LIGHT YEARS: An Investigation into the Extraterrestrial Experiences of Eduard Meier

by Gary Kinder ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 26, 1987

An absorbing, thoughtful study of the most well-documented UFO contact experience on record. Kinder has spent several years digging into this story and verifying every part he could. Today he believes the evidence, but he doubts the interpretation cast upon it by the contactee to whom it happened. Eduard ""Billy"" Meier, a Swiss who lives in a small village outside Zurich, says he has been in contact with aliens from the Pleiades since he was five. Their contacts with him come in 11-year cycles. First they prompted him into becoming what must be the first Swiss hippie: he dropped out of school in sixth grade, roamed through exotic lands and lived in a cave in India. Even in his cave, he was famed as a spaceman and was finally ordered to leave the country. He lost an arm but gained a Greek wife on his way home. In 1975, Meier received telepathic orders to drive his motorbike into the forest and take some pictures of the visitors' spacecraft. Using a simple but faulty camera, the one-armed man began snapping color photos of UFOs over his native countryside and kept on taking them by the thousands for the next several years. He would have his filmstrips printed in his village. The local handler was at first skeptical of what he was seeing but at last came around to believing in the prints. The negatives were always on strips, not cut up, with every picture different--which is to say no single negative was flanked by bad or poor shots of the same subject, as would be the case with someone trying to get a hoax just right. Uneducated Meier had in fact no camera equipment for creating such hoaxes. His prints, put to extremely elaborate tests in the world's finest labs, have yet to be proven fakes. In fact, the usual comment is that the pictures are so clear. Meier also has a female contact from the Pleiades who takes him on board for talks, which he later writes up and prints. He is supposed to be spokesman of a new wisdom--but few can swallow it. Yet analysis of some metal given to him by his female contact shows it to be amazing stuff indeed: several pure metals, including vastly rare thulium, are formed from crystal and bonded into one metal by some unknown process. Meier at present has ended an 11-year cycle and is waiting for the next. Top-flight UFOlogy, with eight pages of black-and-white and color photos (not seen).

Pub Date: May 26, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly--dist. by Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1987

Categories: NONFICTION