The Wedding-Cake UFOs

The event of Oct. 22, 1980. Around 11:30 that morning the craft seen
in the photo on the left, Fig. 1,

Fig. 1.
Wedding-cake craft hovering
at the F.I.G.U. Center. Photo
#800.
Click for enlarged
version.

came and hovered very low over
the parking place at the F.I.G.U. Center in Schmidrüti, Switzerland. From what
Meier was told, this was one of a new series of ships that the Plejarens had
recently developed. In taking the pictures, Meier stood with his back to a
structure called "the carriage house," whose image shows up reflected from the
attached sphere-like structures. It might at first be thought that these highly
reflecting structures around the craft's perimeters had perhaps been
Christmas-tree ornaments on a model UFO. However, the reflecting convex surface
on the far left in the middle tier of "spheres" is seen to be a hemisphere (see
enlarged version), not a sphere. The "carriage house" seen in the reflections is
located over 100 ft to the south of the main residence. If Meier was standing
just in front of the carriage house, with his back to it as he took this
picture, then the camera equation indicates the craft was about 44 ft from him
if 7 m in diameter, or 22 ft away if 3.5 m in diameter. Thus his own image
doesn't show up in the spheres' reflections, as it might have if he had been
situated some 3 ft away from a model UFO. Meier's Verzeichnis doesn't
mention the diameter of the craft, and from what he learned from his entire
series of photo ops in 1980-81, his contactors used three such craft of
identical appearance at different times, of diameters 3.5 m, 7 m and 14 m.

A view of the area from above is shown in Fig. 2, taken from part way up the
hillside to the southeast in August of 1981. The main residence is on the right,
and the structure on the left is the converted carriage house. The pink object,
representing the wedding-cake craft,

Fig. 2. The
Meier residence in 1981 viewed from hillside to the southeast. Carriage
house is on left.
North is to the right. Superimposed pink object
depicts estimated position of wedding-cake craft on
22 Oct. 1980. Pink
"X" depicts deduced position of Meier and camera. From a FIGU
postcard.

has been positioned at the
location to be deduced after consideration of the mirror images. On this
particular morning in 1980 no one else was around but Meier, and there were no
cars parked in the open area between the two buildings. Judging from this photo
and the parked autos (estimating the width of the blue-green auto as 5.5 ft),
the distance between the right-hand side of the carriage house and the
front-center of the main residence building (4th lower window from the right) is
about 115 ft.

It is quite revealing to notice in Fig. 1 that not only is the wedding-cake
craft in good focus, but the main residence beyond it is not badly out of focus.
For a wedding-cake craft of 3.5m diameter situated some 22 ft from the camera
(see below), with the camera's focus upon it, and with a focal length of 55mm
and an f-stop setting of 11 (this was a Ricoh Singlex TLS camera, as briefly
described in Meier's Verzeichnis), one finds that the camera's depth-of-field then ranged from 13
to 79 ft. This would place the residence's windows a little beyond the range of
good focus. The photos on this date are consistent with this scenario, although
Meier's records give no indication of what f-stop he used.

Deductions from the mirror-like reflections.

Fig. 3. Recent
(2006) photo of north end of refurbished carriage house shot
from south
side of the main residence looking south. Courtesy M.
Horn.

The basic equation for a convex
spherical mirror is: 1/d0 + 1/di = 1/f, where
d0 is the distance from the surface of the mirror to the object in
question (the carriage house), di is the distance (reckoned negative)
from the surface of the mirror to the object's image inside the mirror, and f is
the mirror's focal length (reckoned negative) equal to one-half the mirror's
radius of curvature. A second equation is the magnification (or diminution)
equation: |di|/d0 = |wi|/w0, where
|wi| is the width of the object's image seen inside the spherical
surface, and w0 is the actual width of the object in question
(carriage house). Upon choosing, for convenience, a sphere of 1 ft diameter
(results won't depend upon the choice), I find |wi| = 0.393 ft from
one of the more prominent spheres of Fig. 1. I.e., the image of the carriage
house's width occupies about 40% of the mirror's diameter. From Fig. 3, upon
taking the width of the stairs to be around 4 ft and the width of the bench 5
ft, I obtain a carriage-house half width of about 16 ft, or total width of
wo = 32 ft. Given the two equations and two unknowns, d0
and di, I then find that d0 = 20 ft (about 6.1 m). This
strongly suggests that the wedding-cake craft in use that day was the 3.5m
diameter (11.5ft) one.

