Billy Meier and Planets Beyond Pluto

The other night, August 1, I appeared on the Rob McConnell’s X-Zone radio show and in the course of the conversation, I mentioned that it was strange that Billy Meier’s Pleiadian pals had not mentioned the large planet out in the Kuiper Belt that was being postulated by our current astronomical community. I figured that if they were flying around the Solar System they would have a good idea of what was out there, outside the range of our capabilities. But in the world of the UFO, as I often say, nothing is ever quite as simple as that.

Wendelle Stevens, who was among the first Americans to get mixed up with Meier, published a book, A Preliminary Investigation Report: The Report of Ongoing Contact, which, of course, is about Billy Meier. The copyright date is a little strange because it lists 1982, 1981, 1980, 1979 and 1978. It means that the book was updated periodically and the only way to know what was in the 1978 version is to review that copy. I mention this simply because Meier has made so many predictions over time that we need some way to verify the earliest date of a specific prediction so that we can gauge the accuracy of that prediction. However, in this particular case, the multiplicity (I just love that word) of copyright dates does not hinder my observations. However, it seems that the information had been given to Stevens on March 9, 1979, but that the contact with Meier had been on October 19, 1978. Given that, we can deduce that the copyright date after 1978 applies.

Pluto, with the large, heart shaped
feature that no one predicted. NASA
photo.

On page 89 of the book (though I’m not sure what edition and copyright date apply here) Stevens wrote about the number of moons around Jupiter as given to Meier. For this discussion, that is irrelevant. In the same paragraph, he wrote, “They also observed that there are still 2 more planets in our solar system still to be discovered, both beyond Pluto.”

On page 521, Stevens wrote, “Then he [Meier] stated that there are also two more planets orbiting our sun – both beyond Pluto, and both smaller than Pluto… He said that it was not the time for us to discover these bodies technically yet, but that they would be identified and studied in the future.”

Okay, we have some specific predictions here, with a date handed to us by Stevens, so we can see if Meier made some startling predictions about the discovery of transneptune objects (TNO). What does this say about Meier’s predictions? How could he know these things back in 1979 (using the later of the 1970s copyright dates)?

Well, first, the speculation about a planet, or planets, beyond Neptune has been going since the middle of the 19^th century. Calculations concerning the orbit of Neptune suggested to some that there was another object out there influencing the orbit of Neptune with its gravity. This sparked a search for it which lead to the discovery of Pluto in 1930.

What we learn is that in 1909, Thomas Jefferson Jackson, who was a respected astronomer who also seemed to annoy his colleagues, said that there was certainly one object beyond Neptune, most likely two and possibly three. That would, of course, be Pluto, and the two that Meier talked about. Jackson, then, with his prediction, beat Meier by about 70 years.

In 1911, Venkatesh P. Ketakar, an Indian astronomer, suggested that there were two transneptune objects. He named them Brahma and Vishnu. Although his prediction about one of those planets which seems to have been Pluto was close to right, he didn’t explain how he had made his calculations. For our purpose, it is only import that we know that he was talking about this some 68 years before Meier entered the arena.

In 1972, Joseph Brady at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory suggested a Jupiter sized planet out beyond Neptune, and given his prediction that it was 59 AU (astronomical unit that is about 93 million miles long), that puts it out beyond Pluto as well.

What we see in these few examples, is that others, long before Meier told Stevens about what he had been told by the Pleiadians, talked of planets beyond Pluto, and even gave the number as two. So, there isn’t anything new and different in the information supplied to Stevens by Meier or to Meier by the Pleiadians.

But, for fun, let’s look at the accuracy of the prediction, and we’ll ignore the distinction between planets and dwarf planets because it does not come into play here. Meier said that there were two planets beyond Pluto. This, of course, is inaccurate. Beyond Pluto, at the latest count are nine (though it is sometimes

Makemake with its
satellite, far out in the
Kuiper Belt.

difficult to be sure how many have been accepted as dwarf planets and how many are still undergoing research). Of those, seven have names but the IAU recognizes only three beyond Pluto as dwarf planets. Given this, it seems that Meier’s prediction was in error because no matter how you slice it, there are, at least three.

I’ll note that Stevens wrote, according to Meier, that both these objects were smaller than Pluto. One of them Makemake, is about the size of Pluto and since the difference is only about 60 kilometers, with a margin of error that means Pluto could be smaller than Makemake. All the others are smaller than Pluto.

Here’s where we can really run off the rails, with Pluto reduced to a dwarf planet, there are now eight known planets in the Solar System. Astronomers are now suggesting that there are again nine planets and possibly ten, based on their calculations. One of those planets is about the size of Earth and the other ten times as large. If this is true and can be proven by astronomers, it completely wipes out the Meier prediction. They are both larger than Pluto, and are out in the Kuiper Belt far beyond Pluto with those other, dwarf planets.

No matter how you look at it, Meier’s prediction about the far reaches of the Solar System and the planets beyond Pluto have been shown to be false. You can reduce the argument to semantics, but that won’t alter the facts. Meier said there were two planets beyond Pluto, but that speculation had been in play for 70 years before his prediction. We now have three that are recognized and another six that have been found. He said they were smaller than Pluto and you can argue that he was correct, but only by a few kilometers and we can do that only by ignoring the possibility of those two large planets being talked about in the world today. There was nothing that he claimed that was accurate or particularly insightful about this, given the state of astronomy in the late 1970s… in other words, he could have picked up on the discussions about the transneptune objects from terrestrial scientists and from some very old astronomy papers. This information did not require contact with alien beings, only a knowledge of the search for planets in the Solar System in the early 20^th century. His predictions about this fail.