It used to be you could laugh about UFOs and extraterrestrials, brushing them off as science fiction. Space invaders. Martian attacks. Even E.T. phoning home. But no one’s laughing now that new evidence is being brought forward to substantiate not only the existence of extraterrestrials, but that a covert, international effort has been in place for the past 50 years to keep the subject under wraps.
Witnesses are now willing to step forward-should the public exert enough muscle to prompt Congress to hold open hearings on the issue-to testify that technology reverse engineered from extraterrestrial space craft has been produced and is now fully operational. Using zero point energy, unidentified groups of people have reproduced alien space craft and have flown them in our airspace. This technology produces no pollution and is limitless. If used for peaceful means, it would effectively eliminate our global environmental crisis forever.
The problem is, the technology is being kept from our elected government and the public at large. As disclosed recently in a New York Post article by Deborah Orin, former Justice Department official Webb Hubbell, a friend of President Clinton, revealed in his new book Friends in High Places that he was effectively stonewalled in getting information for Clinton on extraterrestrials.
Steven Greer, M.D., international director of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI), has spent the past seven years preparing the case against this covert activity and feels he is now prepared to take his case public.
Greer is not alone in this effort. Among those now speaking out for full disclosure on the ET issue are Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man who ever walked on the moon and founder of the Institute of Noetic Science. Both Mitchell and Greer recently appeared on the Art Bell “Coast to Coast” program:
Steven Greer: “Here we are at the millennium, and as a people we need to stand up and consciously contemplate what will be our future, not only on earth but in the cosmos. I think we need to choose one that’s peaceful and not one that’s violent and secretive and very dangerous.”
Edgar Mitchell: “This is exactly the message I’ve been talking about for about 25 years, Steven. We must shift that idea. It’s a subtle, subtle conditioning that’s going on to prepare us for the idea that we do carry this warlike activity into space.”
As you will read in an exclusive interview conducted by The EDGE with Steven Greer, the implications for humanity if such technology exists and remains in the hands of the underground military industrial complex is unthinkable.
What is the truth about UFOs and advanced extraterrestrial civilizations from CSETI’s perspective?
Dr. Steven Greer: There’s no question that UFOs exist and quite a few of them are extraterrestrial devices. And at the same time, we know there are devices that have been reverse engineered from extraterrestrial devices, which are actually of human manufacture. There are human and extaterrestrial devices that look very similar.
I point this out because there is tremendous confusion on the issue. We know that some of the major aerospace firms, under super secret “black” projects, have studied retrieved extraterrestrial devices and, having made some very good breakthrough in the technologies, have come out with copycat versions of them made by humans.
UFO is a term that describes anything that is unidentified. I think it’s imprecise. I prefer to use the term extraterrestrial space craft-and ARV, alien reproduction vehicle, the term used in the business for the product of reverse ngineering studies.
We have overwhelming evidence that these ARVs exist. We have crystal-clear daylight photos that have been independently studied by people at NASA. We have 4,000 landing trace cases. We have 3,500 cases of pilots, both military and civilian, who have made reports, many with radar lock, onboard and ground radar. Contrary to popular perception, literally dozens of videotape, movies and photographic images that have been taken all over the world and have been studied independently. They clearly show these objects and they’ve been studied by scientists and forensics people and have been established as not being hoaxes.
There are thousands of pages of government documents, the best of which, about 250 pages, we put together in a briefing document. They are smoking guns in this issue, the fact that the government has been widely involved with it since the ’40s.
And I guess the piece de resistance is the 150 or so topsecret witnesses whom we have identified in the past seven years. These are 150 Deep Throats, whose information is more explosive than what Woodward and Bernstein had in the Watergate era. These are people who want to come forward and discuss what they personally have seen and done in their capacity as government intelligence officers or military officers related to the UFO subject.
These are all people involved in unambiguous events. By that, I mean they aren’t just people who have transiently seen a blob of light do something in the sky. These are people who were up close and personal to very unmistakable extraterrestrial events.
Have any of them been involved the creation and testing of the ARVs?
Greer: Yes. We do have such witnesses. They are very frightened. Contrary to what people may think, people have been threatened and people have been killed to keep this subject quiet. In my opinion, there is a very unfortunate criminal element that has done some pretty heavy arm twisting to keep this subject out of the public domain during the past 50 years.
