A Refutation of false Claims and Distortions by Korff
James W. Deardorff, Research Professor Emeritus, Oregon State University USA, May, 1996
In his book, Spaceships of the Pleiades: The Billy Meier Story, Kal K. Korff makes masses of claims against the reality of Eduard Meier's contact experiences. Thus the reader who is unfamiliar with the research by Wendelle Stevens, Lee & Brit Elders, Jim Dilettoso and Gary Kinder on the Meier case, and unfamiliar with Korff's background, may mistakenly think Korff's claims are valid simply due to their sheer number. Since it requires several times the space to clearly refute a false or misleading claim as it does to make it, I can only present a sampling of them here, short of writing a book. This sampling mostly involves the document called the Talmud of Jmmanuel (TJ). Towards the end of this paper I will also examine Korff's claims against an important series of 34 UFO photographs in Meier's collection.
The Talmud of Jmmanuel
In his book, Korff spends 6 or 7 pages trying to debunk the TJ, which was discovered by a priest and Meier near Jerusalem in 1963 in the form of ancient Aramaic scrolls encased in resin. The existent TJ appears from my own analysis to be a translation of the original writing from which the Gospel of Matthew was derived. The TJ is extremely heretical for Christianity, however, indicating that Jmmanuel, alias Jesus, survived the crucifixion and later traveled/taught much in Anatolia and on eastward to northern India and the Kashmir region. Hence it is easy to understand the intense motivation some persons would have to discredit it and Meier at any cost. I've chosen this topic to sample in detail, without skipping any ostensibly relevant charges made by Korff on it, since my own book, Celestial Teachings (CT), investigates the same document. CT explores the matter in depth and finds some 200 reasons why the TJ appears to have been the source for the Gospel of Matthew rather than being any hoax based upon that gospel. Both the TJ and CT are available from Wild Flower Press, P.0. Box 726, Newberg, OR 97132, USA.
On p. 36 Korff says that "Billy Meier himself wrote a book titled the Talmud Immanuel which was released in the United States by Wild Flower Press." This is not correct, however, since Meier was its co-discoverer, custodian of the translations and editor, not its author.
Further, the TJ's correct spelling is Talmud of Jmmanuel, where the reason why the TJ spells "lmmanuel" beginning with a "J" and not an "I" is explained by Meier in the TJ's introductory pages.
On the same page Korff says that I became "a believer and enthusiastic supporter of Meier's messianic claims." I would like to correct any misimpression this may give that I support Meier as being, or trying to be, any sort of savior figure or deliverer – a messiah of that sort. If he is in any sense an "anointed one," it is by virtue of having been singled out by certain extraterrestrials (ETs) as being their particular or primary contactee. This is what the evidence shows; the primary investigators of his ET experiences in the late 1970s and early to mid-1980s (Wendelle Stevens, Lee and Brit Elders, Tom Welch, Jim Dilettoso, and Gary Kinder) could see no way that his main photographs and ET experiences, supported by many witnesses, could have been hoaxed. Their research has been open-minded, intensive and forthright, in contrast, as we shall see, with that of Korff.
Part of the mission Meier sees for himself is to disseminate the TJ, or the true teachings of Jmmanuel, to interested persons. In so doing, however, Meier has gone out of his way to avoid becoming a cult leader, in actively discouraging persons outside of his small group of supporters at Schmidrüti, Switzerland, from promoting his story in any grandiose manner or even through public seminars. And he has long discouraged visitors to Schmidrüti from meeting him. He may be contrasted, for example, with an alleged contactee named Raël (see his The Message Given to Me by Extra-Terrestrials), who has actively recruited a following of several tens of thousands despite any supportive evidence.
It should be mentioned that if the ETs who contacted Meier had instead chosen a different person and allowed him some 18 different occasions to take rolls of daytime color photographs of their craft, that different person, provided he were to go public, would evoke the same desperate attempts by persons like Korff to discredit him as have been directed against Meier.
Taking Korff's claims, charges and innuendo against the TJ in order of occurrence, we may start with the topic uf Judas Iscariot. The TJ was allegedly written by that disciple, and in the TJ one learns that a different person, Juda Ihariot, son of a prominent Pharisee, was the one who pointed Jmmanuel out to the arresting party and soon afterwards committed suicide. On pp. 78-79 of his book, Korff confuses the issue in an interview with Bernadette Brand, Meier inner-group member, by not distinguishing the two names. Because the two names sounded much alike, a chief priest, according to the TJ, was able to initiate a persisting rumor that it was Judas, not Juda, who had betrayed Jmmanuel, thereby succeeding in casting doubt on Jmmanuel's teachings if one of his own disciples could not accept them, while sparing Juda's Pharisaic father of embarrassment. We don't know if Korff quoted Brand correctly when she allegedly said, "No. This is another Judas Iscariot" in response to Korff's question of whether the TJ author was the same Judas Iscariot who the Gospels say betrayed Jesus. And we don't know if Korff could discern the difference between the two names, if she had mentioned Juda Ihariot, or whether Brand herself for expedience did equate the two names in replying to Korff. What we do know is that Korff did not bother to state in his book the different name of the betrayer given within the TJ, and instead left the issue in a needlessly confused state. lnterestingly, the TJ's matter-of-fact presentation of Judas Iscariot as designated writer among the Twelve, and a different person as betrayer – Juda, an acquaintance of Jmmanuel and the disciples – solves some five problems concerning Judas, ranging from major to minor, that New Testament scholars have had to deal with in the past century (see my book, The Problems of New Testament Gospel Originse, Mellen Research University Press, 1992, chap. 6).
On p. 78 Korff says that the TJ "can be obtained in the form of another book called Celestial Teachings: The Talmud of Jmmanuel by Dr. James Deardorff." This is incorrect on two counts: (a) My book contains various verses and passages extracted from the TJ, but does not begin to set the whole TJ into print; and (b) The subtitle of CT is quite different from being The Talmud of Jmmanuel.
On p. 78 Korff states that Jmmanuel was a Pleiadean, whereas the TJ indicates that it was lmmanuel's father who was a Pleiadean, his mother being (earthling) Mary. Although this error is corrected in a following sentence, where it is his father who is mentioned as being the Pleiadean, a second error is immediately incurred in that Korff names Jmmanuels father as "Plejos" rather than as Gabriel. Instead, according to what Meier learned, "Plejos" is the name of the Pleiadean ET who was in charge of overseeing much of Earth during Jmmanuel's time. Later in the same sentence, however, Korff then corrects "Plejos" to "Gabriel." It is evident that Korff has not read the TJ ; if he had, he would then have no excuse to have become so confused.
(Regarding the spelling of "Pleiadean," I should explain that I prefer the "ean" ending, in analogy to "Archimedean," rather than the "ian" ending, which, however, is most prevalent. And it may be mentioned that Meier has been told by the "Pleiadeans" that they are not really from the Pleiades but are from that direction in our galaxy, some 80 light years beyond the Pleiades.)
On pp. 78-79 Korff expounds on why the Feb. 3rd date that Jmmanuel was born on, according to what Meier was told during his contact experiences, and the Feb. 3rd date of Meier's own birthday, represents an irrelevant agreement. If this is so irrelevant, why then did Korff spend a paragraph speaking about it?
