Unacknowledged: An Expose of the World's Greatest Secret

FILE: Steven M. Greer, M.D

• Founder: The Orion Project

• Founder: The Disclosure Project

• Founder: CSETI (Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence)

For the record, my goal was never to brief presidents and CIA directors, and I certainly didn’t expect to have to deal with threats on my life, let alone see harm come to people I cared deeply about. I was working full-time as an emergency and trauma doctor in a North Carolina ER and I loved my work. Using meditation to establish peaceful contact between humans and these visiting Interstellars… my only intention was to show our visitors that there was far more to the human race than the military establishment that was shooting them down. [See Secret File: Roswell.]

As discussed in Part 2, in 1990 I founded CSETI―the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence―a grass roots movement that by-passed governments in order to make peaceful contact with these civilizations as citizen-diplomats, much like Physicians for Social Responsibility were citizen diplomats to the Soviet Union during the darkest days of the Cold War.

An early successful CE-5 experience happened in February of 1992 with a group of about fifty people on a beach near Pensacola, Florida. Two of our participants were Air Force pilots, one was a colonel. That night we vectored in four ET craft and they materialized and were filmed―it was actually quite close, but the night cameras back then were not very good.

The story ended up on the front page of the Pensacola paper. Among the thousands who read the article was John Petersen of the Arlington Institute. Considered to be one of the top futurists in the world, Petersen’s book, The Road to 2015: Profiles of the Future was awarded Outstanding Academic Book of 1995 by CHOICE Academic Review and featured a section on humans reaching out to extraterrestrials.

Also reading that article was the former head of Army Intelligence and a member of the MAJIC cabal. Suddenly, I found myself flying on the radar of some very serious national security guys.

About a month after the close encounter in Pensacola, I was invited to attend a conference in Atlanta. Being naïve, I thought it was just a UFO convention. When I got there, I realized many people in attendance were part of MJ-12 [See Secret File: Majestic-12], including the former Head of Army Intelligence, the NSA, DIA―a lot of Intel spooks. They were very confrontational, asking me, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I said, “Well, you can read about it, I don’t have any secrets.” I told them I was developing protocols and a team to make contact with these civilizations outside governmental channels because the government was broken. They informed me that it was none of my business and not to do it. My response was, “Try stopping me.” We kind of had a “mano a mano” in a hotel room until three in the morning.

A short time later a senior official at the CIA flew a trusted emissary down on a private jet to visit me in North Carolina. This man’s family founded the California Institute of Technology, one of the most prestigious universities in America. He said, “Dr. Greer, do what you were planning on doing and don’t give up. Someone’s got to do this because it’s completely out of control; moreover, someone’s going to have to spearhead a contact protocol―right now, the system is completely dysfunctional.” I told him that I was only a country doctor and I was just doing this ad hoc between ER shifts and raising four children. All the time I’m thinking, “Why is this guy asking me to do something? Why don’t they just do it themselves?”

That was my initiation into this weird ‘down the rabbit hole’ world of secret projects.

A few months later William Jefferson Clinton was elected 42nd President of the United States. Almost immediately I was approached by people who were friends of his who said, “This is something that the president is very interested in.” Webster Hubble, who was third in command at the Justice Department prior to being convicted of some other problems, wrote in his book that Clinton wanted to know three things when he took office: Who really killed Marilyn Monroe; Who killed Jack Kennedy; and What is this UFO stuff? Apparently they made inquiries into the subject and were not happy with the answers they were getting, meaning they knew they were being lied to. At about that time some military people who were in favor of disclosure approached me. These people had had UFO experiences either on battleships or at strategic air command facilities where nuclear weapons were being kept and they offered to assist me.

One of these men was a naval commander… very connected up in the Pentagon. When he showed up at my front door, my first thought was that he was a spy. Turns out he was a totally stand-up guy who did everything he could to set up a number of the deep background briefings that I did at the Pentagon. We decided to have a meeting to discuss how to put together a team that would brief the right folks in government and encourage them to end the secrecy. You have to understand, this was back in 1992-93, when I actually thought we had a functional constitutional government. Since then I’ve learned it’s all window dressing, that there’s a parallel governmental process that operates completely independent of the people we elect.

