Ever since the Roswell incident all those years ago, there have been millions of reports of unidentified flying objects over our skies. All over the world people have seen strange lights and noises, unusual flight patterns and objects moving at incalculable speeds. Often is the case that these phenomena are blamed on natural occurrences such as meteors blasting through and burning up in the atmosphere or man-made features like weather balloons or military aircraft. A lot of these reports are clearly hoaxes designed to either harmlessly forward the debate on whether extraterrestrial intelligence exists outside out solar system or by people who just want the attention. However, there are many cases where the truth becomes just as unidentifiable as the objects in question.

When ordinary civilians take to reporting these UFO’s they can often be met with scepticism and ridicule from those that wish to debunk the their claims, but is this always fair? To date the number of people worldwide who have reported seeing or recording UFO’s is around the 100 million mark. This huge number of witnesses would be enough to win any court case in the world, yet, the debate on whether aliens exist or not is still rife. Many scientists agree that it would be extremely illogical to assume that we are alone in the universe and that life on Earth is all that there is. Some scientists, however, go a little further than that.

Dr Steven M. Greer is an American former medical doctor and current ufologist whose claims about extra-­‐terrestrial intelligences go that extra mile. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1955, Dr Greer had his first supposed alien encounter when he was eight years old and has gone on to state that this event solidified his interest in the subject. Greer himself also states that his uncle was involved in designing the Lunar Module of the Apollo program, however, upon researching this claim I found no evidence whatsoever to back it up and there is also much speculation on Internet forums that this is in fact pure fabrication.

A lot of Dr Greer’s history appears to be missing from any records that are publicly available and thus his early life before the completion of his graduate work remains somewhat of a mystery. It is known that he trained in transcendental meditation and served as a director of a meditation organisation the name and location of which, again, remain undisclosed. Greer completed his graduate work in 1987 at East Tennessee State University James H. Quillen College of Medicine. He attended MAHEC University of North Carolina where he completed his internship in 1988 and received his Virginia medical license in 1989. In the same year, he became a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha honour medical society which happens to be one of the most prestigious honour medical societies in the United States.

In 1990 Greer founded CSETI (the Center for the Study of Extra­terrestrial Intelligence), which was claimed to be “a diplomatic and research-­based initiative to contact extra-terrestrial civilisations”. The CSETI organisation, however, has come under fire for advertising “Ambassador to the Universe & Consciousness Trainings/Expeditions” at the not so affordable price of $2500. This price includes membership and materials but does not cover flights and accommodation, a fact that is not advertised on the CSETI website. The training claims to teach those attending how to successfully contact extraterrestrial entities by using what are essentially laser pens. It also trains attendees in advanced mantra meditation, advanced techniques of remote viewing, precognition and the science of consciousness.

Critics have gone on to claim that this is pure exploitation by someone claiming to be working for the greater good of humanity and even that CSETI is a cutting edge cult of sorts. Dr. Greer also founded the Disclosure Project in 1993, a non-­‐profit research project whose ultimate goal is to disclose to the general public the alleged knowledge the government has on UFO’s, extraterrestrial intelligence and advance propulsion systems. As well as this, the Disclosure Project also had the aim of providing amnesty to government whistleblowers that would violate their security oaths by shedding light on insider knowledge and top-­secret information about UFO’s.

That same year, Greer claims that he spent “many hours” briefing CIA director James Woolsey about extraterrestrials and has since gone to accuse Woolsey of blocking inventors from going forward with their inventions. A former associate of Greer’s who states that the “briefing” was actually just Mr. Woolsey making the mistake of inviting Dr. Greer and three other people to dinner has objected to this claim.

In 1998 Greer gave up his job as an emergency room physician in order to focus more of his time into the Disclosure Project. A year earlier Greer and several other of his SCETI members including astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who was the sixth man to walk on the moon, gave a presentation at a background briefing to members of congress. He also held a press conference in 2001 at the National Press Club in D.C that featured 20 retired Air Force, Federal Aviation Administration and intelligence officers. It was at this meeting that Dr. Greer lined up and impressive selection of credible, eloquent witnesses who all gave testimony to the fact that they had been involved or associated with in one way or another dealings with extraterrestrials.

However, many believe that he shot himself in the foot by also presenting an equal number of so-called witnesses whose credibility was practically zero as well as being in questionable mental health states. This incident somewhat dented Greer’s own credibility as an expert on UFO’s as the impact these later mentioned witnesses had was that of detracting from those whose credibility was more solid. Internet speculation after the event focused on the theory that the CSETI organization was in fact just a “confidence trick” into fooling gullible believers into parting with their hard-earned cash. Greer was the keynote speaker for the 2008 International Conference on Science and Consciousness held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.