On p. 79 Korff promotes an error of omission in the book of Randy Winters, The Pleiadian Mission, in stating that it was the priest, Isa Rashid, who discovered the TJ. As noted in the Foreword to the 1992 TJ, however, it was Meier who actually unearthed the resin encasement that contained the TJ scrolls, with Rashid having led him to the site. They can thus be called co-discoverers. At the time, Meier still had his left arm, and thus was able to carry out the necessary excavating before the encasement containing the scrolls was uncovered.
On p. 79 Korff perpetuates another apparent error of Winters, though a minor one, in stating that Rashid did his translating of the TJ from Aramaic into German while living in Baghdad. Instead, the TJ's attachments imply that the priest continued to live in Jerusalem while secretly working on the TJ translation until around 1970, during which period he transferred the bulk of the translations then completed to Meier. By 1970 Meier had returned to Switzerland to raise his young family and, I believe, there received at least one last set of translated TJ pages from Rashid via mail, after which Meier did not hear from him until September of 1974. However, some time around 1970 Rashid's translation project in Jerusalem was discovered and he fled with the scrolls to a Lebanese refugee camp. Only after he was flushed out of the refugee camp by a large conflagration in 1974, which caused the scrolls to be destroyed, did Rashid flee to Baghdad, where he was assassinated in 1976, according to what Meier was told by Semjase as conveyed in his Contact Notes.
On p. 79 Korff states that "what ... people who espouse the Talmud Jmmanuel as being real ignore is the fact that there are no original scrolls." However, this is not true, because the fact that the original scrolls were lost or destroyed in 1974 and are no longer available is made clear in the letter-copy attachment at the end of the TJ, in Meier's Contact Notes, and has certainly been emphasized by myself in Celestial Teachings and in my later discussions of the topic. This is the primary reason New Testament scholars typically supply as to why they cannot be made interested in the TJ – there are no originals of which they could check the Aramaic writing and send out to labs for radiocarbon dating analyses. And so this is also an important reason why the TJ has not come to the attention of the general public.
On p. 79 Korff implies that the Bible is backed up by original, ancient texts and thus has a preferred status over the TJ, which has just the German translation to show for itself. However, the earliest complete texts of the New Testament gospels do not date to earlier than the 4th century; moreover, patriarchal evidence does indicate that the Gospel of Matthew was the gospel first written, and written in Hebrew or Aramaic. But all we have received, centuries later, are Greek transcriptions of other earlier transcriptions of it that in turn had had to be translated from the Hebrew (in the case of Matthew), at least according to one school of thought. Korff needs to be informed that the originals to the Bible do not exist. The TJ, on the other hand, is in much better shape than this, having suffered only one translation leading to its 1978 version, which is available for scholarly study from Meier in Switzerland. Later Meier gave the TJ an editorial update to correct errors and incorporate some unrevealed "code" at the behest of his ET contactors, which led to its 1992 German-English version by Wild Flower Press. The two versions agree in their essential content. This is not to say, however, that the English version of the TJ is not in need of corrections.
In the same paragraph, Korff states that the scrolls "have never been found," and then goes on to complain that the scrolls, which he claims never existed, were "conveniently lost" by Rashid. All this is a grandstanding denial that avoids treating the available information seriously. The available information indicates that Rashid (by then an ex-priest) and his young family, while hiding out in a Lebanese refugee camp, had to flee for their lives after a large section of the camp where they were in hiding was burned down, according to Rashid's letter, by the Israeli military. They barely managed to escape, but Rashid had no time to retrieve the scrolls from their separate hiding place to take them with him. So it cannot be said that Rashid simply "lost" the scrolls, especially if he is correct in assuming that the Israeli raid was conducted for the express purpose of eliminating himself and the scrolls, rather than as "punitive action against Palestinian guerillas." Thus, Korff does not begin to let the reader know what the story is that underlies the TJ's discovery, translation and loss or destruction. At the time Rashid wrote Meier to tell him about this in September of 1974, he didn't know if the TJ scrolls had been lost to the Israelis or burnt up. Later, Meier was told by his Pleiadean contactors that the scrolls had been destroyed by the conflagration. This loss was in no way a "convenience," not even to Rashid, as he was nevertheless assassinated two years later, from what Meier learned from Semjase, because of his having been the TJ's translator and a witness to the original scrolls. Thus Korff's cavalier dismissal of all this represents a total distortion.
A newspaper search through the New York Times reveals, in a tiny article in its Aug. 10, 1974 issue (p. 11), that on Friday, Aug. 9th, 1974, Israeli warplanes "attacked a tent encampment and two buildings in southern Lebanon" (at Fachaya Fukhar or Fashaya Fukhar). Israel's next raid on Lebanon was not until Sept. 15th. Thus the Aug. 9th raid appears to have been the one that destroyed the TJ scrolls.
A reason the TJ is heretical for Judaism, as well as Christianity, is that in it Jmmanuel teaches that the Jewish God was not the true Creator God (the Great Spirit or "the Creation" or Creation), but an advanced human that we'd nowadays identify as an ET. This of course opens the door for interpretation of angels as aliens, sky chariots & pillars of cloud or fire as UFOs, and similar treatment of other elements of Old Testament Merkabah mysticism – a scenario unacceptable to mainstream Judaism and truly blasphemous within it.
On p. 80 Korff claims that the TJ's existence is "evidence of nothing" without the original scrolls. However, one may analyze the translations, study how overwhelmingly improbable it is that they could be any hoax, and therefore find it extremely plausible that the TJ's originals indeed once existed. What Korff should have said is that, if the burden of proof is upon Meier to show beyond any doubt that the TJ is genuine, then without possessing the original scrolls he is unable to do so.
On p. 80 it is stated that the TJ "is not unique as a document." This is false, since anyone who reads the TJ will immediately note its many unique narrations, as well as its unique yet natural solutions to scores and scores of New Testament Gospel problems, both major as well as minor ones, which have occupied New Testament scholars for centuries. Simply because the TJ supports the numerous traditions indicating that Jesus survived the crucifixion does not at all mean that it does not show unique features throughout. Its narration on how Jmmanuel survived the crucifixion, for example, is unique among the 10 or so scenarios various independent scholars of the past three centuries have proposed to explain Jesus' appearances in the flesh to his disciples after the crucifixion.
On p. 80 Korff claims the TJ says that after Jesus reached India he remained in hiding. He gives Randy Winter's book as a reference. However, Winters says no such thing, but indicates what Meier had learned from Rashid's early browsing of the end sections of the TJ scrolls — that Jmmanuel raised a family in Kashmir and continued with his teachings even there.
Also on p. 80 Korff mentions the book Jesus Lived in India by German author and investigator, Holger Kersten, and exclaimed, "ln truth, Meier had even read Kersten's book!" Here Korff was apparently implying that Kersten's rendering of the Jesus-in-lndia traditions gave Meier the idea of hoaxing this theme into the TJ. What Korff failed to mention, however, is that Kersten's book first came out (in German) only in 1983, whereas the TJ first appeared in print in 1978. This is an example of a flagrant innuendo by Korff.
