Whether you love or loathe Billy Meier his activities have been the subject of intensive monitoring by intelligence authorities including the CIA. Officialdom at a secret level take the man very seriously indeed.
The extraordinary surveillance of the Swiss UFO contactee has been outlined in detail by the late American investigator, Wendelle Stevens, who spent eight years involved in an in-depth investigation of Meier and his followers at their farm near Hinterschmidruti.
Stevens gives a detailed picture of the contact that he and fellow investigators Lee and Brit Elders were pressured into having with a range of intelligence agencies during their visits to Switzerland in the late 1970s and 1980s. These pre-briefings and debriefings, which took place mainly in London, could stretch for days and were dominated by discussions with a senior CIA officer who maintained a secure, sealed off section of a London hotel. The interviews were sometimes marked by anomalous phenomena that Stevens could only ascribe to the intervention of Meier’s alleged Pleiadian visitors – in other words, while the CIA was monitoring Meier, the ET visitors appeared to be monitoring the CIA with technology that left no doubt about who was on top. The ET pranks included dematerializations of documents and shenanigans with a secure CIA telephone line.
This cooperation by Stevens and the Elders with a range of interested government agents was frankly admitted by Stevens in anecdotes scattered through several of the six volumes of his investigation reports and contact notes of Meier. This huge output of investigative material totalling nearly 3,000 pages was published by Stevens between 1982 and 1996 and reflects the former US Air Force Lt Colonel’s conviction that the Meier contacts, though bizarre and eccentric by conventional standards, were authentic. Stevens died in 2010, Lee Elders is a private investigator in California and his wife Brit is the webmaster for Shirleymaclaine.com and an assistant to the Hollywood actress.
“We were stopped in different countries en route to and from Switzerland, and were interrogated and sometimes given instructions by one service, and then again and differently by another,” wrote Stevens. “Every time we visited the Meier farm a military strongpoint was set up on the hill just above the Meier house looking right down into the family living room.” Journeys out into the surrounding countryside to visit alleged landing sites often saw the arrival of observer planes monitoring the American investigative team’s activities.
Despite the intimidating atmosphere, Stevens and the Elders also had their research trips facilitated by special treatment in both London, where they had accommodation set up for them by the Americans, and in France, where the Gendarmerie made sure their train journeys to and from Switzerland proceeded smoothly. Uninvited police escorts protected them from interference.
On their third return trip across France the Gendarmerie not only ensured they had a reserved compartment but assigned them an empty carriage and placed guards at each end to keep people out. “They made no move to stop us when we went to the dining car but they let nobody else through,” wrote Stevens. This time the team were carrying a precious consignment of high quality super-enlargements of spacecraft photos that Meier had taken and which he allowed the investigators to copy from the original slide transparencies. These photos were later published in a large format pictorial volume by Stevens and the Elders, a book which heralded Meier’s spectacular arrival on the international UFO scene. When the three arrived at the boat-train dock at Dunkirk at the end of this train ride they were pulled out of the immigration queue and taken to a special check-through which was opened and closed exclusively for them.
On their third return trip across France the Gendarmerie not only ensured they had a reserved compartment but assigned them an empty carriage and placed guards at each end to keep people out. “They made no move to stop us when we went to the dining car but they let nobody else through,” wrote Stevens. This time the team were carrying a precious consignment of high quality super-enlargements of spacecraft photos that Meier had taken and which he allowed the investigators to copy from the original slide transparencies. These photos were later published in a large format pictorial volume by Stevens and the Elders, a book which heralded Meier’s spectacular arrival on the international UFO scene. When the three arrived at the boat-train dock at Dunkirk at the end of this train ride they were pulled out of the immigration queue and taken to a special check-through which was opened and closed exclusively for them.
“In London we were met again and taken to the now familiar ‘debriefing’, where our host asked to see the new pictures – which I still had in a long narrow box under my arm,” wrote Stevens. “We let them be taken away to another room to be examined (and probably photographed), and then they were brought back and given to me with a single word comment, ‘Nice.’”
Stevens commented that in addition to the interest shown by agencies in Switzerland, France and America, his team also tracked involvement by the English, Austrians, the Czechs, the East Germans and the Russians.
Stevens commented that in addition to the interest shown by agencies in Switzerland, France and America, his team also tracked involvement by the English, Austrians, the Czechs, the East Germans and the Russians.
On one stop-over in London the investigators were witness to a prank that demonstrated that when it came to secret surveillance the ET’s won hands down. During one of the meetings with the CIA station officer they were shown an object that was inside a multiple secured safe. “Inside of that safe at that time,” wrote Stevens, “on a top shelf, laying flat was a plain powder-blue folder with an enclosure clip, and a signature sheet was fastened to the front. That folder was never touched or moved as we crouched in front of the open safe.” After viewing the object of interest the safe was closed and locked and the piece of furniture behind which it was camouflaged was returned to its position. The interview lasted several hours and then the three were returned after midnight to their rooms which were kept behind careful layers of security in a special wing of a hotel. When Lee Elders woke the next morning and retrieved his wallet from the top of a low wardrobe near his bed he found the blue folder from the CIA safe sitting on top of it. Leaving Brit to guard the folder and get dressed, Lee and Stevens went downstairs and made a phone call to the officer to advise him of the bizarre turn of events. “He was dumbfounded...and held the line open while he went to the safe and checked. Sure enough the sensitive blue folder was in fact missing from the safe. He asked us not to touch it, and said he would be right over.” The man arrived a few minutes later with a bodyguard and sought assurances that the team had not read through the folder.
