The MUFON UFO Journal

 

I haven't forgotten your request for information on Billy Meier

but bear in mind, this covers much more than just a few puny text

files as there's video, books and much written, pro and con, extant

on the case. To be sure, there's plenty of information available and I

urge you to consider all possible sources and reach your own conclusions.

I'll kick this off with Gary Kinder's Open Letter prior to publishing

his "Light Years" book, in 1987, regarding his investigation into Meier's

case.  This file courtesy of MUFONET.

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From The MUFON UFO Journal              Number 228              April 1987

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LIGHT YEARS: AN OPEN LETTER

By Gary Kinder

   I have received so many phone calls and letters (and copies of letters

sent to others) about the forthcoming LIGHT YEARS, it seems appropriate

for me to write a letter of explanation. Had I not been involved with

the arrival of a new daughter two weeks ago, I would have written

this letter much sooner. I know that many of you were confused to

hear I was writing a book on Meier; I also know that most of you

will understand when I offer a proper explanation. Here it is.

   Though no one in the UFO community has seen the manuscript for

LIGHT YEARS, much of the vehemence over its publication seems to arise

from a feeling that I betrayed the UFO community, that I pretended

to be interested in ufology, its history, and its people, when my only

intention was to write about Meier. Some of you may have felt used.

   I have been researching the Meier case since the fall of 1983. In 1984

and the first half of 1985, I made three trips to Switzerland totaling

about thirteen weeks in country visiting the alleged contact sites,

speaking with Meier, interviewing witnesses (some of whom are detractors),

and talking to neighbors, town administrators, etc. I also made side

trips to Munich and London. In the States I traveled several times to

Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, San Jose, and the Los Angeles area to

speak with the people who had investigated the case, the ufologists

who had called it a hoax (Korff, Lorenzen, Moore, Spaulding), and the

scientists who had analyzed the Meier evidence. Yes, qualified scientists,

engineers, and a special effects expert did analyze the Meier evidence.

   Everyone I talked to in the UFO community, except Lou Farrish,

warned me that the Meier case was poison. They said that Meier made

preposterous claims about traveling back and forth in time to speak with

Jesus and to photograph the destruction of San Francisco. Some

pointed to Bill Spaulding and said that he had found ten of the Meier

photos to be patently fraudulent. Others pointed to Kal Korff, who,

they claimed, had conducted an exemplary investigation of the case.

   After two years of research and over 120 interviews in Switzerland

and the U.S., I finally told my editor I simply could not make sense

of the Meier case; it all was too confusing, and I had no idea how to

begin laying out the story. If everything I had uncovered concerning

the case had proved to be negative, I would have found it easy to

abandon the project--my editor had given me that option from the

beginning; the problem was that I discovered many aspects of the case

that truly were intriguing and difficult to explain.

   In the meantime I had read many books on ufology to become familiar

with the field, and I found the UFO community and the history of UFOs

fascinating. l felt there was a book in it, and during the fall of 1985

I began to focus my research on the broader picture, traveling first to

Washington, D.C., to spend a week with Dick Hall, Bruce Maccabee,

Larry Bryant, et al., though I still was under contract for a book on

Meier. (When Maccabee asked me how I became interested in the field,

I told him and several others present at a Fund meeting that my first

exposure was through the Meier case.) My editor agreed that a bigger UFO

book would be a good one. I began to concentrate on this book, quitting

work on Meier, packing up all of my research on him in big boxes, and

throwing them into the basement.

   When I spoke with the Washington, D.C. group, and later in the spring/

summer of 1986 attended Hal Starr's conference in Phoenix, the

MUFON symposium in Lansing, and Sprinkle's contactee convention in

Laramie, I myself was under the impression my research was for a book

on ufology, not the Meier case. At the same time I began traveling to

attend the various UFO symposia to acquaint myself with more of the

community, my editor met with me in Phoenix at Starr's conference and

encouraged me at least to give the Meier story a try, just to write it

simply and as it happened. Continue to research the other book,

he said, but get something on paper about Meier. With that completed, I

could go on to the bigger book on ufology.

