Meier Photographs - An Extensive Analysis

Billy Meier, during his contacts with the alien creatures who reside in the open star cluster known as the Pleiades, has had the opportunity to travel around the cosmos on their beamships. Over the decades he has taken hundreds, if not thousands of photographs showing a wide variety of subjects, all presented to validate his claims of space travel. These have been tested, examined, studied,

Billy Meier

scrutinized, reviewed and subjected to many efforts to either authenticate or disprove them. It is clear that they are real photographs which means simply there are images on film. The real question is if there has been some sort of trickery involved or if they actually show what Meier claims they show.

 The most cited study was carried out by Jim Dilettoso at the request of Wendelle Stevens and sounded as if it was competent, scientific and definitive. Stevens published and updated versions of this study from the point of its completion until his death years later. There are, however, problems with it that suggest the vetting of the Meier photographs was not as complete as it should have been and the study might not be as conclusive as it could have been.

The first thing to be said is that 230 of the photographs taken by Meier, or allegedly taken by Meier, are faked. These range from those taken on other planets, of satellites in orbit around Earth and pictures of dinosaurs suggesting either time travel or that there is a planet on which the dinosaurs still roam. Originally, the photographs were declared authentic and were promoted for years by those who believe Meier. Once it was established by others that the photographs were images from books, NASA video and television shows, the Meier camp agreed… then claimed that these 230 photographs were not taken by Meier but were added to his photographic collection by the Men in Black in an attempt to discredit him. The take away should have been that there were 230 photographs once claimed to be real that were now admitted to be faked and not that they have been slipped into the Meier collection by a mythical group.

But there were all those hundreds of others that had not been faked, at least according to the photo analysis that had been done by experts consulted by the Meier camp. Stevens said De Anza Systems, a San Jose company, was credited with providing the computers to do the analyses of some of the photographs. Here was a reputable company that had no known ties to Meier or his champions in the US, Stevens and Dilettoso. The suggestion was that they authenticated the pictures which proved the Meier tales were true.

Tony Ortega, reporting in the Phoenix New Times, wrote:

“They came to De Anza under the pretext of wanting to buy our equipment. We demonstrated it, and they snapped many pictures and left. We made no data interpretations whatsoever," Dinwiddie told [Kal] Korff in the presence of two other investigators.

What about the captions which appear in the [Meier] book under each photo? Are they correct?" Korff asked Dinwiddie.

“Those are their interpretations, not ours. Nothing we did would have defined what those results meant,” [Dinwiddie explained].

It was clear to Dinwiddie, Korff writes, that Dilettoso and Stevens dreamed up the impressive-sounding captions despite that they had nothing to do with demonstrations De Anza had performed.

Korff showed Dinwiddie a caption below a Meier photo that purports to show a hovering spacecraft: "Thermogram--color density separations--low frequencies properties of light/time of day are correct; light values on ground are reflected in craft bottom; eliminates double exposures and paste-ups."

"No, we put those colors in the photo!" Dinwiddie exclaimed. "Jim [Dilettoso] said, 'Can you make the bottom of the object appear to reflect the ground below?' I said yes, and we performed the operations that they asked for."

The Korff in this statement, the one apparently conducting the interview, is Kal K. Korff who has thoroughly discredited himself with tales of being a high-ranking counter intelligence officer, an expert on terrorism, the author with a contract to write 500 books and a man who had been involved in some very shady activities. All of that would be enough for me, as well as nearly everyone else in the world, to ignore his work if there wasn’t something else to be said about it.

But Korff does not stand alone on this. Ortega took the next and proper journalistic step. He wrote, “New Times [meaning Ortega] did talk to Ken Dinwiddie last week, and he remembers things the way Korff describes them.”

It is not required to accept Korff’s writing on this then. Ortega confirmed the information by talking to the same man at the same organization and what we learn is that Stevens and Dilettoso misrepresented what had taken place when they visited with there. De Anza Systems did not analyze, study, or examine the photographs taken by Meier. They were demonstrating the capabilities of their computer systems to two men who claimed they were interested in purchasing a system. In other words, this didn’t do anything but provide some impressive looking photographs that did nothing to suggest the authenticity of the flying saucers, the beamships, photographed and add the name of a computer company to the body of evidence. It did not rule out hoax, but instead suggested that manipulation of the situation to provide some authority for a claim the photographs were real which, in itself, is indicative of a hoax.

