Billy Meier Has a DellaFavorite
Swiss-born Eduard Albert “Billy” Meier-Zafiriou aka Billy Meier claimed frequent contact with flying saucers and aliens, dating, he said, to 1942, when he was just five. The visitors came from the planet Erra, in the Plejares star system.
Their intentions were benevolent, and grounded in concern for undesirable qualities inherited by humans from a common ancestor. Meier went public with all of this in 1970. In the Adamski vein, he described the aliens he encountered as handsome Nordic types. As Meier’s celebrity grew in Europe during the 1970s, he wrote books and began a photo catalog where followers could buy his images. His earliest photographs of saucers and good-looking aliens generated some enthusiasm, so Meier added hundreds more as the years went by. Three fuzzy but particularly intriguing photos (catalog numbers 109–111) were offered in 1983. The images showed off a pair of beautiful young female aliens; Meier identified the blonde as Asket and the auburn-haired woman as Nera. Meier explained that the aliens had given their permission to be photographed while Meier was aboard their spaceship in 1975.
Asket’s heart-shaped face was dominated by a winsome smile and striking, wide-set blue eyes. She appeared human, although Meier urged buyers to note her elongated, attractively curved earlobes. Redheaded Nera was a somewhat livelier-looking type, with apple cheeks and enormous baby-doll eyes.
In 1998, French computer scientist Luc Burgun and an American debunker of UFOs, Kal K. Korff, announced that the Asket and Nera photos were fakes. Mexican chemical engineer and science writer Luis Ruiz Noguez helped to spread the news that Asket was an American dancer named Michelle DellaFave.
Nera was a dancer, too; her name was Susan Lund. When a surprised DellaFave was contacted by the Independent Investigations Group (a volunteer American organization dedicated to rational scientific thought), she confirmed that the women in Meier’s photos were of herself and Lund. The images had been snapped from a television screen when DellaFave and Lund were members of the Golddiggers, a perky singing-and-dancing troupe put together in 1968 as an eponymous summer replacement for The Dean Martin Show. (Lund was an original member; DellaFave joined in 1969.) When asked about her earlobes, DellaFave explained that during part of one season of The Golddiggers (“about 1971,” she said), she wore light blonde side curls that might, perhaps, resemble ear lobes. DellaFave identified Susan Lund, and surmised that Meier had snapped the pictures when Golddiggers reruns played in Europe.
Billy Meier offered at least two explanations for all this, and they are tortured.
He first claimed that he had indeed taken the photos from a television monitor— inside the spaceship. The ship’s magnetic field accounted for the shots’ less than sterling quality. When doubters continued to press, Meier explained that DellaFave and Lund were not the women he had photographed. The dancers had been inserted later by Men in Black, who wanted the faces of the alien women kept under wraps. Meier’s explanation does not seem to account for the longtime presence of DellaFave and Lund in the Meier catalog, but he had a story for that, too. On www.forgetomori.com, blogger Mori wrote, “[T]he aliens warned [Meier] of the switch but he then forgot about this warning. So he kept selling the forgeries until the photos were exposed in 1998, at which point Meier was able to quickly contact the aliens, be reminded of what he had forgotten, and publish those explanations.”
deception for nearly twenty-five years.