textfiles-politics/politicalTextFiles/lghtye.txt

                         LIGHT YEARS
                        -------------
                    The Controversy Over
                The Eduard "Billy" Meier Case


     In response to an ad in the January 23 issue of
Publishers Weekly announcing the forthcoming publication of
LIGHT YEARS, by Gary Kinder, both Kinder and his publisher
received a flurry of letters and phone calls from UFO
investigators across the country.  The emotions registered
in these calls and letters ranged from surprise to anger to
indignation, but all those who wrote or called shared one
trait:  each was convinced that the Eduard Meier case was a
hoax.

     One UFO group described LIGHT YEARS in a press release
as "a glorification of patently phony UFO photographs."  A
representative of another UFO group wrote that if Kinder's
publisher proceeded with the publication of LIGHT YEARS,
they would be "guilty of perpetuating one of the greatest
hoaxes in ufology."  Yet another wrote that he hoped the
publisher "will elect to include a disclaimer of some type,
if not make an outright statement that this is fiction, not
non-fiction."

     It is important to note that none of these
correspondents had read a single word of LIGHT YEARS.

     Why do emotions run so high in the ufo community over
the Meier case?  What could compel these people to condemn a
book they'd never read?  A word of explanation is necessary.

     In 1979, the investigators on the Eduard Meier case --
Lee and Brit Elders, Tom Welch, and Wendelle Stevens --
published a photo journal titled UFO...Contact from the
Pleiades.  The book claimed that photographs, sound
recordings, and metal samples offered by Meier as evidence
of his experiences had baffled scientists.  But it mentioned
no names and quoted no reports.  The book also maintained
that many people in Switzerland had witnessed strange lights
in the sky when Meier claimed to have a contact.  But the
investigators provided no names of witnesses, the UFO groups
(who vie for such evidence) protested:  The case was a hoax,
they claimed, and the investigators had perpetrated a fraud.
The groups published scathing articles about Meier in their
monthly newsletters.

     But the evidence did exist, and it was analyzed by
scientists, engineers, and a special effects expert, all
with impeccable credentials.  This is the part of the story
the UFO community knows nothing about.

     Gary Kinder researched the Meier case for two years,
beginning in the fall of 1983.  Kinder conducted over 120
interviews, spending thirteen weeks in Switzerland to visit
the alleged contact sights, speak with Meier and his family,
track down witnesses, and talk to neighbors and town
administrators.  He also interviewed witnesses in Munich and
London.  In the States, he traveled several times to
Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, San Jose, Washington, DC, and
the Los Angeles area to speak with the people who
investigated the case, the ufologists who called it a hoax,
and the scientists who analyzed the evidence.

     Well into his research, Kinder realized that the Meier
case had drawn such hostility from the UFO community for two
reasons:  First was Meier's sometimes preposterous claims,
and the general reluctance of ufologists to believe any
claim of contact, especially repeated contact; second was
the investigators' refusal to release the evidence.  (In
1979 and 1980, some of the articles on the Meier case
suggested that evidence may indeed exist, but until the
investigators produced some of that evidence, they deserved
to be castigated by the UFO community.  The Elders then
offered to make material available for analysis, as long as
it did not leave their possession.  No one accepted their
offer.)

     In the beginning, Kinder, too, doubted Meier's story
for the typical reason:  It couldn't be true.  His editor
gave him the option to quit the project at any time should
he discover that Meier was a fraud;  but Kinder found the
story to be the most fascinating he had ever encountered.
If the poor, one-armed farmer had faked the hundreds of
clear, color, daylight photographs, the 8mm films, the sound
recordings, the landing tracks, and the metal samples, no
one knew how he did it;  nor did anyone have an idea who
could have been an accomplice.