Despite small uncertainties in the various estimates, this analysis indicates
that the wedding-cake craft was situated a considerable distance away from the
carriage house and camera, and was thus no model UFO.

If Meier had shot the photo from just in front of a model UFO at this
location, the house would have been some 50 ft (15.3 m) away (and his own
reflection might have shown up in the mirrored balls). However, the camera
equation as applied to Fig. 1 yields a distance from the camera to the house
(4th lower window from the right) of about 125 ft (38 m), if the window was 4 ft
high. Although this exceeds by some 10 ft the distance previously estimated
between the carriage house and this window, it indicates within the
uncertainties involved that Meier had been standing very close to the carriage
house when he took photo #800. This means the wedding-cake craft was some 20 ft
away from the camera and carriage house, thus conclusively showing that the
craft was large and no model UFO.

The event of 26 March 1981. Early in the morning on this day Billy
drove out in his little tractor to the near vicinity of Dürstelen, some 5 or 6
miles southwest of his residence at Schmidrüti. Behind his tractor he pulled a
small van, which he had by then also acquired, in which he could carry his
camera and video equipment. He had a mental-telepathy appointment for another
photo opportunity of Semjase's beamship of the "wedding-cake" type.

Fig. 4.
Wedding-cake craft hovering in front of van.
Brightness-enhanced copy
of photo in the FIGU
website.

He then took a few pictures
with his Ricoh camera and also took some videotape footage, but in haste,
because joggers were already starting to come by. One of these photos is shown
in Fig. 4 on the right. So Semjase soon departed, but then Billy found he could
not start up his little tractor; it had become too highly affected, magnetized
apparently, by the close proximity of the ship. The videotape he had shot was
also rendered useless, though his ordinary film survived. Through telepathy with
Semjase he explained the situation, whereupon she arranged to have another
Pleiadian/Plejaren— Quetzal—come out with equipment with which he, Quetzal,
would try to cure the problem. A couple hours later Quetzal showed up with some
special equipment with which he fixed the tractor after a half hour, though not
without three interruptions occurring when joggers approached; this caused him
to "beam up" into his own craft hovering invisibly somewhere overhead before
resuming work. This information comes from Meier's notes, which he published in
his photo-log, or "Verzeichnis." The photo of Fig. 4 first gained international
attention when published in Vol. 2 of UFO...Contact from the Pleiades,
the 1983 photo-album book of Lee & Brit Elders.

Now if you examine the lighter stripes encircling the front side of the craft
in a well focused photo of
it, you find that the width of each strip is only about 20% of the width of an
adjacent darker band. However, in the present photo, this ratio has expanded to
about 80%, showing that the near edge of the craft is severely out of focus.
Yet, if you follow the outer edge of the craft around to its rear side, next to
where its view is blocked by the protruding underside structure, you find that
this far edge is in good focus, as is the van, which for a width of 1.6m is
estimated to lie about 23m away from the camera. This can only mean that the
craft was large, and not any small model. If it had been a small model close to
the camera, its far edge would also be strongly out of focus, when the focus
setting is much greater than a few feet as it would have to be to put the van
into good focus. We don't know, however, if this particular wedding-cake craft
was of the 3.5m- or 7m-diameter variety, we don't know the f-stop setting Meier
used at the time with the Ricoh camera, and we don't know the distance to best
focus with much certainty. Hence we cannot estimate the depth of field with any
certainty. But for a 3.5m craft, the camera equation indicates it was situated
about 9.25m from the camera, with front edge about 7.5m away and rear edge 15m
away. Then with parameters of: focus set at 15m, f-stop at 2.8, and the known
focal length of 55mm, a depth-of-field formula yields good focus between
10.6m and 25.6m. This would leave the front edge of a 3.5m craft a couple meters
too close to the camera to be in good focus, but would leave the rear edge and
the van in good focus.

However, if the craft had been a small model with a diameter of a typical
garbage-can lid (22"), for example, its distance from the camera would be 4.7
ft, to produce an image occupying 62% of the width of a 35-mm film, as does the
wedding-cake UFO. Then if the camera's focus is set at 7.0 ft, in order to bring
the rear of the object into fairly good focus, and with the known focal length
of 55mm, no f-stop setting will leave the front of the object in poor focus
while leaving the van in rather good focus. For example, upon feeding these
parameters along with an f-stop of 2.8 into the depth-of-field formula, one
finds the nearest distance of good focus to be 6.6ft while the far distance of
good focus would be 7.4 ft—giving a narrow depth of field, as expected. This
would yield the front side of the assumed lid, which would be 3.7 ft away, in
poor focus as desired, while leaving the rear side, 5.6 ft away, in good focus,
also as desired. However, the van, which is some 75 ft away, would then be
hopelessly blurred, lying far beyond the far distance of good focus. If the
f-stop is increased to 11, then the depth of field only ranges between 5.7 ft
and 9.0 ft, which would again leave the van hopelessly blurred.

