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193 THE MYSTERY LINGERS complex personality than a simple country boy who had some unusual experiences in his pasture, as his followers would like us to believe. This strange man got entangled with the law at an early age, spent some time in jail, ran away to France, joined the Foreign Legion, escaped from the Legion in Africa, was a soldier of fortune, a sailor, a race car driver in Turkey; he lost an arm in a bus accident somewhere in the Middle East, found himself on a Greek island, where he fell in love and came back to Switzerland with his bride, only to find that entire fleets of Pleiadian spaceships were hovering regularly over his pasture: not exactly what you'd expect from the average Swiss farmer. It would be very naive indeed to take the whole story at face value. But that is exactly what many New Age believers are now doing. In the fall of 1989 my wife Janine and I traveled to the place where Billy Meier lived in the hills above Zurich. It was raining, and the fat, green grass had a luscious tone under the gray sky, the tone that Billy's pictures had indeed admirably captured. We had no illusions of actually meeting the great guru. Meier, we had been told, rarely came out of his poor retreat except to meet television crews. Indeed, the guest book we were presented with was covered with laudatory comments from media reporters who had come from the four corners of the world—many of them from Japan. What we did find was evidence that Billy Meier was far from a poor farmer. He was well cared for, at the center of a well-run organization that had its own land, a large and comfortable house, dozens of eager disciples tending the grounds, and its own dark blue flag of Semjase. There was even a satellite dish to catch the television shows from America, where the organization now has several centers for the dissem- ination of Pleiadian learning. We were very far indeed from the image of a humble laborer toiling away from sunup to sundown to feed his family. Billy Meier, who says he is no longer in regular physical contact with the Pleiadians, has been turned into a media celebrity with an array of disciples who screen visitors and a retinue of people who disseminate a kind of knowledge that tolerates neither doubt nor the most basic questioning. As for the Pleiades, the cluster of bright blue stars in the winter sky,