Steven Greer's 1990s private meetings

Steven Greer's 1990s private meetings

Date	Mid-1990s
Topics	Military encounters (topic), Government programs (topic)
People	Steven Greer, Bill Clinton
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 107
Year	1990 in UFO history
Timeline	1990 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	16

Through the 1990s Steven Greer, a Virginia emergency physician who founded CSETI in 1990 and the Disclosure Project in 1993, said he privately briefed senior figures in the Clinton administration, the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and Congress. He also said he met wealthy and well-connected people, all in an effort to bring about an official disclosure of what he believed the government knew about UFOs.^[2][3] His own account names Clinton's first CIA Director, James Woolsey, the Joint Staff's director of intelligence (J-2) and a serving director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). He said all of them turned out to have been "left out of the loop".^[3] A 2024 timeline submitted to Congress adds a mid-1990s gathering in a San Francisco salon, described in Greer's 2006 book Hidden Truth, Forbidden Knowledge.^[11][1] The meetings are known almost entirely from Greer's own writing and talks.^[2][3]

Greer and his organisations

• Early life. According to the Wikipedia account, Greer was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1955. He trained as a Transcendental Meditation teacher, took a biology degree from Appalachian State University in 1982, and earned his medical degree from East Tennessee State University in 1987.^[2]
• Medical career. He was licensed in Virginia in 1989 and worked as an emergency-room doctor until 1998, when he retired from medicine to concentrate on UFO work.^[2]
• CSETI. He set up the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in 1990 to pursue what it called "close encounters of the fifth kind": contact with extraterrestrials started by humans.^[2]
• The Disclosure Project. In 1993 he founded the Disclosure Project. It aimed to make public the government's supposed knowledge of UFOs, and of advanced energy and propulsion systems, and to win amnesty for whistleblowers who broke their secrecy oaths to talk about them.^[2]
• Television. In October 1994 he appeared in Larry King's TV special The UFO Coverup?.^[2]

Greer's account of the briefings

Greer's fullest written description is in the Disclosure Project Briefing Document, prepared for the project's May 2001 news conference.^[3][4]

• The 1993 start. In an "Important Editorial Notice", Greer wrote that he began in 1993 to identify first-hand military and government witnesses and other evidence for a public disclosure. From that year, he said, the group "spent considerable time and resources" briefing the Clinton administration, including CIA Director James Woolsey, senior military officials at the Pentagon and selected members of Congress.^[3]
• Who he briefed. In a comment attached to the Bentwaters testimony, Greer listed the people he said he had personally briefed. They were Clinton's staff, his first Director of Central Intelligence (Woolsey), senior members of Congress, and very senior Pentagon officers, including the J-2 for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a sitting DIA director.^[3]
• Kept in the dark. All of them, he wrote, had either been left out of the loop or been refused information when they asked. He compared this with Britain's Lord Hill-Norton, a five-star admiral whom Greer described as a former head of the Ministry of Defence. Greer said Hill-Norton had been deceived about the subject and never officially briefed on it.^[3]
• The military list. A recommendations section of the same document says that since the early 1990s the project's director and members had briefed the J-2, the DIA director, the Director of Central Intelligence and the director of the National Air Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson. All of them, it says, had plainly not been informed on the subject.^[3]
• Abroad. Elsewhere Greer wrote that within a few months of a first meeting in July 1993, he or members of his team had met very senior officials of the CIA, Congress, the Clinton administration, the United Nations, the Joint Chiefs and the British military. He said they told him the time had come for disclosure, but that they had no access to the data themselves.^[3]
• Need to know. In another essay he said that officials who asked questions were usually told nothing, or told they had no "need to know".^[3]

From these meetings, held in late 1993 and through 1994, 1995 and 1996, Greer drew what he called a "shocking truth". He came to believe that the UFO matter had been largely privatised, buried "10 levels deep black", and run outside the constitutional chain of command by a mix of covert operatives and private corporate interests.^[3]