On pp. 80-81, Korff states that the typewritten translations by Rashid received by Meier were analyzed by several unnamed scholars in Germany and Switzerland, and that they "decided not to publish their results." Korff did not name the source of the letter to him that supposedly disclosed this piece of information, claiming, he said, that this source wished to remain anonymous because the results were negative. However, the points that Korff goes on to mention from a Swiss scholar are the same as those which Prof. Ted Auerbach of Gebenstorf, Switzerland, has discussed with me in correspondence (Auerbach, Feb. 5, 1988; April 16, 1988; Sept. 29, 1988; Feb. 2, 1989 and March 31, 1989). After noticing this, I spoke with the international director of MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), and he confirmed that Auerbach indeed was the person referred to here by Korff (Walt Andrus, telephone conversation of April 19, 1996). Auerbach is one of MUFON's overseas consultants, and was Andrus's key advisor in Switzerland. That Auerbach did not publish his conclusions anywhere is understandable, as what journal would accept discussions, often detailed and technical in nature, on topics connected to a heavily debunked UFO-contactee case and also involving heresies for Christianity and Judaism?
However, there seems no reason for Korff to have withheld Auerbach's identity, unless it be because Auerbach has indicated that he has come to see much realism in Meier's experiences. For example, in his letter of Feb. 2, 1989, Auerbach wrote: "A member of our UFO club gave me G. Kinder's 'Light Years', and I finished reading it a few days ago. The book convinced me that I had done some injustice to E. Meier. This goes to show that one should not judge a person until all the information is at hand. I always thought that Meier's photos still were likely to be fakes. However, according to the book this is impossible. There may be some false ones among them, but the great majority of them, amounting to several hundred pictures, must be genuine. Also, I did not realize that he has had more than 100 meetings with Semjase."
Until 1988, Auerbach's knowledge of the Meier case came only from materials loaned to him in 1976 by Hans Jacob, an early member of Meier's group of supporters who soon defected. (Jacob is mentioned frequently in Korff's book.) Auerbach kept the materials for a month or two, took notes, and then returned the materials to Jacob, who had asked Auerbach to advise him whether or not to remain a member of Meier's group.
On p. 82 Korff includes a portion of a summary report by the Swiss scientist, said to date to 1980, which states, "The Talmud turns out to be the New Testament verbatim, but with a large number of additions without much ethical value." This first part is not correct, as it is only the Gospel of Matthew that exhibits many parallel passages to the TJ, not the whole New Testament; and even about half of these passages or, more precisely, verses, are only poorly or moderately correlated with TJ verses (see Celestial Teachings, pp. 227-232). As to the second half of the above quote, the task of such a study should have been not only to see if a case could be made that the "additions" were such as could have been inserted by a hoaxer, or even by Meier himself, but also to see if an even stronger case could not be made for the opposite: that the compiler of the Gospel of Matthew had had the TJ in front of him and omitted much from it, especially everything heretical, when writing his gospel. Celestial Teachings considers both angles, but indicates overwhelmingly that the latter is the case. It, moreover, analyzes what appear to have been the additions made to the TJ text by the compiler of Matthew and shows how these additions have been preferentially pointed out by various New Testament scholars to be redactions (editorial additions). There is no way that Meier's limited fourth-grade education could have prepared him to be a literary hoaxer excelling over any known Gospel scholars, or could have allowed him to attract an unknown scholar of unsurpassed ability to create a literary hoax comparable to the TJ. However, Auerbach was proceeding on the assumption that the TJ had to be a hoax, and so did not consider this most important aspect of the problem.
As to the TJ's "additions" not being of much ethical value, one should notice that the compiler of Matthew had no reason to omit those portions of the TJ pertaining to ethics that were compatible with early Christianity. Thus such material, which is seen to trace back to the TJ, is found in Matthew; e.g. , the Golden Rule, and "Why do you…not notice the log that is in your own eye?" What this compiler is found to have omitted, in particular, were the TJ's teachings about the existence, evolution, and immortality of the human spirit and its connection to true God, or "the Creation." Obviously the compiler of Matthew could not include material in his gospel that deviated from the teachings of early Christianity, for which the only spirit to be emphasized was the external Holy Spirit, whose emphasis traces back to Paul. Thus the TJ does contain a goodly number of teachings of ethical value beyond those that managed to find their way into the Gospel of Matthew; in particular Jmmanuel's admonitions to obey the natural law of the Creation.
In this same portion of the sumary report it is stated (Korff, p. 82), "lt is hard to see how the New Testament can agree word for word with the original – apart from the added passages – if the latter [the original] lay buried all the time." Again I point out that the agreement was usually much less than perfect, and not with the New Testament as a whole but with substantial portions of Matthew. Only about 17% of Matthew's verses are very highly correlated with verses within the 1978 TJ (Celestial Teachings, p. 232). Even this much correlation may probably be attributed largely to the fact that Rashid was a priest who, in translating the TJ into German, must have had the German Bible in front of him as a guide in choosing optimal words in those verses that seemed to be about the same in the TJ as in the German Bible.
To move on to the last part of the report's same question, restated – "How could the Gospel of Matthew agree with substantial portions of the TJ if the latter lay buried until 1963?" – it is not at all difficult to understand how the TJ likely came to be known to the writer of Matthew. One need only infer that Judas Iscariot, during the 40 years or so of his later life in India, had time to transcribe the TJ scrolls as well as continuing to add to them, thus making an additional set, which in early 2nd century was carried back to Palestine along with the originals (by Jmmanuel's oldest son, Joseph, according to what Meier learned from Rashid). Perhaps Judas even made one or two further sets of transcriptions that never survived in India. Or perhaps this Joseph made a transcription of the first part of the lengthy scrolls – the only portions that would be deemed of interest to persons who had known of Jmmanuel in Palestine – on his two-year trek from India to Palestine. Once in the Palestinian region he probably released the transcription to some seemingly capable and honest person who knew of some of the true traditions about what Jmmanuel had taught, but eventually the scrolls found their way into the hands of the compiler of Matthew in an unknown early church. The original scrolls, however, Joseph encased in resin and buried in the tombsite near Jerusalem, not to be discovered for some 19 centuries. There is no shortage of possibilities of this nature that exist, on which one can only speculate, but which Auerbach either could not imagine or chose to ignore. In his letter to me of March 11, 1988, Auerbach mentioned that this whole question had struck him right from the beginning; it seems that his failure to have seen plausible solutions to it was a prime cause for his proceeding on the assumption that the TJ must be a hoax.
The same portion of the report claims, "both the additions and the letter of the priest are written in Mr. Meier's characteristic style, containing all the errors in German also found in the Semjase manuscript." Some suggested examples of such errors are evidently given further into the report, and are the ones Auerbach has discussed with me. The so-called "additional" TJ material, having no parallel in Matthew, would require the most editing by Meier because its content would have been strange for both Rashid and for Meier's key editorial assistant of 1976-1978 (Frau Krauer). Meier, however, had been educated in many ways by his earlier contacts with the ETs named Sfath and Asket, and was prepared for the TJ's non-biblical revelations. From his editing, it is of course to be expected that some of Meier's personal writing style would show through, including his use of Swiss-German. After all, Meier was the TJ's editor, and likely felt that Rashid's rendering of German in places left something to be desired. Such an imprint from Meier may then exhibit some positive correlation with Meier's writing style within the Contact Notes, since the latter were all channeled through his mind.
