Steven Greer is the most prominent figure in the modern UFO disclosure movement, and also its most divisive. An emergency physician who left clinical medicine in the 1990s to pursue what he considered the most consequential question facing humanity, Greer founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) in 1990 and has since built the largest organized effort to gather firsthand military and intelligence testimony about classified UAP programs ever assembled.
His most significant achievement was the Disclosure Project press conference, held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on May 9, 2001. The event presented more than twenty military and government witnesses — including a former FAA Division Chief, a retired Air Force brigadier general, a former Navy Lieutenant Commander, and a former U.S. Army Sergeant with direct involvement in retrieving crashed UAPs — before the largest single gathering of journalists in the National Press Club's history at that time. The witnesses testified under oath about their direct knowledge of classified UAP programs, recovered craft, and non-human biological entities.
The mainstream press largely failed to follow up on the testimonies. But the material Greer had assembled — which eventually ran to thousands of pages of witness testimony — became one of the most significant archives of firsthand UAP disclosure testimony in existence. Many of the witnesses he brought forward have been independently verified as having the backgrounds, security clearances, and positions they claimed. His subsequent documentaries, Sirius (2013), Unacknowledged (2017), and Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (2020), brought this testimony to tens of millions of viewers worldwide.
Greer is also the developer of CE-5 protocols — a structured set of meditation and visualization practices that he claims can initiate intentional contact with extraterrestrial intelligences. This aspect of his work has generated significant skepticism even among researchers who respect his witness archive, as it crosses from documented evidence into unverifiable personal experience and claims about the intentions and nature of the phenomena being observed.
His broader claims — that the UAP phenomenon represents a benevolent extraterrestrial presence, that the secrecy around it is maintained not for national security reasons but to protect the financial interests of fossil fuel and military industries, and that certain factions within the intelligence community are engaged in deliberate disinformation to make the phenomenon seem threatening — are contested by other serious researchers, including some who accept the basic premise of government secrecy around UAPs.
The honest assessment of Greer's legacy requires holding two things simultaneously: that his Disclosure Project represented a genuine, significant, and historically important effort to bring credible witness testimony into the public record; and that he has drawn conclusions from that record that go far beyond what the evidence can support. These two things are not incompatible. The archive he built matters regardless of the framework he has imposed on it.
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The Disclosure Project Press Conference — National Press Club 2001