The earlier version of this article said Greer described his meeting with Woolsey as a dinner in December 1993. The briefing document's text names Woolsey several times but does not give a date or setting for the meeting, and none of the other sources read here covers it.^[3]

Other reported encounters

The 2024 congressional timeline compiled by Michael Shellenberger records several more of Greer's claims from this period.^{[12][13][14][15]}

• Stubblebine, 1992. Greer said that at the TREAT IV conference in March 1992 he was pulled into a hotel room with Major General Albert Stubblebine and people "connected to covert programs". There he faced a "barrage" of questions about his right to bypass the military command and contact extraterrestrials himself. In Greer's telling, Stubblebine's assistant left to consult someone for about 45 minutes. Stubblebine then gave his permission and tried to recruit Greer with promises of money, power and access to technology.^[13] (See Greer meets Albert Stubblebine.)
• Rockefeller money, 1994. Jacques Vallée wrote in December 1994 that Laurance Rockefeller was funding two UFO projects. One of them was Greer's, which gathered testimony from government insiders and worked on communication with UFOs.^[14]
• The 1996 congressional list. On 30 August 1996, according to the timeline, CSETI gave members of Congress a list of government sites and private companies it believed were involved in UFO work. The sites ran from Edwards Air Force Base and Area 51 to Los Alamos and Sandia; the companies included Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop, E-Systems, EG&G, SAIC and Bechtel.^[15] (See CSETI site list for Congress.)
• Admiral Wilson. Greer said he gave an alleged National Reconnaissance Office document to Admiral Thomas Wilson, then the J-2 and later DIA director. According to Greer, Wilson recognised one of the entities listed as a program run by a contractor. When Wilson called the contractor, he was told he did not have a need to know. Greer said this set Wilson on a search for a UFO reverse-engineering program held by an aerospace company outside government oversight.^[12]

The San Francisco salon

The timeline dates this episode to the mid-1990s and cites page 211 of Hidden Truth, Forbidden Knowledge.^[11]

• The guests. Greer described a salon in San Francisco's Pacific Heights neighbourhood. Those present included Steven Bechtel of the Bechtel Corporation, the oil billionaire Gordon Getty, the chairman of AT&T and a former head of SRI International.^[11]
• DARPA money. According to Greer, the SRI executive told him that funds from DARPA, the Pentagon's research agency, had been channelled into an operation connected with UFOs, but that he himself could not get access to it.^[11]
• Nothing more. The guests are named only in Greer's account as summarised in the timeline. The sources read here give no response from any of them.^[11]

The Internet Archive's description of the book says it draws on years of high-level meetings with over 450 military and government insiders and whistleblowers. It also mentions briefings with Woolsey, members of the US Senate and senior UN officials, alongside Greer's own contact experiences.^[1] The 2013 documentary Sirius, which Greer co-produced, covers the book.^[2] Other episodes from the same chapters of the book appear in the timeline under 2006. They include an E-Systems executive's account of black-budget reverse engineering and a Bell Labs witness who described shelved "free energy" devices.^[16] (See E-Systems reverse-engineering claim.)

Washington briefings, 1995–1997

• The 1995 letter. According to the briefing document, a number of witnesses met at a "witnesses' summit" in the summer of 1995. They signed a letter to President Clinton asking him to release them from their secrecy restrictions. A special assistant to the President acknowledged receiving it, but Greer said no action followed, even as of 2001.^[3] The document also cites transcripts of closed witness meetings held in June 1995 and April 1997.^[3]
• April 1997. In April 1997 more than a dozen government and military witnesses were brought to Washington to brief members of Congress, Pentagon officials and others. One transcript the document cites is dated 9 April 1997.^[3] An editorial note says the briefings were also attended by White House staff, and that it was "disconcerting" to see how many senior officials had been kept in the dark.^[3]
• Hearings refused. The group asked specifically for open congressional hearings. "None were forthcoming", Greer wrote. Another part of the document says no one in Congress was willing to call for them at the time.^[3]
• What witnesses recalled. Michael W. Smith, a former Air Force air traffic controller, said he was "very nervous" when Greer brought him to the congressional briefing. He was struck by the roughly 12 other witnesses there, whose stories made his seem tame.^[3][7] NASA employee Donna Hare said that at the 1997 briefings she likened the subject to sex: everyone knew about it, but nobody talked about it in mixed company.^[3]