This same portion of the summary report claims (Korff, p. 82), "comparison shows the letter alleged to have been written by the priest in Iraq actually to have been typed on the same typewriter as the Semjase manuscript." (ln this and preceding paragraphs where I quote Korff, the italics within quotes stem from Korff.) This latter manuscript refers to Meier's Contact Notes, of which I possess copies of the German versions of Nos. 2, 61, 76, and 150, dated Feb. 3, 1975, July 29, 1976, May 23, 1977, and Oct. 19, 1978, respectively. These I have compared against the Rashid-letter copy in the TJ. Both Rashid's letter and the Contact Notes up until about 1978 do appear to have been written on the same kind of typewriter – same style of German typeface. Hence I will be comparing those Contact Notes (Nos. 2, 61, 76) with the Rashid letter. In so doing, I note four particular distinguishing peculiarities:
(a) With the typewriter used by Rashid, the top of the "9" lies slightly too low, as seen from 2 out of 2 occurrences. In the three German Contact Notes, on the other hand, it lies at the proper height – flush with the tops of other numbers (except the 6 whose top extends on upwards) – in all 10 instances it occurred.
(b) With the typewriter in question used by Meier, the lower-case "w" tends to fall too low. Judging from the position of the base of the "w" relative to the average base line of neighboring letters, in 61 out of 89 occurrences (examining first pages of the Notes from the three particular contacts) its base was positioned 8% or more too low; in 27 more of the 89 it also fell too low to a lesser extent. On only 1 of the 89 occurrences noted did its position coincide with the average base line, within the estimated uncertainty of ±2%. With Rashid's typewriter, on the other hand, the position of the bottom of the "w" agreed with that of the base line within the small uncertainty of estimation in 31 of 34 occurrences; it lay detectably below the base line on only 3 of the 34 occurrences. This distinction is quite noticeable, and indicates that two different typewriters were involved.
(c) In the typescript of the Rashid letter the left side of its "ü" is weak 12 out of 12 times, and also the lower-left side of its "ä" 7 out of 8 times. This could represent either a deficiency in the functioning or structure of those particular typewriter keys or failure of Rashid to strike them hard enough. No such peculiarity shows up in the Contact Notes.
(d) In 3 out of the 7 times where "ur" appears in the Rashid letter, the two letters lie so close together that their bottoms touch or merge; this does not occur in any of the three particular Contact Notes examined where I counted 75 occurrences of "ur". A reason for this to have occurred in Rashid's letter is that the "u" gets struck by the right index finger and the "r" by the left, so that inexact coordination can cause the two keys to strike too closely in succession at times, in turn causing the letter imprints to occur too close together – a problem solved by later word processors. The Contact Notes, however, were typed by Meier himself; having only one hand, this problem did not occur.
One may also include in the comparison a copy of a letter of agreement between Rashid and Meier dated Aug. 4, 1963, which Meier managed to save over the years. (Rashid was to retain custody of the scrolls, Meier custody of the German translations produced by Rashid.) The typewriter used therein has a slightly different typeface than that used in the Contact Notes or in Rashid's letter, as is best seen by comparing the J's. In this letter of agreement Rashid's signature appears to be readily identifiable as coming from the same hand as in his 1974 letter, though differences in detail are also apparent. In particular, the latter signature is somewhat less well articulated than the earlier signature.
In summary, the charge that the same typewriter was used in typing the Contact Notes and the letter from Rashid in the rear of the TJ does not stand up under close scrutiny. One does not need to be a typewriting expert to notice the differences I have discussed.
Let us move further into this report (p. 82 of Korff's book), where it mentions that in the Contact Notes Semjase made a point of bestowing lavish praise upon Meier at times. By omitting the fact that Meier just as frequently objected to this praise, which remarks were also faithfully reproduced in the Notes, Auerbach was implying that Meier had inserted this within invented conversations to make himself look good.
Also omitted in the report was any discussion of a very plausible reason why Meier's contactors at times would have spoken to him in excessively flattering terms: in order that their contacts not force unreceptive people to believe what their belief systems cannot tolerate; namely, that ETs or aliens further evolved than we are exist in our vicinity, are aware of us and have interacted with selected persons. That is, aliens purposely include speech, actions and items in their contacts that can be used to discredit their contactee and/or undermine the supportive evidence they may have allowed him to possess concerning their existence. If the positive evidence supporting the reality of the contacts is ignored, the disinformation fed in by the alien contactors can then give critics of an anthropocentric mindset an excuse to maintain their existing beliefs without "going crazy." Although this would mean that the Pleiadeans, being the ETs in consideration, are more intelligent than their skeptical human detractors and can stay several jumps ahead of them, this kind of strategy should not be so surprising if they are thousands or tens of thousands of years more evolved than we, and are ethical enough not to force any sudden mental chaos upon society. This thought seems to be a giant stumbling block for negative skeptics – that UFO aliens would be smarter or more knowledgeable than they themselves are – causing skeptics at times to utilize ridicule to deny the observations rather than face up to reality. The ethic of not forcing skeptics to believe what they simply cannot accept as real appears to be a higher one than the ethic of never lying, when the disinformation is presented within a context of requiring us to "sift out the wheat from the chaff."
At various points within the Contact Notes, Semjase does tell Meier that they regard the individual's free will as paramount, and also that the worst result that could happen from their contacts would be for it all to be turned into another religion or cult, with either them being considered gods and goddesses or Meier becoming a world renowned guru. By feeding in some semi-obvious disinformation to what they told Meier, which would be incorporated into his Contact Notes and later be seen by detractors as egoism or dumb invented remarks on the part of Meier, the Pleiadeans would be fulfilling all these objectives. (A person can be said to be subject to a cult, or to an unnecessary loyalty, when he unquestioningly accepts what the cult leader says as truth. If one has to question the veracity of each statement made by a source, that source can scarcely qualify as the head of a cult.) Neither Korff nor Auerbach mentions this explanation, which seems evident enough in retrospect. Do detractors like Korff really think that aliens who can "get from there to here," and make their UFO craft perform wondrous maneuvers we can only gasp at, wouldn't also be smarter, more knowledgeable, more experienced and more clever than we ourselves are?
The same report (Korff, p. 82) then injects the sentence: "No one, incidentally, including his wife and children, has ever seen Semjase." To be true, this sentence should have read, "No Earth human, except Meier, has ever seen and recognized Semjase as far as we know, with an exception reported by Stevens" (in his Preliminary Investigation Report, pp. 177-179). But consider the erroneous impression this leaves by failure to mention that on one occasion four adults besides Meier's wife and children had a daytime sighting of Semjase's beamship. (Others who had sightings of Pleiadean craft connected with Meier's contacts are named in Preliminary Investigation Report.) Until about the time Meier's wife had her sighting, she had been upset and confused or disbelieving about it all. But afterwards, she told the Elders this (from UFO… Contact from the Pleiades, Vol. 2, by Lee and Brit Elders, Genesis III Publishing, p. 45, as translated into English):
"ln June of 1976, seven people were waiting with me for Billy to come back from a contact. He came and said to us, 'go with me to another point.' We went and waited. It was daylight and one of the boys told us to look up into the sky. It was our first sighting in the day. The ship was very big but got smaller as it rose, and I clearly saw the detail around the top of the ship. I saw little ports, and the whole UFO seemed to be light. The children, three other women and one man saw it, too. There are many lights going across the sky at night and I cannot be sure what they are, but this I am sure was the ship of Semjase. I didn't believe it before because I had never talked about UFO's or seen one. But after this day…l believe.