     Many of the witnesses that Kinder interviewed in
Switzerland described seeing things happen to Meier that no
one could explain.  Louise Zinsstag, cousin of famed Swiss
psychiatrist Carl Jung and the most prominent of UFO
researchers in Europe, visited Meier on several occasions
and wrote of her experiences in a series of letters between
June 1976 and October 1977.  In one letter she called Meier
"the most intriguing man I have ever met."  In another
letter she wrote, "If Meier turns out to be a fake, I shall
take my whole collection of photographs to the ferry boat
and drown it in the old man river of Basle."

     In the States, Kinder interviewed four scientists, two
sound engineers, an astronautical engineer, a special
effects expert, and the head of the photo lab at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, all of whom (unbeknownst to those in
the UFO community) had analyzed or otherwise studied the
Meier evidence.  (A sampling of what they had to say is
enclosed.)  After submitting portions of the LIGHT YEARS
manuscript to these scientists for their comments and
suggestions for changes, Kinder received not only approval
from each of them, but two of the scientists -- Dr. Michael
Malin and Eric Eliason -- wrote that they were impressed
with Kinder's objectivity in presenting the case.  "Thanks
for letting me see what you've written," said Malin.  "It's
a credit to your writing that I cannot tell whether you are
a supporter or a detractor of Dilettoso, and of the claims
of the people who supplied the UFO images."  Eliason wrote,
"Thank you for the accurate representation of my views on
the Meier UFO photographs.  If your LIGHT YEARS publication
remains as objective as the pages you provided, I will look
forward to reading what you have to say."

     In February of this year, Kinder sent an 8-page outline
of his research into the Meier case to one of the UFO
investigators who had contacted him in response to the
Publishers Weekly ad.  In early March he sent a slightly
expanded version of this outline as an open letter to the
UFO community (a copy is enclosed).  So far the response has
been encouraging.  Jerome Clark, editor of the International
UFO Reporter, wrote to Kinder saying, in part:

     "I can hardly wait to read your book. . . . I also look
forward, by the way, to the reception your book gets from
the ufological community.  I think -- I know -- my
colleagues are going to be astounded and confused.  It
really has been an article of faith among us (me included)
that this whole business was just an exercise in heavy-
handed fraud.
      But apparently you have shown it is rather more
interesting than that.  It's ironic.  Ufologists forever
complain that scientists and debunkers won't take an
objective look at the UFO evidence.  You have demonstrated,
I think, that in this case the ufologists acted just like
the people they criticize!"

     Mr. Clark then sent a letter to one of the UFO
community's more vocal critics of the Meier case, in which
he wrote:

     "After correspondence with Gary Kinder. . . and a
follow-up phone conversation, I have concluded that our
initial response -- i.e., anger and resentment -- to the
announcement of his forthcoming book was unwarranted.  There
seems no doubt that Kinder has conducted by far the most
through probe into this peculiar episode."

     As for Kinder himself, he remains fascinated but
uncertain about the truth behind the Meier sightings.  "I
would not call him a prophet, though he may be,"  Kinder
writes in LIGHT YEARS.  "I would not rule out imposter,
though I have no proof.  I know that if you boiled the story
in a kettle you would find a hard residue composed of two
things:  One would be Meier's ravings about time travel,
space travel, philosophy, and religion;  the other would be
the comments by the scientists and engineers impressed with
the evidence he has produced.  I can't believe the former,
nor can I dismiss the latter..."

     "Meier may simply be one of the finest illusionists the
world has ever known, possessing not the power but the skill
to persuade others to see things that did not happen and do
not exist.  Or, perhaps he has no such ability; perhaps
beings on a much higher plane have selected him and used him
for reasons far beyond our comprehension.  I do know this:
Trying to make sense of it all has been the most difficult
thing I will ever do.  Finally I realized, as the Elders had
years before, that the truth of the Meier contacts will
never be known."

