Dr. Steven M. Greer is setting himself up to be the next L. Ron Hubbard.
At a party in the early 1950s, before Scientology become Hubbard’s main focus, Hubbard was overheard saying, “Religion is where the money is.” That was the birth of the biggest business every to be disguised as a modern religion. It’s seems to me Greer is going down the same road.
On the surface Greer seems to be a scientist who is extremely interesting in uncovering alien conspiracies and helping the world be a better place with secret alien technologies. Greer’s Advanced Energy Research Organization (AERO) has the sole mission of finding clean renewable energy sources. Which is delightful and what the world needs right? Right.
So let’s give him gold star for that.
Connected to that is the Orion Project, which concentrates more on the implementation of AERO’s found technologies. This project in completely funded by private sources and has shown no results. This is where it gets fuzzy for me. It seems as if no technologies have been successfully discovered and reproduced by AERO, so why would Greer start taking money to implement them?
So let’s give him a negative gold star here.
Greer also started the Disclosure Project. This project is trying to uncover governmental conspiracies hiding alien contact. Greer is a firm believer in unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and and extraterrestrials (ETs) – he even considers himself a ufologist. The disclosure project is founded on these beliefs and helps to bring other people with similar beliefs together. He’s had several conventions that brought together people who believe they saw, contacted, or were abducted by aliens. Which is also good, in a way, in that these people have a place to meet.
Let’s give him half a gold star, then.
The disclosure project supposedly receives government funds from “covert” departments. Which is a little dicey because the project hasn’t shown any real results or evidence to support its claim. I’m not sure if I like the idea of my tax money going towards something with no results or actual measurable output, but I guess I’ll turn a blind eye because there’s “potential” for groundbreaking discovery.
These three projects-AERO, Orion, and Disclosure-all seem a little sketchy to me, but still leave me on the fence about whether Greer is really an obsessed scientist or a conniving extortionist. When he started the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) in 1990 it seemed like an honest nonprofit organization, until he started offering week long seminars he called “Ambassador to the Universe.”
This is where everything is illuminated for me. The seminar claims to teach attendees to “remote view”, cultivate a cosmic consciousness, and to be precognitive or see the future. All through meditation techniques. Supernatural, psychic powers. All for the small fee of $995. For less than a grand Greer will teach you to have not only physic powers, but cosmic powers to contact aliens. Plus all his books are required for the seminar, of course. Again there has been results from these seminars.
Let’s give him 995 negative gold stars for this, which is fair, right?
So that leaves Dr, Greer with -994 1/2 gold stars.
Is Greer a man in relentless pursuit of proof or a master salesman? He is a salesman. He may have an interest in UFOs and ETs, but this is a business for Greer. He has learned ways to extort money from the government and from private citizens. He is one step away from saying the same thing L Ron Hubbard said over fifty years ago.
Believing something without proof is called faith, and collective faith is called religion, and “religion is where the money is,” right, Dr. Greer?