"Now the UFO's are secondary, the information from the Pleiadians come first. We have to learn to live together…man and woman, different countries, different races and different worlds."
This information has been available since 1983, and for Korff to omit it from his book represents unconscionable bias in reporting. Being a daytime eyewitness to the UFO whose pilot Meier had been having contacts with is certainly relevant information that the pilot existed. Although Korff lists (p. 307) names of 21 witnesses who saw UFOs related to Meier's contacts, and Meier's wife is included, he falsely implies (p. 306) that these were all just nighttime observations "of blobs of light."
The same portion of the summary report goes on to say (Korff, p. 82), "The manuscript [Meier's Contact Notes] makes it abundantly clear that she [Semjase] wishes to confine her contacts strictly to Mr. Meier alone. Certainly a convenient wish." Again, the report omitted other relevant material within the Contact Notes in which Semjase explained to Meier why they had to maintain this policy, since Meier quizzed her about it several times and asked permission to bring one or two others along on more than one occasion. Her explanation involved their need to avoid making their contacts so well attested that many people would abruptly be forced to believe in their existence before they were mentally and psychologically prepared to do so. Failure to provide the explanation along with a fact can create a misleading picture. And again, the report's use of "convenient" here implies through innuendo that it was convenient for a hoaxer to have invented the contact-confinement theme, while ignoring the likelihood that it was part of the ETs' strategy.
The summary report continues with the mention of various statements Meier was told by Semjase, and which therefore appeared in his verbatim Contact Notes, that sound like silly science or pseudo-science, at least to most scientists. Apparently, the members of the Swiss-German study group referred to by Korff, along with Korff, believe that what ETs tell their contactees/abductees has to be truth and nothing but the truth! That's quite an assumption for an investigative group to make, and as has just been pointed out here, seems unjustified. An ET strategy of including some disinformation is an obvious alternative to the possibility that it was Meier who was not always telling the truth; yet Korff seems not to have considered it. However, it is not always possible for us to say with certainty which statements are disinformation and which are not but only seem so because of our highly limited scientific understanding, which frequently needs revision as science progresses. Think of how many ways our science has been updated in the past century, then try to imagine how many further updates and totally new revisions will have occurred by 50 centuries from now.
Korff's rendition of the summary report then says that Meier "had had himself transported back in time to Jerusalem." This is in need of a correction: he did not request the trip; rather it was urged upon him by his ET contactor at the time (1956), namely Asket. Only due to some respected scientists in the past decade having concluded that time travel may not be inconceivable after all must its possibility now be taken seriously by UFO critics.
The report then states, "The Lord listens patiently to a great deal of religious philosophy on the part of Mr. Meier and duly admires his high intelligence." Here, to start with, it is misleading to have called Jmmanuel "the Lord," as both at this point and in the TJ, through prophetic insight, he made clear that he was not the son of God or what he has come to be known by with the Christian title of Lord.
It is further misleading to imply that Meier did most of the talking to which Jmmanuel only listened. During this past-time encounter with Jmmanuel, Meier spoke 91 sentences, including many questions directed to Jmmanuel, who spoke 253 sentences. This is the opposite of what the report implies.
Out of these 253 sentences, few relate to Meier's intelligence. One did call Meier "wise" or "fast-thinking," and this was in response to Meier's recognition and commendation ot Jmmanuel's precognitive abilities. In one other sentence Jmmanuel told Meier he was very educated in spirit, which is different, however, from mental intelligence. In another Jmmanuel told Meier that he was more discerning than he had expected, which, however, refers only to an unknown expectation. At one point he told Meier that Meier properly caught his meaning, though this is "cancelled" by his telling Meier at another point that Meier had not interpreted him right. And once he was surprised that Meier could conceive qualitatively of how it was possible for him (Jmmanuel) to prophesy far into the future. This represents only 2 or 3 sentences of "high intelligence" praise, however, which do not seem undeserved, out of 253, and so does not begin to justify the prominence the report assigned to it. An unbiased report would have discussed some of the substance of the conversations, but if the report did, Korff chose not to reproduce it. This substance included discussions of how Christianity went sadly astray from Jmmanuel's teachings, and discussion of the degree of development of Meier's spirit relative to Jmmanuel's, a topic Meier was naturally quite interested in.
Finally, what Korff presents from Auerbach's summary report speaks of Meier's frequent use of characteristic mistakes in the German language. This was meant to imply that the same mistakes occur in both the German TJ and the Contact Notes or Rashid's letter, with Meier supposedly having hoaxed them all. Now, as noted before, the appearance of Meier's personal style should not be unexpected within the Contact Notes, since they are his own reproduction, through a rapid form of technologically channeled "automatic writing" from the Pleiadeans, of his own conversations with the Pleiadeans he had held the previous day or night during a contact. They were all expressed through his own thoughts, and were thus expressed in his own Swiss-German tongue. And they are not unexpected within the TJ, since Meier edited it.
Concerning Rashid, we cannot expect that his knowledge of German, being a second or third language for him, would be independent of what he learned from Meier. He conversed with Meier frequently in 1963, kept in touch with him afterwards, and may have exchanged letters with him. Thus in all probability Rashid learned some Swiss-German from Meier. A few pieces of this style learned from Meier might then be expected to have appeared in his letters to Meier, and also in his translation of the TJ, since he of course knew that Meier was the custodian of the TJ's translation. As anyone knows, parts of a foreign language learned from someone with whom you speak and whom you respect will stick with you better than what you learn from a textbook or in class.
Only three examples of these improprieties in language are mentioned in Korff's summary of the report, the first being Meier's use of "yet however," which refers to "doch aber" in the German and does not represent good German grammar. This is a perceptive observation by Auerbach. I have found this used 5 times in the TJ, which occur in its verses that are distinctive of Matthean verses, and one time in Rashid's letter. Assuming it is indeed an expression also used by Meier, this could be a prime example of an expression Rashid picked up from Meier and continued to use at times when expressing thoughts in the German language intended for Meier to read. On the other hand, one cannot be sure that Meier himself did not, in giving the TJ its initial editing, try to improve upon Rashid's translation and, in so doing, insert "doch" before "aber" in some or all of these instances. Auerbach was apparently not open to either of these two possibilities, as they seem not to have occurred to him.
The second example is Meier's not infrequent use of the German word "so" to mean "so that." This observation of Auerbach also seems correct, assuming the improper use of "so" did not stem from Rashid himself during translation. However, it says nothing against the validity of the TJ, for the reason already mentioned of Meier being its editor. The third example given is that "Olives" was once written (somewhere) as "Oilives," regarding the Mount of Olives. However, since this refers to some English translation of the TJ, and since the word for the Mount used in its two appearances in the German TJ is spelled correctly, as in the German Bible (Ölberg), this criticism is irrelevant. It is puzzling that Auerbach would have brought it up.
