Exclusive Q&A With Dr. Steven Greer, Head Of The Disclosure Project (Part 1)

Officially, The Disclosure Project is a nonprofit research project working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems. But in a very real unofficial and informal sense, The Disclosure Project is on the frontline of a epic paradigm shift that could not only influence the degree to which the American public becomes informed about what its government has kept secret but as a result, and in the process, reform the American political process and accelerate the global technological advancement. I recently spoke (in June) to The Disclosure Project's brilliant and passionate Director, Dr. Steven M. Greer, in a lengthy discussion regarding the impact of his organization's work, their mission and aims and objectives. And we spent a considerable amount of time discussing the geopolitical ramifications of his work juxtaposed to the interests of the military-industrial complex.

Cedric Muhammad: Dr. Greer, what can you give us in the form of an update regarding the developments since the historic May 9th Press Conference at The National Press Club last year, and the unprecedented level of publicity and interaction with government officials that resulted from that event?

Dr. Greer: Well you know beginning on May 9th, 2001, that very day, we began to brief the U.S. Congress, we had several meetings with members of Congress and their staff and this continued between May 9th and the next few months and we continue to have these meetings. The media coverage was very extensive and what was most impressive is that it turned out that that event at the Press Club in Washington was the most watched webcast in the history of the Internet. And nearly half a million people attempted to view it live although no one has that amount of bandwidth over the Internet. In addition, the National Press Club event itself, which was a two hour event, the archived video of that at the National Press Club site, eventually had over 1 million people view it on the Internet which is also a record, so the interest has been enormous and our website has had over 10 million people visit it since this time last year. In fact just this past weekend, the Sunday Express in London, which I think is the largest Sunday paper in the United Kingdom, just had a full two-page feature on the Project. So there continues to be a lot of interest and a lot of support and I think that one of the other things that has been very encouraging is that since this time last year, we have identified over a hundred new military and government witnesses to illegal projects within the UFO and extra-terrestrial subject and sector that have been kept secret from the public. So we continue to grow the number of people who are following this issue around the world. These military insiders continue to come forward and are eager to tell their story.

Cedric Muhammad: There are some interesting revelations and discoveries that you have been exposed to regarding new forms or alternative energy power sources, relative to the advanced technology that many believe is related to UFOs. I want to get into that at the end of this interview so don't allow me to forget that...

Dr. Greer: That's a really key part of this thing, absolutely. And I particularly think that is particularly the case for people who read your website, BlackElectorate.com, because unfortunately many people think "oh well, this is silly - this stuff about UFOs or so-called extra-terrestrial life forms", which for most people is just an academic interest. They don't know if they exist or not and most people don't really care. But I think the reason people are beginning to care about this issue, especially after September 11th, is that it is quite obvious that the test money and evidence that we have proves that these things are real and what we have also discovered in the course of our investigation is that there are very secret projects within the aerospace and corporate contracting industries that are connected with the super-secret "black" projects within the government that have studied these so-called UFOs and have found out how they operate and of course this means that they have discovered entirely new types of energy and propulsion systems, and that the reason for the secrecy around this is that because if you release this information to the public you would end up having something that would be able to replace the need for combustion engines and fossil fuels, gas, coal and with that you would completely change the way the world operates. It would lead to a completely new world without the need for pollution and without the kind of poverty we see in the world today.

Cedric Muhammad: Most people forget oftimes when they come across your literature or when they meet you, that you have been on the other side of the briefing process, meaning that the people who are keeping the secrets, are individuals that you have also briefed. Could you go into details into your interaction with Mr. James Woolsey when he was head of the CIA?