These witnesses have a great deal of concern for their pensions, for their own safety and for their families. And we’re asking the president, and Congress, to be sure that they have protection in place and that they can be properly subpoened under the immunity conferred by Congress so they can talk about these events and projects without any fear of repercussion.
One of our projects is getting this information disclosed in a proper format.
Do you fear for your safety?
Greer: No. I’m not someone who is a fearful person. I guess if I were, I would be. To be frank, that’s not within my paradigm. I’m not someone who is frightened easily, if at all. I was very sick when I was a teen-ager. I had a near-death experience. I had an experience of the reality of the continuity of life after death. And I’m not afraid of these sorts of things, and I’ve said so to the head of Army and other intelligence who’ve tried to do their own version of arm twisting with me.
I think the bigger issue is that I’m afraid for humanity. A subject like this being basically hijacked by covert military and industrial interests is a danger to our future. On the other hand, we have the very bright prospect that if this can be changed, that humanity can begin to interface with these non-human life forms in a peaceful fashion, and these fabulous technologies that permit interstellar propulsion, travel and communication can begin to be brought to bear to benefit humanity.
For example, I’ve always been very environmentally involved. And I have recently been meeting with people from NASA and the National Science Foundation about the issue of global warming and climate changes. I have to tell you that all of the proposals on the table, at the best, are tinkering at the edge of a very serious, fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that we utilize fossil fuels and internal combustion engines for virtually all of our energy generation on this planet. That’s the problem.
On the other hand, we know from witnesses that we have, as well as from what I have personally observed, that there are technologies which resulted from study of these extraterrestrial devices that permit the generation of huge amounts of power — for propulsion and electricity — that do not involve internal combustion and put out no fumes or pollution.
These technologies are fully operational. They are not theoretical. Yet, they are in ultra-secret black projects.
One of the most important men in aerospace history, a man named Ben Rich, head of Lockheed Skunkworks, wrote a book called Skunkworks, which I recommend your readers take a look at. Before he died of cancer, he gave a talk at UCLA. One of my team members was at the talk, and afterwards, Mr. Rich had about 15 people standing around him.
Ben Rich, who had been head of these ultra-secret black projects at Lockheed, turned to the group and said, “We already have the means to travel among the stars. But these technologies are locked up in ultrasecret black projects — and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity.” And everyone’s mouth dropped open.
But we know this is true. The fact that the major media and politicians are side-stepping this issue is as much a crime as the fact that it’s been hidden from the public. Because, meanwhile, these people are basically fiddling while Rome burns. You have this massive deforestation, air pollution, water pollution, global warming, polar ice cap melting and so on, and we already have the solution to that for a civilization that could be sustainable without creating this type of pollution. We have it in our society, but it’s in black projects.
It’s truly a great scandal here and it needs to have some very serious attention given to it. We think the way to resolve that is through a series of open Congressional hearings. We’ve spent four years meeting with the CIA director, members of Congress, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the White House staff, UN leadership, the Boutros-Ghali family. You name it, I’ve met with them and this issue has been discussed. There’s wide agreement that there should be a change away from the kind of secrecy that exists, toward disclosure. The question is, is there anyone out there with the courage to take the issue on and get it done? That’s what we’re looking for.
In that sense, I’ve very concerned for humanity’s future. And it does, in a sense, frighten me that something like this can go unaddressed for as long as it has when, on the one hand, it holds so much promise for humanity. On the other hand, if used in a militaristic and abusive way, these technologies are very dangerous. This brings up some serious issues.
We’re at a crossroads in our civilization. We’re either going to evolve to a peaceful and fairly well-integrated global village or we’re going to self-destruct. Do want to replace the international tensions we’ve had in the past few centuries with interplanetary tensions? Certain militarists and military industrialists would like to have us replace the Cold War with interplanetary war. There’s a very serious danger here, with all the stuff coming out of Hollywood like Independence Day. They have within them the seeds of a very virulant form of xenophobia (fear of strangers) that could lay the foundation for replacing super-power tensions with interplanetary tensions.
If people think the Cold War was expensive, they should begin to look at the price tag for militarizing space. And I’m telling you that this is what’s happening. A lot of technology is going into programs that are tracking and targeting and attempting to destroy these extraterrestrial vehicles as they approach the Earth. We have first-hand witnesses who can verify that that has happened and that we have hit them on a few occasions.