                           * * * *

     Now on to the substance of LIGHT YEARS.  Many of the
witnesses I interviewed in Switzerland, none of whom had
ever been contacted by anyone in ufology, had seen things
happen to Meier that no one could explain:  Standing next to
another man, he once disappeared instantly from the roof of
a barn twelve feet off the ground; in a separate incident he
suddenly reappeared, warm and dry, in a group of men
standing in a dark and secluded forest in a freezing
rainstorm.  These scenes, associated with alleged contact
experiences, appear in much greater detail in the book.
They may be tricks, but if so they were performed by a
master illusionist.  When Meier claimed to have had a
contact, sets of three six-foot diameter circles would
appear in a meadow surrounded by thick woods.  I did not see
these myself, but I talked to several people who had seen
them and who had photographed them while still fresh.
Swirled counter-clockwise and perfectly delineated in tall
grass, one set remained for nine weeks, until a farmer came
and mowed the grass.  Here is the mystery of the landing
tracks:  Grass that is green rises even after being mashed
down; grass that dies turns brown and lies flat.  This grass
remained green but never rose; it continued to grow in a
flat circle.  The landing tracks puzzled everyone I spoke to
who had viewed them, including Meier's most ardent
detractor, Hans Schutzbach.  Schutzbach told me that other
people had tried to duplicate the landing tracks, but that
their efforts were "a bad copy."  Meier's were "perfect."  I
listened to dozens of such stories, so many I could not
include all of them in the book, including nighttime
sightings of strange lights reported by a variety of people,
many of whom witnessed the same incidents and corroborated
each other's accounts.  One nighttime photograph, taken by a
school principal from Austria during an alleged contact,
will appear in the book.  On the other side, I know that
Meier's photos of the alleged future destruction of San
Francisco, for instance, came right out of the September,
1977, issue of GEO Magazine.  After one of the witnesses
reported this to me, I found the magazine myself and
compared the photographs.  They were identical.  All of this
is in the book - the crazy claims, the apparent lies, the
unexplained disappearances, the mysterious landing tracks,
all weaved into the narrative.

     In London, Timothy Good provided me with many lengthy
letters from Lou Zinsstag (who often had been pointed out by
the ufologists in the States as one who thought that Meier
was a fraud and "crazy").  Zinsstag had written the letters
between June, 1976, and October, 1977, as she investigated
Meier and reported back to Good.  In one letter she calls
Meier "the most intriguing man I ever met."  She goes into
great detail in her observations, including a description of
"this feeling of discomfort" she experiences in Meier's
presence.  In another letter she writes, "If Meier turns out
to be a fake, I shall take my whole collection of
photographs to the ferry boat and drown it in the old man
river of Basle."

     Back in the States I interviewed nine scientists,
engineers, and special effects experts who had analyzed or
otherwise studied the Meier evidence.  (One, Bob Post, is
none of the three, but heads the photo lab at JPL.)
Following is a sampling of what they had to say.  Realize
that where the photos are concerned an original transparency
was never available for analysis, so none of the work done
on those was definitive (Spaulding himself told me he had no
idea the generation of the photographs he analyzed);
however, knowing this limitation, the scientists who did
agree to examine them told me they would have been able to
detect all but a very sophisticated hoax.

     Dr. Michael Malin is an associate professor of
planetary sciences at Arizona State University; he wrote his
doctoral thesis on the computer analysis of spacecraft
images beamed back from Mars.  He was at JPL for four years
and he's worked with the special effects people at
LucusFilm.  He works under various government grants at ASU,
and a recent experiment he devised has just been accepted
for a future Shuttle launch.  A friend of mine who is the
science editor at National Geographic and who has researched
and written many cover stories on the Universe, the Space
Shuttle, etc., had spoken to Malin before and once told me,
"If Malin says it, you can believe it."  Here is one thing
Malin said concerning the Meier photographs which he
analyzed in 1981:  "I find the photographs themselves
credible, they're good photographs.  They appear to
represent a real phenomenon.  The story that some farmer in
Switzerland is on a first name basis with dozens of aliens
who come and visit him...I find that incredible.  But I find
the photographs more credible.  They're reasonable evidence
of something.  What that something is I don't know."  Malin
also told me, "If the photographs are hoaxes then I am
intrigued by the quality of the hoax.  How did he do it?
I'm always interested in seeing a master at work."  These
quotes, and all of the rest of the quotes I attribute to the
scientists here, appear verbatim in the book.