Pictures of the craft between treetops. On 3 April 1981, Billy was
allowed to take more photos (see Figs. 5-6 below), this time while he was
actually on board a Plejaren wedding-cake craft, according to Meier and his
Verzeichnis. It was Quetzal's craft that he was on, but not
in. That is, he was taken up just above treetop height and then permitted
to sit on one of the ship's spheres for his picture-taking, outrageous as that
may seem! The photos are of a smaller but otherwise nearly identical
wedding-cake type of craft. This was early in the afternoon, at a location some
15km SSW of his residence at Schmidrüti, hovering just above a forest. Meier
used just his Ricoh camera on this occasion.

Fig. 5.
Wedding-cake craft between two treetops
(lower center). Meier's photo
No. 836.

Fig. 6.
Similar shot less than a minute later, No. 838.
Arrow denotes a
secondary treetop shoot whose connec-
tion to the trunk lay below the
photo's lower edge.

Apparently he could not
have obtained clear photos had he been inside the craft. For the picture of Fig.
6, Quetzal's craft with Meier atop it had moved up right next to the nearer
treetop, while the craft pictured had moved a little to the right, compared with
Fig. 5. Before ignoring previous evidence to the contrary and assuming this to
be a small model UFO, the skeptic should first consider that in the photo on the
right (Fig. 6) the same nearer tree top is slightly out of focus while the
wedding-cake craft and the same treetop behind it are in good focus. This
suggests that the craft was situated an appreciable distance away from the
nearer treetop.

We now use the camera equation and check this conclusion and Fig. 6 for
consistency with the camera's depth of field. First we notice that the rear
treetop is obviously of a mature conifer full of dense, multi-branched growth,
and is in rather good focus for its small branches to show up so well; we
estimate its outer diameter at the base of the photo in Fig. 6 to have been 5m,
with branches extending out about 2.5m on each side. The camera equation then
gives it a distance of 28.2m. If the hovering craft were of 3.5m diameter, its
distance from the camera would be 24.9m. The slightly out-of-focus nearer tree's
distance is found to have been 4.2m upon taking the longer cones of the Norway
spruce to have a length of 7 inches. This places the 7m-diameter craft Meier was
perched on very close to the nearer tree top, and locates the craft in the photo
at a point just in front of the distant tree top. Upon utilizing the same
depth-of-field formula as previously, we then find, for a focus distance of 10m
and an f-stop of 11, that objects will be in good focus at distances beyond
4.8m. Hence, the far treetop, along with the wedding-cake craft, would both be
in good focus, while the nearer treetop should be in somewhat poor focus, as
observed. Thus this wedding-cake craft could indeed have been the 3.5m-diameter
craft that Meier was told was remotely controlled. In his Verzeichnis,
Meier refers to this craft as "a second ship," the first one being Quetzal's
ship, on which Meier was sitting.

If, instead, the pictured craft in Fig. 6 had been a model UFO of some
22-inch diameter, its distance from the camera would have been about 4m. With
that as the distance of focus, the depth-of-field calculator predicts
good focus for objects only between 2.8m and 7.0m distant, again using an f-stop
of 11. This result, as well as those using any other f-stop setting, place not
only the postulated model UFO but the nearer tree top both in good focus, but
places the distant treetop in poor focus, again in contradiction to what is
observed.

Although one would wish that Meier had pointed his camera downwards and had
taken some pictures showing the forest as viewed from above plus the edge of the
wedding-cake craft he was sitting on, it seems more likely that he was not
permitted to do this than that he simply didn't think of it.