   So I pulled my Meier research out of the basement and forced myself to

sit down and wade through all of it to try to piece something together.

Once I did that, though, all of a sudden LIGHT YEARS came pouring out

of me. A 15-page treatment grew in three weeks to a 100-page outline,

and in three months I had a 300-page manuscript. Then I re-wrote and

re-wrote and re-wrote. Once it began to fall together l liked it more,

and when I assembled all of the quotes from the scientists the story

began to feel far more solid than it had while I was researching.

   I also finally located the two sound engineers who had analyzed

Meier's audio tapes, and the special effects expert who had studied the

Meier 8mm footage and some of the photos back in 1980.

   The two engineers told me the sounds were unlike anything they had

ever heard, or seen, on a spectrum analyzer. The special effects expert

informed me that Meier could have created the films and photographs only

with a team of experts and tens of thousands of dollars worth of

sophisticated equipment. (From my own experiences in Switzerland I knew

that neither of these existed.) I had heard so many negative references to

Meier for so long I had nearly forgotten similar intriguing things that the

the scientists had told me two years earlier.

FINAL DRAFT

   My editor liked what I was writing. He showed it to the people at Atlantic

Monthly Press, where he has his new imprint, and everyone there liked it too.

Last October they took the first half of the manuscript to the Frankfurt Book

Fair as their lead title, while I continued to work on the manuscript, as it

was far from being finished. I honestly don't know how many drafts I finally

completed, but the figure is somewhere between five and seven. Then last fall

two things happened: My editor felt that the Meier story needed to be set in

historical context, that I needed to provide the reader with background on

the UFO phenomenon itself. Not only did I already have a tremendous

amount of research in that area, I had also completed 35 pages of a proposal

on the bigger UFO book. I expanded that work, pulled in more detail, and

weaved it into the Meier story. You will find about one-half of the second

half of LIGHT YEARS is all Arnold, Robertson, Condon, Hynek, Blue Book, Hill,

etc.

   The second thing that happened was that when my editor took the

manuscript to Frankfurt he discovered that even in Europe books on UFOs are

difficult to sell, too difficult. After that experience he and his publisher

both told me they felt it would be unwise for me to follow a book on Meier

with another book on UFOs. So we decided to utilize all of my research into

the history of ufology for the Meier book and go on to something new for my

next project, a decision that frankly left me not too unhappy. Ufology is a

frustrating field to research and more frustrating to try to make sense of

and put down on paper in a readable fashion. Emotions run so high and

name-calling among the ufologists (even without the Meier case) is so

rampant, a writer finds himself wallowing in explanations and counter

explanations until every sentence dissolves into battle and nothing is

decided.

   Anyhow, the foregoing is why many of you (and 1) thought I was

researching a book on ufology when we met in Michigan, or Washington, D.C.,

or Phoenix, or Laramie. Prior to beginning that general research, I

always informed those I interviewed that while I wished to know more about

the entire field, I was particularly interested in the Meier case.

Spaulding, Moore, Lorenzen, Korff, Starr, all knew back in 1984-85 that I

was looking primarily at the Meier case during the early part of my

research. This sentence from my letter to Kal Korff on March 28, 1985, is

indicative: "I am researching a book about the UFO community, what it does,

who it is, where it is (in more ways than one). I'm particularly interested

in the Swiss Case or the Meier case, which seems to have generated a fair

amount of emotion within the community. I know you have referred to it as the

most infamous hoax in the history of ufology."

   The next quote cames from a letter written by Bill Spauling the day after

I interviewed him.

   "It was a pleasure talking to you on January 6, 1985 regarding the subject

of unidentified flying objects and the Billy Meier hoaxed UFO photographs...

