The Farmer And The Cosmonauts Part 2

File: UFO123

The Pleiades of Greek myth were seven sisters, named Aleyone, Asterope, Electra, Celaeno, Maia, Metrope and Taygeta. They were daughters of Atlas and Pleione. As it happens, the leader of the migration from Lyra was called Pleione, according to Meier. Was the mythical name a faint memory of the space traveller? Or was the space travelers's name suggested to Meier by the half-remembered mythical name?

...The chief critic of the Meier case has been Kal Korff, and the title of his book on the subject sums up his attitude more than adequately: "The most infamous hoax in ufology."

One instance of self-contradiction on the part of Meier and his defenders concerns a sequence of photographs purporting to show a Pleiadean spacecraft circling a tree. An unfortunate aspect of this series is that when independent investigators visited the site, no tree was to be found. Meier's explanation for this was that the spacecraft had subsequently disintergrated the hapless arboreal specimen. Wendelle Stevens told Korff that the tree vanished because it had been teleported into "another time frame". Kal Korff's suspicion is that neither of these things happened, since a close look at the pictures -- reputedly taken within seconds of one another -- reveals markedly different cloud patterns from frame to frame. Genesis III's claim that the day in question was particularly windy is not borne out by the weather record, which shows wind speeds reaching a maximum of 15 miles per hour (25 km/h). Korff reasons that a model UFO and model tree were superimposed on pictures of the site. And indeed models of Pleiadean craft have been found on the Meier farm -- though Meier says that they were inspired by his actual encounters.

Possibly the least plausible of Meier's defender's is Jim Dilettoso, of Genesis III. Kal Korff prints a long interview with him ... in which he says that in the 1950s Wendelle Stevens and another ufologist, Richard Miller, performed something called 'transchanneling' on aliens for the US Air Force: "They would fly up to Alaska because they were told that the magnetic fields there were proper for resonance induction, and we have hundreds and hundreds of audio recordings of Richard and other CIA officers doing transchannelings of aliens.... Two of these CIA officers ... have developed serious personality aberrations...

The paucity of photographs of the Pleiadeans themselves is explained by Wendelle Stevens thus: "They are afraid of being hurt ... they do not want to be recognized. Supposedly, they do walk the streets in Europe and don't want to be compromised." Billy Meier, on the other hand, has happily admitted to the strong resemblance between Semjase and his own girlfriend -- so who is really worried about being recognized on the streets of Europe?

Less edifying are the claims made by Meier and Genesis III concerning the sample of metal and crystal given Meier by the Pleiadeans as examples of their technological wizardry. Meier actually produced these while Stevens and his team were in Switzerland. They called on him one morning and were told that he had his 105th contact during the night and "had a surprise" for them. This turned out to be a package, handed over by the cosmonaut Quetzal, of four metal, one biological and nine mineral and crystal specimens. According to Stevens's book, the scientists who conducted "in-depth, highly sophisticated examination" of these samples found them to have unique qualities and said they had "never seen anything like it before". The level of purity in the metal was not "immediately explainable" while the general characteristics "seemed to indicate a non-electrolytic, cold-fusion synthesis process not generally known to earth technology".

Kal Korff found rather less to be excited about. He interviewed Dr Marcel Vogel, who had analysed the samples for Genesis III -- and had drawn rather different conclusions from those published in the book. Only the first sample was unique, said Dr Vogel, consisting of aluminum, silver and thulium, each having a high degree of purity. The other samples were ordinary crystals of quartz, citrine, amethyst and silver solder, and there was no reason to believe they are of extra-terrestrial origin. Jim Dilettoso characteristically failed to further the cause by claiming that Genesis III hold a 10-hour videotape of "the entire lab proceedings" (which Dr Vogel denies having made), "And ... we have about an hour of him discussing why the metal samples are not possible in earth technology, going into intrinsic detail of why it is not done anywhere on earth, that type of chemistry." Of course Dr Vogel may not be the only scientist to have analysed the samples (no mention is made by either party of the biological specimen), but then Genesis III are notably coy about naming any of the 200 scientists they say have verified Meier's remarkable story...

End of part 2