The summary report (Korff, p. 83) mentions that "logical" and "forms of life" are favorite expressions of Meier. Although the point of this is not given in Korff's presentation, it is clear from Auerbach's letter to me of March 31, 1989, he was concluding that the occurrence of "logic" (some 20 times) within the TJ as opposed to its non-occurrence within the Bible means that Meier placed it within the TJ. Again, however, Auerbach was just stating the conclusion that comes from already having assumed the TJ to be a hoax, rather than examining the likelihood that a word meaning "logic" occurred freqently in the original TJ and was then removed by the early 2nd-century Christian-scribe editor as he compiled the Gospel of Matthew.
One needs to ask, if Jmmanuel had taught basic truths, or even learned some from the Pleiadeans, is it not likely this would have involved mention of logic? Neither Auerbach nor Korff asked this question. Although logic may have been of little or no concern within Judaic literature of that era, it was a well developed concept within Greek literature, and even many "mainstream" New Testament scholars assume that Jesus must have known Greek. The TJ itself indicates that Jmmanuel had knowledge of one Greek saying, which derives from Plato in the 4th century B.C. – the saying, "Man is the measure of all things," within an extended prophecy speaking about people of the future:
"Thus they will also lose sight of the principle of the oldest wisdom, which says that humans are the measure of all things in life, because they are after all a part of the Creation." (TJ 36:25)
Thus it is only consistent that Jmmanuel urged the use of logic within the TJ.
One also needs to ask, Would the writer of Matthew have had reason to omit the word or thought involving "logic," or substitute something else for it, when editing the TJ and forming his gospel? The answer to this question is also affirmative. Consistent with other alterations the compiler of Matthew is deduced to have made to the TJ, he is seen to have omitted TJ teachings that encourage the reader to think for himself, apparently because followers of the new religion were supposed to obey the teachings of the church and its scribes rather than to think independently. That is, if one uses logic, one is thinking for oneself. An additional reason for this compiler's omission of "logic" is that as a concept more in use in gentile lands, e.g., in Greece, than in the land of Israel, and with the compiler of Matthew being anti-gentile in his outlook (as may be seen from some 8 or 9 verses of Matthew), "logic" would not likely have appealed to him. Six of the 20 usages of "logic" occur in text presenting teachings of Jmmanuel occurring well after his survival of the crucifixion, and so could not have been made use of by the compiler of Matthew for that reason alone.
As to a preference by Meier for the phrase "forms of life," this has little connection to the TJ, as it appears there only once ("Lebensformen" or "life forms").One needs to keep the TJ context in mind – of Jmmanuel himself being a contactee, having received 40 days and nights of tutoring under the same general ET group (Pleiadeans) as those who contacted Meier, and who, having an ET biological father and being aware of it, consequently spoke frequentiy in terms of this "human race," and of the Creation being the maker of the universes and of all living things. Within this background, it is not at all surprising that "life forms" would also receive mention. No doubt the phrase occurs more frequently in the Contact Notes, where the subject must have arisen several times in conjunction with Meier's numerous questions to Semjase, and her replies, on all kinds of topics.
In his letter to me of March 11, 1988, Auerbach also pointed out that in Rashid's letter, his clause "Es ist mir leid" (l am sorry) represents a mistake in grammar also present in Meier's Contact Notes, thus implying that Meier hoaxed the letter by Rashid. The preferred expression is "Es tut mir leid." However, this could well represent another idiosyncrasy Rashid picked up from Meier in 1963. On the other hand, the expression may not be so ideosyncratic, as the use of "ist" instead of "tut" is OK'd in the Cassell's 1978 German-English dictionary (see under leid).
Other criticisms of Auerbach similarly seem based simply on the fact that much of the TJ's content is different than what's in the Bible. Thus this also contributed to his initial bias that the TJ could not possibly be genuine. This is despite the fact that he found the TJ "to be a persuasive document" (in correspondence of March 31, 1989), and found its "Epilog and Explanation" page to be "particularly interesting" (in correspondence of Sept. 29, 1988).
Korff then (p. 83) mentions a so-called analysis of the TJ by Michael Arends, a German ufologist, in which "similarities were noted between the typewriter used by Billy Meier to transcribe his 'contact' notes with Semjase and the 'Rashid' translations Meier claimed to have received from Baghdad. Arends identified specific letter characters which he found indicative that the same typewriter had been used." This is essentially the same claim already discussed and shown to be unfounded. As an aid to answering this kind of question, however, it would have been very helpful if Meier had retained the rough TJ translations he received from Rashid. However, after overseeing the editing of the TJ manuscript and readying it for publication in 1977-78, Meier unfortunately did not retain them. From his viewpoint there was no need to, storage space being at a premium, since he knew as a personal fact that the TJ he co-discovered was genuine, and that if his many hundreds of photographs of Pleiadean beamships did not convince a person of the reality of his experiences, additional less direct evidence would not be convincing to such a person either.
Korff goes on to say that Arends "discovered that entire passages had been embellished on and lifted from a standard Lutheran version of the Bible." This again goes over some of the same ground already covered. What Korff failed to say here in this unproven claim is that any priest who is already well acquainted with the Gospels would find that, in translating those passages of the TJ that had been most faithfully carried over into the Gospel of Matthew, his translation would naturally end up sounding very much like what is in that Gospel. The following question would then arise for him: Should he then translate those sections into the words and language as he remembers them from the version of the Bible he was most acquainted with, or should he not use one particular Bible as his guide, and use its language consistently for these parallel passages? The latter is an evident choice, in which case the Bible he used would have been the well known and prevailingly used German Bible (which is the Martin Luther Bible), since the translation from the Aramaic was into German. The only other alternative would be to try to cast his translation into a form that would seem fresh and never before used, such as referring to the Mount of Olives as the "Hill of Olives" or "Hill of Oval Drupes," as an extreme example of the problem that would be encountered. So Rashid evidently had the German Bible on hand and used its German in familiar passages.
Yet, from the point of view not considered by Arends or Korff – that the TJ could be authentic – one finds that it was the compiler of Matthew who made many insertions, omissions, and substitutions when utilizing the TJ as his source. And one finds a very consistent picture of the theological slant of this compiler from this viewpoint, as well as fresh and consistent solutions to the problems of Gospel priorities and interpretations of the few, terse, ambiguous sayings about the formation of the Gospels that have survived from certain early church fathers but continue to puzzle mainstream Bible scholarship. These alterations incorporated into Matthew then are what Arends refers to as "embellishments" from the standpoint of his assumption that Meier is guilty of fraud. Thus Arends and Korff are guilty of failing to even consider the likelihood that it was the compiler of Matthew who made massive editorial alterations in rendering his source document, the TJ, into a form acceptable to the early church, namely, into the Gospel of Matthew. The interested reader may need to consult The Problems of New Testament Gospel Origins to learn how strong the evidence is that Matthew (not Mark) was the first Gospel written, and in Hebrew or Aramaic, with Mark being second and Luke third, just as attested by the early church fathers: Irenaeus, Origen and Augustine and implied by bishop Papias.