Because the Meier incident is such an obvious hoax, any further publicity

extended to this incident...will only provide additional exposure to this

case... We cannot involve ourselves to any extent which could further

generate favorable publicity for the conspirators of the Pleiades book."

In a small community whose members correspond regularly, it was no secret

that I was researching the Meier case.

   Now on to the substance of LIGHT YEARS. Many of the witnesses

I interviewed in Switzerland, none of whom had ever been contacted by

anyone in ufology, had seen things happen to Meier that no one could

explain: Standing next to another man, he once disappeared instantly from the

roof of a barn twelve feet off the ground; in a separate incident he suddenly

reappeared, warm and dry, in a group of men standing in a dark and secluded

forest in a freezing rainstorm. These scenes, associated with alleged contact

experiences, appear in much greater detail in the book. They may be tricks,

but if so they were performed by a master illusionist.

   When Meier claimed to have had a contact, sets of three six-foot diameter

circles would appear in a meadow surrounded by thick woods. I did not

see these myself, but I talked to several people who had seen them and who

had photographed them while still fresh. Swirled counter-clockwise and

perfectly delineated in tall grass, one set remained for nine weeks, until a

farmer came and mowed the grass. Here is the mystery of the landing tracks:

Grass that is green rises even after being mashed down; grass that dies turns

brown and lies flat. This grass remained green but never rose; it continued

to grow in a flat circle. The landing tracks puzzled everyone I spoke to who

had viewed them, including Meier's most ardent detractor, Hans Schutzbach.

Schutzbach told me that other people had tried to duplicate the landing

tracks, but that their efforts were "a bad copy." Meier's were "perfect." I

listened to dozens of such stories, so many I could not include all

of them in the book, including nighttime sightings of strange lights reported

by a variety of people, many of whom witnessed the same incidents and

corroborated each other's accounts.

   One nighttime photograph, taken by a school principal from Austria during

an alleged contact, will appear in the book. On the other side, I know that

Meier's photos of the alleged future destruction of San Francisco, for

instance, came right out of the September, 1977, issue of GEO Magazine. After

one of the witnesses reported this to me, I found the magazine myself and

compared the photographs. They were identical. All of this is in the book--

the crazy claims, the apparent lies, the unexplained disappearances, the

mysterious landing tracks, all weaved into the narrative.

MORE EVIDENCE

   In London, Timothy Good provided me with many lengthy letters

from Lou Zinsstag (who often had been pointed out by ufologists in the

States as one who thought that Meier was a fraud and "crazy"). Zinsstag had

written the letters between June, 1976, and October, 1977, as she investi-

gated Meier and reported back to Good. In one letter she calls Meier "the

most intriguing man I have ever met." She goes into great detail in her

observations, including a description of "this feeling of discomfort" she

experiences in Meier's presence. In another letter she writes, "If Meier

turns out to be a fake, I shall take my whole collection of photographs to

the ferry boat and drown it in the old man river of Basle."

   Back in the States I interviewed nine scientists/engineers/special

effects experts who had analyzed or otherwise studied the Meier evidence.

(One, Bob Post, is none of the three, but heads the photo lab at JPL.)

Following is a sampling of what they had to say. Realize that where the

photos are concerned an original transparency was never available for

analysis, so none of the work done on those was definitive (Spaulding himself

told me he had no idea the generation of the photographs he analyzed);

however, knowing this limitation, the scientists who did agree to examine

them told me they would have been able to detect all but a very sophisticated

hoax.

   Dr. Michael Malin is an associate professor of planetary sciences at

Arizona State University; he wrote his doctoral thesis on the computer

analysis of spacecraft images beamed back from Mars. He was at JPL for four

years and he's worked with the special effects people at LucasFilm. He works

under various government grants at ASU, and a recent experiment he

devised has just been accepted for a future Shuttle launch. A friend of mine

who is the science editor at National Geographic and who has researched

and written many cover stories on the Universe, the Space Shuttle, etc., had

spoke to Malin before and once told me, "If Malin says it, you can believe

it."