If there is only a 10 percent chance that this is true, this is one of the most serious threats to world security-ever. And it’s totally unnecessary. In my opinion, it’s the result of this whole issue being managed exclusively in a covert fashion. Therefore, it has circumvented normal dialogue, and normal diplomatic channels, that would be at our disposal as a people.
In Eisenhower’s most famous speech to the world, the last speech to the nation as president, January 1961, he warned us of the potential excesses and abuses of power of the military industrial complex. And the reason he did-of course, he was a five-star general and a conservative, two-term Republican president-was because he had seen these abuses, up close and personal. And by the way, it related to the UFO issue. It related to the fact that there were ultra-secret projects that evolved in the ’40s, ’50s and early ’60s that he knew about, and he knew they were lying to him about what they were doing, the amount of money being spent on them, the types of technological breakthrough that had ensued, even events that were happening related to these extraterrestrial vehicles.
We know Eisenhower knew this was being withheld from him, because we have a witness who was in Army intelligence assigned to the White House who knew the president and knew the president’s concerns. He’s willing to testify under oath before Congress about this. This is a huge story.
The story seems much larger than just keeping the evidence of extraterrestrials hidden from the public.
Greer: The story is multifaceted. You’ve got the extraterrestrial phenomenon itself. Then you have the implications of humans interacting with extraterrestrial life. You’ve got the whole diplomatic question of who speaks for planet Earth and how do you establish some kind of relationship with these life forms.
And you have these covert, disfunctional programs that have become Frankensteins that, quite frankly, have gotten up off the table and walked away. The government of the United States is going to have a very difficult time reining those Frankensteins in.
What will it take to bring those people running the covert operations to light?
Greer: We have that ability now. What it will take is some subpoenas from Congress for the witnesses we have identified.
We have three categories of witnesses:
- Level One witnesses are those who are ready to step forward right now and have done so at a private briefing I conducted for members of Congress on April 9, 1997.
- Level Two witnesses are equally willing to come forward, but they don’t want to do it until they have the protection of immunity, a subpoena from Congress and that venue from which to do it, because they are afraid for their safety.
- Level Three witnesses are those who would be best-described as hostile witnesses. They are those who we know have been deeply involved in these programs and would prefer to not have it known that they have been involved. But we know who a number of them are. And we have multiple points of corroboration to establish that they are and have been involved in these problems.
Now, this becomes problematic, because you have to have someone in Congress whose chairman of a powerful committee who’s willing to have a hearing. I’m having conversations with those types of committees now. We have succeeded in convincing some of them that the subject is real. What we have not yet gotten is the commitment from them to hold open hearings. What we need the public to do is contact the chairman of these committees and request that open hearings take place.
We have on our website a list of 15 comittees and they are triaged according to what is most important to least important. People can write or call those congressmen and express their desire that these committees take place. Now, what I have been told, by members of Congress, is that regardless of whether they think the subject is valid, unless it has the interest of the public, and the media, there’s going to be little incentive to take the political risk of holding hearings.
These congressmen need the cover of the public saying, “We want the hearings.”
That takes away some of their fear of stepping forward to have the hearings.
Greer: Sure, because then they’re saying, “The public and media are really making an issue of this, and as their representative, it is appropriate for us to take the time and government money to hold a hearing and get to the bottom of it.
It is very important in a democracy that people not just sit back and look at the boob tube and get off their derrieres and write a letter and call these people and say, “Look, this is an issue we also think is important and we would like to see you hold these public hearings.” That is how a representative government is supposed to work. It’s not going to happen with people just zoning out in front of “The X-Files.”
Is there a high enough percentage of the public that is willing to do that?
Greer: We know that between 60 and 70 percent of the public believes the subject is real and that the government is lying to them, that there’s some covert program going on. Ten percent of the public — 26 million people — has seen these objects, and they all have family members and friends who have heard their stories.
This subject is not a minor thing. I pointed out to one of the president’s friends that more people believe this subject is real, and that the government is hiding information about it, than voted for the president in both of his elections. My point is that, yes, there is a constituency. Whether the constituency is motivated enough to exert that kind of political muscle is another question.
If not, then it’s going to be incumbent upon my group, and quite frankly, myself as the leader of the coalition, to privatize the disclosure process and bypass Congress.
Is that doable?