Dr. Greer: Well, yes, we began actually in 1992 when I began meeting with the head of Army intelligence, General Stubblebine, and other people of his stature, that this Project - The Disclosure Project - which is a function of CSETI - the Center For The Study Of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, has been meeting with senior military and government officials for now 10 years and what we have found is that most of them, including President Clinton's first CIA Director and including President Clinton himself are people who are not allowed information about these super-secret projects and they are actual desperate to find out what is going on. One of the things that happened between 1990 and 1995 during that period of our evolution with the Disclosure Project, we became sort of an informal advisory group that provided briefings to, and information to senior officials such as President Clinton's CIA Director James Woolsey; people like head of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs Of Staff; the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency; people who are senior members of Congress including chairmen of committees such as Representative Dan Burton, Congressman Christopher Cox of California of the Cox subcommittee that investigated the Los Alamos nuclear secrets being allegedly stolen. There were many of these sorts of briefings that took place during the first half of the 1990s because these officials without exception have learned that, of course, there is enough evidence that we have put together to prove that there are projects dealing with so-called UFOS, but when they make an inquiry into these projects - and this of course is what President Clinton did, and his first CIA Director Ambassador Woolsey did - what they found was that they were lied to when they made an inquiry. Literally they would be denied access. This was a very difficult thing for me to accept when I first heard it. And to be honest with you, I felt that I was being lied to. But it turned out that they were telling the truth and one of the shocking things was that when I met with CIA Director Woolsey, on December 13th, 1993 for about three hours, I discovered that in fact he was very frustrated if not a bit overwhelmed by the fact that something of this enormity was something that he would be not able to gain access to. Subsequent to that, a few years later, I met with the head of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs Of Staff, so-called "J-2", a very senior position, as you can imagine, this is the person in charge of all of the intelligence analysis for the joint staff of the United States military. And he had been given, by me, a code name and specific information into a cell, or group, very clandestinely, working within the Pentagn, on this issue, and he made an inquiry to that group and discovered that it did in fact exist. But he was told he did not have a need to know. You can imagine how upset he was when I had my meeting with him and I had a couple of these military witnesses that we have and I took to the meeting, at the Pentagon, some of these men, and he said, the word he used was that he was "horrified" that these projects were going on and that he could not get access to them given the fact that he was head of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs Of Staff. I think that one of the things that the public doesn't understand is that they think that there is sort of a vast conspiracy where everyone in the CIA and Pentagon knows about this stuff. In reality, it is a very tightly controlled relatively small number of people who are allowed inside of the tent. And they are managing, of course, a very large project but it is compartmented. And a lot of times people don't even know what they are working on. It is extremely compartmented into little free-standing islands of activity where the left hand doesn't even know the right hand exists, let alone what it is doing, and I think that what happens frequently is that the nature of this compartmentalization of intelligence and operations results in very important leaders in the Congress, in the White House, in the Pentagon, and elsewhere, even the head of the CIA, not being able to get any information, and certainly they are not able to get the full picture because of the nature of this group being a super-secret group that has, quite frankly, opted out of the chain of command, the rule of law and the Constitution. And this of course becomes a very serious problem because basically what you are talking about here is a decapitation of the chain of command from the congressional oversight, the executive branch oversight, and the military, on a subject of enormous importance. This has not just happened within the United States. It has happened in countries elsewhere. This I know for a personal fact because I have personally met with the former head of the Ministry of Defense in the United Kingdom, Lord Hill Norton, who is a member of the House of Lords, and he was head of the Ministry of Defense and also had been the head of the military committee for NATO and he was very frustrated when I met with him in his home in Hampshire and he shared with me, personally, the fact that he had not been given any information on this subject and that he had only found out about it quite accidentally after being head of the Ministry of Defense of the United Kingdom because he had run into some people who had seen these objects and knew that there were programs dealing with it. But here he had been the Head of the Ministry of Defense, a five-star admiral, what they used to call a Sea Lord in the United Kingdom and he had been completely left in the dark. These men and women who have been in these key positions are, in effect, as much a victim as you or I are or our society has been by this secrecy. And of course the reason for this extreme and really unusual level of secrecy is because the secret is so important to the world, you see. If it were a trivial thing, if it was just about "little green men, ha, ha, ha"- no one would care. However, you are talking about programs that have discovered the means for deriving energy and propulsion that you could replace the entire fossil fuel industry, and replace all of the central utilities in the world; and end up with a new type of civilization in which poverty could be eliminated within a generation; in which we would not have to be fighting over oil in the Middle East; in which we would not have to be faced with global warming and the destruction of our biosphere etc... and so on. You are talking about an enormous change in the world geopolitical situation. And for that, extraordinary measures have been taken to ensure the secrecy.

