARMER'S TALES OF SPACE TRAVEL
WON'T FLY WITH MANY UFO BUFFS
by Keay Davidson
EXAMINER Science Writer

To Billy Meier's fans, he's a gentle Swiss farmer who has
befriended UFO pilots from the Pleiades, a powdery star cluster
more than 2 quadrillion miles from Earth.

To Meier's foes, he's the biggest hoaxer since the UFO
fad began four decades ago. Meier's tales of flying aboard
UFOs with lovely spacewomen have triggered civil war in the
weird, wacky world of "Ufology," an international movement whose
members slog through swamps and forests, night and day, to
investigate sightings of unidentified flying objects or "flying
saucers."

Wednesday is the 40th anniversary of the first "modern" UFO
sighting June 24th, 1947 - when a private pilot sighted
saucer-shaped objects zipping past Mount Rainier in Washington
State - and ufologists are celebrating with conferences from
Burbank to New York City and Washington, DC.

Although few are trained scientists, they like to form
clubs with grandiose names such as "Intercontinental UFO Galactic
Spacecraft Research and Analytic Network, Inc." and "Aerial
Phenomena Research Organization."

But in four decades they've gained little scientific
respectability, and some fear they'll lose even that because of
the Meier controversy - a steaming stew of bizarre claims, ugly
accusations, crude fakery, financial exploitation, "stolen" and
"vanished" evidence, and alleged death threats and assassination
attempts.

"If you ever want to see a parallelism to Jim Bakker and
PTL, you're seeing it right here," snarled one anti-Meier
ufologist, William Spaulding of Phoenix. "I get emotional about
(Meier) because I've just seen ufology go down the drain...it just
reeks of money, a slick way to make a buck."

He isn't alone. "The Meier case is probably one of the
most obvious hoaxes in the history of the subject," said
ufologist Ronald Story of St. Petersburg, FL, author of "The
Encyclopedia of UFOs."

Meier is a "damned charlatan - I wouldn't touch his stuff
with the proverbial 10-foot pole," said Don Berliner, an official
at the Maryland-based Fund for UFO Research.

The Meier fad is part of a "credulity explosion" that is
helping to wreck ufologists' credibility, said one of the men
ufologists fear most, Robert Sheaffer of San Jose, author of "The
UFO Verdict." Sheaffer has exposed some famous saucer sightings as
hoaxes and misidentifications of natural phenomena. Ufology "isn't
dead yet, but it's dying," he said.

Ufologist Jim Speiser firmly disagrees and accuses Sheaffer
of "wishful thinking." But he acknowledges that trying to gain
scientific respect while Meier is in the news is "like trying to
get a date when your little brother who picks his nose is always
hanging around."

Speiser, of Fountain Hills, AZ, runs an electronic
"bulletin board" that allows saucer buffs to rap via personal
computers.

So why on Earth has Atlantic Monthly Press, one of the
nation's most respected publishers, just released a book - "Light
Years" by Gary Kinder - that suggests there may be something to
Meier's claims after all? A book whose sources include an
imprisoned child molester and a San Jose chemist who tells ghost
stories to plants? A book that, some say, whitewashes what has
been called "the most infamous hoax in ufology"?

Its a strange story that began in the mid-1970's in the
green hills of Switzerland. Eduard "Billy" Meier, a one-armed,
bushy-bearded farmer, amazed local residents by saying he had
established psychic contact with saucer pilots from the Pleiades.

He also said he had photographed and filmed UFOs that
resembled hub-caps; tape-recorded their noises, which resembled
sound effects from old science-fiction films; conversed with
female UFOnauts, who taught him cosmic truths; flew aboard a
UFO into space, where he photographed God's "eye" and the
Apollo-Soyuz docking of 1975; and traveled by saucer into the
future, where he saw the ruins of San Francisco after an
earthquake.

But Meier's "evidence" dissolved under scrutiny,
ufologists say. Ufologist Spaulding used a computer to clarify
blurry details in Meier's photos and, he said, detected threads
holding the "UFOs" aloft - evidence that they were small models
suspended near the camera. Also, critics said, the photos of
quake-ravaged San Francisco turned out to be copies of an
artist's rendering from the September 1977 issue of Geo
magazine. And in Meier's 8mm movies of UFOs, the objects sway
back and forth as though they were lightweight models bobbing in
the breeze.

Yet the Meier story has survived partly because of the
relentless advocacy of his American backers, the Arizona
ufologists Lt. Col. Wendelle Stevens (US Air Force, retired),
Tom Welch and Lee and Brit Elders. Years ago, they obtained the
legal rights to market Meier's photos and other memorabilia,
threatened to sue anyone who used the material without permis-
sion and built a small publishing industry, Genesis III. The
publishing arm sells books and videocassettes (for as much
as $29 apiece) about Meier's adventures.

