by Steve Alten
Reaching for the lanyard hanging around her neck, she removed the I.D. badge from inside her shirt and glanced back at Logan. “Anything else you’d like before I swipe? Dessert?”
The teenager had gone pale, his jaw slack, his blue eyes staring at the I.D. card in her hand. “You’re Cosmic Clearance?”
“Yes. So what?”
“I was lying. I’ve never been on Level-4, I swear.”
“Okay. Logan, calm down—you’re hyperventilating.”
He wiped tears from his eyes. “I gotta be somewhere, I just remembered.”
He jogged back to the Maglev track, stepped on his board and took off, accelerating down the concourse.
19
Charlottesville, Virginia
Saturday
ADAM LAY AWAKE IN BED, staring at the sun-drenched window. Ten hours before, he had been convinced a species from another world had been observing him from the other side of the glass.
Seven hours of sleep later, and he wasn’t sure if it had really happened or if it was just a dream.
The scent of brunch and a freshly-brewed pot of coffee drove him from his bed. Guiding his pant leg over his prosthetic he dressed, used the bathroom, and made his way down the stairs.
He found Emily Greer in the kitchen, transferring a pan of hash browns into a serving dish.
She greeted him with a smile. “Good afternoon. How did you sleep?”
“Surprisingly well considering a spaceship from another world practically landed on your house.
Emily smiled. “Just another night at the Greers.”
“Are you saying that this kind of thing happens often?”
“Not often, but it happens. However, you definitely received the VIP treatment. I made hash browns and scrambled eggs, and we have fresh bagels and cream cheese, unless you’d prefer toast. Go on and help yourself; I have to run into town before this afternoon’s training session. Steven pushed it back until four p.m.”
“Where is Steven?”
“Where else? In his study.”
Adam fixed himself a plate of food, poured a cup of coffee, and crossed the hall.
He found Dr. Greer at his desk, reading through a file. He looked up as Adam entered. “Sleep well?”
“All things considered. What are you doing?”
“Reviewing the personnel files of this week’s CE-5 group. I suspect at least one of our guests is not quite who they claim to be.”
“CIA?”
“Or MAJI. The ETs knew, they always do. I think that’s why they waited until the group left before revealing themselves to you.”
“You knew they were coming, didn’t you?”
“I always ask them to make an appearance; I never know if they’ll actually show. As I said last night, every CE-5 session is different. But I did ask them to do something that would eliminate your doubts. And that was impressive.”
“Ya think?” Adam sat on one of the folding chairs. “How do you communicate with another species and ask them to pop in for a visit? Do you have an ET hotline or something?”
“Thought-energy and consciousness is my hotline and it’s theirs; it’s how they communicate with one another across millions of light years. I meditate before each session. Last night I communicated to them that you were on a mission to help us, and if they felt you were worthy, then I suggested they do something to remove your doubts. Years ago, I did the same thing when I was in Phoenix preparing for an important briefing. Google ‘Phoenix Lights’ when you have a chance. That event was bigger; last night was far more personal. I’m sure you thought I was a bit of a kook.”
Adam smiled. “It’s the subject matter. When I tell my brother about what happened last night, he may dissociate himself from me.”
“You need to understand—the ridicule attached with seeing UFOs … it was all intended. Back in 1953, the CIA actually hired Disney Studios to create cartoons about little green men so that the subject would never be taken seriously—de-fanging the whole issue into silliness. It will take a lot of courage to pursue this, not just in terms of one’s own personal safety, but also your reputation. You’re going to be ridiculed and laughed out of meetings; you’re going to be ostracized. Everything terrible you can imagine has been said about me, and so what? I mean, you just expect it … but most people in the public eye don’t want to go through it.
“I wrote a paper about this called, When Disclosure Serves Secrecy. It’s on our website, SiriusDisclosure.com—I suggest you read it. The paper describes the dangers of doing what we’ve done and how the process of disclosure is being hijacked by charlatans who masquerade as disclosure supporters. It’s an old CIA trick they’ve used time and time again to diffuse the threat of the public learning the truth about a subject from the inside. In my case, they attached nonsense to the body of evidence I compiled; things exacerbating the fear factor and the silliness—the whole evil aliens are coming to eat us for lunch. The CIA has gone to extraordinary lengths to perpetrate alien abductions in order to add fuel to the craziness associated with UFOs, keeping legitimate scientists from getting involved.”