Cedric Muhammad: This is a really important point, because you and I have talked about this before, in terms of the military-industrial complex. There are of course people outside of the government who you just referred to, and others within it. Now, focusing on the United States for instance, once, I learned that there was a very high-level briefing on UFOs that took place in Colorado, where Colin Powell was present or received the official documentation. He was among 200 to 1000 people who received this information. The others included a host of names that we would all recognize. And then there is your (The Disclosure Project's ) attorney, Mr. Daniel Sheehan, he and I talked about what President Carter went through when President Bush (41) was the head of the CIA, in terms of getting access to UFO information. So, would you say that people like President Bush (43) and Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld would be people in the government who do know what is going on?

Dr. Greer: Well, you know, it really has little to do with your rank and position, it has more to do with whether or not you are willing to go along with the game. And what I am about to say here is the real core to how the secrecy is determined. For example, you could be a CIA director who has come up in the ranks and would know about these projects if you had been tested to see if you would comply with the secrecy. However, if you were somebody like Mr. Woolsey or President Clinton who wanted this information out to the public and they knew that, they would not tell you even if you were the Commander-In-Chief. So, the Constitution and the rule of law have been routinely subverted when it suited them to subvert it. Its been in place when it has suited them to have it in place. So that you could have someone like, for example, Mr. Rumsfeld or Mr. Cheney, who I understand do have some detailed information on these projects because they are quite connected into the oil industries and what have you and the international geopolitical financial system but if you have someone who is not plugged into those systems and would not feel that it was wise to keep the secret, they would simply tell them, "no such project exists". So, the rank of the person has much less to do with whether you know than does, if I can use this concept - the psychological profile of the person - to see whether or not they would be willing to go along with what I call, "the game". And in this sense, it begins to make sense why you would have someone like President Carter, who, in his first meeting with former President Bush, CIA Director Bush, the current President's father, the first thing that he asked him was to get the secret files on the UFOs. And he (President Carter) was denied those files and was told to get them from Congress if he could. This is during the transition period in between the time someone is elected and then takes office, when they provide intelligence briefings for the incoming president. Now this of course is a stunning sort of admission of the breakdown in the rule of law and the Constitution. But it happened because Carter had stated during his campaign, if you remember, in 1976, that when he became President he would disclose the secret government information about UFOs. Since they knew that was his official position they simply said, "We are not going to give it to you". And that is in fact what CIA Director Bush said to incoming-President Carter. Now, this means of course that you could be a President that could have some limited information but I still think that even the best of them, and when I say "best of them", I mean those most connected and willing to go along with the game, such as former President Bush and Reagan, that they were not given a whole lot of the information. A lot of information was withheld from them because this thing is like 38 layers deep of secret information. And there are a lot of people who may be at layer 19, half way through it, but they don't know the other 19 layers that are underneath them. So I think that the nature of secrecy on this thing is extremely complex and there are in fact many people who have limited information but they still don't know what is really going on and I think that is important for people to understand. One of the dangers of this kind of secrecy is that in that secrecy there is room for deception, there is room for people being misled because they can be given partial truths or they can be given information that spins the whole situation in one direction. And I think this is in fact what happened to former President Reagan, when he, on several occasions in the 1980s, stated publicly at the United Nations and at the Council On Foreign Relations that, in effect, that "Gee wouldn't our task of creating world unity be easier if we had a common alien threat to unite against to fight". Now I am paraphrasing here, but that is essentially what he said. I think he said such things, and my understanding is that he did, because there were people like Frank Carlucci and others who gave him information that was very xenophobic and very oriented toward a military response to this problem. And they did that so that he would support the funding of "Star Wars". They wanted hundreds of billions and eventually trillions of dollars to go into putting weapons in space. So, again, you have a situation where many of these leaders, say a President who kind of comes into this situation but comes and goes, that they can manipulate their perspective on this issue by giving them limited information. Well, where else are they going to get their data from? Because it is so secret and so complex, there are very few clearinghouses where someone like a President or UN Secretary General or a senior member of the Senate intelligence committee can go to get an impartial and accurate view on this problem. Well that is what the Disclosure Project has been doing for about 10 years - is to try and put together the best information from inside sources, from our own direct research and make assessments of the situation that are as comprehensive and relevant as possible. Not only for the public which the people can see at our website, DisclosureProject.org, but also that we can do in these briefings that we have done for political and military leaders from around the world -in the United States, in Europe, Japan and elsewhere.

