In 1990 Steven Greer founded the Centre for the Study of Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (CSETI), a lobby group separate from the non-profit SETI Institute formerly funded by NASA.1 In 1992 he created the Disclosure Project, which advocates for the release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) secrets he believes are hidden within the US government and aerospace corporations.2 The attorney Daniel Sheehan worked with disclosure advocate Greer in 2001, vetting and legally representing dozens of government and military witnesses who came forward to speak at the National Press Club.3 Greer has said he has personally briefed presidents and a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director about the ‘UFO reality’.4
In 1993 the futurist John Petersen, founder and president of the Arlington Institute, invited then CIA Director James Woolsey and Greer to dinner.5 On his website, Greer describes the meeting as “a covert briefing on the topic of UFOs under the guise of a dinner party”.6 Woolsey denied that the gathering was a briefing.7 Petersen, who also arranged for Greer and researcher Stanton Friedman to compile a list of the twenty most significant redacted government documents,8 flatly denied claims that the CIA had reached out to Greer or that Woolsey had requested the dinner.9 Ross Coulthart has written that Woolsey would likely have felt obliged to deny the meeting was a briefing if embarrassed about being exposed for conversing with Greer over a supposed UAP cover-up,10 though Coulthart also considers it possible that, if Greer’s account was correct, Woolsey was genuinely motivated to hear and investigate the claims.11 Coulthart further considers that Greer’s public outing of Woolsey for allegedly soliciting a UFO briefing damaged the prospects of persuading public officials to speak out on the UAP issue.12
In April 1997 Greer went into the Pentagon as part of a group of UFO disclosure activists and former military servicemen, and was escorted to the offices of Admiral Thomas Wilson, then Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).13 Willard Miller had told Greer about a conversation he had had with Wilson,14 and, according to In Plain Sight, Wilson agreed to be briefed by Greer and Miller because he was one of the senior military officers whom Miller said had been denied knowledge of a secret so-called “Big Secret”.15 On 9 April 1997, the day before the Pentagon meeting, Greer held a briefing on the UAP phenomenon at a Georgetown, Washington DC hotel with senior congressmen and dozens of their staffers.16 In advance of the visit, Greer sent Wilson’s staff a leaked US National Reconnaissance Office document detailing a series of authentic codenames for highly top-secret Special Access Programs (SAPs);17 the document related to a security lockdown at Nellis Air Force Base in July 1991.18 Greer has said that when Wilson saw the document, he was very upset that it listed Special Access Program codenames unknown to him, the second-most powerful man in Defense Intelligence.19 According to In Plain Sight, the cover-up alleged by Greer, Edgar Mitchell and Miller was said to be so secret that even the second-highest official in the DIA was not permitted to know about it.20
At the 1997-04 Pentagon briefing, Greer, Miller and Mitchell gave a talk in a Pentagon conference room, with Admiral Mike Crawford and General Patrick Hughes present, in April 1997.21 The top-level meeting with Wilson took place on 10 April 1997 at 10am.22 There the group presented what they were convinced was strong witness evidence supporting their belief that the US government was covering up alien visitations to Earth, recovered spacecraft and alien bodies, and technological breakthroughs derived from those discoveries.23 Greer has given several accounts of Wilson’s reactions during the briefing: that Wilson recognised one of the codenamed entities on the leaked list, made an inquiry, and was told by a contractor “you don’t have a need to know” before the contractor hung up and blocked his line;24 that Wilson began cancelling other appointments because he was so interested in the information;25 that the subject of Majestic MJ-12 came up, with an aide reportedly saying “we know it exists” but that the Directorate for the Joint Staff did not have the need to know what MJ-12 does;26 that Wilson reacted with horror, saying “Well I have no doubt this is true, but I am horrified that I hadn’t known about it”;27 and that Wilson was angry at the illegality of the alleged cover-up, discussing the risk the rogue group posed to the United States, the rule of law and national security.28 Greer also says he told Wilson that the group had Alien Reproduction Vehicle (ARV) technology capable of circling a B-2 stealth bomber,29 and that Wilson told him: “Well, as far as I am concerned, if you can get people who know about this matter to talk on the record, you have my permission to go to the media with this! This group is illegal!"30
Mitchell later confirmed to many friends that the meeting happened as Greer described,31 and Miller supported Greer’s account of Wilson’s frustration during the briefing.32 Shari Adamiak, Steven Lovekin, Mitchell and Miller all backed Greer’s account of the meeting.33 According to Coulthart, Wilson confirmed to Richard Dolan in an interview more than a decade later that the 1997 Pentagon meeting with Greer and Mitchell had taken place,34 but described everything else Greer claimed about it as “poppycock” before hanging up on Dolan.35 Coulthart has written that something about Greer’s accounts of his numerous briefings of military and government officials does not ring as wholly plausible, and in some cases seems outright implausible,36 and suspects this stems from the way Greer casts himself as always so much better informed than every official with whom he engages.37 Coulthart considers it remarkable that Greer achieved being invited to brief top DIA officials on UAPs on at least two occasions, but regards the claim that both a senior admiral and a general confirmed belief in a UFO cover-up at their first meeting as straining credibility for many who hear it.38 He also considers that, if Greer’s account is accurate, his public outing of both Wilson and Hughes sent an unhelpful message to any other official contemplating disclosure that they could not expect confidentiality from Greer,39 though Coulthart finds it difficult, given the number of witnesses to the meeting, to escape the conclusion that Wilson gave the impression of having been improperly blocked from accessing UFO information.40
Months after the April 1997 meeting, Wilson’s DIA boss, Lieutenant General Hughes, invited Greer and Miller back to talk about UAPs,41 and in 1998 Greer was invited back to the DIA, again with Miller, to brief Hughes directly on UFOs.42 Greer has said that during this meeting Hughes grabbed an extra-terrestrial doll from the Steven Spielberg movie that he happened to have on his shelf, declaring: “Well, I have no doubt that what you are sharing is true, but I have made inquiries through channels in my agency and nobody can tell me anything! In fact, all I have gotten is this!"43 The Admiral Wilson Memo, on its face, supports what Greer, Mitchell, Miller, Lovekin and Adamiak each said they were told by Wilson at the April 1997 Pentagon meeting about a supposed UAP cover-up.44 According to In Plain Sight, the memo asserted that after the 1997 briefing Wilson searched for the Pentagon’s “UFO files”,45 and, if authentic, indicates that Wilson told the meeting’s attendees he had investigated the codenames Greer had leaked to him, discovered a secret group working on recovered alien technology, and had been blocked from finding out more about it.46 Greer has made further, more extreme claims: according to In Plain Sight, he has said that dark forces were trying to kill him or his colleagues,47 and he has said that when he sent a briefing document to Bill Clinton, the response he received was that the president could not get anywhere with UFOs and did not want to push the issue because a close friend had warned him he would end up assassinated like John F. Kennedy.48 In his book Hidden Truth: Forbidden Knowledge, Greer has claimed that he and fellow disclosure activist Shari Adamiak were diagnosed with metastatic cancers caused by an electro-magnetic weapons system targeting them “from a laboratory in Utah”,49 a claim for which Coulthart states there is no supporting evidence.50 Greer has also claimed that former CIA Director William Colby, who died in a boating accident, was actually assassinated because he planned to help Greer’s organisation,51 a claim Coulthart likewise states has no supporting evidence.52 Greer has attributed his own survival to his golden retriever, Yami, which he has said “bonded to me and astrally took some of the hit from the EM weapon system targeting us”.53 Greer considers the narrative that UAP represent an alien threat to be a “false threat narrative”.54