An independent study of the photographs was undertaken by Neil Davis at Design Technology in Poway, California. This study has been suggested as supporting, if not endorsing, the authenticity of the Meier photographs, or rather, some of them. Davis wrote, “Nothing was found in the examination of the print which would cause me to believe that the object in the photos is anything other than a large object photographed a distance from the camera.”

But the important part of his report, which is often ignored tells us something else. Davis also noted, “These results are preliminary and qualitative in nature because of the unknown processing history of the print, and its presumed inferior quality to the original negative. A more detailed, quantitative analysis of this photo can only properly be made on the original film. It is most desirable that all 6 photos be examined. It is possible to optically or digitally superimpose the several images of the object resulting in an image with increased resolution.”

Those of us who have been involved in questioned document research, that is, reviewing everything relevant about such examinations, know that you simply can’t draw conclusions about something that is not the original. Here we have a second-generation photograph. To do a proper analysis, as Davis reported, he needed to have the negative. While nothing indicative of a hoax appeared on the photographic print, such evidence might have surfaced on the negative. This then, is not supportive of the Meier photographs as being of a real craft, but only that on this second-generation photograph there was nothing that shouted it was a hoax.

At the far end of the spectrum, Dilettoso told Alejandro Rojos during a recorded interview that a great deal can be learned from such second-generation photographs. While that might be true, Davis made it clear that you needed to examine the original negative to draw any real conclusions. The negative would reveal flaws not visible on prints made from that negative. To suggest otherwise is to be disingenuous.

Those at the now defunct Ground Saucer Watch, an independent group founded in 1957 and made up of scientists and engineers, among others, examined twenty-five of the Meier photographs in 1977. Their conclusion was not ambiguous. They said, “It is our opinion that all of the analyzed photographs are hoaxes, both crude and grandiose, and that they should not be considered evidence of an extraordinary flying craft.”

Wendelle Stevens labored very hard to belittle the work done by Ground Saucer Watch, suggesting that they had worked from polaroid prints of Meier’s photographs and using a video camera to create a file that could then be fed into a computer. According to Stevens, they were using software and equipment used to search for cracks in jet engines. To him, this didn’t suggest good science and he eventually contacted Jim Dilettoso to get better information. Had Ground Saucer Watch been the only organization to reject the pictures as hoaxes, that argument would have been quite persuasive, but, GSW was not alone in its conclusions and Stevens had done nothing to prove their conclusions were in error.

In 1980 Colman S. VonKeviczky, Major (Ret), Director of ICUFON Inc. (Intercontinental UFO Galactic Spacecraft Research and Analytic Network), wrote a report titled ‘The Eduard “Billy” Meier fraud‘. In the report, he analyzed some of Meier’s photos received from German UFO researcher Ilse Von Jacobi and ex-FIGU member Hans Jacob. Together, with Hans Jacob, VonKeviczky even visited a site were Meier made some of his photos. The tone of the report is cynical and as the title already implies VonKeviczky concludes the pictures and videos are fake and the case is a hoax. On June 9, 1980, the report was forwarded to Wendelle Stevens and Tom Welch of the Genesis III team who were working on the side of Meier.

Having been associated with the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization off and on for a number of years before its demise in the mid-1980s, I was curious about the reaction of the Lorenzen’s to Meier’s claims and photographs. They had been at the forefront of research into UFO occupant sightings and provided groundbreaking research into alien abductions. If there was one organization that would be open and supportive of a collection of UFO photographs that were suggestive of alien visitation, APRO would be that organization.

According to a letter published in the August 1979 issue of the A.P.R.O. Bulletin, Jim Lorenzen provided a detailed explanation about his apparent endorsement of a book of photographs by Billy Meier. Lorenzen wrote that his statement, written at the request of Wendelle Stevens “describes the Meier photos as art [emphasis in the original].”