Cedric Muhammad: One of the things that I think has a powerful effect in terms of persuading people of the truth of what you are speaking of is that there are people in the know in different areas and spheres of influence, like for instance, media and religion. Could you briefly touch on families like the Graham family, or The Washington Post, and New York Times, papers that are actually part of the secrecy to a degree and then, even, some religious institutions, that for good or bad, are aware of the existence of what you are talking about?

Dr. Greer: Well, I think that this is hitting the nail on the head here. In fact, one of the problems is that these programs are managed and policy is derived or created for managing these secret programs, not by the elected representatives of the United States or any other government or by the United Nations but by very secretive think tanks, various institutes within religious orders, within corporate think tanks, within other international or national entities and these do include various religions various non-sectarian think tanks. Over the years there have been organizations such as Patel Memorial Institute, Rand Corporation involved. We know that there is a very heavy database within the Vatican and the Vatican's secret archives that are there. We have this from direct testimony from people who have dealt with it. We know that there are other institutes that have information on this. The high-end of the technology research have been done by Lockheed Martin, by Northrup, EGG, E Systems and Raytheon, and a whole hosts of other multi-billion dollar secret government contractors and in fact that is where the real action is. Ironically, the government itself, what we think of the government, you know the "normal" government of the United States, the "normal" government of the United Kingdom and so on, is probably the least important aspect of all of this. That the real power base for this secrecy and for the agenda that has been set forth resides outside of Democratic institutions and resides outside of government as it is normally thought of by the public and portrayed in the media. Now the media in fact is probably the most beguiling part of this. Entire studies have been done about how the national security apparatus have co-opted and forced into secrecy a lot of the media. For example, a little tidbit, that Constitutional Attorney Daniel Sheehan shared with us is that when he was doing the Pentagon papers and representing the New York Times, he saw a document in a secret briefing that listed 43 names that had been blackened out who were major figures at various media, big media, around the world who were on the payroll and answer to the intelligence community. Now this is a complete corruption of the concept of free press and a complete corruption of the concept of separation of the freedom of the press; and the important constitutional functions of a free press as one of the checks and balances in a democracy. Now you see, that function has been completely subverted by these relationships with the very large media. And it is a scandal of the first order, but who is going to report on it? Because the big media that everyone gets their information from is part of the problem. So it is a very serious issue. One of the things that I would like to see us do, if we ever got the funding support to do it, would be to start an entirely new network, we could call it The Disclosure Network (TDN) {Dr. Greer laughs}, which would be able to do real investigative reporting on these issues, that would be very serious, very high-end with great corroborating testimony and evidence and get it out to the public outside of the channels of the corrupted large media that exists today. And I think that is...in fact I will tell you that there is a tremendous amount of interest, for example, among political leaders that I have met with to deal with this issue, but they know that they would be attacked and ridiculed in the media so, really the media, which is the organ, the instrument, whereby most people in the world, and certainly America and Europe get their information about reality and current events - it has been corrupted. And unfortunately, this means that it is very difficult for either the political leaders who want to show courage, or for other people who want to disclose information to get it out to the masses, which is of course very important in a democratic form of governance. So, again you get a sort of censoring of this sort of information or a spin on the information that usually ridicules it within the media that have a corrupted relationship with these secret interest groups and I think, unfortunately, this is something that has been going on for a number of decades. We know that it has been going on since at least the 50s and 60s and so this is something, which becomes one of the great hurdles to overcome in terms of getting the message out which is why networks like your own at BlackElectorate.com are so important.