Greer: It can be done with about $5 million and private funding for documentaries and books. Absolutely. But we don’t have that funding. It would be a very lucrative proposition for someone who had enough acumen to see the value of it. But there’s no question that we have the ability to do it. It is not the preferred way to do it. We have spent four years meeting with senior government officials and members of Congress. Now we’re going to the public.
If there’s not some kind of positive motion toward a commitment to have these open hearings, then you’re either going to let the government delay the process of disclosure by refusing to hold the hearings or you’re going to say, “No, that’s not going to happen. We, the people, are going to bring this information out.”
We’re not talking about renting a ballroom in a hotel to make an announcement. This will have to be driven with a very powerful multimedia push, and that cannot be done on $3.85, which, by the way, is how we’ve been doing these other initiatives. I have injected about $2 million of my own time and money into this effort to get it done. We’ve had some small donations from Laurance Rockefeller and Burl Ives and some others who have an interest in the subject.
If you’re not going to have Congress hold these hearings, then you’re going to have to have the infrastructure in place to investigate each witness, get them into documentaries and get these documentaries on the air.
Are there governments in the world that are more knowledgeable than ours, or more willing to cooperate?
Greer: No. They’re all in the same boat. This is an international covert program. For example, I had for a very frank discussion on this subject for a couple hours at the home of former Ministry of Defense head Lord Hill-Norton, the only living five-star admiral in the world, at his home in Hampshire, England. And he told me that even though he was head of the Ministry of Defense, no one had ever told him about this subject. He found out about it after he left office.
He, frankly, is hopping mad about it. He thinks it’s outrageous that in his position, with the House of Lords, NATO head, that he never knew about the subject in his official capacity. I believe he found out about it because Lord Mountbatten had a craft land on his estate in rural England, and it melted a huge ring in the snow. And then Lord Hill-Norton started looking into it as a private citizen and discovered there were all these things going on in covert military and intelligence that he had not been told about.
This is basically what has happened around the world. It is a very questionable enterprise. I think it is making a joke out of constitutional, representative government and the appointed officials of the people.
I met for almost three hours with an acting CIA director, Jim Woolsey, on Dec. 13, 1993. 1 was the first poison to ever brief him on the subject. And I’m just a country doctor in North Carolina! This is not right. And believe me, this was a very serious tête-a-tête, not an off-the-cuff, whimsical inquiry on his part. And the subject was taken very seriously. He knew the subject was real and had made inquiries about it, but he had not been told the truth about it.
Webster Hubbell, a good friend of the Clintons, was appointed to the Justice Department. The president asked him to look into the UFO issue. He did so, but he was never happy with the answers he got because he was lied to-by NORAD, by one agency and one military entity after another.
This is not something that can be allowed to go forward for much longer. I think it is a threat to national security and world security.
Leaders of these covert operations seem to have widespread control.
Greer: It’s complete. One of the conversations I had at the Pentagon with a Joint Chiefs of Staff official, a senior admiral, took place in the past two months. Former astronaut Ed Mitchell, who walked on the moon with Apollo 14, was with me. Eisenhower’s military aide was with me. My military advisor who has personal knowledge of the subject and whose grandfather was the first head of NASA was with me. And we all sat there and laid out the evidence. The admiral was very shaken by it. He said he was horrified that this could be true and didn’t know about it. This man, one of the most senior military people in our country, and he didn’t know about the subject because he was not in that compartmentalized “loop.”
And I said, “There’s a problem here. What happens when a group of covert entities have technology capable of interstellar travel, that can do pirouettes and circles around the Stealth bomber?” This is not a safe development in the world. And I think it’s something that needs to be corrected.
It’s hard to believe members of our elected government don’t have an inkling that there are these covert operations.
Greer: There are some members who do. That’s part of the problem. I know of several members of Congress who have personal knowledge of the subject. In fact, I know of a couple who were at a secret air show at Norton Air Force Base in November 1988 at which an Alien Reproduction Vehicle was test flown for them in a hanger. It levitated for them and went up and all around. I have eye witnesses to this event and eye witnesses to the members of Congress who were there.
But these members of Congress, in my opinion, are in all likelihood part of the covert management of the subject. In that sense, they’re probably part of the problem.
Let me be clear. I’m not saying that there has not been anyone who’s ever been in government who has known about it. I’m saying it’s handled in a very secret, black project way that bypasses the normal oversight of Congressional committees, of presidents, of presidential appointees and so on, which should be intact if you have a working constitution.