Anyway, we had this meeting and it was decided that we should contact certain key people in the U.S. government to―in military speak― de-conflict the CSETI contact teams from Air Force and other military operations so that they didn’t interfere with us and we didn’t interfere with them. That was my whole purpose of the meeting, to make sure we weren’t caught in the middle… to prevent an accidental shooting. It seemed that, whenever and wherever we were doing our CE-5, we’d have a run-in with military jets, helicopters, and all kinds of stuff coming in to our contact sites… and we still do to this day. All I wanted was to keep my people safe.

My military advisor met with Admiral Cramer, the Head of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at that time. After speaking with him he decided we needed to have a meeting with the Intel people at Wright-Patterson, the air force base where the Roswell remains were sent. This was in September of 1993. While that meeting was being set up, two more influential individuals reached out to me. The first one was Boutros Boutros-Ghali via a friend of the U.N. Secretary General. The second was Laurance Rockefeller.

Laurance was the philosopher king of the Rockefeller family. David Rockefeller was the money guy with Chase Manhattan, and his nephew, Jay Rockefeller, was Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Laurance knew what we were doing was really working―he had sent his people to our CE-5 protocols where ET craft would appear and then disappear. He invited me out to his ranch―the J.Y. Ranch in Wyoming, which is where the Clintons vacationed. I was asked to go there in September of 1993 to share information about our CE-5 initiative.

It was an eclectic crowd. Billionaire Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace was there, along with people of various backgrounds from the UFO sub-culture… some friendly to what we were doing and some incredibly hostile. I found out later that the unfriendlies were working for the intelligence community.

At some juncture over the weekend, I was asked what else I was working on. I said, “We’ve initiated a project to brief senior government officials in the Clinton Administration and the Pentagon and members of Congress so that we can terminate secrecy on this issue and get the government to change policy because we understand that the incoming president is favorable to that idea.”

Well, you could have heard a pin drop. Laurance Rockefeller asked what I was doing next, and I said, “I’m going straight over to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base after this meeting to brief the colonel over this Foreign Technology Division of the Air Force, and then, in a couple of months, I’ll be briefing President Clinton’s CIA director.”

Laurance Rockefeller and his guests were in a state of shock. Laurance wanted to be involved, but only from behind the scenes. He offered to host the president and first lady at his ranch so that Laurance could show them the best available UFO photos and evidence we had collected.

Meanwhile, the U.N. Secretary General’s wife attended an event where I spoke about ETs and UFOs. Mrs. Boutros-Ghali was so taken by the subject that she wanted to arrange a meeting at the U.N. so I could brief a lot of the diplomats and friends of hers who were supportive of ending secrecy and making peaceful interplanetary contact. Again, our objective was to provide accurate information to world leaders, the president, his advisors, and the key people in Congress. We even gave them the perfect cover story as to why this information had been kept so long from the masses―that world leaders were simply waiting until the Cold War was over, not wanting to throw into the mix the fact that Earth was being visited by interstellar civilizations, and that our scientists had in fact reverse-engineered many of their technologies.

In the fall of 1993, I was invited to speak at Colorado State University. The event was hosted by astronaut, Brian O’Leary [See Endorsement], and Maury Albertson, one of the co-founders of the Peace Corps. Before roughly eight hundred people, I laid out the entire manifesto which justified disclosure and how we should do it. At the end of that talk I noticed a bald man standing at the back of the room, waiting to speak with me. He said, “Dr. Greer, I think I can help you with this. I’m John Petersen, and I know some folks in Washington who want to know about this, but they’re not getting any good answers.” I assumed it was some low-level staffer for some junior congressman, only he surprised me by telling me it was James Woolsey, the director of Central Intelligence. The two men were good friends, and he said Woolsey wanted to be briefed.

The meeting was eventually set for December 13, 1993. The cover story was a dinner party in Arlington at Petersen’s home. The CIA director and his wife, Dr. Sue Woolsey, who was the COO of the National Academy of Sciences, would attend along with my wife, Emily, and myself. So we got a nanny for the kids, flew up to Washington, and had this meeting. I began by showing the director a portfolio of images, photographs, and documents. After about ten minutes, Woolsey stopped me. He said he knew UFOs were real, turns out he and his wife had a sighting in New Hampshire when they were younger. What he wanted to know was why no one would discuss it with him or President Clinton.