He said that, “My current inclination is (and always has been) that the case is an elaborate hoax.” This is the same conclusion that he communicated to me as we discussed UFO photographic evidence many years ago.

Then Lorenzen noted, “A pertinent fact that was omitted is that Meier builds UFO models and that they have the appearance and proportions of some of those in the photos claimed to be authentic craft, and further [and importantly], that Meier has been caught in at least one attempt to destroy evidence of the existence of such models.”

The counterclaim, by the Meier camp, is that he was building models of the spacecraft he had seen for his children. The models came after the sightings and were not part of the pictures that he had taken but there is no way to validate Meier’s claim. What can be said is that Meier built models and attempted to destroy some of them.

Lorenzen does provide other information that might negate that claim and the authenticity of the photos. He wrote:

Your brief mention of the UFO which flew around the tree does not do that incident justice. Why did you not include some of the photos? Would it be because the photos show the disc penetrating the tree limbs to the point that the rim apparently touches the trunk? A skeptical view might be the rim to the trunk of a small model tethered by the rim to the trunk of a miniature tree, and supported by the limbs, super imposed again normal landscape…

The rest of the story is that there is no sign of a tree at the position that this one appears to be. How does Meier explain this troublesome fact? Why, the tree, damaged by radiation from the space ship, just pined (sorry!) away for a couple of weeks and then disappeared without a trace over a period of three days. Meier is supported in this statement by two witnesses from among his disciples, one of whom now claims that he was hypnotized into giving false testimony.

There are other problems with this incident. The changing cloud background suggests that the photos were taken over a much longer period than would be required for the circumnavigation of the tree by a technically advanced vehicle. Stevens counters this objection with the statement that clouds change quickly in that area, but no supporting documentation is furnished and apparently no one bothered to check the winds aloft for the time in question.

In a somewhat similar vein, Gabrielle Pickard provided additional evidence. In a story at the Top Secret Writers website, she provides a compelling case showing the Meier photographs are faked. Their website can be found here:

http://www.topsecretwriters.com/2015/11/billy-meier-ufo-research-group-keeps-the-fraud-under-wraps/

When asked about what she found most compelling about the evidence that Meier was lying about his space encounters, she said:

Undoubtedly, the 50+ fake space and time travel pictures which Meier even to this day publishes and promotes as being verified by the ETs as genuine. If you want me to pick one example, I would choose the Universal Barrier or Tunnel photo.

Meier claimed that while he was onboard a spacecraft at the “boundary” of our universe, he photographed a huge tunnel that connects our universe with a parallel universe, somewhere between July 17-22, 1975. Skeptics, in the 1970’s, have pointed to an identical looking painting of Gerard O’Neill’s Island III design cylindrical space colony, made by the artist named Rick Guidice, published in Smithsonian magazine in February 1976, as evidence that Meier simply copied from it.

Meier and the alleged ETs in return claimed that Meier didn’t copy it since he first photographed his picture in July 1975, which is 7 months before the illustration was published in Smithsonian magazine. They even went further and claimed that the artist Rick Guidice has indeed copied his illustration from Meier’s photograph.

To settle this issue, I have directly contacted the artist Rick Guidice, NASA archivist and also filed a NASA FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request. As it turns out, Rick Guidice had already finished his painting before May 27, 1975 and that this painting was also first disseminated to the media and public through NASA press releases on June 16, 1975, several weeks before Meier allegedly photographed the Universal Barrier somewhere between July 17 and 22.

In other words, they were saying that they had uncovered yet another example of Meier photographing something not while traveling in space, but that had been published on Earth before he had made his alleged trip. The source of the photograph was not something Meier had seen in space, but something published prior to Meier’s photograph surfacing.

To the Meier colleagues, all of these negative results can be discarded simply because those who have made the negative comments have some unstated but compelling reason to reject the Meier story, at least according to those residing in the Meier camp. According to Meier and his followers, his critics refuse to look at the evidence, that they are afraid of what the Meier contacts really mean, or that they are somehow worried that this will cut into their own profits from the UFO research field. Instead, the only true and important analysis of the Meier evidence, in this case the photographs, was made by Jim Dilettoso, at least according to Wendelle Stevens.