If there are military programs in place that are mismanaging the issue and trying to militarize space, that is a very big danger for the world and it should be openly discussed. On the other hand, you’ve got extraordinary promise in terms of us evolving into an interplanetary society. It’s one that would have these technologies, not for exclusive military use or misuse, but for peaceful energy generation so we can evolve into a civilization that does not have to cannibalize the planet in order to have an advanced technological civilization.
At this moment, we do not have a sustainable civilization. And everyone knows it. I’ve talked to Federal Reserve Board officials who have talked to me about this. And yet, he ability to create that does exist. But there are many vested interests that would like that kept quiet. I presume if you owned a $10 trillion oil field, the information I’m giving you now would not be very welcome. And the disclosure of these technologies would be unwelcome because oil then would only be valuable for the creation of plastic, other substances and lubricants.
There’s a lot of greed behind this.
Greer: There’s a tremendous amount of greed and a tremendous amount of power. And I think, fundamental to it, is a faulty paradigm-a paradigm that is based on fear, mistrust of the human race and in humanity, and a tendency to be afraid of an extraterrestrial presence that they don’t fully control and understand.
And beyond that, there are manipulations related to maintaining the status quo of the industrial base of the world and the military raison d’être (reason for existence). Let’s face it: If you have a situation in which there is global peace, and you cannot resurrect a bogeyman or an evil empire in space to justify a multi-hundred billion dollar military and intelligence outlay, then it becomes problematic as far as having a raison d’être for a military industrial complex.
There are some vested interests that would like to see the relationship between humans and extraterrestrials militarized, because it would support the continuation of an increasingly large global military operation.
All of that is based on a paradigm that I believe is dysfunctional and needs to go the way of the dinosaurs. We need to begin to look at these problems with a totally different perspective and avoid this recreation of problems of the past as we step into the future. We’re trying to drag an “us versus them” military perspective when we should look at it in a very different way.
Our research indicates there is no evidence that extraterrestrials are hostile toward humans. They may not be friendly toward our military based upon what our military is doing, but it doesn’t mean they’re hostile toward humanity.
There is a tendency to be afraid of that which we do not understand and that which we cannot control. That tendency in humans needs to be overcome, because it creates and sows the seeds for potential catastrophe.
Have you found evidence of any extraterrestrial contact by those operating the covert programs?
Greer: There are reports of the landing of one of these extraterrestrial crafts and the emergence of some of these ETs at Edwards Air Force Base in 1954 when President Eisenhower was present. The extent of that communiqué and involvement, I don’t know. My sense is, there may have been some types of approaches like that, but very quickly, secretive and covert interests around the world have taken that information and have sat on it-and probably then misused it.
My own sense is that there is this terrible irony that perhaps some very interesting technological breakthroughs have occurred as a result of these initiatives and that they are now being used to create devices and space weaponry to target and destroy extraterrestrial vehicles. There’s a huge history here that we can only view through a glass dimly. But this needs to be brought out. Regardless of whether we ever find out the truth of what’s happened in the past, what we’ve got to begin to look at is the future.
I don’t believe the future consists of trading the Cold War for Star Wars. I don’t believe most humans want that. It is utterly unnecessary. However, there are very powerful vested interests that would like to see the situation manipulated in that direction, and they range from right-wing, religious kooks who are going to try to portray extraterrestrials as demons to military industrialists who are going to try to portray them as enemies. And all of them are going to have some kind of agenda to try to make hay out of that xenophobia. Calmer heads must prevail and stand up and say, “Wait a minute. This is unnecessary, and we need to approach this question of interspecies relations and interplanetary relations in a way that involves preventative diplomacy, proactive efforts and communication.
CSETI has pioneered that effort globally. We are training teams to go out to where UFOs are being seen and try to establish that kind of rapport and communication. It’s a very experimental effort, but it’s beginning to work. We’ve had some extraordinary encounters take place, up to and including landings and near-landings of these objects a few hundred feet of us.
We’re trying to move that forward so that, even if the governments are too dysfunctional to deal with it, perhaps a citizen’s diplomacy effort could make some positive headway. By the way, I don’t feel we need to get permission from anyone to do that. I tell people that they do not have to be like passive cows in a pasture. We are citizens of this planet, as well as citizens of the United States. There’s no reason we need to sit back and ask permission of anyone to attempt to create some positive communication and rapport with these life forms. It’s actually one’s civic responsibility to do that, particularly when you realize there’s as much dysfunction as there is in covert and governmental circles.