     Steve Ambrose, sound engineer for Stevie Wonder and
inventor of the Micro Monitor, a radio set complete with
speaker that fits inside Wonder's ear, analyzed the Meier
sound recordings.  "The sound recording's got some
surprising things in it," he told me.  "How would you
duplicate it?  I'm not just talking about how to duplicate
it audio-wise, but how do you show those various things on a
spectrum analyzer and on the 'scope that it was doing?  It's
one thing to make something that sounds like it, it's
another thing to make something that sounds like it and has
those consistent and random oscillations in it.  The sound
of the spacecraft," he added, "was a single sound source
recording that had an amazing frequency response.  If it is
a hoax I'd like to meet the guy that did it, because he
could probably make a lot of money in special effects."  His
findings were corroborated by another sound engineer names
Nils Rognerus.

     In 1979 Dr. Robert Nathan at JPL was sufficiently
impressed with the Meier photographs to have copies made of
Meier transparencies at the JPL photo lab.  After the
transfer he refused to analyze the photographs, however,
because his developer discovered they were several
generations away from the originals.  Nathan felt that the
transparencies were so far away in generation from the
photographs he had seen that Wendelle Stevens had attempted
to trick him.  Later, I showed the Meier films to Nathan,
and he laughed at some of them, but he couldn't figure out
how Meier flew the ship into a scene and had it come to a
sudden halt; or how it could hover motionless while a pine
branch in the lower right hand corner blows in a stiff wind.
Nathan said, "He would have to be awfully clever, because
that's a very steady holding.  It would have to be very,
very good tethering."  Then he said, "Apparently he's a
sharp guy, very clever.  So he should be given some points
for effort."  Nathan concluded about the films, "If this is
a hoax, and it looks like it is to me but I have no proof,
this is very carefully done.  Tremendous amount of effort.
An awful lot of work for one guy."  From all of the
scientists, these were the most negative comments I
received.

     With Nathan saying in theory the films could be hoaxed,
I was curious about the logistics involved.  Then I
discovered that a special effects expert, Wally Gentleman,
who for ten years had served as Director of Special Effects
on the Canadian Film Board and who, for a year and a half,
was director of special photographic effects for Stanley
Kubrick's film 2001, had viewed these same films.  This is
what he told me:  "To produce the films, Meier really had to
have a fleet of clever assistants, at least 15 people.  And
the equipment would be totally out of (Meier's) means.  If
somebody wanted me to cheat one of the films, $30,000 would
probably do it, but this is in a studio where the equipment
exists.  The equipment would cost another $50,000."  That's
for each of the seven Meier films.  Gentleman also had
examined the photographs.  "My greatest problem is that for
anybody faking this," (he pointed to one of the
photographs), "the shadow that is thrown onto that tree is
correct.  Therefore, if somebody is faking it they have an
expert there.  And being an expert myself, I know that that
expert knowledge is very hard to come by.  So I say, 'Well,
is that expert knowledge there or isn't it there?'  Because
if the expert knowledge isn't there, this has got to be
real."

     Then there is Robert Post, who had been at the JPL
photo laboratory for 22 years and was the head of that lab
in 1979, when Nathan brought the Meier photos to him to have
copies made.  Post oversees the developing and printing of
every photograph that comes out of JPL.  Though he analyzed
nothing, his eye for spotting fabrications far surpasses a
lay person's.  Post told me:  "From a photography
standpoint, you couldn't see anything that was fake about
the Meier photo's.  That's what struck me.  They looked like
legitimate photographs.  I thought, 'God, if this is real,
this is going to be really something.'"

