Fresh Analysis of Swiss Meier-case UFO Photo Proves its Genuineness

Text Box: Fig. 1. Meier's photo No. 164. The sun is believed to lie behind the right-hand side of the craft. From Stevens’s Vol. 4 (CD) “Best of Meier UFO photos.” A key set of Eduard “Billy” Meier’s beamship photos for which its main investigators of 1978-1982 could claim genuineness and absence of any hoax was that of his Hasenböl-Langenberg series taken on March 29, 1976. One of a trio of photos shot after the craft had approached closest to the camera is shown on the right. In their books on the case, Wendelle Stevens and Lee & Brit Elders pointed out that in their photos of this scene, certain branches of the deciduous tree on the left could be seen to lie in front of the UFO. But this was not perfectly clear to others, because the branches in question were thin, and there is lack of contrast between the branches’ shaded sides facing the

camera and the shaded underside of the UFO.

Although Stevens’s copy of photo No. 164 was only one generation removed from Meier’s original, others more available to the public were further generations removed. So this “smoking gun” of the Meier case, one of several, has lain smoldering. However, from an enlargement of the craft and tree, a rather strong case can be made that Stevens and others were correct. On the left, below, we see that two thin branches do appear to cross upwards in front of the narrow slice of exposed surface of the craft’s upward-facing broad flange. The added black dashes in Fig. 2 indicate the approximate location of the

Text Box: Fig. 2. Blow-up of a section of Fig. 1, with arrow pointing to the two thin branches crossing over in front of the craft's broad flange. Dashed lines added. Text Box: Fig. 3. Fig. 73 from Korff's Spaceships of the Pleiades (Prometheus Books, 1995).

uppermost left-hand edge of the flange, whose surface shows up with a whiter tinge, reflected from the sky higher up, than the tinge of the direct background sky.

Because of a presentation of the same scene by Kal Korff, however, shown in Fig. 3 above, doubt may exist in some minds. In his analysis, automatic edge-enhancement processing was performed, in which the upper sides of significant edges are marked white, the undersides black, and the rest is portrayed in grey. Due to lack of contrast, the limbs in front of the craft’s dark underside again do not show up, but the unwitting viewer is led to think they should have if it weren’t a model UFO. The exposed slice of the craft’s upward-facing flange is now indiscernable, thus providing no contrasting background for the two faint limbs in front, which are no longer visible due also to the program’s threshold for edge detection being insufficiently sensitive. Hence the claim of hoax – Meier must have used a model UFO close to the camera – is still heard in some quarters.

Fresh insight on this question comes from close examination of another photo in this series taken at about the same time, Meier’s No. 175. At this time, the craft had tipped its

forward facing edge very slightly downwards, exposing more of its broad flange. We can understand that, except in front of the craft’s superstructure, the craft’s flange reflects the color of the cleaner sky farther above than that of the more polluted background sky. Hence color contrast occurs that delineates the extent of the flange’s broad surface. In Fig. 4, a cropped blow-up from Meier’s photo 175, we see more clearly the two faint

Text Box: Fig. 4. Cropped blow-up from Meier's No. 175, in UFO---Contact from the Pleiades, vol. 1 (1979), p. 44. Credit Jeroin Jansen. Text Box: Fig. 5. A darkened version of Fig. 4. Dashed curve delineates right-hand edge of the broad flange.

limbs in front of the bluish tinted flange. They are seen even more clearly in Fig. 5, where the upper edge of the broad flange on the right has been dashed in. A piece of a thicker branch near the extreme left edge of the rim can also be seen to lie in front of the leftmost edge of the flange, judging from left-right symmetry.

A blow-up from the third photo of the trio, No. 174, shown below in Fig. 6, also exhibits eclipsing evidence from the thicker tree branch on the far left. It eclipses the left edge of

the leftmost protuberance, judging from the corresponding apparent width of the protuberence on the far right, with the lighter brown of the left edge of the limb contrasting with the brownish-black of the protuberance.

Text Box: Fig. 6. Cropped from Meier’s photo #174 available from www.theyfly.com. Black circle on left is centered around the partially eclipsed far-left protuberence. First noticed by Jeroen Jansen.
There is now no doubt of the genuineness of this trio of Meier’s

photos; the craft was on the far side of the tree, whose existence and location when in leaf has been documented (see Lee & Brit Elders’ UFO…Contact from the Pleiades, Vol. 1 (1979)). One does not need the originals in proving this.

Meier’s other 31 surviving photos of this series that show the very same beamship at greater distances from the camera, and exhibit the expected haze effect, must then also be genuine.