The question now is if Dilettoso’s work was scientific and accurate. Although some of the following deals with his analysis of other UFO cases including the Phoenix Lights and the Oliver’s Castle Crop Circle, it does provide an insight into the value of his work. But the real trouble seems to grow out of some of the claims he has made about his background which is always problematic when studying questioned photographs. Michael Kieffer supplied some of that information. He wrote:

Jim Dilettoso's bio is a tangled circuit board of fact and fiction, disputed achievements, inventions and connections that can't be documented, others he won't talk about. He claims he has a Ph.D: in biomedical engineering from McGill University in Montreal, but the registrar's office there never heard of him. He claims an undergraduate degree from the University of Hartford, but its records show he took a single math course there.

When confronted with these apparent fabrications, he first admits he'd never have the patience to sit through so many years of classes… Then he just digs in deeper and deliberately raises more questions. On another occasion, he offers that these are notions put forth by others, left uncorrected, until by some logic, they become true.

A University of Hartford professor who served as Dilettoso's mentor simply says, "it's part of his being exceptional that all of the columns don't add up."…

His invention of colorization is disputed as well. American Film Technologies, the company that holds the patent on the process, claims that his work was "a failed R&D attempt," while Dilettoso swears his technology was ripped off and he was paid mostly in worthless stock. However, the company executive who fired Dilettoso from the project confirms the importance of his contribution-though he stops short of confirming the allegations of theft for fear of legal retribution.

One of the consequences of life on the borderline is that neither side claims you as its own. One JPL scientist on the Voyager project scoffingly asked how anyone could take Dilettoso, seriously if he believed in UFOs and other such New Age claptrap. Yet Dilettoso claims that JPL sent him to work on analysis of the Shroud of Turin. And it's unclear whether he became embroiled in UFO research because NASA asked him to or because the UFO underground sought him out for his JPL contacts.

I could go on in this vein, providing both praise for Dilettoso’s genius, and his lack of understanding some of the science that he spouts so often. We do see here that Dilettoso falls into the same trap as many others in this field which is resume inflation and unverifiable claims of important work and invention. The real evidence for us as it relates to the Meier photos is in his analysis of other UFO sightings and what has been found about them.

Dilettoso was involved in the analysis of what is known as Oliver’s Castle Crop Circle. This video supposedly showed a crop circle being formed as two balls of light flashed over them. I found information at:

http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/ilyes/ilyes4.html

According to the analysis of the video found there and the work done by Dilettoso, there was no question that the video was real. They wrote:

There is absolutely NO evidence of tampering on the Oliver's Castle Videotape.

I've spoken twice with Jim Dilettoso about his findings. Jim is the president of a company which, in addition to other clients, does work for government labs. It has a state-of-the-art lab with top-of-the-line equipment, including a Cray 6400 computer.

Jim's main responsibility is setting up supercomputer networks. He uses a supercomputer to analyze video footage when he deems it necessary. [The Cray, however, was not used to evaluate the OC videotape.] His work also entails very advanced image processing. He is the 'expert' analyst the national television programs *Sightings* and *Unsolved Mysteries*, among others, call upon to verify the 'purity' of, in particular, UFO tapes and photos. He's been doing this work for twenty years.

Jim made it clear to me that while it might be possible for a team of people with the experience, the appropriate equipment, *and the time* to come up with a *similar* video, he stated emphatically that THIS tape showed no signs of computer enhancement, splicing, depth cueing, or fields-per-frame anomalies. He used terms like 'subcarrier' and 'blanking pulse' to describe facets of his analysis. He said the Balls Of Light (BOLs) were NOT spherical but were appropriately distorted (as actual movement would distort them as opposed to animation-generated movement). [Patrick's evaluation of the BOLs (below) not only agrees with Jim's, but goes even further - see his startling analysis on his website!]