Now they've landed a much bigger fish: royalties from
Kinder's 206-page book, published May 26th. They're sharing
royalties in return forgiving Kinder access to Meier's photos and
other documents.

Much money may be made by all: Kinder will take 50
percent of the royalties, then the rest will be divided
among Meier, Stevens, the Elderses and Welch.

Sales have gone "extremely well," Kinder said. The best-
seller list is in sight, said the book's backer, New York
publishing whiz-kid Morgan Entrekin, who paid Kinder an advance
of more than $100,000. Bay Area bookstore owners say its selling
moderately.

The book has infuriated many ufologists who think it lends
an undeserved patina of respectability to a vulgar hoax,
although Kinder doesn't reach a specific conclusion about
Meier's claims. "Face it, you're in it for the money like the
rest of the writers of superficial paranormal literature,"
Spaulding said in a bitter letter to Kinder.

"It's been a real ordeal trying to fend off the entire UFO
community," joked Kinder, 40. "There were times when I would
look at Meier and think, `He's nothing but a clever con man.'
There were other times would I would look at Meier and think,
`Here is a sincere and warm individual who has experienced
something far above his understanding and intellectual capabilities
and is trying to deal with it.'"

The Elderses say they've received threatening letters
and phone calls and that Meier has been the target of
several assassination attempts. They're not disturbed by
evidence that Meier faked photos of, for example, the San
Francisco earthquake; in fact, they haven't even discussed it
with Meier, Lee Elders said. His wife insists that just because
Meier faked "one or two things" doesn't mean all his photos are
phony.

To Lee Elders, the best evidence for Meier's contentions is
an analysis of metal samples from an alleged UFO. The analysis
was conducted by Marcel Vogel, formerly a chemist at an IBM
research center in San Jose. In the New York Times Book Review,
a full page ad for "Light Years" quotes Vogel as saying the
metallic composition was one "we could not achieve...on this
planet."

However, the book doesn't mention that Vogel is a very, very
imaginative fellow. In fact, he also has claimed the ability to
communicate psychically with plants.

The 1937 best-selling "Secret Life of Plants" includes
an entire chapter on Vogel. In one scene, he attempts to
determine whether plants wired with electrodes show a
physiological response to "spooky stories." The book says that
at "certain points in a story, such as...`Charles bent down and
raised the lid of the coffin,' the plant seemed to pay closer at-
tention."

Vogel, 70, said Meier's UFO movies convinced him the farmer
had been in contact with "some form of extraterrestrial
intelligence" However, Vogel doesn't regard the metal samples
by themselves as proof of extraterrestrials because he didn't
have a chance to consult with other experts before the samples
mysteriously disappeared. Vogel added that since his plant work
of the 1970's, he had founded a psychic research institute in
San Jose, employed his "mental energy" to bend spoons and
studied the use of crystals to cure illness.

"Light Years" also quotes authorities such as Robert Post,
head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, as saying:
"From a photography standpoint, you couldn't see anything that
was fake about the Meier photos... I thought, God, if this
is real, this is going to be really something."

Or is it? In an interview with The Examiner, Post recalled
that several years ago, Wendelle Stevens visited him at JPL and
requested an expert opinion on the pictures. Post acknowledges
he was fascinated by the images, but was unable to perform a
scientific analysis for two reasons: First, he isn't a photo
analyst but rather the operator of a photo processing lab ("like
you take your film to K-Mart", he said); and second, the pictures
weren't originals but rather copies of originals - perhaps even
copies of copies of copies. Such multiple copying tends to
obscure delicate details, making it hard to detect evidence of
fraud - e.g., threads supporting hubcaps.

In addition, when Post examined some images with a
magnifying glass, he realized "a lot of the pictures weren't
really photographs at all - they were lithographs," or
high-resolution ink prints made from photos - and, hence, were
worthless for purposes of analysis. Furthermore, the photos
were " a lot fuzzier than the stuff on the lithographs, and
I thought that was a little strange."

For that and other reasons, Post began "to think, `Nuts,
maybe this guy is just a con man.' That's not the kind of guy I
want to have anything to do with."

In 1983, Stevens was convicted of child molestation in
Pima County, AZ. He is now serving time in the Arizona State
Prison and declined to be interviewed. But he did send The
Examiner a cryptic letter in which he said a "number of high
officials...have taken a personal interest in some of the things
we were doing, but they could neither support nor tolerate them
officially."

Stevens' conviction triggered a wave of paranoia among
Meier buffs. Some phoned Vicki Cooper, editor of California UFO
Magazine in Los Angeles, and said Stevens "was `set up,' that
certain witnesses were being killed," said Cooper, who is not
unsympathetic to Meier's claims. "I was discouraged and disgusted
with the people I was talking to."

"Its a cesspool out there," she said. "Personality
conflicts are rabid in this field...There are hoaxers, there
are fraudulent people who are claiming outrageous things all
throughout the UFO field.
End of report