A peculiar event occurred soon after Meier took these pictures and Quetzal
had taken the craft down for Meier to dismount. Quetzal took his ship back up
and, accidentally or not, rammed it into the nearer tree of Figs. 5-6,

Fig. 7. Top of
the tree rammed by Quetzal's ship.
Forest in background. Meier's photo
#862.

causing the tree to break off some 25m
up, and causing its uppermost two meters to break off also. Meier realized the
downed tree was the same one whose top he had just photographed, which the 3.5m
craft was on the far side of (in Fig. 5). Considering this to be evidence that
would substantiate the event, he mentally contacted Quetzal to ask if he, in his
craft, could drag the downed portion of the tree to the edge of the forest where
he could photograph it, and Quetzal obliged. After the wedding-cake craft had
departed, Meier then took several photos of the downed tree, and especially of
its uppermost portion, which he hauled back with him to his residence. Upon
comparing Fig. 7 with Figs. 5-6, one can see that it is indeed the very same
treetop in all three images.

However, the treetop is not the conclusive evidence Meier would have liked it
to be, as the skeptic who ignores all the other supportive evidence could just
claim that Meier had hacked off the treetop after the tree itself had been, for
whatever reason, downed, and then stuck the treetop into the ground atop a hill
to photograph along with a never-discovered UFO model dangling from a line just
behind the treetop, using a distant treetop as background.

Yet the downed tree does add suggestive supportive evidence for several
reasons. First, Meier's photos #851-854 (see #851, #852, #853) show the broken-off
ends of the downed tree, and they show the bright fresh tan color of a recently
opened healthy tree at the breaks and rips where it had indeed broken off; it
definitely hadn't been sawed or chopped off. It takes tremendous force to break
a tree off like that. Second, a hoaxer would have needed to be creative enough
to have inserted a second, smaller treetop in the ground right next to the first
one in order to simulate the complications of nature (see red arrow in Fig. 6).
This secondary top shoot does not appear in Fig. 7, as its base lay some unknown
meters below the upper break point. Third, it would not be at all simple for a
hoaxer to locate an appropriate hilltop where he could erect a broken-off
treetop such that no foreground grass or brush, and no background trees or
hills, except the sky and a second treetop, would appear in the photos.

Nevertheless, the negative skeptic, upon ignoring the depth-of-field
considerations and these other considerations, can claim that Meier and unknown
assistants set up the broken tree top at the proper distances from the camera to
achieve the pictures of Figs. 5 and 6. Thus one suspects it was no accident that
Quetzal rammed his craft into the tree at appropriate spots. Otherwise, the
skeptic would have been left with almost nothing at all to back up a desire that
the episode be a grand hoax.

Fig. 8. The
small wedding-cake craft partially eclipsed
by fir tree. Cropped from
Meier's photo #850 in Through
Space and Time (Steelmark, 2004).
Image enhanced
using Paint Shop Pro X to bring out contrast
between
foreground fir and background
forest.

Wedding-cake craft partially eclipsed by large fir tree. Only after
the English version of Meier's Fotobuch came out did I become aware of
his photo #850 as published in Through Space and Time: A Photo Journal of
"Billy" Eduard Albert Meier (Tulsa, OK: Steelmark LLC, 2004), p. 114. See
Fig. 8. This was in the hills in the general vicinity of the villages/towns of
Auenberg, Egg, Girenbad and Hinwil, some 15 miles ESE of Zurich. Meier shot it
around 2:30 pm, April 3, 1981 while standing on the top of his van, according to
his 1999 Verzeichnis. One can see 5 or 6 separate main branches of the
tree eclipsing most of the right-hand side of the craft, with more of its
branches extending out to the tree's left side above the craft on up to the
tree's top. According to Dr. Edward C. Jensen, Associate Dean for Academic
Affairs, Elizabeth P. Ritchie Distinguished Professor, Forest Ecology and
Natural Resources Education, Oregon State University:

"The portion of the tree above the potential UFO appears to me to
be in the range of 6-10 feet. Although it's pretty fuzzy, there appear to be 5
or 6 whorls of branches with an average growth (and this is just an educated
guess) of 1-2 feet between whorls." (March, 2006)
This 6-10 ft
estimate of the height of the portion of the tree above the craft then
translates to a height for the craft of 4 to 7 feet, and a diameter of 8.8-15.4
ft, or from 2.7 to 4.7 meters. This suggests that it was the same 3.5m craft as
shown in Figs. 5 and 6 above, and hovering very close behind the tree.

Another opinion on the tree in question comes from Professor Emeritus Doug
Brodie of the College of Forestry, Oregon State University.

"The tree is one of the European true firs -- Abies species. The
picture has only a portion of the top of the crown 10 to 15 feet. There could
be anywhere from 10 to 50 feet of tree bole below the picture." (March,
2006)

Zooming in on the craft in front of a distant tree. A day later, near
the same place,

Fig. 9.
Meier's photo #843.