Jim also noted, as I did early on but before I mentioned the fact to him, that (especially) the central Circle can be seen to 'open' because the crop goes down blazingly quickly IN SPIRALS around the centre of it. Some have claimed that the crop movement appears to be 'animated' and seems to 'jump forward' in the quadrant nearest the camera. Such is NOT the case, both according to what I've seen, and what Jim's observed. He was especially impressed by the 'action' documented in the main Circle.

When I questioned Jim about the 'shadows' at the far bases of the Circles, he immediately replied that they were most probably an artifact, the result of a camcorder technical phenomenon called 'blooming'.

A final spontaneous point Jim offered, which I too had independently noticed somewhere around my 30th time of viewing the clip, was that after the Lights leave, the crop (especially) in the largest Circle can be seen to be 'twitching'. This residual effect of the Energies was first noted many years ago, and was witnessed in 1993 by a group of visitors to the early-morning addition to a UK Formation known as the Overton Oval. The tuft in the newest Arrival (the Circle highest on the hillside on which the rest of the Formation had arrived the previous morning) had been standing when the first witness saw it. It subsequently underwent two phases of 'collapsing', or settling, over the next hour or so, during which time there were additional visitors in that Circle who noted the changes to the tuft. This same type of settling can clearly be seen on John's tape. I'm delighted that Jim commented on it.

He told me that creating the BOLs and their flight paths would not be difficult to do on computer by a computer animation person with the right equipment. (Remember, while Jim said it is *possible* to achieve a *similar* effect using computer, he found no computer enhancements on the OCVid tape itself.) He wasn't so sure about how one might go about computerising the 'laying' of the Formation itself, for he thought it would be an especially complex, highly technical (if not impossible), time-consuming procedure.

But the Oliver’s Castle footage is a fake. Other investigators had questions. Even Colin Andrews, one of those who had researched crop circles for years, had trouble with it. You can read his analysis here:

http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/CPRI/wabe99.html

The highlighted parts of the interview, meaning the important parts of that interview said:

Coincidental to your comments about Michael Glickman still putting out the Oliver’s Castle video as real, I have just viewed the confession interview by John Wabe.

It is clear by what I have witnessed in this filmed interview, that his confession was made as a direct result of my own findings. As you know, two years ago, my investigations uncovered his real name, and the studio where he works as “First Cut” studios in Bristol, England.

I have been in close contact with the owners of this film for some while and recently agreed to have it flown to my offices in the USA. Wabe says why he did it and how. Two versions of the events were prepared to cover the film as authentic (the original story) and later the second version, when it as obvious I have found him out…

This filmed confession with other material it contains, plus additional information I discovered in England during August this year, confirms all my earlier findings, those being that the Oliver’s Castle video is a fraud.

What this demonstrates, in this particular instance, is that Dilettoso’s conclusions about the film are incorrect. He applied his expertise, using his expensive computers and modified software to examine the film and came to a conclusion that was later found to be inaccurate.

But, as they say, we all can make mistakes. The real question is if the methods used by Dilettoso to gauge the authenticity of film or photographs can be used to do that. If the methodology is flawed, then the conclusions reached are equally flawed and the analysis must be rejected.

This leads us to the Phoenix Lights and the work that Dilettoso did on the footage, specifically on the video made at 10:00 p.m. as the lights seemed to hover and then fade out over the Sierra Estrella Mountains in Phoenix. He said that the lights over the mountains did not match the composition of videos of known flares. According to Tony Ortega:

He shows similar frames with similar line segments cutting through streetlights, the known flares captured by Channel 12, and the 10 p.m. lights of March 13.

Each results in a different graph.

It's rather obvious that the graphs are simply measurements of pixel brightness in the cross-sections he's taken.

But Dilettoso claims that the graphs show much more. To him, they represent the frequencies of light making up each of the images. He claims he's doing spectral analysis, measuring the actual properties of the light sources themselves, and can show intrinsic differences between video images of streetlights, flares, and whatever caused the 10 p.m. lights.

Because the graph of a known flare is different than one of the 10 p.m. lights, Dilettoso concludes that they cannot be the same kinds of objects.

In fact, Dilettoso claims that the graphs of the 10 p.m. Phoenix Lights show that they are like no known light produced by mankind.