The belief in the past has been that the public would panic if the truth be known about extraterrestrials.
Greer: Nonsense.
Aside from keeping extraterrestrial information from the public, those operating covert programs are keeping new technology from us.
Greer: A great deal of extraterrestrial devices deal with the zero point physics or zero point energies. And yes, there are huge covert interests keeping that quiet, because it is a multi-hundred trillion dollar question.
You’re talking about fully operational technologies that would replace every power plant in America, every internal combustion car, all the oil, gas, coal in the world. This is not an insignificant impact. And yet, I spoke with senior economists with the Federal Reserve Board who said to me that if such a thing really exists-and after talking with them for five hours they were convinced that it does-they said it would be one of the most promising things in the history of humanity, even though there would be some short-term economic winners and losers.
A person who has been with the Federal Reserve Board for 30 years turned to me and said, “We sit at our Federal Reserve Board meetings and talk about the fact that we only have 40 years of fossil fuels left before it’s Mad Max, fighting over the last few barrels of oil. And before that happens, the environmental and ecological impact, and its economic sequela, will be so severe we wouldn’t want to live on this planet anyway, before you’ve burned the last barrel of oil.”
This woman went on to tell me, “If you’re telling me something exists to correct that ultimate crisis that our society will have to face, then this is very good news. And our opinion is that the market will take care of it.”
Like other revolutions in industry, certain sectors of industry are put out to pasture while new ones come to create even more jobs and prosperity. I think this is one of those cases. However, if you were sitting on a trillion dollar coal field, or $10 trillion oil field, this is not really in your best interests. And you are sitting in the catbird seat-industrially, militarily, geopolitically.
Now, having said that, there’s a bigger and deeper issue. This relates to some of the geopolitical issues I talked to the CIA director about. What happens when all of humanity realizes we’re not alone in the universe, and suddenly the Earth looks very small? Humans must realize they are only one species, even though there are all the races, religions and such.
There are also geopolitical events that will result from the proliferation of these technologies. For example, what happens when every village in Africa, South America, India, and China can have a device that generateswithout pollution and being tied to an oil pipeline-an inexpensive and limitless source of energy, for manufacture, agriculture, clean water, etc.? Suddenly, areas that are now barely out of the jungle, barely able to prevent themselves from starving, will have the means to have an advanced lifestyle and will have the economic ability to become significant players in the world.
That’s where most of the population of the world is. Where, then, does the geopolitical balance tilt? It’s going to tilt out of the white, Northern hemisphere and into these other areas. I believe this is the ultimate issue. I think it has a lot to do with institutional racism, a lot to do with people feeling they need to stay in control and not allow these third-world people to have the economic viability that we do. Let’s face it: There’s no way all 5 billion people on this world are going to live the way you and I do, with cars, air conditioning, heat, modern conveniences. It ain’t gonna happen.
So these new energy forms, which have been studied and perfected in these covert programs, much of it by studying extraterrestrial devices, would totally alter the geopolitical, economic, social order in a way that would change things forever. And I believe that is a hot spot that has been studied and analyzed very secretively, because I’ve had conversations with these people about it. That is something they don’t want to have happen, and are afraid of happening, because they don’t want change.
We live in a world that is incredibly inequitable. There is a huge disparity between the haves and the have nots-and that disparity is growing. And billions of people live on the edge of a jungle-like existence. This is not a sign of an enlightened world. I think that could be changed, but it would be changed at a very significant price. Once there is that economic and social empowerment in Southern hemisphere and countries and continents, as well as in other Third World and developing countries, the relative power of United States, Europe and Japan would be very different. I think it would be changed away from their predominance.
This change would require a very firm commitment against international warfare and conflict, a collective assurity that it is enforceable and an ability to allow a rising tide to lift all ships, not just to lift the ships in the Northern hemisphere, Europe and Japan. So this becomes a very serious discussion. There are ricocheting and reverberating effects of this disclosure that goes way beyond folks just saying, “Gee, we’re not alone in the universe.”
