Gary Kinder's Defence of Light Years: The Meier Case, the Withheld Evidence and the Experts Consulted

This document, transcribed on the preterhuman.net archive, answers the storm that broke when a Publishers Weekly advertisement in a January 23 issue announced Light Years, Gary Kinder's book on the Swiss contactee Eduard "Billy" Meier. It has two layers: a third-person publicity statement on Kinder's behalf, and a first-person open letter from Kinder to the UFO community. Its purpose is persuasion. Kinder wants ufologists to stop condemning a book they had not read, and he summarises the expert opinions he gathered.

Why were ufologists so hostile?

According to the publicity statement, every letter and phone call that reached Kinder and his publisher took the case to be a hoax. One group's press release dismissed the book as celebrating faked pictures, and another correspondent wanted it relabelled as fiction. None of these critics, the document stresses, had read the manuscript.

Kinder's explanation splits into a problem with the claims and a problem with the evidence. On the claims side, he points to Meier's more extravagant assertions and to ufologists' wariness of contact reports in general, and of repeated contact in particular. On the evidence side, he blames the case's investigators, Lee and Brit Elders, Tom Welch and Wendelle Stevens. Their 1979 photo book, UFO...Contact from the Pleiades, said scientists had been baffled by Meier's photographs, sound recordings and metal samples, yet it named no scientists, quoted no reports and identified none of the Swiss witnesses to lights in the sky. Kinder says Lee Elders kept the evidence to himself; a later offer to allow analysis, provided the material never left the Elders' possession, found no takers. He grants that George Earley, reviewing the book in Saucer Smear, was right that the group deserved condemnation until it produced some evidence.

What did Kinder do?

The statement says he started research in the fall of 1983 and conducted more than 120 interviews. He spent thirteen weeks in Switzerland visiting the alleged contact sites, Meier's family, neighbours and town officials. He also interviewed witnesses in Munich and London, and travelled to Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, San Jose, Washington, DC and the Los Angeles area. The publicity text calls this two years of work, while Kinder's letter speaks of three years of research and reflection. He says he sent each expert the manuscript passages about them and that every one approved them, some with minor corrections.

What did the experts say?

Kinder says he interviewed nine experts who had analysed or otherwise studied the Meier material, and he presents his account of them as a sampling of what they said; the list below follows the people he describes individually. He admits a basic limit: the photo analysts never had an original transparency, so none of the photographic work was definitive. The analysts who examined the photographs told him they could still have detected anything short of a highly sophisticated hoax. That is their own assessment, relayed second-hand by Kinder, not a tested result.

• Michael Malin, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University, examined the photographs in 1981. He found them credible as photographs but found Meier's story of friendship with aliens incredible.
• Eric Eliason of the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff ran the photographs through his image-processing equipment in 1981. He reported no sharp breaks that would indicate artificial dubbing.
• Steve Ambrose, a sound engineer, said the recording had consistent and random oscillations on spectrum analyser and oscilloscope that would be hard to reproduce. A second engineer, Nils Rognerus, is said to have agreed.
• Robert Nathan of JPL had copies made in 1979 but refused to analyse them. They proved to be several generations from the originals, and he suspected Stevens of trying to trick him. Shown the films later, he could not explain the hovering craft. His verdict was the most negative Kinder received: "If this is a hoax, and it looks like it is to me but I have no proof, this is very carefully done."
• Wally Gentleman, a special-effects director who had worked on Kubrick's 2001, estimated that each of the seven films would take at least 15 assistants, $30,000 in studio work and $50,000 in equipment. He also said a shadow on a tree in one photograph was correct.
• Robert Post, head of the JPL photo lab, analysed nothing. He said only that he saw nothing fake about the prints.
• David Froning, a McDonnell Douglas astronautical engineer, found that figures in Meier's 1975 notes on "tachyon" propulsion came within 20 percent of his own acceleration calculations. The letter gives no calculation, and agreement with one engineer's theoretical figures does not show that such a propulsion system works or that Meier's account is true.
• Marcel Vogel of IBM (spelled Vogal at one point in the text) is said to have stated that the metal sample could not be made with any technology he knew. This is contested: Kinder quotes a British magazine, The Unexplained, mocking claims about a 10-hour videotape of the lab work that Vogel is said to deny making. Kinder's evidence for Vogel's statement is a video he watched plus his own conversations with Vogel, and no analysis data is given. Vogel also said the sample had disappeared while in his possession.

These are recollections and opinions reported by an author defending his book. The document reproduces no measurements, spectra or written lab reports.

The witnesses, the tracks and the faked pictures

Kinder reports Swiss witnesses who described events nobody could explain: Meier vanishing from a barn roof twelve feet up while standing beside another man, and on another occasion reappearing warm and dry among men out in a freezing rainstorm. He also describes the so-called landing tracks. After claimed contacts, groups of three circles, each six feet across, were found pressed into tall meadow grass in a counter-clockwise pattern. What puzzled observers, by Kinder's account, was that the flattened grass stayed green but never rose again; one set survived nine weeks until a farmer mowed it. Kinder did not see the circles himself and relies on people who saw and photographed them. Hans Schutzbach, Meier's former assistant and later a bitter detractor, told him that other people's attempts to reproduce the tracks fell short while Meier's were flawless. Martin Sorge, said by American ufologists to have exposed Meier with charred slides, told Kinder in 1985 he was certain contacts happened, though not as Meier described.

The letter also contains evidence against Meier, and the most concrete item rests on Kinder's own checking. After a witness pointed him to it, he says, he found the September 1977 issue of GEO magazine, compared it with Meier's San Francisco destruction photographs, which supposedly showed the city's future destruction, and judged them identical. No independent comparison is reported. Kinder says his book sets Meier's evident falsehoods beside the unexplained events. He mentions without endorsing them a second-hand report of ropes and pulleys in Meier's barn, Stevens's imprisonment, and an 18-inch beamship model in Meier's office.

Kinder's challenge to the sceptics' sources

Kinder argues that the critics leaned on Bill Spaulding of Ground Saucer Watch and on Kal Korff. Both rebuttals rest on 1985 interviews that Kinder himself quotes. From one dated March 25, 1985, he cites Bill Moore dismissing Spaulding's work as empty show and calling him someone the field ignores. From his own interview with Korff on April 13, 1985, he quotes Korff as open to the possibility that Meier had some genuine experience buried in the noise. Jerome Clark, editor of International UFO Reporter, wrote back that ufologists had treated fraud as an article of faith and had acted like the debunkers they criticised. Clark still kept serious reservations about the alien meetings.

What the document does and does not establish

Kinder explicitly says he offers no proof of contact. His closing verdict is a hedge: he cannot believe Meier's talk of time travel and religion, "nor can I dismiss" the experts' comments. He treats Meier as either a master illusionist or a chosen instrument, and he concludes that the truth will never be known. The document is valuable as a record of who examined what and of the investigators' secrecy. It does not supply first-generation evidence. Its expert quotations are filtered through one author with a book to sell. And the one photographic comparison Kinder says he made himself, of the San Francisco destruction photographs against GEO magazine, went against Meier. For the contact narrative and the embassy claims elsewhere in this dossier, see The Pleiades Embassy: Semjase, the Pleiadian Contact Narrative and the source archive Mirror, Pleiadian Contact Narrative and Pleiades Embassy Claims vs. Evidence: The Contactee Account and Its Artifacts.