On p. 83 of his book Korff also mentions a verbal attack against Meier that not too long ago was launched by Underground Video (UV) of Beverly Hills, CA. However, their charges seem to be of the same nature as Korff's 6- quite unsubstantiated, with few details being made available. However, in a footnote referring to a conversation with UV's president, Korff does mention one particular charge: that UV had "discovered evidence proving that the Talmud Jmmanuel does not contain Aramaic!" One scarcely knows what to make of this charge. Does it mean that UV or Korff thinks that after translation of a document from Aramaic into German the latter should contain Aramaic writing?
To interpret this charge in the most intelligent light, it may be that UV was claiming that the German TJ does not show any awkward language indicative of having been translated quite literally from the Aramaic in places. Such indications, if present in the translated text, would be called Aramaisms, whose meaning Korff may not have understood. However, in the 1978 German TJ there are some Aramaisms that are sufficiently evident that even a non-scholar of Aramaic, such as myself, can identify them (with the help of some textbooks that discuss Aramaisms within the Gospels). One set of them involves sentences of the type where "and he spoke" or similar words occur, seemingly redundantly, just following another verb having very nearly the same meaning, such as "answered." It is an indication that the original text contained no quotation marks, as punctuation was not invented until a few centuries later. Thus, "and spoke" served to notify the reader that a quotation was commencing. One would search for these indications primarily in those portions of the TJ not having Matthean parallels, since the same redundancies persisted also into the German Bible, which stems from old texts (Greek or Latin). An example occurs at TJ 28:41, which has no parallel in Matthew for reasons that may become obvious. A literal translation of the German, with the redundant phrase italicized, reads:
"But Jmmanuel answered und spoke: 'Truly I say to you: You may succeed for a long time in accusing Judas Iscariot of treason in front of the people, but the truth will come out and be known by all in the whole world.'"
The actual English translation by Wild Flower Press omits the redundant "and spoke," which indicates how easily such an Aramaism can innocently be removed. Fortunately, however, neither Rashid nor Meier or his editorial assistant removed this and some other redundancies. (ls Meier, with no formal schooling past the fourth grade, supposed to have known about this and hoaxed in such an indication of an underlying ancient text?) Another such instance occurs at TJ 29:27 in the 1992 German version, which is TJ 29:33 in the 1978 version. Two more occur at TJ 31:12, 13 respectively, which read, literally:
"But Mary asked and spoke, 'Yet he was dead and lay here dead, how can he rise?' But the guardian angel answered and spoke, 'Why are you seeking someone alive among the dead?'"
Another instance occurs at TJ 31:52, and another at TJ 33:23 (1992 version; in TJ 33:21, 1978 version). Another occurs at TJ 35:20 (1992 version; in TJ 35:21, 1978 version). Still another occurs at TJ 23:33. Two more occur at TJ 29:45, 46 (1992 version; in TJ 29:50, 51 in the 1978 version). With a literal translation these two read:
"Slowly the screaming stopped, and a third time the governor asked and spoke: 'Which one of these two shall I release?' The people cried out and spoke, 'Free Barabbas!'"
Two more instances occur in the following two TJ verses, and another at TJ 30:6. Still another occurs at TJ 31:51. These are 14 instances that have been pointed out here; there may well be more.
A more distinctive type of Aramaism occurs in TJ 3:31, in the passage:
"When Jmmanuel had been baptized, he soon came out of the water of the Jordan, and behold, a metallic light dropped from the sky and descended steeply over the Jordan. Consequently they all fell on their faces and pressed them into the sand while a voice from the metallic light spoke, 'This is my beloved son …'"
The italicized expression in the original Aramaic means to bow down to, or cower before, some exalted person or object. In this case, however, the expression can be taken more literally than usual, because of the fear that a close-up UFO encounter instills in bewildered spectators.
A still different type of Aramaism occurs in the Sermon on the Mount at TJ 5:30, a verse not in Matthew. The verse, with a literal translation of the portion of the German exhibiting the Aramaism (in italics), reads:
"lf a thought causes you annoyance, eradicate it and ban it from your brain. It is better to destroy a thought that incites annoyance and not to bring the whole world of thought into an uprnar."
If Rashid had been concerned to render this into better German, he would have used the common German word "als" here, which means "than," instead of "and not." And indeed, in the English translation by Wild Flower Press "than" is used, thus removing the Aramaism. It turns out that the Aramaic language lacked the ability to express this comparative sense in the manner we are used to (see M. Black, An Ararnaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts, 3rd Ed., 1967, Oxford Univ. Press, p. 117), not having the direct equivalent to "than," and so other language was used to put across the intended thought.
These examples show some of the Aramaisms and evidence of ancient origins exhibited by the German TJ, in as conclusive a manner as is possible from indirect evidence, that the TJ is no hoax. Korff's contention to the contrary (p. 84) is seen to lack any substance.
Korff and the Hasenböl-Langenberg photographs
One of Meier's color photos from this series is among the most famous, the beautiful "sun-glint" photo showing a pair of golden rays from the setting sun reflecting off the beamship (Lee and Brit Eiders, UFO… Contact from the Pleiades, Vol. 2, p. 38), of which Korff (p. 205) shows a black-and-white version. ("Beamship" is what the Pleiadeans told Meier they informally called their craft.) The other reason l've selected this from among the photos Korff discusses is that in his first booklet attempting to debunk the Meier case (The Meier Incident: The Most Infamous Hoax in Ufology; 1981) he first suggested (Korff, 1981, p. 8, middle) that the photo was hoaxed by being a (small model) UFO in front of a real deciduous tree. But then on the same page he suggested (Korff, 1981, p. 8, lower) that it was hoaxed by a different method: overlaying the negative of a model UFO photo in front of a featureless background on top of a negative of a photo of scenic background, and combining the two images within an enlarger (double-print technique). It is even more astonishing, therefore, that in the same year Korff had instead suggested a third method by which Meier was supposed to have hoaxed the photo – by attaching a model UFO to a model tree (Korff, "The Billy Meier Hoax," Frontiers of Science, March-April, 1981, p. 31)! Thus it was of some interest to see if, some 15 years later, he had settled upon one particular method.
Korff says (p. 203) that he purchased prints of this photo series in 1991 from Meier's group for analysis, though, by his own admission elsewhere these are unknown generations (or copies) removed from Meier's original color slides. The Meier photo material Wendelle Stevens and his team utilized for their analyses, on the other hand, was 2nd-generation, with Meier's originals being the 1st generation. In early 1978 Stevens obtained permission from Meier to take some 40 of Meier's color slides to a photo processing shop in the city of Winterhur, Switzerland, with group member Bernadette Brand along to oversee their handling and to safeguard them. These 40 were selected because they appeared to be originals, often showed foreground or background features, were in good focus, and represented a variety of different sites. Internegatives were made from them , which Stevens still possesses.
These internegatives are 2nd generation, except as noted later for a few selected from one series (showing the Swiss jet making passes at the beamship at Schmarbuel-Maiwinkel); that series, Meier noted, came back from the photo developer's with left-right reversal, indicating to Stevens that someone had made emulsion-to-emulsion duplicates and kept the originals. This series was taken in April of 1976, some 15 months after his Pleiadean contacts commenced, by which time the Swiss government and perhaps others had taken notice and were trying to intercept his receipt of photos.