   Here is one thing Malin said concerning the Meier photographs which he

analyzed in 1981: "I find the photographs themselves incredible, they're good

photographs. They appear to represent a real phenomenon. The story that some

farmer in Switzerland is on a first name basis with dozens of aliens who come

and visit him...l find that incredible. But I find the photographs more

credible.     They're reasonable evidence of something. What that something

is I don't know."

   Malin also told me, "If the photographs are hoaxes then I am intrigued by

the quality of the hoax.  How did he do it? I'm always interested in seeing

a master at work."  These quotes, and all of the rest of the quotes I

attribute to the scientists here, appear verbatim in the book.

SOUNDS

Steve Ambrose, sound engineer for Stevie Wonder and inventor of the

Micro Monitor, a radio set complete with speaker that fits inside Wonder's

ear, analyzed the Meier sound recordings. "The sound recording's got

some surprising things in it," he told me. "How would you duplicate it? I'm

not just talking about how to duplicate it audio-wise, but how do you show

those various things on a spectrum analyzer and on the 'scope that it was

doing? It's one thing to make something that sounds like it, it's another

thing to make something that sounds like it and has those consistent and

random oscillations in it. The sound of the spacecraft," he added, "was a

single sound source recording that had an amazing frequency response. If it

is a hoax I'd like to meet the guy that did it, because he could probably

make a lot of money in special effects." His findings were corroborated by

another sound engineer named Nils Rognerud.

   In 1979 Dr. Robert Nathan at JPL was sufficiently impressed with the

Meier photographs to have copies made of Meier transparencies at the

JPL photo lab. After the transfer he refused to analyze the photographs,

however, because his developer discovered they were several generations away

from the originals.  Nathan felt that the transparencies were so far away in

generation from the photographs he had seen that Wendelle Stevens had

attempted to trick him. Later, I showed the Meier films to Nathan, and he

laughed at some of them, but he couldn't figure out how Meier flew the ship

into a scene and had it come to a sudden halt; or how it could hover

motionless while a pine branch in the lower right corner blows in a stiff

wind.

   Nathan said, "He would have to be awfully clever, because that's a very

steady holding. It would have to be a very, very good tethering." Then he

said, "Apparently he's a sharp guy, very clever. So he should be given some

points for effort." Nathan concluded about the films, "If this is a hoax,

and it looks like it is to me but I have no proof, this is very carefully

done. Tremendous amount of effort. An awful lot of work for one guy." From

all of the scientists, these were the most negative comments I received.

   With Nathan saying that in theory the films could be hoaxed, I was curious

about the logistics involved.  Then I discovered that a special effects

expert, Wally Gentleman, who for ten years had served as Director of Special

Effects on the Canadian Film Board and who, for a year and a half, was

director of special photographic effects for Stanley Kubrick's film 2001,

had viewed these same films.

   This is what he told me: "To produce the films, Meier really had to

have a fleet of clever assistants, at least 15 people. And the equipment

would be totally out of [Meier's] means. If somebody wanted to cheat one of

the films, $30,000 would probably do it, but this is in a studio where the

equipment exists. The equipment would cost another $50,000." That's for each

of the seven Meier films. Gentleman also had examined the photographs. "My

greatest problem is that for anybody faking this," [he pointed to one of the

photographs], "the shadow that is thrown onto that tree is correct.

Therefore, if somebody is faking it they have an expert there. And being an.

expert myself, I know that that expert knowledge is very hard to come by. So

I say, 'Well, is that expert knowledge there or isn't it there?' Because if

the expert knowledge isn't there, this has got to be real."

   Then there is Robert Post, who had been at the JPL photo laboratory

for 22 years and was the head of that lab in 1979, when Nathan brought the

Meier photos to him to have copies made. Post oversees the developing

and printing of every photograph that comes out of JPL. Though he analyzed

nothing, his eye for spotting fabrications far surpasses a lay

person's. Post told me: "From a photography standpoint, you couldn't

see anything that was fake about the Meier photos. That's what struck me.