What I specialize in is looking at all of these implications and articulating them. If you begin to think about that, and how the people who are in the catbird seat now look at these things and say, “Oh, my God.” It’s going to forever change the world as we know it. There are people who would like to not have that happen, but what I have to say to them is, “You need to let go and let this evolve.” They are holding up the progression of the human race, and it’s a very dangerous precedent. It’s creating tensions, injustices and inequalities in the world, which ultimately are going to come back to haunt us. There are certainly understandable reasons for the behaviors of the past, but I don’t think those can be projected and continued into the next century.
People do not like change. They don’t like change in the personal lives, professional lives, economic lives. That’s understandable, but the fact of the matter is, there’s going to be change, but we’re going to have to find the best way to facilitate that change that will be the least destabilizing to the masses of society without being overly conservative to the point that it withholds from humanity these wonderful new energy sources and the information that, indeed, we’re not alone in the universe. These are things that ultimately will be very positive events for humanity.
I tend to be positive and don’t get into paranoia, but what you’re describing are people who are greedy fascists.
Greer: I think that is fairly true. In some respects, some of the sensibilities that have informed the management of this are very much related to the Nazi and fascist perspective on human social and economic evolution. I say that with some trepidation because people may take and run with that too far.
But there is a tendency in people in very powerful positions to begin to view their fellow humans through that kind of lens. However, I think some of them have been very well intended. For example, many of the people involved in these programs have not known what all the issues are. They’re just cogs in the wheel. And you have to understand that this is highly, highly compartmentalized. The average person who might have been involved in some technology program may not have known of the ultimate objectives.
The bottom line is that this is an incredibly important issue. It needs to be openly discussed and debated, and the technologies need to be looked at to see how they can be safely and peacefully applied. Now, I’d be the first to acknowledge that there may be applications of some of these technologies that could fall into the hands of some psychopathic leader like Pol Pot or whoever would try to use it in some bellicose or exploitive way against their international neighbors. There are national security issues, but let’s face it: We all know about the hydrogen bomb, but you can’t go down to your True Value hardware store to buy the nuclear trigger to make one.
It’s a very complex matter and the implications of all of this are so vast and farreaching. That’s one of the problems. We’ve never had the opportunity to have a public debate on this in the media so the masses know about the issues, because everything is reduced down to some sensationalistic, tabloidesque sound byte. The media has partaken so heavily in the dumbing of America and the dumbing of the world into ridiculous clichés and sound bytes that it’s almost impossible to get into any substantive discussion and dialogue on these larger issues.
Have you made any headway with the national media?
Greer: I have, but one of the issues I have, and it’s a quality control issue for me personally, is the desire of some of the major media to do some documentaries on the subject, but they want us to give them all our assets and have no say in how it is done.
One runs the risk of having a top-secret witness, who is literally risking his life to step forward, being portrayed next to someone who claimed he made love to a beautiful Venusian and has babies floating around Alpha Centauri, which of course would not only make that witness look like an idiot but would totally negate the impact and seriousness of his testimony.
Essentially I’m waiting to see if we can create a multimedia disclosure effort in which we will have some sort of cut in the finished product. I cannot go to these topsecret witnesses-many of whom I have a relationship with like a brother, or a son to some of the older military witnesses-in good conscience and say, “Colonel X, this person wants to do an interview with you for a documentary, and they have assured me (wink, wink, and a handshake) that this is going to be done properly.â€
My experience is that the media generally treats such a subject with disdain and ridicule. No matter how good your evidence is, you get dumped into that cesspool of tabloid, sensational rubbish. In order for the subject to be treated in a way that’s more serious, I’m afraid we’re going to have to insist upon some degree of empowerment in the process of how it’s presented-and very few media outlets are willing to do that.
I know from working in the daily media that you’re almost branded a fool to bring up the subject.
Greer: An editor with the Boston Globe told me that it didn’t matter if she believed the subject is real or not, because of the atmospherics in the major, mainstream, high-brow media like the Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post. She said if you tried to do something serious on it, you’d be laughed out of your career. So there’s this incredible peer pressure, which has been set up — I think deliberately through military counter-intelligence operations — to portray the subject in a way that would be so ridiculous that it is something that serious scientists and the media steer away from for fear of ruining their careers.
I think there has been quite effective psychological warfare and counter-intelligence used to portray the subject in the most ridiculous light and to ridicule it to the point that career people in the major media and career people in the sciences-while privately holding that they think the subject is real and important-would not have the courage to step forward.