The fallacy in Dilettoso's analysis is easily demonstrated. When he's asked to compare the graph of one known flare to another one in the same frame, he gladly does so. But he admits that the two flares will produce different graphs.

In fact, Dilettoso admits, when he looks at different slices of the same flare image, he never gets the same graph twice. And when he produces some of those graphs on demand, many of them look identical to the graphs of the 10 p.m. lights.

When he's asked to produce an average graph for a flare, or anything that he could show as a model that he uses to distinguish flares from other sources, he can't, saying that he knows a flare's graph when he sees it.

It's an evasive answer which hints at the truth: Dilettoso is only measuring the way distant lights happen to excite the electronic chip in camcorders (which is affected by atmospheric conditions, camera movement and other factors), and not any real properties of the sources of lights themselves.

Met with skepticism, Dilettoso reacts by claiming that his methods have been lauded by experts.

For those interested in the whole analysis of Dilettoso’s take on the Phoenix Lights, you can read Ortega’s article here:

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/the-hack-and-the-quack-6445593

Dilettoso was aware of the criticisms of his work and again, according to Ortega, what Dilettoso said is not exactly what he claimed. Ortega wrote:

"Dr. Richard Powell at the University of Arizona believes that my [Dilettoso] techniques are not merely valid but advanced to the degree where there was nothing more that they could add," he says.

Powell, the U of A's director of optical sciences, confirms that he spoke with Dilettoso. "He called here and I talked to him, and I could not, for the life of me, understand him," Powell says.

"I don't know how you take a photograph or a videotape after the fact and analyze it and get that information out. We didn't say that his method was valid, we said we didn't have any other way that was any better," Powell says.

Hearing that Powell denies calling his techniques "advanced," Dilettoso claims that Media Cybernetics, the company which sells Image Pro Plus, told him that the software package would do the kind of spectral analysis he does.

Jeff Knipe of Media Cybernetics disagrees. "All he's simply doing is drawing a line profile through that point of light and looking at the histogram of the red, green and blue. And that's really the extent of Image Pro. . . . Spectroscopy is a different field."

What this means, in the long run, is that Dilettoso’s analysis of the Phoenix Lights was flawed and the techniques that authenticated the Meier films and photographs was equally flawed. There is no independent analysis of Meier’s photographs and films that that argue for authenticity. The consensus among those who have offered an independent conclusion is that the Meier contacts are an elaborate fraud.

Here's where we are today. Of the independent analyses done of the Meier photographs, all have grave reservations about the authenticity of them. As I have noted, these analyses were not done on the original negatives but on prints from those negatives and that reduces the information that can be gleaned from them. Without an examination of the negatives, all they can say with authority is that there is no evidence of a hoax on the prints.

That, however, isn’t the end of it. It is clear, and it has been admitted that 230 of the photographs are fake. It is claimed that these were not taken by Meier but slipped into packages or albums of the real photographs in an attempt to discredit Meier. Either governmental intelligence agencies or the Men in Black have done that. The explanation is weak at best, especially since Meier had originally claimed they were his pictures. We have to take that into consideration simply because 230 photographs have been exposed as hoaxes and all of them came from the Meier camp.

This is an interesting dodge because it covers the exposure of any other photographs as faked. It wasn’t taken by Meier as claimed, but substituted at some point by some mysterious agency without Meier being aware of the fake. It would seem that at some point he would notice that some of the photographs were not taken by him. Rather than wait for others to expose the fakes, Meier should be able to do that himself, but to date, that hasn’t happened.

At the other end of the spectrum are those analyses that suggest there is no evidence of a hoax and that the pictures are authentic. But the analyses were done by those who believe Meier is in contact with an alien race so there is a built-in bias, and, as we have seen, the most cited of those analyses was completed by a man whose credentials are in dispute and whose science is shaky at best. In any other arena, that analysis would be rejected, especially in the light of the faked photographs and the independent examinations of the photographs that have been discovered.

The best that can be said is that evidence of a hoax was not found on most of the photographs. The worse that can be said, based on the various studies, the contradictory stories, and the lack of other evidence, is, as Jim Lorenzen said so many years ago, “… an elaborate hoax.”