     Besides working in the highly classified field of
military defense, David Froning, an astronautical engineer
with McDonnell Douglas for 25 years, has done exploratory
research to develop ideas and technology for advanced
spacecraft design.  As a longtime member if the British
Interplanetary Society and the American Institute of
Aeronautics and Astronautics, he has presented many papers
on interstellar flight at technical conferences in Europe
and the United States.  In October, 1985, he addressed the
XXXVI International Astronautical Congress in Stockholm.
Froning's wife discovered at a friend's house the photo
journal published by the Elders in fall, 1979, and took it
home to her husband because of one word in the text -
tachyon.  In Meier's notes from 1975, he spoke of the
tachyon propulsion system utilized by the Pleiadians.  For
over a year Froning had been spending most of his spare time
working to design just such a theoretical system.  When he
read more of Meier's notes on faster-than-light travel (he
had contacted the Elders and Stevens for more information),
he found that Meier's figures for the time required to
achieve the speed of light (at which point, according to
Meier, the tachyon system would kick in to make the hyper
leap), and the distance a ship would have traveled at that
point, were within 20 percent of his own calculations
determined through the use of complex acceleration formulas.
Froning told me, "If what this Meier is saying is just a
hoax, he's being cued by some very knowledgeable scientists.
I've only discussed this Meier case with scientists who are
fairly open-minded about interstellar flight, but I'll tell
you, the majority of them think it's credible and agree with
at least part, or sometimes all, of the things talked about
by the Pleiadians."

     During my research I read an article from a British
publication called The Unexplained, in which the author,
referring to the alleged Meier metal analysis by Marcel
Vogal at IBM, wrote, "Jim Dilettoso characteristically
failed to further the cause by claiming that (the Elders)
hold a 10-hour videotape of 'the entire lab proceedings'
(which Dr. Vogal denies having made).  'And,' Delettoso
incautiously persisted, 'we have about an hour of him
discussing why the metal samples are not possible in earth
technology, going into intrinsic detail of why it is not
done anywhere on earth.'"  The author, of course, is poking
fun at such a claim.  I have seen that video.  I have also
seen another video in which Vogel states, "I cannot explain
the metal sample.  By any known combination of materials I
could not put it together myself, as a scientist.  With any
technology that I know of, we could not achieve this on this
planet."  I've interviewed Vogel twice and he insists that
the metal sample he spent so much time analyzing is unique.
I spoke with him again three weeks ago and to this day he
remains fascinated with the specimen.  He said that if the
metal sample had not disappeared while in his possession, he
would now be continuing research on it with a number of
other scientists from IBM and Ames Research.  A reporter
from the Washington Post also called Vogel two days ago and
Vogel again verified the above quote.

      With the exception of Vogel, and possibly Nathan,
though he doesn't remember, none of these men had ever been
interviewed by anyone in the UFO community.  And Vogel even
said to me on tape regarding one of the ufologists who did
interview him about Meier: "Treat him with caution.  He'll
ramble on and he'll quote you out of context.  So watch it."
He also told me this same person "has taken my statements
completely out of context and published them.  This case has
been badly mangled."

     In the book, I go into much greater detail with each of
the scientists and engineers.  I mention each by his real
name (as I do everyone else in the story) and I include his
place of employment.  After completing the final draft of
the manuscript I mailed to each of the scientists a packet
which included everything in the manuscript pertaining to
him.  I asked that each make any corrections, technical or
otherwise, he cared to make.  I have heard back now from all
of them either by mail or by phone during the past six
weeks.  Some had nothing to change, others made minor
changes.  Everything concerning their analysis of the
evidence will appear in the book exactly as they have
authorized it to appear.  (Two weeks before sending his
letter to my publisher attempting to persuade him not to
publish LIGHT YEARS, Walt Andrus called me and we talked for
forty-five minutes.  During that conversation, I told Andrus
of the comments made by the scientists.  I gave him their
names, I spelled the names for him, I gave him their places
of employment, and I encouraged him to contact them for
verification of their statements, three of which appeared in
an ad for the book in "Publishers Weekly."  Apparently, he
never did so.)  In this letter to me Michael Malin opened
with this:  "Thanks for letting me see what you have
written.  It's a credit to your writing that I cannot tell
whether you are a supporter or a detractor of Dilettoso, and
of the claims of the people who supplied the UFO images."