My initial thought was that I was being set up. Three hours later I was convinced he knew nothing about these projects; that both he and the president were being completely deceived by those who had compartmented intelligence within the CIA. That was the moment I realized that we were living in a country that had undergone a quiet coup d’état decades earlier―a story that would never be covered by either the New York Times or the Washington Post because it would be the biggest scandal ever.

I had come to the Woolsey meeting with a “white paper” which described what needed to be done by the president and his people in order to end the secrecy. I gave it to the CIA director as he was leaving. Woolsey looked at me and he said, “How can we disclose something which we have no access to?” That was a very chilling question. If we were to push on this, it would unveil the biggest constitutional crisis in the history of the United States. No president wants to admit that they’re out of the loop on important things. They tend to think in terms of activities being either classified, secret, or top-secret, never realizing that within these classifications there are compartments. Unacknowledged Special Access Projects are only known to those individuals inside the compartment, and that includes the President of the United States.

I’ll give you an example of how even a high-ranking official is kept in the dark about a department he’s in charge of. On September 10, 2001― the day before 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld announced that $2.3 trillion was unaccounted for in the Department of Defense budget, based on a recent audit ordered by the Undersecretary of Defense. Think about that a moment. The war in Iraq cost American taxpayers a trillion dollars, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is saying there is more than twice that amount―not missing, but unaccounted for.

I know an auditor who audits Northrop Grumman. Just like Lockheed Martin, they do a lot of top-secret work on certain kinds of aircraft dealing with anti-gravity propulsion. If it’s an unacknowledged compartment with billions of dollars in it, the auditor will be told, “You don’t have a need to know what’s going on with this,” and it’s just rubber stamped as audited. The auditors have no idea where that money is or where it’s going. It goes in the front door and leaves out the window, and no one knows where it ends up.

In early February of 1994, a friend of the president came to our home for dinner; I was told that he was a big fundraiser for Bill Clinton. We’re sitting at the table eating dinner when he turns to me in front of my wife and kids and says, “The president and his team are really very supportive of what you’re recommending in this white paper, but they’re concerned that if he does this, he’ll end up like Jack Kennedy.”

I start laughing… I think he’s joking. He stopped me and says, “No, Dr. Greer they’re not kidding.” We went into my library to talk in private where he tells me the president and his people were convinced that if he were to push on the UFO issue, he would be subject to TWEP― Termination With Extreme Prejudice. I’m hearing this, thinking―“Okay, then what am I supposed to do?” It’s not like I’ve got a Secret Service detail. He said, “No… they want you to do this… go ahead and try to bring this stuff together.” In other words, President Clinton is afraid he’ll be assassinated if he attempts to bring disclosure to the UFO-ET subject, but I’m expendable?

Laurance Rockefeller gave me the same line… that it was too dangerous for him, that the money side of his family―the oil people― were already angry at him for pursuing this. He’d support our efforts and he’d arrange for the Clintons to receive the briefing materials at his ranch ―a get-together that finally happened in the mid-1990s. The president was fascinated, only Hillary shut it down… she was too afraid.

Once I realized the president would never sign an Executive Order, I decided to approach potential allies in both houses of Congress, and eyewitnesses in the military and government, believing there was safety in numbers―not just for them but for myself. Between the years 1995 and 1998 we identified several dozen potential individuals with top-secret clearances who could be subpoenaed and would swear under oath about UFOs and the secrecy behind it.

I am frequently asked how we were able to convince our eyewitnesses in the Armed Forces to violate their national security oaths in order to come forward and testify. My military people provided the solution. They advised me to draft a UNOD letter.

UNOD is an abbreviation for “Unless Otherwise Directed.” The letter we created stated that these USAPs (Unacknowledged Special Access Projects) exist and are being run illegally, and have been unconstitutional since the 1950s; that the president and other key figures we know have been lied to, as have the oversight committees of the Congress. It also mentions how similar illegal programs exist in the United Kingdom and other countries where I had briefings. Therefore, it was our assessment that the National Security Act and secrecy laws that are attached to oaths of secrecy were null and void, and that any man or woman who has knowledge in any document, material, or evidence attached to the UFO and extraterrestrial issue can disclose this information publicly without penalty of law. Unless Otherwise Directed, we intended to proceed with disclosing this UFO testimony and all related documents.