"Privatizing" disclosure, 1998–2001

After the hearings failed to materialise, Greer wrote, the group set out in 1998 to "privatize" disclosure by filming witnesses itself.^[3]

• Funding. They estimated they would need $2 million to $4 million to videotape, edit and organise more than 100 witnesses worldwide. By August 2000 they had raised only about 5 per cent of that, but decided to go ahead anyway with what they called the Witness Archive Project.^[3]
• Filming. From August to December 2000, Greer and a few volunteers travelled to interview witnesses on broadcast-quality digital video.^[3]
• Editing. From late December 2000, Greer edited more than 120 hours of tape at home on a dual-processor Macintosh. He cut it to 33 hours of "select" and 18 hours of "super-select" testimony, about 1,200 pages of transcript, which he edited into readable form in March and early April 2001.^[3]
• A warning. He warned that the transcripts probably contained errors, especially in names spelled by ear. Of the 18-hour days, he wrote: "And I thought the Emergency Department was tough!"^[3]

The May 2001 news conference

The effort ended in the Disclosure Project's news conference at the National Press Club in Washington on 9 May 2001.^[2][4]

• The announcement. The advance notice promised more than twenty military, intelligence, government, corporate and scientific witnesses. It said several hundred witnesses had been identified, over 100 videotaped and 70 transcribed. The group was calling for open congressional hearings, a presidential order protecting witnesses, and a ban on weapons in space.^[7]
• The day. Patrick Gross's account says the event lasted two and a half hours.^[6] ABC News reported about 20 former government workers and quoted Greer: "These testimonies establish once and for all that we are not alone".^[5]
• Greer's remarks. Greer told reporters he had seen "grown men weep" in the Pentagon and in Congress over the subject. He handed out a 492-page briefing document and a 95-page executive summary.^[4]
• Coverage. A video of the event is listed among this article's sources; its page could not be viewed without an account.^[8] Writing afterwards, the futurist Jonathan Kolber complained of the media's "deafening silence": the major outlets attended, he said, but few reported it and none investigated the witnesses' claims.^[9]

Assessment

• One witness. The meetings are known mainly from Greer's own books, talks and the briefing document. No account by Woolsey, Wilson or the other officials, and no record of the 1997 congressional sessions, is cited in the sources read here.^[2][3][11]
• Leslie Kean. The journalist Leslie Kean had worked with Greer and watched the 2001 event uneasily. She later said some speakers made "outrageous, grandiose claims", and that she knew then she had to walk away.^[4]
• No hearings. The History News Network piece says the media covered the event "with frolicsome derision", and that Congress did not hold the hearings Greer wanted.^[4]
• Later films. Critics have dismissed Greer's later documentaries. Reviewing the 2020 film Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind in Variety, Owen Gleiberman called it "fantasy propaganda".^[2] Sirius presented the Atacama skeleton as possibly alien, but genetic tests showed it was human.^[2]

People and topics

• Steven Greer — Physician who founded CSETI and the Disclosure Project.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• CSETI — The organization founded by Steven Greer in 1990.
• Disclosure Project — Steven Greer's campaign for UFO disclosure, best known for its May 2001 press conference.
• Disclosure — The official release of government information about UFOs.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Bill Clinton — 42nd U.S. president, lobbied about UFO files by Laurance Rockefeller.
• Central Intelligence Agency — The U.S. foreign intelligence agency, which has followed UFO reports since the 1940s.

On the Timeline

• AGARDograph 313 and gyroscopic drives (March 1990) — A NATO aerospace study discusses a gyroscopic device said to counteract gravity.
• SAIC electromagnetic-gravity coupling study (1990) (August 1990) — An SAIC study tests whether electromagnetism and gravity can be coupled for space propulsion.

See every 1990 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Steven M. Greer”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.