Billy Meier (born 1937) is a Swiss UFO contactee who claims he has been in communication with extraterrestrial beings known as the Plejaren since childhood. He gained international attention in the 1970s after publishing hundreds of UFO photographs, films, audio recordings, and detailed contact reports documenting his alleged encounters.
According to Meier, his first contact occurred when he was about five years old. Over the years, he claimed to have met extraterrestrials named Sfath, Asket, Semjase, and Ptaah, who shared information about spirituality, human evolution, future world events, and advanced technologies.
His case remains one of the most controversial in UFO history. Critics argue that several of his photographs resemble small suspended models rather than spacecraft, and investigations by skeptics concluded that much of the evidence could be explained as hoaxes or misrepresentations.
The famous "Wedding Cake UFO" photograph, for example, has been cited as potentially depicting a fabricated model, while Meier's former wife publicly claimed that some of the UFOs were created using household objects. Even respected UFO researchers such as Jacques Vallée and Stanton Friedman expressed doubts about the authenticity of the evidence.
Despite the controversy, Meier's photographs became some of the most widely circulated UFO images in the world, leaving a lasting impact on UFO culture and mythology. More than fifty years later, the debate continues: if even a small portion of his evidence is genuine, the implications would be extraordinary.