In addition to these 40 2nd-generation internegatives, Stevens a little later similarly had about a dozen positive-to-positive prints (color slide to positive print) made from further of Meier's originals. These were also 2nd generation. (The preceding information is from Stevens, personal correspondence of April 14 and May 15, 1995). Thus the analysis team under Stevens had the best possible photo material to analyze short of the originals themselves, which Meier had finally learned to retain close control over if he wished them not to disappear.
Stevens had the 2nd-generation internegative of the Hasenböhl-Langenberg sun-glint photo laser-scanned and enlarged. The resulting photo clearly showed a forked branch of a deciduous tree 48 meters away from the camera to pass in front of the side of the beamship to the viewer's far left. In the black-and-white reproduction of Stevens' Preliminary Investigation Report (p. 352), however, this is scarcely discernible, the contrast between the dark underside of the craft and the shaded tree branches having been very weak originally.
Korff, on the other hand, claims from certain computer image processing techniques applied to his print that the UFO was in front of the tree (Korff, p. 203). Thus of the three different methods of hoaxing he had earlier suggested for this one photograph, he has settled for the image being of a model UFO in front of a real tree. From the somewhat degraded quality of Korff's higher-generation print, the contrast between the tree branches and the underside of the craft was totally washed out. A negative or reversal of this print was then made in which the underside of the UFO craft appeared to be relatively light (Korff, Fig. 73) instead of dark. Then after that image had been enhanced so as to create a heavy line along certain edges of the UFO and of the tree's branches, the resulting image gives the impression to the unaware observer that any tree branches in front of the craft ought to have shown up against the apparently light background of the craft's underside. I find this to be a highly misleading analysis designed with only one end in mind – to produce the desired impression upon the naive reader.
In his Fig. 75 Korff presents an image of the same photo enhanced in some manner that displays a line segment off to one side and inclined 20° from the horizontal without either end being attached to anything, and never passing closer than a beamship diameter away from the craft. No such flaw was present in Stevens' 2nd-generation photo. It could not have represented a tethering line for suspending a model, as suggested by Korff, since there was nothing to hold up either end of the line segment despite the tension its linearity indicates it would have been under, no nodule on this line segment that might indicate a point of connection to a model-support tie line, and no indication of any such tie line. Perhaps for reasons like these, Korff allowed (p. 207) that it could have been a scratch on his film.
On p. 201 Korff says that Stevens is mistaken in mentioning that Meier had used up four rolls of 36-exposure film that day (Stevens, Preliminary Investigation Report, p. 343), since only 34 photos are listed in Meier's Photo Index (Verzeichnis) for March 29, 1976. However, this photo occasion also occurred long after government authorities had learned of Meier's continuing experiences and were therefore surreptitiously trying to tail him to his contact sites and also gain access to his original photos. It is naive to think that, with contacts of such an unprecedented nature occurring, this would not have happened, and that some of his film would not have been intercepted by undercover agents. In this case Stevens mentioned that two rolls were apparently so intercepted, although Meier allows that they might have been lost in processing. Korff fails to let his readers know about this, and what Stevens had learned about the frequent failure of Meier's rolls of developed film to be returned, though Korff was aware of this explanation. Quite possibly up to 38 more of Meier's photos from this series were lost due to having been loaned out to interested persons and not returned, unless Meier or Stevens were off by one roll in the number of rolls expended or intercepted, in which case two photos were subsequently lost. With so many photos on hand, Meier was not very careful with them at first; only later was a member of Meier's group assigned the task of trying to gather together all his photos, scattered around the house, and arrange them in some kind of semi-chronological order and number them, making use of Meier's log book he took with him on photo contacts.
This is an example of a Korff irrelevancy – trying to lull the reader into thinking that the photos are fakes because of a possible error in recollection by Meier or Stevens. The photos speak for themselves.
On p. 204 Korff charges, with respect to the sun-glint photo (there are three of them: Nos. 174, 175 and 164), that Meier had deliberately aimed his camera into the direction of the sun in order "to use its glare to help obscure any supportive structures or 'strings' that were used to suspend the model." This charge is without merit, however, since in his surviving 34 photos of this series, only these three show a piece of the sun next to, or near, the beamship. If Meier had been a hoaxer doing what Korff suggests, one would see the sun's glare nearby in the other photos as well. However, the beamship had proceeded towards Meier from the southwest, so that in the first 31 photos of the series the sun was off the right side of the photographs. And in the several hundred other beamship photos Meier took in other series, the sun is not in the picture.
The conclusion that the beamship image was not that of a model comes also from consideration of photo Nos. 152 and 153 of the same series, the first of which is shown on p. 36 of the Elders' Vol. II. There the beamship, smaller in angular size (i.e. farther away then), is seen through the multiple branches of a different tree, one much closer to the camera. The tree's twigs and branches, one of which cuts across one edge of the beamship in photo No. 152, are somewhat out of focus, suggesting a proximity to the camera of 2-4 meters, while the clear focus of the object in question indicates it had to have been considerably farther away. However, the tree's branches can be seen to have extended on upwards out of the top of the photograph, rendering it totally impractical for a hoaxer's accomplice to have tried to utilize a pole sufficiently long to reach up over the tree top to suspend a model UFO at a distance well beyond the tree's most distant branches.
Looking at the series of 34 photos overall, one may examine the beamship's image under a magnifying glass from its first appearance in the earliest photo when it was just a speck in the haze, occupying only 0.001% of the area of the photograph, to the sun-glint photo where it occupies 0.2% of the area, an increase by a factor of 200, and find no reason whatsoever to suspect that it was not exactly the same object in each photo. That is, there is no evidence to suggest that different-sized models were used. However, if some particular model supported by a suspension line attached to a long pole had been used, the pole would have had to be 14 times longer for use in the first photograph than in the sun-glint photograph. In the latter photograph the object, if a model, would have had to be at least some 12 feet away from the camera, judging from its good focus, requiring a support pole at least 14 feet in length. For the former photo a pole of length 200 feet would then have been needed!
In his 1995 book Korff claims that Meier used quasi-horizontal support lines to which a suspension line was attached and from which a model UFO supposedly dangled (pp. 197-200, 207). However, he never addressed the question of how Meier could do this and not have all his support apparatus be seen by the rural neighbors and passers-by. Each end of the quasi-horizontal line would need a suspension point, and in Korff's 1981 booklet it was suggested that several large tethered balloons were used for this. Such cumbersome equipment, plus the need for a storage location for it, would almost certainly have been noticed and come to the attention of Meier-case investigators and detractors, but such has never happened. Instead, the explanation that Meier received from Semjase -- that they normally kept their beamship craft invisible from all lines of sight except Meier's during his filming -- needs to be treated seriously.
None of the above photographic findings is surprising if Meier's ET contacts are treated as the reality they appear to be. Yet, apparently because he is unable to seriously consider this possibility, Korff has failed to look into, or report on, the above evidence validating the genuineness of this series of 34 beamship photos. I find his repeated omission of the evidence supporting the reality of Meier's ET contacts in his book to be just as serious a breach of competent investigative analysis as are his false claims, distortions and innuendo. The apparent genuineness of Meier's contact experiences, photos and movie film obviously adds support to the genuineness of the heretical Talmud of Jmmanuel, and both aspects together explain the intense fervor exhibited by detractors of the Meier case who have attempted to debunk it over the past 15 years.
(The Hasenböl photo series is available as a beautiful poster from FIGU)