“But you got involved. You weren’t afraid.”
“I had a sighting when I was a boy, plus I had a near-death experience which somewhat inoculated me. Still, my goal was never to brief presidents and CIA directors, and I certainly didn’t expect to have to deal with threats on my life, let alone see harm come to people I cared deeply about. I was working full-time as an emergency and trauma doctor in a North Carolina ER and I loved my work. Using meditation to establish peaceful contact between humans and these visiting Interstellars … I stumbled upon that when I was much younger. My only intention was to show our visitors that there is far more to the human race than the military establishment that was shooting them down. So I founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence—a grass roots movement that bypassed governments in order to make peaceful contact with these civilizations as citizen diplomats, much like Physicians for Social Responsibility were citizen diplomats to the Soviet Union during the darkest days of the Cold War.
“Our first really successful CE-5 experience happened with a group of about fifty people on a beach near Pensacola, Florida. Two of our participants were Air Force pilots, one was a colonel. That night we vectored in four ET craft and they materialized and were filmed—it was actually quite close but the night cameras back then weren’t very good. The story ended up on the front page of the Pensacola paper and I suddenly found myself flying way above the radar of some very serious national security guys.
“In March of 1992, about a month after the close encounter in Pensacola, I was invited to attend a conference in Atlanta. Being naive, I thought it was just a UFO convention. Once I arrived I realized half the people there were part of MJ-12.”
“Like who?”
“The former Head of Army Intelligence, the NSA, DIA—a lot of Intel spooks. And they were very confrontational, asking me, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I said, ‘Well, you can read about it, I don’t have any secrets.” I told them I was developing protocols and a team to make contact with these civilizations outside governmental channels because the government was broken. I was told it was none of my business and not to do it. My response was, ‘Try stopping me.’ We kind of had a mano a mano in a hotel room until three in the morning.”
“What changed? How did you go from group meditations to briefing presidents?”
“A senior official at the CIA flew a trusted emissary down on a private jet to visit me in North Carolina. This man’s family founded the California Institute of Technology, one of the most prestigious universities in America. He said, ‘Dr. Greer, do what you were planning on doing and don’t give up. Someone’s got to do this because it’s out of control; moreover someone’s going to have to spearhead a contact protocol—right now, the system is completely dysfunctional.’ I told him that I was an emergency room doctor and I was just doing this ad hoc between ER shifts and raising
four children. All the time I’m thinking, ‘why is this guy asking me to do something? Why don’t they just do it themselves?’ That was my initiation into this weird ‘down the rabbit hole’ world of secret projects.
“A few months later William Jefferson Clinton was elected President of the United States. Almost immediately I was approached by people who were friends of his who said, ‘This is something that the president is very interested in.’ Webster Hubble, who was third in command at the Justice Department prior to being convicted of some other problems, told me Clinton wanted to know three things when he took office: Who really killed Marilyn Monroe, who killed Jack Kennedy, and what is all this UFO stuff? Apparently they made inquiries into the subject and were not happy with the answers they were getting, meaning they knew they were being lied to. At about that time, some military people who were in favor of disclosure approached me. These people had had UFO experiences, either on battleships or at strategic air command facilities where nuclear weapons were being kept, and they offered to assist me.
“One of these men was a naval commander … very connected up in the Pentagon. When he showed up at my front door, my first thought was that he was a spy. Turns out he was a stand-up guy who did everything he could to set up a number of the deep background briefings that I did at the Pentagon. We decided to have a meeting to discuss how to put together a team that would brief the right folks in government and encourage them to end the secrecy. You have to understand, this was back in 1992-93, when I actually thought we had a functional constitutional government. Since then I’ve learned it’s all window dressing, that there’s a parallel governmental process that operates completely independent of the people we elect.
“Anyway, we had this meeting and it was decided that we should contact certain key people in the U.S. government to—in military speak—de-conflict the CSETI contact teams from Air Force and other military operations so that they didn’t interfere with us and we didn’t interfere with them. That was the whole purpose of the meeting, to make sure we weren’t caught in the middle … to prevent an accidental shooting. It seemed that whenever and wherever we were doing our CE-5, we’d have a run-in with military jets, helicopters, and all kinds of stuff coming into our contact sites … and we still do to this day. All I wanted was to keep my people safe.