They looked like legitimate photographs. I thought, 'God, if this is

real, this is going to be really something'."

   Besides working in the highly classified field of military defense, David

Froning, an astronautical engineer with McDonnell Douglas for 25 years, has

done exploratory research to develop ideas and technology for advanced

spacecraft design. As a longtime member of the British Interplanetary

Society and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, he has

presented many papers on interstellar flight at technical conferences in

Europe and the United States. In October, 1985, he addressed the XXXVI

International Astronautical Congress in Stockholm. Froning's wife

discovered at a friend's house the photo journal published by the Elders in

fall, 1979, and took it home to her husband because of one word in the text -

tachyon.

   In Meier's notes from 1975, he spoke of the tachyon propulsion system

utilized by the Pleiadians. For over a year Froning had been spending

most of his spare time working to design just such a theoretical system.

When he read more of Meier's notes on faster-than-light travel (he had

contacted the Elders and Stevens for more information), he found that

Meier's figures for the time required to achieve the speed of light (at which

point, according to Meier, the tachyon system would kick in to make the

hyper leap), and the distance a ship would have traveled at that point, were

within 20 percent of his own calculations determined through the use of

complex acceleration formulas.  Froning told me, "If what this Meier is

saying is just a hoax, he's being cued by some very knowledgeable scientists.

I've only discussed this Meier case with scientists who are fairly

openminded about interstellar flights, but I'll tell you, the majority of

them think it's credible and ag~ee with at least part, or sometimes all, of

the things talked about by the Pleiadians."

   During my research I read an article from a British publication called

The Unexplained, in which the author, referring to the alleged Meier metal

analysis by Marcel Vogel at IBM, wrote, "Jim Delettoso characteristically

failed to further the cause by claiming that [the Elders] hold a 10-hour

videotape of 'the entire lab proceedings' (which Dr. Vogel denies having

made). 'And,' Dilettoso incautiously persisted, "we have about an hour of

him discussing why the metal samples are not possible in earth technololgy,

going into intrinsic detail of why it is not done anywhere on earth."'

   The author, of course, is poking fun at such a claim. I have seen that

video. I have also seen another video in which Vogel states, "I cannot

explain the metal sample. By any known combination of materials I could not

put it together myself, as a scientist. With any technology that I know of,

we could not achieve this on this planet." I've interviewed Vogel twice and

he insists that the metal sample he spent so much time analyzing is unique.

I spoke with him again three weeks ago and to this day he remains fascinated

with the specimen. He said that if the metal sample had not disappeared while

in his possession, he would now be continuing research on it with a number

of other scientists from IBM and Ames Research. A reporter from the

Washington Post also called Vogel two days ago and Vogel again verified the

above quote.

   With the exception of Vogel, and possibly Nathan, though he doesn't

remember, none of these men had ever been interviewed by anyone in the

UFO community. And Vogel even said to me on tape regarding one of the

ufologists who did interview him about Meier: "Treat him with caution. He'll

ramble on and he'll quote you out of context. So watch it." He also told me

this same person "has taken my statements completely out of context

and published them. This case has been badly mangled."

[ Don's note - David Froning is also in the "Messengers of Destiny"

Video tape put out by Lee and Britt Elders ]

