BILLY MEIER

‘UFO’ sighting by Billy Meier.

Afterimage by Oliver Griffin:

Last February I did a residency at the Andreas Züst Library in Switzerland. I found that most of the photographic records of UFOs in the country were taken by a Swiss farmer, Eduard 'Billy' Albert Meier, just outside Zurich in the seventies. The images are beautiful, and every time you look at one, it evokes the idea of what a UFO encounter should be, in the Hollywood sense—not as a horror story, but more as a captivating experience. It’s the kind of encounter that makes you want to believe in a truth beyond our world.

I first saw one of these images in the 1983 book UFO…Contact from the Pleiades by Brit Elders & Lee Elders and something about the composition, the landscape, and the idea of an object floating and observing caught my attention. The stories behind his ‘encounters’—which lasted for much of his life until the end of the seventies when the aliens supposedly stopped contacting him—fascinated me. By then, he had an international UFO religious organisation with followers in the US, Mexico, and Europe. Despite Meier’s fame, he was a recluse, never leaving Switzerland. His photography and filmmaking were extraordinary, and this particular image still haunts me. It feels so ordinary, as if you were on a form of transport, traveling through a familiar landscape, and in the background, you spot a UFO floating quietly.

There’s a crazy history behind Meier. He ran away from Switzerland, joined the Foreign Legion, escaped again, lost an arm in Turkey while riding a bus back to Switzerland, and eventually ended up with a farm where he shot everything. He then claimed to have communication with an alien race over five years, with instructions on where to spot UFOs. He used a specific Olympus 35 ECR camera— the one that required winding with your thumb with a wheel —because it was the only camera he could use. He would take his motorbike up the hill to shoot these photos. Ironically, one of his images was used for the infamous X-Files TV series poster. When you think of TV series, popular culture, and aliens, you probably think of the iconic X-Files image, and Meier’s photograph is the one featured in the back of Fox Mulder’s office. It became the popular cultural representation of what a UFO should look like.

What’s fascinating is that Meier, who didn’t seem to want much, kept taking these photographs of aliens. It was later revealed that he actually made these aliens himself, using various bits of scrap metal on his farm and polishing them up as models. Some of these models occasionally pop up on eBay, not for much money. There’s a whole typology of different alien crafts and there supposed capabilities.

From the very beginning of photography things have been altered, making people believe false narratives. For instance, many believe Communist Russia propaganda photography was full of people drinking champagne, but in reality, they were just sitting around empty tables. If you asked me to draw a photograph, it would probably look something like this. It encapsulates everything that photography stands for—and everything that's problematic about it. It’s about the idea of evidence, but photography is arguably one of the worst mediums for documenting an event.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series about that one image you see when you close your eyes, the one still lingering in your mind. We invite artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.