The Moons of Jupiter and Billy Meier

Here’s a question that has come up recently, given all the attacks on me. If Billy Meier was not receiving his “secret” information from his Pleiadian pals, where did he get it?

Can we find a source and can we prove it?

How about this?

According to the 115^th Contact, which took place on October 19, 1978, but was not published until 1982/1986, we are told that the moon closest to Jupiter, which is named Amalthea, “would only measure approximately 200 km in length, which I defined as a gigantic hen's egg.”

Amalthea as photographs by
Voyager.

This information is inaccurate. According to Science, June 1, 1979, the diameter of the moon was given as 265 kilometers, plus or minus 20 km and in Science, on November 23, 1979 it size was calculated as 270 km, plus or minus 15 km. Amalthea is not the moon closest to Jupiter, and it is now thought to be 250 kilometers or more long.

Meier is close on this, but the measurements for Amalthea, as they appeared in the newspaper, suggest that is the source of his information. The New York Times on March 7, 1979 reported Amalthea as 224 km long, Aviation Week reported 200 -  220 km long on March 12, 1979, and The New York Times on April 1, 1979 reported it as 160 km long.

To be fair, you can suggest that Meier’s estimate of the size isn’t all that far off, but it is, in fact inaccurate. The size as reported by Meier is smaller than the actual size of that moon and seems to match those sizes from the newspaper. It would seem that space-faring race would be able to judge the size of that moon more accurately than they did.

However, Amalthea is not the closest to Jupiter, though until 1979, that was the information available. The closest to Jupiter is Metis which was discovered in 1979 in photographs taken by Voyager 1.  Next in line is Adrastea, also discovered in 1979 but was discovered in photographs taken by Voyager 2 and is the first natural moon to be discovered by images taken from a spacecraft rather than

Adrastea, one of the
70 moons of Jupiter
and the second closest
to the planet.

through a telescope. Both Metis and Adrastea, are much smaller than Amalthea, something less than half its size.

Interestingly, Amalthea was discovered in September 1892 by Edward Emerson Barnard. So, in October 1978, the astronomical information was that Amalthea was the closest to Jupiter, but about a year later that information was revised. It’s odd that Meier didn’t know that when he talked about these things in his 115^th Contact, if he was dealing with space travelers.

The take away here is that Meier was wrong about the size of Amalthea, though not by much. I’m not comfortable calling it a complete miss, though the information about its size does seem to come from the newspaper articles published at the time rather than another source.

The real problem is the claim that it is closest to Jupiter. This is not true. It is the third in distance, but in 1979, it was thought to be the closest. This is a miss and was not based on anything other than the information available in 1979.