Debunking Billy Meier's Pleiadian Beamships, part 4 - The 'Wedding Cake' Craft (WC Craft)
The first video that can be found below represents the first effort I made to remake something of the Billy Meier case. Michael Horn had been advertising the Meier case like nothing I'd seen before during 2009 so I challenged him. He came back with his own challenge to me by saying "Get a dustbin lid and have a go!" A short while later on youtube he left a message that suggested I wouldn't bother because nobody had bothered before. Jeff Ritzmann did have a go at building the WCUFO but because he was simply making a point that christmas balls can be glued to a plastic surface he didn't go all the way with it and use the same type of lid (made by Harcostar Ltd). Michael Horn has since used Jeff's attempt as the standard of comparisons with the Meier case.
The other person who had a go before me was Tony Wharton who made a great effort to replicate the essence of the meier films and succeeded. Of course because they don't look almost exactly like the originals Michael Horn claims they are useless as comparisons when they're not. It doesn't sway the people who love detail though so I thought it would be worth having a go. It took a couple of days to work out exactly how to do it but it is basic in its design really. It's exactly the same as the "Hubcap UFO" in that there's a top part which needs the inner wiring to keep it in line and tight together with the base. The inner wiring is what allows you to suspend it. The rest just glues onto the surface and makes it look "interesting."
It's made from 46 christmas balls at 30mm width but because I made it a few months before christmas I had trouble, even online, getting the balls. I ended up with black plastic ones instead of glass silver ones and it meant they had to be sprayed chrome. Unfortunately chrome spray isn't as clear in its finish as silver glass so there is a slight discrepency between the way it looks on 35mm film. The rest is shelf pins and the eyelets for them, standard 1cm eyelets for the base, 18mm curtain rings, part of a cooking pot rim which I mimicked with the 11" rim of a splatter screen normally used over frying pans to stop the fat splashing out, pin caps for the outer rim, a couple of 8" biscuit tin lids, a couple of bowls and plastic lids cut out before spraying chrome, a flower pot tray at the top and a screw-in hook.
The main hull is a Harcostar container lid at 17" width, so it's a fair size and accounts for why Meier didn't suspend this one between trees across a field. It's so heavy for that technique it won't go up very high making outside picture taking difficult. The main method for this baby then is to hook it onto a pole and this accounts for all but 4 of the WCUFO pictures, 3 of which have the model suspended right in front of the camera. The only "odd" one out in all 63 of the original images is the one between the tree tops.
In the picture there's a tree top taking up most of the frame with the WCUFO at the bottom looking as though it's moving from one tree top to the next. To recreate it you only need to know that fishing line doesn't show up on film at that kind of range especially if you're using the same camera as Meier. I didn't have the Olympus at the time so used a simple 80's canon camera as well as a decent Practika camera with a manual zoom for comparison. You just tie fishing line around one small tree trunk, take it to the next trunk and bring it back around to the start giving two parallel lines that go underneath the model, either side of the bulky central hub. It just sits there happily.
Bizarrely, and this really is bizarre, the Meier group at FIGU actually published a picture of that very tree top standing up against a tractor, giving away it's actual size and scale. This means you can use that scale to determine how big the WCUFO really is from the frame because it's right behind the tree top. It confirms it as about 17" wide. The picture was published as part of a "story" that the WCUFO had caused the tree top to break and fall and when taking the picture Meier says he was standing on the hull of another disc in the tree tops, and pink elephants are actually real! Really they are!
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