The Pleiades are a real star cluster in the constellation Taurus, catalogued as M45 and known in many cultures as the Seven Sisters; they sit about 444 light-years from Earth and are only around 100 million years old. The "Pleiadians" are something different: human-like beings from that cluster described by twentieth-century contactees and channelers, beginning with the Swiss farmer Billy Meier in 1975, and they belong to belief and spiritual practice rather than to astronomy.
The distinction matters because the two are often blended. The Seven Sisters is one of the most widely shared star stories on Earth, told in ancient Greece, across Aboriginal Australia, in Japan, on the Great Plains and in the Maya world, and researchers still debate why the versions are so similar. The Pleiadian contact claims are a modern layer on top of that ancient attention. Separating what astronomers measure, what the myths say and what contactees report is the only fair way to weigh any of it, including the reading Billy Carson brings.
Watch the video
What are the Pleiades in astronomy?
The Pleiades are an open star cluster: a loose family of stars that formed together from the same cloud of gas and are still travelling through space as a group. It holds around 1,000 members, but to the naked eye it shows as a small, misty dipper of six or seven stars. Charles Messier listed it as the 45th object in his eighteenth-century catalogue, hence M45.
Its distance was briefly controversial: the Hipparcos satellite's data put it at about 385 light-years, closer than other methods suggested. Later work, including Hubble measurements and the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, settled on about 136 parsecs, close to 444 light-years.
The cluster is young by cosmic standards. Age estimates run from about 75 million to 150 million years; many sources round to 100 million, and several recent studies favour about 125 million. The brightest member is Alcyone; the other named stars are Atlas, Electra, Maia, Merope, Taygeta, Pleione, Celaeno and Asterope. The blue haze in long-exposure photographs is a reflection nebula, dust the cluster is passing through, not leftover material from its birth.
Why are they called the Seven Sisters?
The name comes most directly from Greek myth, where the Pleiades were seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and the sea nymph Pleione. In the best-known version, the hunter Orion pursued the sisters, and Zeus turned them first into doves and then into stars. Orion still appears to chase them across the winter sky, rising behind them in the east. The Pleiades were already practical markers in archaic Greece: Hesiod's Works and Days tells farmers to begin the harvest when the Pleiades rise and to plough when they set, and Homer names them in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ovid and Hyginus later filled in the family tree.
The Greeks also had a problem to explain. Most people see six stars, not seven, so the myth needed a missing sister. One account says Merope, the youngest, married the mortal Sisyphus and faded from shame; another says Electra hid her face in grief after the fall of Troy. This "lost Pleiad" is the thread that ties the Greek story to many others around the world.
How do other cultures tell the Seven Sisters story?
The parallels are close enough that astronomers and anthropologists treat them as a genuine puzzle. A few of the best documented:
- Aboriginal Australia. The Seven Sisters songline crosses the Western and Central Deserts. The Martu people call the sisters Minyipuru and their pursuer Yurla; the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara people call them Kungkarangkalpa, chased by a man named Wati Nyiru. Elders and artists from these communities worked with the National Museum of Australia on the 2017–2018 exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters. Several Aboriginal versions say one sister was caught, hidden or killed, echoing the Greek lost Pleiad, and the pursuer is often linked to Orion.
- Japan. The cluster is called Subaru, from a word meaning to gather or cluster together. The carmaker took its name and its six-star logo from it.
- The Great Plains. The Lakota call the cluster Wicincala Sakowin, the Seven Little Girls, placed in the sky by the hero Fallen Star. The National Park Service records that the Kiowa and many other nations tell how seven girls fleeing a bear climbed a rock that rose into the sky, the rock becoming Devils Tower (Mato Tipila, "Bear's Lodge," to the Lakota) and the girls becoming the Pleiades.
- The Maya world. In Yucatec Maya the cluster is still called tzab, the rattlesnake's rattle. The scholar Susan Milbrath has argued that the rattle stands for the Pleiades in the Maya codices, tied to the cluster's spring disappearance and dawn return, a signal for planting.