Cedric Muhammad: Thank You. And there have been some breakthroughs in popular media outlets. I don't know if you saw it but in my view, Unsolved Mysteries did a credible job, in a recent episode. They worked hand in hand with the Belgian government.

Dr, Greer: Right.

Cedric Muhammad: What is it like abroad? It seems to me that some of the international press is a lot more interested and some of the foreign governments seem to be a lot more cooperative than is the case in the United States, in looking into the matter.

Dr. Greer: I think that is true. For example, a couple of years ago, some people who worked closely with the French government and their space agency put together the now famous Cometa Report, and a woman that I know did an investigative report on that and did get an article in the Boston Globe and a few other papers about it. But basically this was an assemblage of generals and scientists and others in France talking about the UFO issue and saying that obviously there exists a huge amount of evidence and proof and they actually chided the U.S. government for dragging its feet and continuing to cover-up this information. And this was reported extensively in France but interestingly, until my associate Leslie Kean did this article and talked some people into publishing it in the United States, it was completely unreported here. Similarly, if you go to Latin America you find a fair amount of coverage about events in Mexico, Peru and Chile and other places where these UFOs are tracked on radar, where they are pursued by military planes and yet no reporting of it will be seen in the mainstream press in the United States. Interestingly, I have seen this happen because I have traveled all over the world dealing with this issue. There are a number of countries that are quite interested in this but when you ask them to do anything more formal they privately will tell me that they are afraid of reprisals from the international community or from the United States if they were to do anything more official, in terms of actually holding hearings or convening high-profile scientific or investigative panels. And so, there is a sort of fear in a number of countries of dealing with this issue too aggressively in terms of what kind of backlash might come their way. I know for a personal fact that the United Nations has been coward into silence on this issue. I was personally involved with Boutros Ghali, the head of the United Nations before Kofi Annan, as well as other people within Kofi Annan's circle, in trying to get this looked at by the United Nations and I was told directly that they were threatened with reprisals as an institution if they were to pursue this and this resulted in them not pursuing an open investigation within the United Nations. You know, I have been part of so many things like this over the past 12 years that what I have concluded is that we the people are going to have to keep this in front of the public, continue to put the evidence out there, and develop our own institutions and our own means for communicating the truth because unfortunately, we have a media that has been largely corrupted and unfortunately, we also have a political system that also has been largely corrupted or forced into secrecy or to go along with the secrecy. Nobody wants to rock the boat too much on this issue. And even other foreign countries when I have met with officials in those countries they will show tremendous interest and encouraging support for what we are trying to accomplish but when you ask them to put their necks out on the issue they pull back and go, "well it is a little too risky for us to do that". So that is the sort of thing that does happen but I will certainly agree with you that there tends to be much more openness and accurate reporting on the subject in other countries than there has been in the United States over the years. And I think that is because public opinion and the political system of the United States and the U.S. culture and media is so dominant in the world today that this is the key market where they need to keep these thing under control. And in that sense, while ironically we portray ourselves as the land of the free to the whole world, on this issue we are probably the most deceived and the least free people.

End Of Part 1

Wednesday, July 24, 2002