Quetzal arranged to have
his remotely controlled craft hover in front of an isolated Norway spruce (picea
abies) estimated by Meier as 15m in height. That day, again in the early
afternoon, he utilized both his Ricoh camera and his Saba video camera. Fig. 9
on the left shows one of the Ricoh camera shots. Figs. 10 and 11 below show the
scene from a different viewing angle and from video-camera frames when the zoom
lens was not employed and when it was fully employed, respectively (focal length
of the video camera going from 12 to 75 mm). The videotaping lasted about six
minutes, and the time for the lens to advance from no zoom to full zoom was
between 3 and 4 seconds. This zooming, and Figs. 10 & 11, indicate that the
hovering craft and the tree are both at about the same distance from the camera,
and that this distance must be appreciable. From the estimate of tree size, one
may then estimate the size of the wedding-cake craft. Now, according to
Professor of Forest Management, J. D. Brodie of Oregon State University, who
gave me his opinion in 1986, the tree's height was only 3 to 7 meters (10-23 ft)
tall. On the other hand, if the annual top growth is a typical 0.3 to 0.4m (12
to 16 inches; see Fig. 6), the tree's height comes out to be 5.5 to 7.3m, (plus
whatever portion of the lower trunk lies unseen below the brow of the ridge).
Hence a 7m height seems reasonable for the tree.

Fig. 10.
Wedding-cake craft in front of tree.
Brightness enhanced. No zoom used
at this time.
From FIGU's "Ausschnitte-Reportage"
videotape.

Fig. 11.
Similar shot when full zoom was employed.
Brightness
enhanced.

Then the diameter of the craft turns out to be 3.5m, which agrees with
previous estimates for the smaller, remotely controlled craft. Its distance
away, from Fig. 9, is then suggested to be about 70m (230 ft).

When viewing the video, one may hear the sound of the zoom mechanism cranking
the lens out; Meier zoomed in and out on the craft twice. This video was
presented by Michael Hesemann at the 8th Annual International UFO Congress,
1999, and a videotape of its projection, entitled "The Reopening of the Meier
Case" is available from the conveners. From it and its
sound track one can be certain that it was a continuous video-taping not
interrupted by any shut-downs & movements of the camera equipment; i.e., the
two zoom-ins-and-back were genuine, and could not have been staged through
shutting down the video-tape, moving six times closer to the tree, turning it on
again, etc.

At one point in the tape one may observe Meier off to one side, to use his
photo camera, while the tripod-mounted video camera ran unattended. According to
Meier, Quetzal was standing behind him at the time, and for a while one can hear
Meier speaking to him. The translation goes as follows, thanks to Christian
Frehner of F.I.G.U.:

"Ja, isch guet." = "Ja, ist gut." --- Yes, fine [it's good]. [In
the background you hear a chain saw.]

"OK" --- "OK"

"Ganz? Ja." --- "(The) whole (distance)? Yes." [meaning: zooming away]

"Ich hole die andere Kamera." --- "I go and get the other camera."

"Siehst du, jetzt kommen die auch noch." --- "Do you see, they are
coming also." [meaning: the Swiss Army jet fighter plane that is heard passing
over them.]

"Was meinst du, hنlt der Bleimantel? Wir werden dann sehen." --- "What do
you think, does the lead sheeting hold? We will see."

"Aber weisst du, wenn du ein bisschen rund um den Baum drehen kِnntest. So
steht es immer am selben Ort." --- "But you know, if you could turn a bit
around the tree. In this way it remains at the same location all the time."

"Geht nicht? OK." --- "That's not possible? OK."

"Testen wir erst mal, ob es klappt mit dem Bleimantel." --- "Now let's test
whether the lead sheeting is working."

"Ich nehm's nochmals her." --- "I take it in again."

"Ja, weisst du, herzoomen." --- "Yes, you know, zooming in."

"Ja, weisst du, wenn du rüber gehen kِnntest, ein bisschen ..." --- "Yes,
you know, if you could move [it] to the side, a little bit ..."

"Was, schon wieder!" --- "What, again!"

"Da kommt jemand!" --- "Someone is coming!" [It could be Billy saying this,
or Quetzal. When I asked him, Billy didn't know for sure
either.]