This is what I call the Kindergarten Phenomenon, where we are all sort of children who are very insecure of what other people think of us. And then there are a few crazy people like myself who really don’t give a damn what people think. I’m going to go after what I think is the truth. I may get laughed at and ridiculed all the time, and sometimes it may hurt, but ultimately it won’t deter me from doing what I think is right.
There have been some positive developments. The Boston Globe actually did run a fairly serious article about the briefings we did for Congress last April. USA Today printed a fairly serious article about the lights that were seen over Phoenix by thousands of people in March, which happened, by the way, while I was there and was centered right over the building where I was operating. It was a weird coincidence, if you believe in coincidences.
But there needs to be more people in the media who dare to take some risks. I’ve taken a huge risk as a medical doctor who does emergency medicine. But if you can articulate the issue clearly, and have it be driven by the evidence, I don’t think it becomes something that is too hard for people to understand the significance of the subject.
None of the meetings I have had with members of Congress, including with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee or chairman of committees, nor the meetings with the CIA director, White House staff, UN officials or senior military officials have had people ridiculing the subject. It’s been taken very seriously. No one has laughed. I’ve had some people on the verge of tears when they realized the problems facing us with this issue, but no one has been laughing ii these personal briefings.
I’ve often wished there could have been a fly on the wall from the New York Times or Washington Post at these meetings, but then, we wouldn’t have had the meetings if they had been there.
In the same vein, some of the most eminent scientists in the United States are working with us know. There are heads of major divisions of NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences and Ivy League institutions who know the subject is real, and they’re taking it seriously. So I’m heartened that there’s a growing momentum among that caliber of people who are taking the subject seriously.
Why have you devoted your life to this?
Greer: Well, I don’t know sometimes. I ask myself, “My God, what am I doing?” I’m still working in medicine, because I have four young children to feed. As I’ve said, I’ve virtually gone bankrupt doing this. You know, if I had claimed I had been abducted and raped by aliens from Alpha Centauri, there’d be an unlimited amount of money out there for me. Every crack-pot billionaire would be giving me hundreds of thousands of dollars to do research. But the fact of the matter is, if you do anything serious like this there’s no funding.
I’ve had to decrease my time as a doctor. I had been full-time and chairman of the department, and now I’m very part-time. I forego about $20,000 a month in personal income working on this. It’s a serious commitment on my part and on the part of my family. We’re not rich people.
The reason I’ve continued to work on this as intensely as I have is because I understand-as do astronaut Ed Mitchell and people in my inner circle-the huge implications of the subject. Not only the implications for governmental function, but the implications for the human race in the future. I think it really will determine what kind of species we’re going to be in the future.
Are we going to be a species living in secret, engaging in covert actions against other life forms, hiding from each other promising new technologies that would enable us to literally save the environment from destruction? Or are we going to totally change paths and evolve into a sustainable civilization that is not only living peacefully among ourselves but among others in the universe and is able to evolve into a civilization that can equitably have prosperity throughout the world and does not damage irreparably the environment?
I have understood the implications of these issues for many years, having decided in 1990 to form CSETI. It’s become quite clear to me that the issues are large enoughand the need for action is unfortunately acute enough-that it’s hard not to continue being part of the solution. The old adage is that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
There are times I wish I didn’t know what I knew, because in good conscience I could go and do something else and live a normal life and not be so exhausted.
But once you know, you can’t go back.
Greer: Once you know, you can’t go back.
One of the biggest problems for me, psychologically, in the past four years, going into all of these meetings with some of the most powerful people in the world-in the military, in intelligence, in Congress, White House, UN, you name it-is seeing people sit there and say they can’t take this on, that it’s too big of a thing.
And I say, “Well, I’m just a country doctor in North Carolina. My God. What am I supposed to do?” The ball keeps getting dumped back into our laps, with them saying, “Why don’t you guys go and do this” and “Why don’t you guys go and do that.” It’s a laughable situation except that it’s so tragic.
What those of us who have been working on this day and night have concluded is that, ultimately, we can make a difference but we’re going to have to push and push and push and keep moving forward and persevering. We can’t, in some form of a cosmic co-dependency, sit back and wait for the extraterrestrials to solve the problem or sit back and wait for some magical and powerful person in Washington or some other government to fix it.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen that way. It looks like common folks like ourselves are going to have to make sure this gets fixed.