To cover ourselves legally, we sent the UNOD letter to the president, the head of the Justice Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, FBI, NSA― basically the entire alphabet soup of the intelligence agencies, and we sent it return receipt requested to prove it was received. Danny Sheehan, the constitutional attorney who did the Silkwood Case and represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers, helped me pro bono on what is essentially constitutional law. The letter exonerates every man and woman in the private and public sector, Intel or the military―whoever worked on these projects from any legal penalties related to disclosing information. We used the document to legally protect every eyewitness and whistleblower that came forward to testify for the Disclosure Project. To this day, none of these top secret witnesses has been prosecuted, harassed, or injured. We are calling for thousands more like them to come forward!

More recently, I’ve been asked why Eric Snowden didn’t use this strategy. Snowden’s mistake was that he disclosed things that were legal― however Orwellian they may have been. Even though those programs are Big Brother-esque, they were being overseen by the president and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Had he instead limited his disclosure to operations that were unacknowledged and illegal, he would not be in any legal trouble.

In my opinion, he just didn’t know; he was young and had very bad advisors. The journalists and people who were working with him didn’t understand the system well. As a whistleblower, it’s okay to disclose the illegal programs, but not the legal ones, no matter how outrageous they are. Of course, there are far more potential witnesses who will never come forward because of the threat to their families. This is the type of criminal behavior you’d associate with organized crime, which is exactly what it is… organized crime.

Many of the people we reached out to who were involved in USAPs would say to me, “I want the truth out, but I’d like to breathe the free air of Earth for another 30 days.” Their fear was stronger than their sense of duty, and they felt that if they spoke out, they were dead men walking.

In August of 1996, I met with Congressman Christopher Cox, who was later head of the Securities and Exchange Commission for President George W. Bush. Harvard-educated, he’s a very bright man representing Orange County CA, and was on a number of key committees. A friend and supporter of CSETI who knows Congressman Cox, and who is an executive with IBM in Orange County, asked me to brief him.

Shortly after the meeting began, Cox said, “I have no doubt this is true, but I’ve never heard of it, and I’ve been on some pretty important committees.” So I told him about all the folks I’ve met with who are out of the loop who should be in the loop and that this is a common theme.

He then asked for a list of facilities and companies working with UFO matters.

I followed up our meeting by sending Congressmen Cox the letter and list you will find in Appendix 13. The list has since been updated.

In 1997, we held a meeting at the Westin Hotel in Georgetown for the group, along with a few members of Congress… a very private, closed event. Congressman Dan Burton, who was Chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee showed up; he was interested because one of his closest friends had a UFO encounter in Indiana some years earlier and told him all about it. Burton was a mover and a shaker; he wanted everything we had on the subject. But a short time later, someone got to him and he backed off.

From 1998 until 2000, we gathered together more and more of these top-secret military people and others. I went all around the world and interviewed them. I had completed 110 hours of testimony that I had to cut down to the four-hour and two-hour DVDs that you can get on our website. There’s so much material… and it’s on digital film. I did most of the filming back then―we didn’t have the funding to do this like a big project.

Everything we had was dedicated to The Disclosure Project.

On May 9, 2001, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., I hosted The Disclosure Project, an event which featured the testimonials of more than twenty military, government, and corporate witnesses to unambiguous UFO and extraterrestrial events. The event was a live webcast, and at 9 a.m., over 250,000 people were waiting online for the live press conference to begin. The next biggest webcast event at the National Press Club was less than 25,000 people.

The cabal was ready, too―the first hour of the conference was “electronically jammed” according to the president of ConnectLive, the company that webcasts all National Press Club events. The entire broadcast became the most-watched event in the history of the entire Internet up to that time. The company that hosted the Internet broadcast at the National Press Club said they had so many people trying to see it, it crashed their system… they had to grab every T-1 line in Washington.

Eventually about 800 million people around the world saw it―by then, one by one, the media were contacted and told to take it down repeatedly and immediately… and four months later, 9/11 happened.

In the course of all this, I’ve learned a lot. One of the things I’ve learned is that you cannot expect people in power to bite the hand that feeds them. Most people in the corporate and political world are not going to do something that could be enormously dangerous for themselves personally, or ruin their career by being associated with it. That’s why I concluded that the people have to do it.

We, the people, have to do it.