Billy Meier

Eduard Albert "Billy" Meier (born 1937) is a Swiss farmer who has claimed lifelong contact with extraterrestrials, principally the Plejaren (Pleiadians), since childhood, with the documented phase beginning in January 1975. His photographs, films, metal samples, and thousands of pages of contact notes are often described as the largest single-source contact corpus ever produced.

Meier lost his left arm in a bus accident in Turkey in 1965. He founded FIGU, his study group, at his Semjase Silver Star Center in Hinterschmidrüti, Switzerland, which continues to publish his material.

From 1975 Meier produced hundreds of daylight photographs and 8mm films of "beamships," often crisp, sunlit, and aesthetically striking, plus contact conversations with the Plejaren woman Semjase and successors, covering philosophy, prophecy, and history. American investigators (the Elders/Stevens "Genesis III" group) promoted the case lavishly; Gary Kinder's Light Years (1987) gave it a serious literary treatment. The corpus fed New Age Pleiadian culture worldwide.

Meier claims ongoing physical and telepathic contact, prophetic information, and a spiritual teaching mission. His contribution to the lore is scale and production values: the imagery defined what a "real" saucer photo looked like for a generation.

The skeptical investigation is extensive. Kal Korff's Spaceships of the Pleiades (1995) and others documented model-photography indicators (visible supports in some frames, matching tree-and-model setups), identified Semjase's portrait as a Dean Martin Show dancer, and showed prophecies edited after events. Meier's ex-wife Kalliope stated in the 1990s that the ships were models made with household items, including a garbage can lid; FIGU disputes her account. Analysts found the metal samples unremarkable once examined outside the promoters' chain. Supporters maintain the volume, the one-armed photographer's logistics, and unexplained residue keep the case open. The consensus outside FIGU: an industrious, decades-long fabrication wrapped around a genuine new religious movement.

Meier, in his late 80s as of 2026, continues at Hinterschmidrüti; FIGU publishes and translates the contact notes worldwide.