So the video-taping ended at this point, and unfortunately Meier did not get
to tape the departure of the craft. It is seen above that he twice tried to
persuade Quetzal to move the remote-controlled craft while the video-tape camera
ran, but Quetzal never did. This may have been part of the Pleiadian/Plejaren
strategy of plausible
deniability, so that skeptics who can't accept the reality of the UFO
phenomenon could have something to be suspicious about. This might allow such a
skeptic to assume the UFO was a large model somehow attached rigidly to the
tree.

The above mention of lead sheeting pertains to some sort of lead shielding
that Meier had constructed around the video camera to protect its video-tape,
after the tape used on March 26th had been rendered useless by the close
proximity of the similar craft. Evidently the shielding was sufficient for the
considerable distance they were away from this craft.

It is not known or understood by what means Quetzal could control the
wedding-cake craft remotely.

Wedding-cake craft photographed at night. An especially eerie feature
of this craft is that it can be made to exhibit a gold coloration all over,
possibly self-illuminated. This occurred on two occasions. The first was on 2
August 1981 (Fig. 12),

Fig. 12. A
wedding-cake craft, with auto below,
both behind a tree. Meier's photo
#999.

Fig. 13.
Picture taken about a minute later.
Meier's photo
#1000.

around 02:18 in the night. At this
time Meier was away from home, near the main street of Rotenthurm, a town some
15 km southeast of Zug, Switzerland. Meier was informed that this was a 14m
diameter craft, although it appears to be virtually identical to the 7m and/or
3.5m diameter craft we have already viewed. If 14 m in diameter, the camera
equation indicates it was 50m (165 ft) distant. The auto, which seems not to
have been moving though on the main street and containing a driver, is estimated
to have been nearly 30 m distant (97 ft) if it was 17 ft long. A nearer tree in
leaf eclipses a portion of both the wedding-cake craft and the car (its trunk).
If this tree's width extended 8 ft, it was then some 60 ft distant.

The squiggly line in the upper left of Fig. 12 was made, Meier was told, by a
tiny, very rapidly maneuvering "telemeter" disc associated with the craft.

To maintain his sanity here, a negative skeptic must ignore the three
previously discussed cases evincing genuineness, and assume that the tree is a
tiny toy tree very close to the camera, the auto a toy car placed a few feet
behind it, and the wedding-cake craft a model UFO suspended a few feet farther
away. He might then assume the squiggly line to be an irregularly bent wire.

About a minute later, according to Meier's Verzeichnis record, he shot
the photo of Fig. 13; his notes inform us that this was a different craft, a 7m
craft. The touch of light green at the top is a tree branch too close to be at
all in focus. The car is now 11.6 m (or 38 ft) distant; if the 7m diameter for
the craft is correct, it was some 16.5 m (54 ft) away. Meier had evidently
advanced nearly 60 ft closer to the car and road after taking photo #999. This
suggests that the low hanging tree-branch tip is part of the same tree as in
photo #999.

A tiny bit of the edge of the 14m craft appears at the same time in the upper
left corner of another photo in this series taken at about the same time (see
photo No. 24 of And Yet...They Fly or photo No. 26 of the German edition,
...Und Sie Fliegen Doch, which best shows it).

Considering the relative degree of focus of the car in the two photos, it
seems likely to me that Meier mistakenly reversed the identity of the two craft
in photos #999 and #1000, with the former one being of 7m diameter and latter
one 14m diameter. If so, the above estimated distances to the craft would need
to be altered accordingly: in #999 the craft would then be only 15 ft closer
than the car, while in #1000 it would be 70 ft farther away than the car.

The second such photo occasion for Meier occurred three nights later, again
in the middle of the night, right over the parking area in front of Meier's
residence at Hinterschmidrüti.

Fig. 14. One
of the wedding-cake craft at night,
at Meier's residence, 5 Aug. 1981.
Photo #873.

The craft was hovering low, and
Meier recalls having taken the picture from partway up the hill just south of
the residence and adjacent parking area. A total of four pictures survive from
this occasion. As usual, we do not know the purposes of any of the detailed
constructs it exhibits, unless one purpose is to provide ornamentation allowing
skeptics to claim it is a model composed of household artifacts, so that they
not be forced to believe what may be totally unacceptable to them. There is
nothing in this photo to indicate the craft's size.

The craft at night has taken on a totally different color, uniform
throughout, except mainly for the ring of red "crystals," as W. Stevens has
called them. Interestingly, despite this, its many spheroids and flat
circumferential surfaces still reflect light specularly.