DOUBLE CHECK

   In the book, I go into much greater detail with each of the scientists and

engineers. I mention each by his real name (as I do everyone else in the

story) and I include his place of employment.  After completing the final

draft of the manuscript I mailed to each of the scientists a packet which

included everything in the manuscript pertaining to him. I asked that each

make any corrections, technical or otherwise, he cared to make. I have heard

back now from all of them either by mail or by phone during the past six

weeks. Some had nothing to change, others had minor changes. Everything

concerning their analyses of the evidence will appear in the book exactly as

they have authorized it to appear. (Two weeks before sending his letter to

my publisher attempting to persuade him not to publish LIGHT YEARS, Walt

Andrus called me and we talked for forty-five minutes. During that

conversation, I told Andrus of the comments made by the scientists. I

gave him their names, I spelled the names for him, I gave him their places

of employment, and I encouraged him to contact them for verification of

their statements, three of which appeared in an ad for the book in

"Publishers Weekly." Apparently, he never did so.) In his letter to me

Michael Malin opened with this: "Thanks for letting me see what you have

written. It's a credit to your writing that I cannot tell whether you are a

supporter or a detractor of Dilettoso, and of the claims of the people who

supplied the UFO images."

   Eric Eliason of the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, is the

ninth of the experts I spoke with. After receiving his packet, he wrote to

me, "Thank you for the accurate representation of my views on the Meier UFO

photographs. If your LIGHT YEARS publication remains as objective as the

pages you provided, I will look forward to reading what you have to say."

   Eliason creates image processing software so astrogeologists can analyze

photographs of the planets beamed back from space. He spent two years

producing the intricate radar map of cloud covered Venus acquired by

Pioneer 10, and his software has been applied in processing space

photography beamed back by both Viking and Voyager. He was sent to

France and to China as a representative of the U.S. space program and an

expert in image processing. He had analyzed the Meier photos on his equipment

in 1981. He told me in an interview in August, 1984: "In the photographs

there were no sharp breaks where you could see it had been somehow

artificially dubbed.  And if that dubbing was registered in the film, the

computer would have seen it. We didn't see anything."

   What would you do with evidence like this? Would you disregard it because

Meier makes outlandish claims? Or because a ufologist reports that a

colleague in Germany has a friend who saw ropes and pulleys hanging in

Meier's barn? Or because Wendelle Stevens is a believer anyhow? Or because

Wendelle Stevens is now in prison? Or because Meier has an 18-inch model of

one of the Pleiadian beamships sitting in his office? Or because a group of

believers has formed around the man?

   And if you had a choice between the analyses performed by the scientists

Malin at ASU and Eliason at USGS and those performed by Bill Spaulding at

Ground Saucer Watch, on which would you stake your reputation? After all of

the bad-mouthing given the Meier case, I was surprised to learn that

ufologists like Walt Andrus had never heard of Malin, or Eliason, or

Gentleman, or Froning, or Ambrose, or even the alleged detractors in

Switzerland, Hans Schutzbach and Martin Sorge.

   Schutzbach was Meier's righthand man for two years, with him night

and day, driving him to contacts, organizing and cataloguing all of the

photographs, measuring and photographing the landing tracks. Then they had

a falling out, and Schutzbach left. He hates Meier and is certain Meier

is a fraud; if anyone would know Meier's "technique" and be ready to divulge

it, Schutzbach would be the man, yet to this day he has no clue how Meier

could have made the tracks, or the photos, or the sound recordings, or the

films. Nor does he have even one suggestion for an accomplice.

   Sorge, a cultured man with a university degree in chemistry and author of

two books, had been mentioned frequently by ufologists as the one who

discovered charred photographs and thereby exposed Meier as a fraud. He told

me in the summer of 1985 that he is "certain" the contacts took place,

though in a different fashion than Meier describes. He also told me the real

story of how he obtained the burned slides. That, too, is much different

than the version I got from ufologists here in the States.

   Again, all of this is in the book. One of the more interesting ironies

in the current uprising of the UFO community against the publication of

LIGHT YEARS is that every time someone slams the book (before it has

been read) he points to Bill Spaulding and Kal Korff as the two authorities

in those skills the community places great faith. After all of the negative

comments I have heard about Bill Spaulding's work from various members of

the UFO community, why would anyone rely on his analysis of anything? Bill

Moore, who is not known for his kind feelings toward the Meier case or the

people who investigated it, had this to say about Spaulding in an interview

on March 25, 1985: "He's generally regarded by anybody in the field as

somebody to ignore. It's all puffery. He wrote a paper on the analysis of

photographs, and I have a critique of that paper by a scientist who knows

what he's talking about, and he just rips it to shreds. It sounds good

unless you know what the system is and then you realize that the guy's a

phony."

