Dr. Steven Greer has made at least one documentary previous to Unacknowledged that I’ve viewed on Netflix. That’s how I knew that the man had suffered greatly—and suspiciously—for his probes into the UFO controversy. Having been warned off with varying degrees of subtlety for some time, he and his initial group of investigators were beset by a curious outbreak of cancer as contagious, apparently, as the flu, and a lot more deadly. (One recalls Aleksandr Litvinenko’s radioactive cup of tea administered by a couple of Putin’s goons.) Greer survived; his wife and many of his colleagues did not.
James Woolsey, former head of the CIA, had on one occasion in his chief-of-spies capacity manifested such an interest in tracking down the actors and the script behind America’s massive, off-budget, quasi-military R&D operations that he privately summoned Greer to brief him on the issues—privately and bizarrely, since Greer is a medical doctor who has immersed himself in “ufology” only as a concerned citizen. Woolsey was obviously convinced that more accredited sources were not giving him the true low-down. Later on, Greer was apparently told by a Clintonista of very high rank that Wild Bill would not risk prying into the Roswell/Area 51 files because his personal security—Secret Service and all—wouldn’t suffice to keep him alive beyond the first few weeks of snooping.
Unacknowledged is packed with declassified documents that support Greer’s outlandish (or should I say “otherworldly”?) claims in surprisingly graphic detail. A few insiders with high security clearances also share enough of their experiences on camera that a coherent picture emerges… or perhaps two-thirds coherent. The assertion is resonant and sustained that extraterrestrial visitors to Planet Earth are a reality, and also that some imponderably covert branch of our government has been reverse-engineering alien technology for its own undisclosed ends. One would like to suppose that these ends would be defensive, and that the extreme secrecy enveloping them would also be related to our nation’s preservation… but here’s where the picture grows hazy. The documentary floated several motives for the obsessive, sometimes ruthless suppression of information about UFO’s by “men in black”. One is that an elite band of corporatist megalomaniacs wants to deprive the world of unlimited, virtually free energy resources so that fossil fuels may still be marketed at whopping costs. Another applies the same kind of conspiratorial thinking to the arms industry. Yet another would have these neo-illuminati planning to stage an alien invasion with reverse-engineered craft so that the planet might be persuaded to create a single vast alliance—with the U.S. its leader, and the insiders leading the leaders.
Where there are too many motives, there’s no motive at all—and it’s desperately important that we figure out precisely who in our employ is lying to us, and why. I’ll explain next time.