Considering the uncertainties involved, these nighttime photos probably leave
the negative skeptic with as much ammunition as they give the positive skeptic.
Hence it is the daytime photos of the wedding-cake craft that provide the best
evidence that Meier's UFO experiences, photographs and videotapes of 1980-81
were genuine.

Debunkers' attempts. The primary claim that would-be debunkers have
made against this series of photos is that the lower body of the wedding-cake
craft is comprised of a garbage-can lid of the type that is used at the FIGU
residence in Hinterschmidrüti.

Fig. 15. A
visitor (Philip McAiney) at Meier's
residence holding up garbage-can
lid, circa 1998.

This strong resemblance
(compare Figs. 14 and 15) was noticed some time in the 1990s. The garbage-can
lids utilized there at the FIGU Center have several evenly-spaced thin lines
running around the circumference, and two protruding ledges on opposite sides,
as handles. The real craft exhibit features similar to this (see also Photo #799. Where the
resemblance ends, however, is that there is comprehensive structure on the
craft's underside (see Fig. 4), obviously not present on the garbage-can lid.
There is an outer circumferential ridge around the top of the garbage-can lid
(see Fig. 15, where the visitor's right thumb and forefinger straddle the
ridge), not present atop the wedding-cake craft (see Fig. 14). There's also a
flange around the bottom base of the craft, not present on the garbage-can lid.
The negative skeptic must assume that someone somehow snugly attached a flange
to the base of the plastic lid, somehow smoothly filled in and leveled the top
of the lid, before adding arrays of complicated adornments on top, and then also
assume that all the camera depth-of-field considerations can be ignored. These
are unreasonable assumptions in view of either the great difficulty for any
hoaxer to achieve the result seen (apparently no one has tried to duplicate this
craft in the form of a model), or the several points of undeniable reality
brought out by the daytime photos and videotape of the wedding-cake craft we
have already viewed. In addition, the garbage-can lids are made of black plastic
whereas the wedding-cake craft were a reflective silvery color in Meier's
daytime photos and a reflective golden color at night. Thus, the garbage-can lid
hypothesis fails to fit the data on far too many important points.

As far as FIGU members are concerned, they only had to point out that they
had not purchased that make and style of garbage can until several years later
than 1980-81. A strong suspicion exists, however, that around that time one of
the Pleiadians/Plejarens implanted the design of the garbage-can lid into the
mind of a garbage-can manufacturer whose product would later be sold in cities
near Schmidrüti. If so, this would be another example of alien "damage control"
to ensure that the Meier case, with all its photographic evidence, would not by
itself cause a premature rupture of the UFO coverup. From what Meier has
reported being told in his contacts, the Pleiadian/Plejaren ETs can, if desired,
either remotely implant or erase selected memories within selected persons'
minds; and from many UFO abduction cases we know that other aliens can also
implant or cover up memories within the mind. Meier's Contact Report #22 (28 May
1975) makes especially interesting reading where Meier was told by Semjase that
they could apply this capability to him, whereupon he objected most strenuously
if they were to attempt that.

The other main attempt to debunk the wedding-cake craft has been by Korff
(Spaceships of the Pleiades, pp. 215-217). One of the photos of 22 Nov.,
1980 (see also plate #21 in Moosbrugger's And Yet...They Fly), seems to
show an irregularity, which Korff implied was "warpage" of a model UFO. The
"warpage" appears just below the lowest tier of spheres and about 30 degrees
around from the front-center to the right, but it does not seem to show up in
the two photos from this series that I possess (Fig. 1 above, and Photo #799). In Fig. 1 it
appears that the shading reflected by the carriage house just behind the camera
may have caused an apparent deviation in circularity of the "rim" just
underneath the lowest tier of spheres. No warpage. It is not clear if this
seeming deviation is an asymmetry in design or an effect of the discrete
shadowing. No such asymmetry or "warpage" shows up in the photos of wedding-cake
craft taken a half year later under daytime or nighttime lighting conditions;
e.g., see the other photos above.

However, the rest of the craft is not totally symmetric, with a couple of the
"spheres" in the lowest and middle tiers looking different from the others. We
cannot just assume that all particular aspects of an alien craft must be
perfectly symmetric, when we don't know what purposes these particulars may
serve. It is especially important not to make this assumption when the aliens
have good reason to provide negative skeptics with needed bits of plausible deniability. If we
ignore this precaution we are, in essence, assuming that surely any aliens
visiting Earth, though possessing far superior technology, would not be
smarter than we are and not have a strategy for dealing with us
that involves covertness and some accompanying deception.