   While Korff was young and inexperienced, these factors do not necessarily

discredit his work. But I am certain that few ufologists have heard him say

what he told me in an interview on April 13, 1985: "I'm even open to the

possibility that Meier had some genuine experience somewhere in there," he

said, "but there's so much noise around his signal that I don't even know

how to sift it. I've always maintained that, yeah, maybe there's something

to it. Most of the people who have read my work say, 'Ah, the Meier case is

totally a hoax, there's nothing to it.' I say, 'The claims [Stevens and the

Elders] have made don't hold up; but it's possible the guy may have some-

thing somewhere."

   After three years of researching and thinking about this story it finally

came clear to me that two things kept the UFO community from taking a far

more serious look at the Meier case: One, of course, is Meier's preposterous

claims, and (in an ongoing effort to insulate itself from the fringe) the

general reluctance of the community to accept any claim of contact,

especially repeated contact; the other is that Lee Elders grabbed all of the

evidence and sat on it. George Earley, after reviewing the Elders's

UFO...Contact from the Pleiades, wrote in Saucer Smear that until the

Intercept group produced some of the evidence they claimed to have, they

deserved to be castigated by the UFO community. And Earley was right. So was

Korff. The claims by themselves don't hold up. But the evidence in fact

existed; I've talked to the people who examined it.

CONCLUSIONS

   None of the foregoing is offered as proof that Meier sat in a Swiss

meadow and conversed with Pleiadians, but only to demonstrate that people

intrigued by the Meier case, who see a fascinating story in the man, are not

simplistic in their thinking. No one, including Stevens and the Elders, has

ever claimed he possesses irrefutable evidence of the Meier contacts, and I

do not make that claim now. No one in ufology can make that statement about

any case.

   After I sent a letter similar to this one to Jerry Clark, he responded

that while he continued to have serious reservations about Meier's claims to

meet with extraterrestrials, he, too, found the Meier story "fascinating."

"My colleagues are going to be astounded and confused," he wrote. "It

really has been an article on faith among us (me included) that this whole

business was just an exercise in heavy-handed fraud. But apparently you have

shown it is rather more interesting than that. It's ironic. Ufologists

forever complain that scientists and debunkers won't take an objective look

at the UFO evidence. You have demonstrated, I think, that in this case the

ufologists  acted just like the people they criticize."

   You will find the book a balanced report that holds many surprises for

you and other ufologists, and in no way degrades the stature of the UFO

community or impedes its progress. Due to cooperation from many of you,

the historical sections in LIGHT YEARS will provide readers with a true

appreciation of the UFO phenomenon and those who study it. Like Jerry

Clark, I myself remain fascinated with Meier, but uncertain about the truth

behind the actual contacts.

   I end LIGHT YEARS with this: "I would not call him a prophet, though he

may be. I would not rule out imposter, though I have no proof. I know that if

you boiled the story in a kettle you would find a hard residue composed of

two things: One would be Meier's ravings about time travel, space travel,

philosophy, and religion; the other would be the comments by the scientists

and engineers impressed with the evidence he has produced. I can't believe

the former, nor can I dismiss the latter. He may simply be one of the

finest illusionists the world has ever known, possessing not the power but

the skill to persuade others to see things that did not happen and do not

exist. Perhaps he has no such ability; perhaps beings on a much higher plane

have selected him and controlled him and used him for reasons far beyond

our comprehension. I do know this: Trying to make sense of it all has been

the most difficult thing I will ever do. Finally I realized, as the Elders

had years before, that the truth of the Meier contacts will never be known."

** End of File **