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:
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:
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:
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:
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.”