     Eric Eliason of the U.S. Geological Survey in
Flagstaff, Arizona, is the ninth of the experts I spoke
with.  After receiving his packet, he wrote to me, "Thank
you for the accurate representation of my views of the Meier
UFO photographs.  If your LIGHT YEARS publication remains as
objective as the pages you provided, I will look forward to
reading what you have to say."  Eliason creates image
processing software so astrogeologists can analyze
photographs of the planets beamed back from space.  He spent
two years producing the intricate radar map of cloud covered
Venus acquired by Pioneer 10, and his software has been
applied in processing space photography beamed back by both
Viking and Voyager.  He was sent to France and to China as a
representative of the U.S. Space Program and an expert in
image processing.  He had analyzed the Meier photos on his
equipment in 1981.  He told me in an interview in August,
1984:  "In the photographs there were no sharp breaks where
you could see it had been somehow artificially dubbed.  And
if that dubbing was registered in the film, the computer
would have seen it.  We didn't see anything."

     What would you do with evidence like this?  Would you
disagree it because Meier makes outlandish claims?  Or
because a ufologist reports that a colleague in Germany has
a friend who saw ropes and pulleys hanging in Meier's barn?
Or because Wendelle Stevens is a believer anyhow?  Or
because Wendelle Stevens is now in prison?  Or because Meier
has an 18-inch model of one of the Pleiadian beamships
sitting in his office?  Or because a group of believers has
formed around the man?  And if you had a choice between the
analysis performed by Bill Spaulding at Ground Saucer Watch,
on which would you stake your reputation?  After all the bad-
mouthing given the Meier case, I was surprised to learn that
ufologists like Walt Andrus had never heard of Malin, or
Eliason, or Gentleman, or Froning, or Ambrose, or even the
alleged detractors in Switzerland Hans Schutzbach and Martin
Sorge.  Schutzbach was Meier's right-hand man for two years,
with him night and day, driving him to contacts, organizing
and cataloguing all of the photographs, measuring and
photographing the landing tracks.  Then they had a falling
out, and Schutzbach left.  He hates Meier and is certain
Meier is a fraud; if anyone would know Meier's "technique"
and be ready to divulge it, Schutzbach would be the man, yet
to this day he has no clue how Meier could have made the
tracks, or the photos, or the sound recordings, or the
films.  Nor does he have even one suggestion for an
accomplice.  Sorge, a cultured man with a university degree
in chemistry and author of two books, had been mentioned
frequently by ufologists as the one who discovered charred
photographs and thereby exposed Meier as a fraud.  He told
me in the summer of 1985 that he is "certain" the contacts
took place, though in a different fashion than Meier
describes.  He also told me the real story of how he
obtained the burned slides.  That, too, is much different
than the version I got from ufologists here in the States.
Again, all of this is in the book.

     One of the more interesting ironies in the current
uprising of the UFO community against the publication of
LIGHT YEARS is that every time someone slams the book
(before it has been read) he points to Bill Spaulding and
Kal Korff as the two authorities in whose skills the
community places great faith.  After all of the negative
comments I have heard about Bill Spaulding's work from
various members of the UFO community, why would anyone rely
on his analysis of anything?  Bill Moore, who is not known
for his kind of feelings toward the Meier case or the people
who investigated it, had this to say about Spaulding in an
interview on March 25, 1985:  "He's generally regarded by
anybody in the field as somebody to ignore.  It's all
puffery.  He wrote a paper on the analysis of photographs,
and I have a critique of that paper by a scientist who knows
what he's talking about, and he just rips it to shreds.  It
sounds good unless you know what the system is and then you
realize that the guy's a phony."

