In the fall of 1993, I was invited to speak at Colorado State University. The event was hosted by astronaut, Brian O’Leary [See Endorsement], and Maury Albertson, one of the co-founders of the Peace Corps. Before roughly eight hundred people, I laid out the entire manifesto which justified disclosure and how we should do it. At the end of that talk I noticed a bald man standing at the back of the room, waiting to speak with me. He said, “Dr. Greer, I think I can help you with this. I’m John Petersen, and I know some folks in Washington who want to know about this, but they’re not getting any good answers.” I assumed it was some low-level staffer for some junior congressman, only he surprised me by telling me it was James Woolsey, the director of Central Intelligence. The two men were good friends, and he said Woolsey wanted to be briefed.
The meeting was eventually set for December 13, 1993. The cover story was a dinner party in Arlington at Petersen’s home. The CIA director and his wife, Dr. Sue Woolsey, who was the COO of the National Academy of Sciences, would attend along with my wife, Emily, and myself. So we got a nanny for the kids, flew up to Washington, and had this meeting. I began by showing the director a portfolio of images, photographs, and documents. After about ten minutes, Woolsey stopped me. He said he knew UFOs were real, turns out he and his wife had a sighting in New Hampshire when they were younger. What he wanted to know was why no one would discuss it with him or President Clinton.
My initial thought was that I was being set up. Three hours later I was convinced he knew nothing about these projects; that both he and the president were being completely deceived by those who had compartmented intelligence within the CIA. That was the moment I realized that we were living in a country that had undergone a quiet coup d’état decades earlier―a story that would never be covered by either the New York Times or the Washington Post because it would be the biggest scandal ever.
I had come to the Woolsey meeting with a “white paper” which described what needed to be done by the president and his people in order to end the secrecy. I gave it to the CIA director as he was leaving. Woolsey looked at me and he said, “How can we disclose something which we have no access to?” That was a very chilling question. If we were to push on this, it would unveil the biggest constitutional crisis in the history of the United States. No president wants to admit that they’re out of the loop on important things. They tend to think in terms of activities being either classified, secret, or top-secret, never realizing that within these classifications there are compartments. Unacknowledged Special Access Projects are only known to those individuals inside the compartment, and that includes the President of the United States.
I’ll give you an example of how even a high-ranking official is kept in the dark about a department he’s in charge of. On September 10, 2001― the day before 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld announced that $2.3 trillion was unaccounted for in the Department of Defense budget, based on a recent audit ordered by the Undersecretary of Defense. Think about that a moment. The war in Iraq cost American taxpayers a trillion dollars, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is saying there is more than twice that amount―not missing, but unaccounted for.
I know an auditor who audits Northrop Grumman. Just like Lockheed Martin, they do a lot of top-secret work on certain kinds of aircraft dealing with anti-gravity propulsion. If it’s an unacknowledged compartment with billions of dollars in it, the auditor will be told, “You don’t have a need to know what’s going on with this,” and it’s just rubber stamped as audited. The auditors have no idea where that money is or where it’s going. It goes in the front door and leaves out the window, and no one knows where it ends up.
In early February of 1994, a friend of the president came to our home for dinner; I was told that he was a big fundraiser for Bill Clinton. We’re sitting at the table eating dinner when he turns to me in front of my wife and kids and says, “The president and his team are really very supportive of what you’re recommending in this white paper, but they’re concerned that if he does this, he’ll end up like Jack Kennedy.”
I start laughing… I think he’s joking. He stopped me and says, “No, Dr. Greer they’re not kidding.” We went into my library to talk in private where he tells me the president and his people were convinced that if he were to push on the UFO issue, he would be subject to TWEP― Termination With Extreme Prejudice. I’m hearing this, thinking―“Okay, then what am I supposed to do?” It’s not like I’ve got a Secret Service detail. He said, “No… they want you to do this… go ahead and try to bring this stuff together.” In other words, President Clinton is afraid he’ll be assassinated if he attempts to bring disclosure to the UFO-ET subject, but I’m expendable?
Laurance Rockefeller gave me the same line… that it was too dangerous for him, that the money side of his family―the oil people― were already angry at him for pursuing this. He’d support our efforts and he’d arrange for the Clintons to receive the briefing materials at his ranch ―a get-together that finally happened in the mid-1990s. The president was fascinated, only Hillary shut it down… she was too afraid.
Once I realized the president would never sign an Executive Order, I decided to approach potential allies in both houses of Congress, and eyewitnesses in the military and government, believing there was safety in numbers―not just for them but for myself. Between the years 1995 and 1998 we identified several dozen potential individuals with top-secret clearances who could be subpoenaed and would swear under oath about UFOs and the secrecy behind it.
I am frequently asked how we were able to convince our eyewitnesses in the Armed Forces to violate their national security oaths in order to come forward and testify. My military people provided the solution. They advised me to draft a UNOD letter.
UNOD is an abbreviation for “Unless Otherwise Directed.” The letter we created stated that these USAPs (Unacknowledged Special Access Projects) exist and are being run illegally, and have been unconstitutional since the 1950s; that the president and other key figures we know have been lied to, as have the oversight committees of the Congress. It also mentions how similar illegal programs exist in the United Kingdom and other countries where I had briefings. Therefore, it was our assessment that the National Security Act and secrecy laws that are attached to oaths of secrecy were null and void, and that any man or woman who has knowledge in any document, material, or evidence attached to the UFO and extraterrestrial issue can disclose this information publicly without penalty of law. Unless Otherwise Directed, we intended to proceed with disclosing this UFO testimony and all related documents.
To cover ourselves legally, we sent the UNOD letter to the president, the head of the Justice Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, FBI, NSA― basically the entire alphabet soup of the intelligence agencies, and we sent it return receipt requested to prove it was received. Danny Sheehan, the constitutional attorney who did the Silkwood Case and represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers, helped me pro bono on what is essentially constitutional law. The letter exonerates every man and woman in the private and public sector, Intel or the military―whoever worked on these projects from any legal penalties related to disclosing information. We used the document to legally protect every eyewitness and whistleblower that came forward to testify for the Disclosure Project. To this day, none of these top secret witnesses has been prosecuted, harassed, or injured. We are calling for thousands more like them to come forward!