- Bronze Age Europe. The Nebra sky disc, found in 1999 near Nebra in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, and dated to roughly 1800–1600 BCE, shows a tight group of seven gold dots widely interpreted as the Pleiades. UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World Register in 2013.
Could the Seven Sisters be humanity's oldest story?
That is the hypothesis of astronomer Ray Norris and his son Barnaby Norris in "Why Are There Seven Sisters?", published in the Springer volume Advancing Cultural Astronomy in 2021. They start from two observations: Seven Sisters stories with a lost or hidden sister appear in European, African, Asian, Indonesian, Native American and Aboriginal Australian cultures, and most people today can see only six bright stars.
Their proposed explanation is the motion of the stars themselves. Pleione now sits so close to Atlas that the two blur into one point to the naked eye. Running the stars' measured motions backwards about 100,000 years, the Norrises calculate that Pleione would have stood further from Atlas and been easier to pick out, giving early observers seven distinct stars. Because modern humans descend from populations that lived in Africa before the dispersals of roughly 100,000 years ago, the authors suggest the core story may have travelled with those migrations, with the "lost" sister added as the seventh star seemed to fade.
The authors present this as a hypothesis, and it cannot be proven. Independent invention is a strong alternative: a bright, compact star group that vanishes and returns with the seasons invites similar stories wherever people farm or navigate by the sky. It is serious scholarship, but a proposal rather than a settled result.
Who are the Pleiadians, and where did the idea come from?
The Pleiadians are human-like extraterrestrials said to come from planets in or near the Pleiades, and the idea is modern. Its best-known source is Eduard Albert "Billy" Meier, born in Switzerland in 1937, who said that on 28 January 1975 he began a long series of meetings with a woman named Semjase who had travelled from the Pleiades. He produced hundreds of photographs and some film of what he called "beamships," along with extensive "contact notes," and his followers organised as FIGU, a study group based in Switzerland.
The photographs are the main evidence, and they are widely considered hoaxed. Investigator Kal K. Korff argued that the craft were small models, and some of Meier's supposed space photographs were shown to match published NASA images. Pictures of two women Meier identified as extraterrestrials, Asket and Nera, were found to show performers from the American dance troupe the Golddiggers. Meier's former wife Kalliope later said the spaceship photos showed models built from household objects such as trash can lids. Even Gary Kinder's sympathetic 1987 book Light Years reports that Meier acknowledged using models to recreate scenes.
A second, separate stream came through channeling rather than physical contact. Barbara Marciniak's Bringers of the Dawn: Teachings from the Pleiadians (Bear & Company, 1992) presents material she says was channelled from a collective of Pleiadian beings, framed as guidance for humanity's spiritual awakening. It belongs with other channelled texts such as the Law of One, or Ra Material, part of a broader movement that receives cosmic teaching in trance.
What is a starseed?
A starseed, in contemporary spiritual culture, is a person who believes their soul originated on another world or star system before incarnating on Earth, often to help humanity through a period of change. Pleiadian starseeds are among the most commonly named types, alongside those linked to Sirius, Arcturus and Orion.
The idea is best understood as a spiritual identity. It draws on the contactee and channeling literature rather than physical evidence, and people hold it in different ways, from a literal belief in lives elsewhere to a metaphor for feeling connected to the cosmos. It cannot be tested, which is worth stating plainly without dismissing the people for whom it matters.
What does astronomy say about life in the Pleiades?
Astronomy's main objection is time. The Pleiades are roughly 100 million years old, while Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and the earliest widely accepted evidence of life here appears more than a billion years after the planet formed. Complex animal life took billions of years more. Any planets around Pleiades stars would be far too young, by every known model, for intelligent life to have evolved on them.
