Denise McKenzie
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 👤 Person
Contents 6
| Type | Person |
|---|---|
| On the Timeline | 1 event, 1996 |
Denise McKenzie is a former employee of the defense contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in San Diego. She gave testimony to Steven Greer's Disclosure Project.[4] Her testimony, dated March 2001 and published in the project's Briefing Document that spring, describes contract files worth "millions of dollars" that showed almost no activity. She suspected they were a "front" for hiding money.[4] Greer presented her account as an illustration of how money for secret UFO-related projects is hidden in dummy contracts. The UFO link, however, comes from his commentary rather than from her own statements as published.[4] Her claims have not been independently confirmed.[1][3]
Her testimony
The Briefing Document introduces McKenzie as having worked for SAIC in San Diego, "a large defense contractor".[4] In the course of her work, it says, she realised that "millions upon millions of dollars" in contracts had been awarded to the company with almost no visible activity behind them.[4] Her account, as published, covers the following:[4]
- Empty files. When she opened the contract files, some several years old, she found only two or three form letters, backdated and all saying the work was being done.
- No documentation. There was "nothing to back it up". Though she worked in a military division with access to all the files, there was no timeline or documentation for the projects.
- An unreal workplace. She sat in "a very plush, very expensive building" with nothing to do. "I don't even sharpen pencils," she said, and "nothing seems real around here."
- A front. She concluded the company was getting "a lot of money for doing nothing" and did not know where the money went. "It's like a front, a front for something," she said, a way "to just hide funds or push funds through".
- Private contracting. SAIC, she argued, could do any research it wanted "under the guise of anything". She described it as a conglomerate of many companies that reported only to its customers, with everything "kept in-house".
The introduction adds that "a pattern of sexual harassment began" after she raised the matter with a supervisor.[4] Greer also refers to an odd detail in her account: her recruiter and supervisor had a different first name and was said to have died years before.[4]
The earlier version of this article said McKenzie "learned of UFO-related work being done by the company, including research projects that were kept highly secret". In the published excerpts she speaks of unexplained contracts and hidden funds but does not mention UFOs. The UFO interpretation is Greer's.[4] The earlier version also said her account was "recorded in the Disclosure Project's interviews in the 1990s". The Briefing Document dates her testimony to March 2001.[4]
Greer's commentary
Greer placed McKenzie's testimony in a section titled "Testimony that explains the secrecy". He said he shared it to show how unacknowledged special access projects hide money in dummy projects, while the real money goes to "super-secret projects" not disclosed to Congress, the president or the public. He said she was not the only witness who had described such schemes.[4] His commentary went further:[4]
- D'Amato. In 1994 Dick D'Amato, senior counsel to the Senate Appropriations Committee under Senator Byrd, had told him that $40–80 billion was going into projects they could not penetrate, even with top-secret clearance and a Senate subpoena. In Greer's telling, D'Amato was sure some of the money was going into UFO-related projects.
- Harassment. The "weird atmosphere and sexual abuse" McKenzie described was, he said, "common, not rare" in such operations. So too were people who seemed to vanish and reappear under different names.
- SAIC. He called the company "one of the crown jewels of the super-secret, black project world" and said it was connected to UFO technologies and covert funding.
- Inman. He noted that former NSA director Admiral Bobby Inman was "heavily involved" with SAIC. In 1994 he had asked Senator Barry Goldwater to seek Inman's cooperation, and Inman rebuffed him.
The Briefing Document also lists SAIC among the corporations Greer's witnesses linked to secret projects, alongside Rockwell International, Booz Allen Hamilton, MITRE and Bechtel.[4] Elsewhere in the document another witness refers to "Bobby Inman and his little oversight group out there in California [SAIC]".[4] These are claims made within the Disclosure Project's materials. None of the sources read here independently documents UFO-related work at SAIC.[4]
The Disclosure Project event
The Briefing Document, 492 pages long, was released when Greer presented about twenty witnesses at the National Press Club in Washington on 9 May 2001. He called for congressional hearings and immunity for witnesses bound by security oaths.[3][2] The project said it had identified several hundred witnesses, of whom 70 had been transcribed into edited testimony.[2] McKenzie appears in the document's list of witnesses.[4] Coverage of the event was largely sceptical:[1][3]
- ABC News quoted space consultant James Oberg's view that Greer had long promoted a "bizarre theory" of a worldwide cabal using UFO technology.
- Leslie Kean. The journalist, who had worked with Greer, said later that some speakers made "outrageous, grandiose claims". The press responded with derision, and Congress held no hearings.
Assessment
McKenzie's testimony concerns her own observations of contract files and workplace conduct. Her suspicion of hidden funding is her interpretation of what she saw, and its connection to UFOs rests on Greer's commentary.[4] The earlier version of this article said her account "has not been confirmed by other sources", which remains the case in the sources read here. It also said SAIC had not commented on such claims. Any response from SAIC is not covered in the sources read here.
On the UAP Timeline
- Denise McKenzie's SAIC account (30 August 1996) — A former SAIC employee says she learned of UAP-related work there.
References
- 'Group calls for disclosure of UFO info' — ABC News (2001) · abcnews.go.com · archived copy
- Greer's Disclosure Project — Patrick Gross · ufology.patrickgross.org · archived copy
- A historian on the Disclosure Project — History News Network · historynewsnetwork.org · archived copy
- Disclosure Project briefing document (2001, PDF) — Internet Archive · archive.org · archived copy
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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