     While Korff was young and inexperienced, these factors
do not necessarily discredit his work.  But I am certain
that few ufologists have heard him say what he told me in an
interview on April 13, 1985:  "I'm even open to the
possibility that Meier had some genuine experience somewhere
in there," he said, "but there's so much noise around his
signal that I don't even know how to sift it.  I've always
maintained that, yeah, maybe there's something to it.  Most
of the people who have read my work say, 'Ah, the Meier case
is totally a hoax, there's nothing to it.' I say, 'The
claims (Stevens and the Elders) have made don't hold up; but
it's possible the guy may have something somewhere.'"

     After three years of researching and thinking about
this story it finally came clear to me that two things kept
the UFO community from taking a far more serious look at the
Meier case:  One, of course, is Meier's preposterous claims,
and (in an ongoing effort to insulate itself from the
fringe) the general reluctance of the community to accept
any claim of contact, especially repeated contact; the other
is that Lee Elders grabbed all of the evidence and sat on
it.  George Early, after reviewing the Elder's UFO...Contact
from the Pleiadies, wrote in Saucer Smear that until the
Intercep group produced some of the evidence they claimed to
have, they deserved to be castigated by the UFO community.
And Earley was right.  So was Korff.  The claims by
themselves don't hold up.  But the evidence in fact existed;
I've talked to the people who examined it.

     None of the foregoing is offered as proof that Meier
sat in a Swiss meadow and conversed with Pleiadians, but
only to demonstrate that people intrigued by the Meier case,
who see a fascinating story in the man, are not simplistic
in their thinking.  No one, including Stevens and the
Elders, has ever claimed he possesses irrefutable evidence
of the Meier contacts, and I do not make that claim now.  No
one in ufology can make that statement about any case.
After I sent a letter similar to this one to Jerry Clark, he
responded that while he continued to have serious
reservations about Meier's claims to meet with
extraterrestrials, he, too, found the Meier story
"fascinating."  "My colleagues are going to be astounded and
confused," he wrote.  "It really has been an article of
faith among us (me included) that this whole business was
just an exercise in heavy-handed fraud.  But apparently you
have shown it is rather more interesting than that.  It's
ironic.  Ufologists forever complain that scientists and
debunkers won't take an objective look at the UFO evidence.
You have demonstrated, I think, that in this case the
ufologists acted just like the people they criticize."

     You will find the book a balanced report that holds
many surprises for you and other ufologists, and in no way
degrades the stature of the UFO community or impedes its
progress.  Due to cooperation from many of you, the
historical sections in LIGHT YEARS will provide readers with
a true appreciation of the UFO phenomenon and those who
study it.  Like Jerry Clark, I myself remain fascinated with
Meier, but uncertain about the truth behind the actual
contacts.  I end LIGHT YEARS with this:  "I would not call
him a prophet, though he may be.  I would not rule out
imposter, though I have no proof.  I know that if you boiled
the story in a kettle you would find hard residue composed
of two things:  One would be Meier's ravings about time
travel, space travel, philosophy, and religion; the other
would be the comments by the scientists and engineers
impressed with the evidence he has produced.  I can't
believe the former, nor can I dismiss the latter.  He may
simply be one of the finest illusionists the world has ever
known, possessing not the power but the skill to persuade
others to see things that did not happen and do not exist.
Perhaps he has no such ability; perhaps beings on a much
higher plane have selected him and controlled him and used
him for reasons far beyond our comprehension.  I do know
this:  Trying to make sense of it all has been the most
difficult thing I will ever to.  Finally I realized, as the
Elders had years before, that the truth of the Meier
contacts will never be known."

                          ** END **