This line of reasoning also takes into account the numerous instances of UFOs
in the past 40 years that have been reported to have changed their shape or
appearance while being observed. For example, see Georgina Bruni's You Can't
Tell the People, (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2000), p. 72, regarding
the Rendlesham Forest case. See also some of the following on-line instances:

1783

Windsor Castle, England

(search for "changed shape")

4
Oct. 1967

Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia

(search for "changed shape")

1974

Comberouger, France

(search for "changed shape")

21 Jan.
1976

Fairfield, MT

Chapter 10

23
May 1980

Pima County, AR

27 Dec. 1980

Rendlesham Forest, England

Section 3

1987 or
1988

Northeastern Montana

30 Mar.
1990

Wavre, Belgium

(search for "changed shape")

In early
1990s

San Bernadino, CA

2 Sept. 1994

Greenhorn Mts., CO

Spring
1996

Commerce City, CA

16 Sept.
1996

Minneapolis, MN

(search for "transformed")

30 Aug.
1997

Sunningdale, Berkshire, UK

(search for "changed shape")

7 Oct.
1998

Monterrey, Mexico

12
Sept. 1999

Monterrey, Mexico

(search for "changed shape")

23 Oct. 1999

Minnesota

4 June
2000

Milwaukee, WI

27 Nov.
2000

Easley, SC

(search for "changed shape")

26 Apr. 2001

Norfolk county, England

(search for"changed shape")

7 Nov.
2001

Northeast U.S.

17
Nov. 2001

Midlothian, VA

Section 3

15 Dec. 2001

near Fayetteville, NC

16
Feb. 2002

Eau Claire, WI

8 June 2002

near Covington, VA

(search for "changed")

28 July
2002

New York City, NY

(search for "changed shape")

11 Aug.
2002

Las Vegas, NV

11 Sept. 2002

Eastern U.S.

22 Oct.
2002

Miami, FL

(search for "morphing")

10 Nov.
2002

near Sherman Oaks, CA

1 May
2003

Woodbridge, NY

13 June
2003

England (Anthony Woods)

Parts 1 & 3

30
Aug. 2003

Suffolk county, England

8 Sept. 2003

Brooklyn, NY

(search for "changed shape")

26 Dec.
2003

Huntington, IN

7 Jan.
2004

Lambertville, MI

22 June
2004

New Hampshire

27 June 2004

Phoenix, AR

16 July
2004

Shafter, CA

(search for "changed shape")

22
Aug. 2004

Atkinson, IL

(search for "morph")

31
Aug. 2004

Southern Maine

14 Dec.
2004

W. of Yosemite Pk, CA

Somehow the technology thousands or millions of years more advanced than ours
is capable of achieving this kind of "magic," which, in the case of the
Plejarens, could render it a simple matter for them to temporarily alter the
outward appearance of their craft, when desired.

Korff went on to suggest that the circumferential band between the 2nd and
3rd tiers of spheres was a bracelet, and that protrusions extending out from
between some of the spheres below it were carpet tacks. He presumably did not
even consider that he had been duped by an alien strategy of plausible
deniability, and did not point out any of the several convincing points of
reality shown on this web page, which show that the width of the wedding-cake
craft was at least an order of magnitude greater than that of a garbage-can lid.
He also did not seem to be aware that by 1980-81 Meier was using the Ricoh
camera, whose focusing mechanism worked properly unlike that of the Olympus
camera he had used in 1975-76.

If we check out Korff's model claim against the camera's depth-of-field for
that photo series, we find it doesn't work well. Let's take a diameter of 3
inches for the claimed bracelet, which being about one quarter the diameter of
the claimed model, gives the latter a one-foot diameter. From the camera
equation and the photo in Fig. 1, we then find the claimed model would have had
to be very close to the camera—only 1.7 ft away. Then, because it's in excellent
focus, we choose a focus distance of 1.7 ft. For an f-stop setting of 11, which
gives a maximal depth of field, we then find the depth of field to lie between
1.58ft and 1.75 ft, which is extremely limited as one would expect for any such
close-up. Thus Meier's residence in the distance would be rather far out of
focus, being about 100 ft away. However, we see that it is only a little out of
focus, with the windows and their edges showing clearly. This indicates the
object was significantly larger than Korff imagined and situated farther away
from the camera.

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