We were approaching the powers that be in a friendly, helpful way, saying, "Look, the time has come for disclosure to happen. The Cold War is over. There is a window of opportunity here, to disclose to the public, in a positive way, the fact that these extraterrestrial vehicles are real and that there are classified projects that may have been justifiable during the pressures of the Cold War, but are not justifiable any longer. Disclosure needs to happen now. We have a chance to make a break from the past."
We were also saying, in the same breath: "If you don't do it, we will. We'll find a way to do it by collecting enough sources to make a convincing case." This is exactly what the Disclosure Project is.
With this fresh impetus, we decided we needed to get further insight into the intelligence operations.
James Woolsey was nominated and confirmed by the Senate in 1993, and now in our story this is September of '93, so he had not been in that position for very long. We found out from our senior White House con- tacts that, in fact, the President, as well as the CIA Director, were trying to find out through channels what the truth was about this subject. We were also told that they were being flat-out lied to.
I have a letter that was Fed Ex'ed to me in the fall of 1993 by this CIA Director's
friend, saying that CIA Director Woolsey had made inquiries into the UFO matter and could not find out anything about it and was being lied to. Further, they knew they were being lied to! He told me that the CIA Director wanted me to come to Washington, and that I was going to be the first person to brief the CIA Director on this. Well, I thought that he had gone stark, raving, mad. I'm thinking, here I am, a country doctor in North Carolina. And I'm supposed to be going to DC to meet with the Director of Central Intelligence on something that is Spook Central? Right!
To be honest with you, my initial reaction was that this had to be a prevarication. I viewed it as a cover story- that the CIA Director knew everything and that he just wanted to find out what we knew and what we were up to. As it turned out I was wrong, and Woolsey and the President really were out of the loop.
On December 13th, 1993, we went to Washington to meet with Woolsey. The cover story was a dinner at his friend's house. It was the six of us, the three couples: my wife and I, the CIA Director and his wife, who, happily, was the chief operating officer of the National Academy of Sciences (so we were able to kill two birds with one stone); his friend and his wife. Our hostess it turned out, didn't know who was coming to din- ner until the day of the event! Can you imagine? "Honey, guess who's coming to dinner? Oh, the CIA Director and this extraterrestrial expert, Dr. Greer." Wow. Can you imagine coming home and telling your wife that?
I remember arriving in the late afternoon at the CIA Director's friend's house, with Emily. I had a whole briefcase full of materials. We discussed what we were going to do, but I had no idea how long this meeting might be. We all knew that this was a very serious briefing for the CIA Director. He was being lied to about the most important secret in the history of the world. Woolsey's wife arrived first by private vehicle, and then the CIA Director arrived via Secret Service escort. After initial greetings and about ten minutes of going through some of the mate- rials, documents, photographs, cases and so forth, the CIA Director said, "Yes, I know these are real."
It turns out that he and his wife had actually seen one of these UFOs years ago in New Hampshire, and so he didn't have any doubt that they existed. But what he wanted to know was: Why wasn't he being told anything? And were there any current projects dealing with it? And why were the extraterrestrials here? And what does all this mean?
People often think that senior officials like that would be laughing up their sleeve at this subject. But no! The man was visibly shaken. He was profoundly upset that as CIA Director, something this important was being withheld from him and the President. He was extremely upset about it. At one point, I thought he was actually going to break down and cry. I considered his reaction an entirely appropriate response, given the gravity of the subject, and I was hopeful of the outcome of the meeting.
The meeting that I thought might be half an hour or so, went on for nearly three hours. During that meeting, we discussed everything he wanted to know. And I told him why the extraterrestrials were here, and I explained why this was being kept secret. And I explained exactly what should be done to fix the problem.
It was, I was acutely aware, a terrible responsibility to take on. I felt the gravity of this situation. I'm dealing with someone who is arguably one of the most powerful people in the world, and I find out the emperor has no clothes! I find out that information is lost in the system and being denied to people who are running the most powerful country in the world. And then I find out they're not running the country at all and that there's a Shadow Government that's really running the whole show, and that this is now being confirmed to me by a sitting CIA Director.
I went from being a complete skeptic -- that someone at that level of power and authority would really be out of the loop -- to understanding how far out of the loop he was: And not just the CIA Director, but also the President. It was then that I realized the severity of the dysfunction within what we think is a constitutional republic and a democratic type of government- to the point that there is flat-out lying to people at this level of constitutional authority and responsibility. I doubted that the CIA Director, the President, and others who were being denied access to these projects were being lied to.
But, because now I have been with people like a sitting CIA Director and sitting members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and similar officials throughout the world, and seen their faces and their body language and their reactions, I can assure you that things are not what big media tells you they are.
I shared with Woolsey the information that these extraterrestrial beings were here for peaceful purposes. I explained that many UFO sightings were of craft made by covert programs in the United States and elsewhere- that the technologies behind these vehicles are very powerful and are in the wrong hands. I also made the point that this matter had to be brought under constitutional control and it could only be done by the President. As a weak back-up position, the Congress could do an investigation, but really, because of the structure of the executive branch and its supervisory and immediate control over the chain of command, leadership had to come from the executive branch - the President.
Toward the end of the meeting, I remember giving him a set of recommendations which we subsequently published. So here's the scene: I deliver the evidence into the hands of a sitting CIA Director, recommend what needs to be done to disclose this information, end the secrecy, and get this matter back under proper control and oversight. I'm naturally hoping for some action, but what he asked me
was: "How do we disclose that which we have no access to?"
Disappointed, but still pressing the point, I said, "You have to get con- trol of it. You have to insist on access." He just looked away. He knew what was involved.
During the time we sat down for our dinner, the CIA Director was sitting across from me, and his wife was next to him. The group was dis- cussing all these issues that had been raised. Finally, Dr. Woolsey, the CIA Director's wife, asked "Do you know how these craft communicate across the vast distances of space?"
I remember going through a quick but agonizing inner gut check: Do I tell her the truth and lose all credibility? Or do I tell her a lie or a sanitized version of the truth and maintain some respectability? And I thought, no, I've got to just tell her the truth, as far-out as the truth may sound.