The Stevens–Dilettoso Photo Analysis of the Meier Pictures: Methods, Film Readings and the 'No Fraud' Verdict

This is the investigators' own case for the photographs of Eduard "Billy" Meier, the Swiss contactee at the centre of the Pleiadian contact story. A Meier-supporting website reprints it from UFO Contact from the Pleiades – A Preliminary Investigation Report by Lt. Col. Wendelle C. Stevens (USAF, Ret.), carrying copyright dates from 1978 to 1982. It combines Stevens's chapter on the spacecraft photographs (book pages 266–284) with a methods paper by Jim Dilettoso of Phoenix, whom the reprint calls the lead photo investigator (pages 380–400). Gary Kinder's later defence of Light Years (Gary Kinder's Defence of Light Years: The Meier Case, the Withheld Evidence and the Experts Consulted) criticised this investigating group for naming no scientists and producing no reports. This document is the group's account of what it did.

What is claimed

Stevens's conclusion is that the pictures show real craft. After all his enhancement work he writes that the team still found nothing pointing to fraud or trickery. He goes further, saying the revealed details tend to support the witness's story. He credits Meier with more than 800 colour photographs. He ends the photo chapter: "It seems almost impossible that all of this could be faked by any man", adding that this would be true even for someone with a laboratory and two arms. (Meier had one arm.)

How the analysis is said to work

The chapter describes a chain of equipment rather than a single test. Hamamatsu microdensitometer and scanning electron microscope modules fed data into a De Anza Systems image computer. Dilettoso is said to have brought together specialists in lasers, optics, video and computing. The steps listed are:

• microscopy at up to 500 diameters, checking grain for double exposure or montage
• microdensitometric scans with filters reaching below and above the visible range
• electron-microscope examination of the film make-up
• a "laserscope" grid of 10,000 lines per centimetre, plus laser holographic plates

Stevens then describes estimating distance in three ways. The first is by blur: the image is split into focus planes and edge sharpness is read as a "blur factor". The second is by atmospheric grey: haze greys distant objects, so two known distances can calibrate a scale. The third is by the colour of halos around emulsion grains, a technique attributed to Ron Spanbauer of De Pere, Wisconsin, in which red is said to give way to blue and then green with distance. Stevens says the haze and blur methods can be used to check each other.

Two more things were done, according to the chapter. The first was print enlargement. INTERREPRO A.G., near Basel, scanned a negative on a HELL Chromograph DC 300 with an argon laser at 400 lines per centimetre. Colour separations for Meier photo number 200 then went to SCHORI REPROS in Bern for a 60-line poster print. The second was an outside check. Design Technology of Poway, California, ran a conventional photogrammetric analysis on another Meier photograph. They reported no difference in sharpness between object and scene, and no sign of paste-up, double exposure or a model on a string. They also found that the shadows and highlights matched. Their conclusion was that the object was large and some distance from the camera. Stevens notes the firm's NASA, JPL and US Navy contracts. That is a credential, not a check on the result.

The movie film

For Meier's super 8mm footage the chapter turns to Jun-Ichi Yaoi of Nippon Television. In the 18 March sequence the craft circles a tree and seems to swing as if tethered. Stevens argues against a tether, saying the craft's axis did not tilt when its motion changed abruptly and no tether point appears in frame. He also reports that the tree bent towards the craft as it passed. In the 12 June sequence near Berg-Rumlikon, filmed from about 200 yards, a passing car is used as a scale. On that basis the craft is put at about 20 feet against roughly 10 feet for the car, while a branch blows in a wind estimated at 15 knots. In the 14 June footage the craft "blinks" out 28 seconds in, stays gone for 30 seconds and returns. Frame-by-frame study is said to show no splice, only a brightening "flare". Similar disappearances and an instant "jump" are described in the 28 March 1976 Unterbachtel films. On 29 March 1976 at Hasenbol-Langenberg the craft is said to hover about 100 yards beyond a tree, in wind estimated at 20 knots.

The document gives Meier's still camera as an Olympus 35 ECR, serial 200519, with a 1:2.8 f42mm lens and a top shutter speed of 1/100th second.

Dilettoso's scoring scheme

Dilettoso's paper sets out a "quantitative" checklist. He says it draws on methods from JPL, LANDSAT, nuclear medicine and the US Navy, though he cites no publications. Each question is scored. In his example, a negative showing no airbrush work earns only 2 points, while signs of airbrushing count 15 against. The asymmetry exists because passing a test does not prove a photograph genuine. Edge widths on a 35mm negative are said to run from 5 to 45 pixels. Without a reference object, size and distance estimates are put at within 25 percent. The paper then moves past fraud-detection into speculation: magnetic "energy fields", harmonic pulses in infrared images, and "Theta Wave Field" and orgone-plate tests.

What the document does and does not establish

Several tensions sit inside the text itself:

• Originals. Dilettoso calls examining the original negative or transparency "imperative", because copies hide grain detail. Stevens, however, admits the team worked from enlarged internegatives made by Photo Color Studio in Zurich, having only inspected the originals in Meier's home. He also concedes that copying can tilt the image plane so as to hide a thin suspension line. Kinder later reported that the photo analysts he interviewed never had an original transparency.
• Clarity. Dilettoso warns that very sharp UFO pictures deserve extra suspicion. Stevens praises the Meier set for its exceptional number of sharp pictures.
• Unexplained patterns. The team says it is unsure whether patterns around the craft are force fields or computer "noise".
• No data. No densitometer traces, scores or Design Technology report are reproduced. Many of the techniques are presented as still being invented. The cruise-missile passage is an analogy and the "binary camera" is a proposed tool for loading photographs into a computer; neither is a result.

Stevens also says over 30 percent of the film never came back from processing, and puts the loss down to the mail system. Both the loss figure and the mail explanation rest on his account of the processing logs, which he says showed every roll was developed and returned, and on witness statements. No logs or figures are reproduced. The document is best read as the primary pro-authenticity claim. It records what the investigators say they measured, and what they say they found, without the measurements themselves. For the wider claim set see Pleiades Embassy Claims vs. Evidence: The Contactee Account and Its Artifacts and Pleiadian Contact Narrative.