Eduard Albert "Billy" Meier is a Swiss contactee whose photographs and films of "beamships" over the Swiss countryside made him one of the most famous and most disputed figures in UFO history. He says he has been in contact since childhood with extraterrestrials, above all the Plejaren, a humanlike people he links to the Pleiades star cluster. Meier and his followers maintain that the material is genuine; scientists, skeptics and most ufologists regard the case as a hoax.

Meier was born on February 3, 1937, in Bülach, in the canton of Zürich. He left school early, and in 1965 he lost his left arm in a bus accident in Turkey. He later married Kalliope Zafiriou, a Greek woman. By his account, his contacts began in 1942, when he was five, with an elderly man named Sfath, continued with a woman named Asket, and resumed on January 28, 1975, with Semjase, whom he describes as Sfath's granddaughter, followed by a Plejaren man named Ptaah. In the late 1970s he founded FIGU, a society for his teachings, based at Schmidrüti in Switzerland. His writings present him as a prophet in a line of reincarnations that he says runs from Enoch through Jesus and Muhammad.

The photographs drew foreign investigators. Retired Air Force lieutenant colonel Wendelle Stevens brought in the investigator Lee Elders, and both men later appeared in the 1987 documentary Contact, which presented Meier's story without skeptical voices. In a 1989 report for KLAS-TV, George Knapp noted that Meier had produced more than 800 photographs and that Elders, after five years of inquiry, said he had yet to find evidence of a hoax. One Meier image, used without clearance, became the backdrop of the "I Want to Believe" poster in The X-Files and was replaced in the show's fourth season after an intellectual property lawsuit.

Critics found models instead of spacecraft. Meier told the journalist Gary Kinder, author of Light Years (1987), that he had used models to recreate scenes after his wife showed him photos of unfinished ones. In 1997 his former wife Kalliope said the craft were models made from household items such as trash can lids and carpet tacks, and the pictures he offered of the women Asket and Nera were identified as Michelle DellaFave and Susan Lund of the Golddiggers, a troupe on The Dean Martin Show. The Independent Investigations Group matched the base of his "wedding cake" craft to a garbage can lid, which the neurologist Steven Novella called an "uncanny" resemblance; Meier's own Contact Report 254 has Ptaah describing receptacle covers that strikingly resemble the ship's underside. KLAS also reported that MUFON considered the case a hoax, largely because Meier would not cooperate.

Meier remains a fixture of 2026 UFO discussion. Michael Horn, who describes himself as Meier's authorized American media representative, presented the case on Area52's Debriefed podcast in June, and online threads repeatedly set the 1975 beamship photographs beside the craft Bob Lazar has described. Online efforts to trace the details of popular "Pleiadian" alien profiles, such as a home world near the star Taygeta, lead back to Meier's 1975 contact claims, which makes him the best-known source of the Pleiadian figure in modern UFO culture.