Beamship photo tests

Also the photo images of the beamships went through rigorous tests. In the book Auf den Tiefen des Weltenraums…Kontakte mid den Plejadiern/Pejaren (1997) Meier printed an article by Michael Hesemann originally published in MAGAZIN 2000, Nr. 100, Düsseldorf/Juni 1994. 

In this article test results of the photos are also brought up. Conclusion: They show full sized 7 meter objects, not models.  

So he starts with writing that when Stevens returned to Switzerland in March 1978, he did not come alone. He brought with him three professional private investigators, friends of his and hard-nosed skeptics who were convinced that “by the end of the week, they would know if something was fishy about the whole thing.” But Meier's disarming openness impressed them, and his witnesses were anything but uncritical believers. 

Among them were a school principal (Moosbrugger) and two teachers, a graphic designer and a computer programmer, as well as a large number of down-to-earth Swiss craftsmen and workers. Detectives Britt and Lee Elders and Tom Welch dispelled any remaining doubts with a lie detector test involving Meier and some of his eyewitnesses. Everyone passed the test and appeared to be telling the truth. 

Impressed and with 300 photos in their suitcase, Stevens and his investigation team returned to America a few weeks later. Now, the existing evidence had to be examined scientifically. They first turned to the company 'Design Technology,' a photo-optical laboratory in San Diego, which was under contract with the US Navy and well-known private firms. The head of the lab, physicist Neil Davis, examined the photo provided by Stevens under a microscope, scanned it with a microdensitometer, and checked for the possibility of a double exposure—detectable by heterogeneous film grain and different lighting conditions on the object and in the landscape—or the use of a model. His conclusion: “Upon examining the paper image, I could find nothing that would lead me to believe that the object was anything other than a large object photographed at some distance from the camera" 

But even that was not enough for the team. In Phoenix, Arizona, they got in touch with Jim Dilettoso, a young computer animation expert whose examination of the Shroud of Turin – said to bear the imprint of the crucified Christ – had already made headlines and who was now working on assignments for the US space agency NASA. In the presence of Stevens, Dilettoso presented four Meier images to NASA employee Dr. Robert Nathan at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the U.S. space agency in Pasadena. Nathan had developed the computer program that NASA used to analyze images from U.S. space probes. 

But instead of examining the images himself, Nathan took him to Bob Post, head of the JPL photo lab, where every image of a planet ever released by NASA had been developed. For two hours, Post ran them through every analysis program he had on his computer, then he came back, explained Stevens and Dilettoso: "Whatever these images are, they're damn good... From a photographic standpoint. There's no evidence of tampering. That amazed me. They look like real photos. I thought, ‘Gosh, if these are real,, then that's quite something!’ 

Even the astronomy professor Dr. Michael Malin, who specializes in image analysis techniques and developed the camera for JPL on the unfortunately lost Mars probe 'Mars Observer,' was surprised to find no evidence of a hoax when he ran it through Dilettoso’s $50,000 computer equipment in his lab. "I zoomed in on the edges of the object and the landscape and compared them," he later explained to the writer Gary Kinder. "The edges showed all the characteristics you would expect from a distant, large object. As far as I could see, I can say the thing was not a photographic hoax," Malin said, "of course, it could still be a 7-meter model being held up by a helicopter on four thin nylon threads. 

Reference: 

Auf den Tiefen des Weltenraums…Kontakte mit den Plejadiern/Pejaren (1997)