Sender: Michael Hesemann 100660.3672_AT_compuserve.com

Dear Jim,

Here´s my response to the KKK statement:

a case of the format of the Billy Meier case can only be investigated through an interdisciplinary approach in which every involved expert has its own role. It does not help the case if, e.g., ten researchers repeatedly go to Switzerland to interview the very same witnesses ten times, repeating their experiences ad nauseam. It helps the case if each team member becomes active in his area of expertise and that the team members share the results in their disciplines. Therefore, it was more than sufficient when, in 1978-80, Lt.Col. W.C.Stevens, Brit and Lee Elders and Tom Welch went to Switzerland to perform the first field investigation, which in 1998 was repeated by Jaime Maussan, professional TV journalist of TELEVISA, Mexico´s largest private TV station, and myself, a cultural anthropologist and historian, confirming the results of the first investigation.

In the course of our investigation, which included four visits to Switzerland on my site and two visits on Jaimes side we were able to interview 24 eye-witnesses, 21 of them FIGU-members, two just normal inhabitants of the village of Schmidrüti and one a senior United Nations diplomat, screen Billy´s picture and footage collection, his metal samples and visit and measure four of his contact/picture taking sites. In the evaluation of his 8 mm films, we were able to locate a 1st generation copy from 1976 and several first generation prints of his pictures, material far superior from anything the critics of the case ever worked on.

In the years before, I visited Billy´s place half a dozen times and had two very intensive conversations with P., one in 1988, another one in 1990. At that time, P. testified of Billy´s contacts and confirmed in an affidavit (of 1991) that, regarding Billy´s contacts, there were never found any indication that Billy manipulated or faked any evidence.

So please allow me the question: was P. lying then or is P. lying now? Or are we just confronted with a "war of the Roses"? Is Kiviat´s "journalism" as serious as someone who tries to learn the truth about Woody Allen by just interviewing Mia Farrow?

It is a matter of fact and on the records that Kiviat contacted Billy in March 1998, promising a fair presentation of his case. He actually told Billy that he believes in his case and tried for years to present it to the American public in a open-minded, positive way; he told me the same.. For this reason, Billy gave him the permission to use his footage. Bob Kiviat lied to us and betrayed our confidence. His FOX-HOAX is far away from being any fair, journalistic treatment of the case but nothing else than a public condemnation without even the chance of a defense. On the other hand, it proved nothing else but how unscrupulous and manipulative Hollywood producers can be if they smell a quick buck. 

1. P´s trash-can-trash is utter nonsense. Yes, there is a slight resemblance of these trash can lids and a part of the wedding cake ship. But what does this tell us about a case which, in his "photo phase", was already closed in 1976, after half a dozen types of UFOs in authentic settings were taken, objects from which we have comparative shots of identical craft from several countries? I admit the "wedding cake ships" were shot in a rather difficult phase, after the original Semjase contacts ended and just before Billy had, after the stress of many attacks, a breakdown from which he still recovers. Therefore, there is the possibility, that indeed, like others, these pictures served the purpose to contaminate the case. On the other hand we carefully checked the pictures and Billy´s video of the craft. The trash can lids are of plastic, the ship of a highly reflective metal. The ship is filmed hovering just in front of a big tree -we compared it with several miniature trees and the big Swiss weather pines and found its very compact structure being that of a large weather pine-, with the tree´s colours reflecting on its surface. When, on the original film, Billy zooms in and out the scene, you clearly see the meadow on which he stand, and the distance of several hundred feet betweeen him and the tree and craft. Therefore we are quite sure it is a large object. 

2. Everybody who ever met Billy Meier in person can confirm that his personality is not that of a cult leader, nor is his position in FIGU that of an autoritarian leader. KKK never met Billy, therefore he can´t say anything about him. The structure of FIGU is purely democratic, with votes deciding every single point on its agenda. A cult has a totalitarian ideology: BELIEVE and you will find salvation. Billy teaches: Don't believe, find the truth by yourself. In his philosophy, man can only evolve through self-realization. He does not appear on public, he does not want to become a public personality, because he does not want people to follow him or consider him anything special. Instead, he wants people to study and find the truth by themselves, because that is the only way how they can grow and evolve.  

3. The FOX HOAX does not expose ANY part of the Alien Autopsy Material as faked. Since the footage was proven to be authentic by a careful investigation I performed between 1995 and 1996, Kiviat had to look for something else. He did and debunked the dubious "tent footage" which has nothing to do with the Alien Autopsy Material and was never published by Ray Santilli, after the AA cameraman did not verify it. The "tent footage" appeared after Ray Santilli gave some dark reels he got from the cameraman to a studio which promised to computer enhance what was on it and gave him a tape with the "tent footage" as a result. After the cameraman did not verify it, Santilli did not publish it, although he had shown it to several researchers directly after it came out of the studio. Later he learned that the studio owner had played a practical joke, staging the scene, which, just in shadows, was recognizable on the 16 mm film. 

Michael Hesemann
(editor-in-chief of Magazin 2000plus, Germany)

MAGAZIN 2000plus examines the background to the UFO Controversy of the Year