Today I came across a press release titled UFO Skeptics Throw in the Towel – How Did Meier Beat NASA by 32 Years? The document, having to do with a new upcoming film based on the controversial Swiss UFO contactee Billy Meier called The Silent Revolution of Truth, mentions many of the recent UFO programs appearing on television, including Larry King’s shows concerning extraterrestrial visits. The release states that such serious treatment of UFOs by the press coincides with “increased worldwide attention being once again focused on the highly controversial Billy Meier UFO contacts in Switzerland, due to the release of the new film on the case, The Silent Revolution of Truth.” Also mentioned is new alleged “scientific corroboration for Meier’s prophetic information.” The document may be viewed in its entirety here.

Asserting that Meier had been told of water present on Mars as far back as 1976 (predating the recent announcement by NASA having to do with this subject on July 31), the release also appears to celebrate “the defeat of skeptics,” stating that “Renewed international interest in Meier’s claims of personal contacts with extraterrestrial humans, for over 66 years, also coincides with the total collapse of the skeptical challenges. Chief among those who have long characterized Meier’s stunning photographic, film and video evidence as merely ‘an easily duplicated hoax done with models’, has been the international professional skeptics organizations CFI-West and IIG, affiliated with skeptical debunker James Randi.”

Perhaps one of the stranger individuals to emerge from the “contactee era” of Ufology, Billy Meier was a Swedish farmer from Bulach, Switzerland who claimed to have had bizarre contact with and even photograph many UFOs he witnessed during the 1970s. A frequent target due to the outrageous nature of his claims, as well as the images he has supplied to accompany them, Meier has been scrutinized by skeptics and Ufologists alike, including Stanton Freidman, Jacques Vallee, and as mentioned before, notorious skeptic “The Amazing” James Randi.

According to Meier, his initial contact with extraterrestrials began as far back as 1942 when Sfath, an alien who appeared to him as an older human male, began to visit him. These visits would last until 1953, at which time a female contact calling herself Asket would begin to appear instead. Asket would continue the visits, which lasted until 1964. His regular contact with aliens began again after more than a decade of hiatus when an alien named Semjase, claiming to be the granddaughter of the elderly Sfath from his childhood visits, visited him on January 28, 1975. These aliens would identify themselves to Meier under various names, most often Pleiadeans in a reference to their home in the Pleiades, one of the nearest star systems to Earth.

Though the most controversial element of Meier’s contact with the Pleiadeans had to do with his prolific photography of their saucer-like spacecraft, at one point Meier claimed to have been given a strange sample of a metallic substance, which he said was presented to him by his alien friends. The sample was later tested by Dr. Marcel Vogel, a scientist who worked for nearly three decades with IBM at their Almaden Research lab in San Jose. Vogel’s analysis of the sample seemed to indicate that it may indeed have been alien in origin; among the strange traits he noted was the presence of the element Thulium, the least abundant of the rare earth metals. Noted skeptic Kal Korff later erroneously said that Vogel had discovered Thallium in the sample, and that Thulium was actually a reference to the same element, stating that “Thallium, also spelled sometimes as thulium, is an extremely rare, malleable, and highly toxic metal. It is unlikely that Meier would have been able to secure a small sample.”

In reality, Thulium is a completely different element from Thallium altogether, bearing only a low-to-moderate degree of acute toxicity and presents a fire and explosion hazard only when present in its dust form. Still, Korff may have been correct in stating that Meier would have had trouble obtaining even small amounts, since Thulium also was relatively rare metal in the 1970s. First discovered as a by-product of atomic testing during World War II, only very small amounts were initially purified, and even three decades later the metal would have been incredibly expensive to obtain, let alone hard to find. But if the stuff were indeed so difficult to come by, could this lend further credit to Meier’s claims that the metal was alien in origin?

It is also interesting to note that Vogel was not a metallurgist to begin with; he was a chemist. Also, in spite of being referred to sometimes as “Dr. Vogel”, he had actually received an honorary degree rather than earning his Ph.D. by more conventional means. Nonetheless his credentials, so far as his association with IBM, as well as the numerous patents he received for many of his inventions, are less easily disputed. Therefore it is unfortunate that, before any further testing could be completed, Vogel claimed that the sample disappeared from his laboratory in San Jose, only bringing further skepticism to the affair.

So was Meier telling the truth about his contact with extraterrestrials? Did he capture beautiful renderings of advanced spacecraft from distant civilizations with whom he shared a strange affinity, or was he indeed just another fraud; a late-arrival to the contactee movement photographing hubcaps on fishing line to try and spoof the world with fake UFO photos? “He foretold the Iraq wars, AIDS, global warming and terrorism,” the release says, also asserting that Meier can be credited with predicting current economic issues crunching Americans like inflation, and even the consequences of a U.S. attack on Iran (however, one might note that all these elements; war, disease, climate change, terrorism, and inflation, could all quite be easily “predicted” as they are all conditions that inevitably tend to fluctuate over time, no matter what the underlying influence may be). The release concludes with, “The fact is that while being exposed to the truth can be quite devastating for some people… it doesn’t change the truth.” But what, we are left to ask, is the truth?