Another time the three were about to be interviewed in London by the officer who was flanked by two telephones, one red and one white. Suddenly the white phone rang 10 short rings but there was no one on the line when it was answered. The interviewer checked it out with the operator but no explanation could be found for the rings. “He cleared his throat and turned to start the conversation again, when the red phone rang 10 short rings! He grabbed the phone and quickly answered it as though he could catch the caller this time. Again no answer....Our interviewer said, ‘I can’t believe this! I’ll get to the bottom of it right now. This is a direct line right to telephone central. It bypasses the switchboard downstairs and goes through no other operators. It is a secure line and only especially cleared people can use it.’” Despite urgent phone calls to the operator the man could find no explanation for the rings.
“This situation was only one of more than a dozen such, of different kinds, which clearly demonstrated to us, with no shadow of a doubt, that the Pleiadians were aware of everything we were doing, as well as everything anybody else was doing that may pertain to them in any way,” wrote Stevens in 1989. “They alone knew who all the players were.”
Part2
So many intelligence agencies were secretly getting copies of Billy Meier’s photos and films from his processing laboratory in Switzerland in the 1970s and 1980s that often the CIA’s copy was from the end of the queue. That was the advice that respected UFO researcher, Wendelle Stevens, received from an informant in the know who contacted him in February 1989.
The informant, a former American intelligence operative in retirement who was happy to sign his letter with his real name (though censored by Stevens), said that in the early days of Meier’s fame American intelligence had looked him over “from asshole to appetite” in an investigation of the “light touch variety, meaning use no force, make no scars, and leave no traces of the investigation,” the man wrote. “Which is to say play tourist, pack a camera, and take a lot of pictures, tell a lot of lies, and ask a lot of questions. Most country’s intelligence systems get pissed if they catch you screwing off on their turf. So do not accuse us of any break-ins, and that type of thing, because it happened back in the days when Billy was in fact liberal with what he gave away.”
“In the early days if you showed up at Billy’s place knowing enough about good manners to bring as much food as you eat, wash as many dishes as you get dirty, and just help around the house or yard a bit, it was possible to get all the UFO information desired from Billy and be treated as a respected guest.”
The man said that CIA checks of the film copies they received from the Swiss laboratory established that there was “hanky panky going on at the processing plant or in the mail system some place. Someone else was getting off with the first copy of the negatives most of the time. Several times, according to the experts, our copy of the negative would be about the fifth one.”
That there was a free-for-all trade in the steady stream of material coming from the Meier contacts in the 1970s and 80s was also underlined by an incident in London during one of the ‘debriefings’ that American investigators, Stevens and Lee and Brit Elders, had on one of their return journey’s from researching Meier and his followers at their farm. While most of their ‘official’ contact in their 8-year investigation of Meier was with the CIA station in London (see “Billy Meier and the CIA - Part One), Lee Elders was approached by a secret service representative of another country in the British capital and invited out for a meeting at a restaurant. “Lee decided to keep the appointment to see what this man might want. He was surprised to hear the man offer to exchange some of the information we had missed…for copies of some of the material we got to first which they had missed in their collection efforts.” All this backroom maneuvering disturbed the American team. It had “already proved dangerous,” Stevens wrote, “and we didn’t want any more of it.”
The easy access that the CIA had been given in the early days at Billy’s home was gone by the early 1980s. Assassination attempts on Meier and the steady leakage of some of his best photos from his albums caused the hapless contactee to hunker down and rely closely on his circle of proven friends. Stevens said in a UFO conference in America in the 1990s that the CIA officer in London who interviewed them had sought to enlist their help because the agency could no longer get an information source in the tight circle of confidantes around Meier.
The informant’s letter to Stevens in 1989 expressed the CIA’s amazement at the privations that Meier’s alleged Pleiadian visitors put their man through in the arrangements surrounding the ET’s rendezvous’ with the one-armed contactee in the hills and woods around Hinwil and Hinterschmidruti. Astonishment was expressed at the “screwball hours” that Meier had to observe as well as the weather conditions chosen. “Billy probably holds the record for more bad weather contacts than anyone else,” he wrote. “His case had some screwball features but it had some very good pictures.”
This impression of extreme hardship for Meier in the timing and travel difficulty involved riding one-handed on his moped motor bike in the dark to isolated landing sites is confirmed by the extensive contact notes that Meier kept and which Stevens later published. Time and again Meier is summoned (telepathically, confirmed by 10 quick rings on his telephone) from his bed at all hours of the night, often in pouring rain, to be taken up for meetings which were far from inspirational. They often involved an ear-bashing about why the cash-strapped contactee with heavy family commitments and a rocky marriage, wasn’t out on the lecture circuit taking the Pleiadian message public. The contact notes showed that Meier consistently appealed to them to see his side of the story. That the man persisted with these irksome exchanges despite a surprising level of intolerance and lack of sympathy from the visitors living comfortably in spaceships rather than in the hand-to-mouth scramble of Earth life, speaks volumes for Meier’s infatuation with the main visitor, a woman called Semjase.
It appears the ET’s were monitoring the intense official surveillance that Meier was under and sometimes figured that meetings in the dead of night in the foulest of weather up the steepest of hill tracks stood the best chance of going undisturbed.
Stevens’ correspondent said that when he had retired from government service many years before, the military had developed UFO detection devices that worked efficiently and could determine direction of travel. The early devices were quite large but “by now could be the size of a pack of smokes, and give direction along with the make and model of the UFO. In the late 50s we could differentiate between about four types of UFOs based on how they affected our devices,” he wrote.
“If I remember some of the information coming out of Billy’s area, the DALs would normally send out a couple of other ships to scout the area some several days in advance, before the contact ship showed up. At that time the devices the Swiss had could tell the difference between the two types of ships normally used. It could also tell the difference between several of the small, ball-shaped probes that might be sent out.”