In 2013, the documentary Sirius premiered around the world and speculation was rife about claims made by Greer that an unidentified hominoid corpse was in fact or extraterrestrial origin. The corpse was nicknamed “Ata” as it was found in the Atacama Desert and early publicity around the film focused on the fact that at the time of discovery the being could not be medically classified. Garry Nolan, director of stem cell biology at Stanford University’s School of Medicine in California featured in the film and also performed the DNA tests. To the surprise of those that initially had bought the idea of the creature being alien, he had this to say about it;

“The DNA tells the story and we have the computational techniques that allows us to determine, in very short order, whether, in fact, this is human,”

“I can say with absolute certainty that it is not a monkey. It is human, closer to human than chimpanzees. It lived to the age of six to eight. Obviously, it was breathing, it was eating, it was metabolizing. It calls into question how big the thing might have been when it was born.”

Pretty underwhelming stuff, at least from someone who wants to believe’s point of view. There seems to be much debate about just how credible a source Dr. Steven Greer really is. There are those who seem to stand by his every word and are happy to shell out large amounts of money in order to undertake his expeditions and learn from his teachings, be they meditational or extraterrestrial. On the other hand there are those who claim him to be a charlatan and nothing more than an egocentric con-man whose projects are more to do with a pathological self-­interest than making contact with otherworldly, intelligent civilisations.

Sadly there are more controversies surrounding Dr. Greer than there are substantiated claims to be taken seriously. A quick run down on his beliefs shows that amongst the logical arguments he is capable of presenting there are also those that even the most hardcore, tin-­foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists would have a hard to digesting. They include a belief that extraterrestrial have visited Earth on many occasions throughout history, that the government knows about these visitations and has covered it up for nearly 60 years. He also tries to provide evidence that top-­secret organisations have recovered and reverse engineered alien spacecraft without actually providing any physical evidence to back up these claims. That free energy systems are being withheld from the global community by what he describes as “Petro-­‐fascists” and that such systems have the potential to create a truly sustainable alternative to the current unsustainable model of civilisation that we have created for ourselves. This last claim being the most believable of the bunch.

But controversy doesn’t only surround his claims, many of the core staff of the Disclosure Project walked out and abandoned him and the project when it was discovered that he had been siphoning funds from the project for his own personal gain. It has also been reported that much of the work he claims as his own is actually plagiarized and taken from the work of others and presented as his own, which in case you didn’t know is one hell of a big no-­no in the scientific community. Lastly and possibly most outrageously, Dr. Greer claims to have invented a zero-­‐point energy device that can be held in one hand and produce enough energy to power an entire city. Zero-­point energy or quantum vacuum zero-­point energy is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical physical system may have. In this context, the device would draw energy from the seemingly empty vacuum of space producing and almost endless supply of free energy. Dr. Greer has never even come close to demonstrating the machine or even justifying the claim that he has one

Sadly this claim joins the ever-expanding list of claims made by Greer that have no substantial basis whatsoever and It looks as if he has no plans whatsoever of even attempting to silence his critics. Which is unusual for someone who seems to be so incredibly convinced of his own beliefs that he would make such outrageous claims or take money off people based on what he states he can achieve i.e. make contact with extraterrestrials using meditation and blinky laser pens. For those of us that believe we are not alone in the universe, Steven Greer could be interpreted in two ways. The first is that he is simply an outspoken eccentric with a history of making bold claims that often may be slightly exaggerated in order to gain the attention of those who are not so sure about their own feelings regarding the possibility of other intelligent civilisations. 

The second is that he is public enemy number one for those wishing for the study of ufology to be taken more seriously than it is by the general public. His constant misinformation, plagiarism and unwillingness to even attempt to justify his claims is directly damaging the credibility of others in the same field. It is this kind of self-righteous promotion for monetary gains that puts people off even entering the debate on alien life. If we want a serious effort to be put into the study of possible extraterrestrial intelligence then we must make sure that people understand that just because the man claims is a scientist, that doesn’t mean he is logical, objective or by any means rational.

If anything, Dr. Greer has proven himself to be more of a self-centred egomaniac than anything else and for those wanting to learn more about the possibilities of life elsewhere in the universe, their attention may be best placed elsewhere. Somewhere where debate can roar on freely, errors in understanding recognize and learnt from, claims are based on ones evidence and evaluation rather than personal beliefs and trustworthy individuals work for the benefit of the course, rather than they benefit of their wallets.