“My military advisor met with Admiral Cramer, the Head of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After speaking with him he decided we needed to have a meeting with the Intel people at Wright-Patterson, the air force base where the Roswell remains were sent. This was in September of 1993. While that meeting was being set up, two more influential individuals came calling. The first one was Leah Ghali, the wife of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the U.N. Secretary General. The second was Laurance Rockefeller.
“Laurance was the philosopher king of the family. David Rockefeller was the money guy with Chase Manhattan, and his nephew, Jay Rockefeller was Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. If you recall from my talk, Nelson Rockefeller was the one who had set up the Rockefeller Commission of 1956 which completely reorganized the Department of Defense and the CIA, and led to the establishment of MJ-12—he was the group’s first leader. It was also Nelson Rockefeller who made it so no U.S. president could contain, control, or penetrate MAJI or their unacknowledged UFO projects.”
“You must have gotten some blowback—associating with a Rockefeller.”
“I did, but I knew Laurance was different; I think he wanted to ‘cleanse the family karma.’ He knew what we were doing was really working—he had been sending his people to our CE-5 protocols where ET craft would appear and then disappear. Laurance invited me out to his ranch—the J.Y. Ranch in Wyoming which is where the Clintons vacationed. I was asked to go there in September of 1993 to share information about our CE-5 initiative.
“It was an eclectic crowd. Billionaire Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace was there, along with people of various backgrounds from the UFO sub-culture. Some were supportive regarding our work; some despised what we were doing. I found out later that the unfriendlies were working for the intelligence community.
“At some juncture over the weekend I was asked what else I was working on. I said, ‘We’ve initiated a project to brief senior government officials in the Clinton Administration and the Pentagon and members of Congress so that we can terminate secrecy on this issue and get the government to change policy because we understand that the incoming president is favorable toward that idea.’
“Well, you could have heard a pin drop. Laurance Rockefeller asked about my plans and I told him I was going straight to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base after this meeting to brief the colonel over this Foreign Technology Division of the Air Force, and then, in a couple of months, I’d be briefing President Clinton’s CIA director.
“Laurance wanted to be involved, but only from behind-the-scenes. He offered to host the president and first lady at his ranch so that I could show them the best available UFO photos and evidence.
“Meanwhile, the U.N. Secretary General’s wife attended a series of events known as salons. A salon was a meeting in a private home attended by dignitaries. The well-to-do host would invite an interesting guest, someone like yours truly, who would inform these rich and powerful people about what was going on, which is exactly what I did. Mrs. Boutros-Ghali was so taken by the subject that she wanted to arrange a meeting at the U.N. so I could brief a lot of the diplomats and friends of hers who were supportive of ending secrecy and making peaceful interplanetary contact. Again, our objective was to provide accurate information to the president, his advisors, and the key people in Congress. We even gave them the perfect story to cover their asses as to why this information had been kept so long from the masses—that world leaders were simply waiting until the Cold War was over, not wanting to throw into the mix the fact that Earth was being visited by interstellar civilizations, and that our scientists had, in fact, reverse-engineered many of their technologies.
“In the fall of 1993, I was invited to speak at Colorado State University. The event was hosted by astronaut Brian O’Leary and Maury Albertson, one of the co-founders of the Peace Corps. Before roughly 800 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, my name is Petersen, and I think I can help you with this. 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 John 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 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.”
“What did you do?”
“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 th
e 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?’
“Well, 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 within these classifications there are compartments. The compartments that are 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 one of your predecessors, the Under Secretary 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 my uncle’s old company, 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.
“My military advisor was involved in one USAP. He and a few others were taken into a SCIF—a Secure Communication Intelligence Facility—completely underground. Everyone’s weapons were taken, their cell phones, watches … anything electronic. A security enforcement officer for that particular USAP escorted them below. The guy took a bullet out of his gun’s chamber and said, ‘If you tell anyone about anything going on in this project, there is a bullet with your name on it and it will find you … somewhere … somehow.’ This is not a movie. This is actually how that world works … the world I’ve been dealing with since 1993. That is serious stuff. Of all the projects that are unacknowledged … black bag operations of all kinds … special operations of all kinds … the blackest and most unacknowledged are the ones dealing with UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence.