The brightest members are also hot, massive blue stars that burn quickly and will not last billions of years. Some believers answer that Pleiadians are colonists from elsewhere or exist at a non-physical level, claims outside what telescopes can check. What astronomy can say is that biology evolving from scratch on planets in a cluster this young is not plausible under anything currently known.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson approaches the Pleiades through the myths rather than through the modern contactee literature. On a recent episode of the 4biddenknowledge Podcast, Seven Sisters Mystery Revealed: Aboriginal Pleiades Secrets, he hosted researchers Evan and Stephen Strong and the Aboriginal elder Trudy, who shared her family's songline and explained that the Seven Sisters is a story known across the whole continent rather than tied to one region. Carson connected that Aboriginal lore with Pleiades traditions in Egyptian, Greek, Sumerian and Native American cultures and pointed to the detail that runs through them: only six of the seven stars are visible to the naked eye.
Carson reads that worldwide consistency as a possible memory of contact, the idea that peoples separated by oceans and millennia are remembering something that happened rather than inventing the same story independently. It is his interpretation, and it sits within the broader frame of ancient astronaut theory that also shapes his work on the Anunnaki and the Sumerian texts. Mainstream scholars explain the same pattern differently, either through a very old shared story, as the Norrises propose, or through independent invention prompted by a conspicuous star group. Readers can hold the three explanations side by side and compare them with similar debates, such as the question of what the Dogon knew about Sirius.
Watch, read and go deeper
The full conversation with Trudy and the Strong brothers is on the podcast episode page, and Carson's longer explorations of ancient contact and unexplained history stream on Beyond the Known on 4BK TV. For more on cosmic consciousness, channelled teachings and the starseed idea, the Consciousness topic hub collects related articles in one place.
Frequently asked questions
How far away are the Pleiades?
The Pleiades are about 444 light-years from Earth, or roughly 136 parsecs, based on measurements from the Gaia mission. An earlier Hipparcos estimate of about 385 light-years was later corrected.
How many stars are in the Pleiades?
The cluster contains roughly 1,000 stars, most of them too faint to see without a telescope. Most people see six with the naked eye; under very dark skies observers can count a dozen or more.
Who first claimed contact with Pleiadians?
The Swiss contactee Billy Meier is the best-known early source, saying he first met a Pleiadian woman named Semjase on 28 January 1975. His photographs of spacecraft are widely regarded as hoaxes made with models. Barbara Marciniak's channelled book Bringers of the Dawn (1992) later spread a different, spiritual version of the Pleiadian idea.
Why do so many cultures see seven sisters when only six stars are visible?
No one knows for certain. Ray and Barnaby Norris have proposed that the story is about 100,000 years old and dates from a time when the star Pleione stood far enough from Atlas to be seen separately. Others argue that similar stories arose independently, because a bright, compact star group that vanishes and returns with the seasons naturally invites them.
Could there be life on planets in the Pleiades?
Astronomers consider evolved life there very unlikely. The cluster is only about 100 million years old, while life on Earth took more than a billion years to appear and billions more to become complex. Believers in Pleiadians sometimes answer that the beings are colonists or non-physical, but those claims cannot be tested.
Sources and further reading
- Ray P. Norris and Barnaby R. M. Norris, "Why Are There Seven Sisters?", in Advancing Cultural Astronomy (Springer, 2021)
- Hesiod, Works and Days, and Ovid, Metamorphoses, for the classical Pleiades
- National Museum of Australia, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters (exhibition and catalogue, 2017–2018)
- Susan Milbrath, Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars (University of Texas Press, 1999)
- Gary Kinder, Light Years: An Investigation into the Extraterrestrial Experiences of Eduard Meier (1987)
- Kal K. Korff, Spaceships of the Pleiades: The Billy Meier Story (Prometheus Books)
- Barbara Marciniak, Bringers of the Dawn: Teachings from the Pleiadians (Bear & Company, 1992)
- Gaia Collaboration and the European Space Agency's Gaia data releases, for the cluster's distance
