The cargo cult of Steven Greer

I originally assumed that Steven Greer was a secular ufologist with a strong penchant for the ETH and conspiracy theory. Pretty mainstream in the U.S. ufological community, I suppose. However, about ten minutes of fact-checking on the web revealed a somewhat different picture. So did this book, "Extraterrestrial contact", published in 1999.

In reality, Greer is a contactee á la George Adamski. His UFO research group CSETI is really a new religious movement centred on belief in benign aliens. It's fascinating that a contactee cult has managed to restyle itself as a ufology research group! This may tell us something about the present state of the UFO sub-culture, and new religious movements in general.

I don't know if scholars of comparative religion have studied CSETI, but if and when they do, they will probably refer to it as a cargo cult. The original cargo cults were strange new religions, sometimes with apocalyptic tendencies, which emerged in New Guinea in the wake of colonialism and the destruction of the traditional tribal way of life. The cargo cults promised that the "ancestors" would soon return in large ships or airplanes, defeating the colonial powers while bringing the natives an abundance of "cargo", i.e. all the technological gadgets the natives craved but didn't know how to produce themselves. In popular culture, cargo cults used to be a potent symbol of Western superiority over the silly, superstitious and savage coloured races.

There's just one tiny detail. Today, the silly natives "R" Us.

In Greer's scenario, the aliens are beings whose technology is hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years, ahead of ours. Indeed, their technology is impossible to distinguish from magic. Its main component is a mysterious new source of free energy, which the aliens are willing to share with humanity. The free energy will instantaneously solve all our environmental and resource problems, ushering in a new era of peace and unprecedented prosperity. It will also destroy our present political, economical and military structures. In some sense, these aliens are also our "ancestors", since Greer seem open to the idea that they were here in the past, built the Face on Mars, and so on. These ideas are preached when human civilization is in the balance due to climate change, peak oil, economic crisis, etc. An easy solution to our predicament is being offered, a solution which amounts to the biggest free lunch in the history of the cosmos.

Yes, this is definitely an American version of the Polynesian cargo cults.

Of course, Greer denies that his message is at bottom religious. As already mentioned, he claims that the UFOs and their occupants are material beings, not angels or gods. However, their technology is so advanced that it's impossible to tell the difference between the supposedly material (and mortal?) aliens and the supernatural beings of human mythology. Indeed, alien technology is based on a fusion between matter and mind. They communicate through a form of channelling (although Greer uses a different term for it) and their space ships seem to roam the astral world, which humans can access during out-of-body experiences! Sectors of the New Age have always been obsessed with high tech, so there is really little new in this transhumanistic techno-spirituality. Still, there does seem to be a subtle shift from the messages of the early contactees, who seems to have used the UFO angle mostly as a gimmick to spread a Theosophically-inspired message of much older vintage. Greer and the CSETI seem to be techno-obsessed in a more genuine manner. The ecological crisis has led many groups to reject high technology, but the CSETI takes the opposite position: embrace it, and claim that an even more advanced form of such a technology can save the planet from destruction. This is surely the more popular option, a kind of crypto-religious parody on geo-engineering, the hydrogen economy or "energy independence". I therefore predict that groups of this sort will become stunningly successful in the near future. Please note: the aliens don't want to give us arcane occultist instructions or commonplace warnings against the dangers of nuclear weapons. They actually want to give us something more useful and tangible. The cargo, remember?

Greer has a ready explanation for why the aliens haven't landed yet and shared their scientific knowledge with humanity. The alien "disclosure" is hindered by powerful human elites who fear the breakdown of the old world order. These elites have already gained access to the alien technology by retro-engineering of crashed alien craft, but rather than aiding humanity, they are using it to decidedly evil ends. For instance, the hidden elite is abducting and torturing people, blaming the abductions on the aliens in an attempt to discredit them. They also have access to powerful mind control techniques which can induce false spiritual experiences. Often, the military interferes with genuine UFO observations by releasing flares from airplanes, in order to confuse witnesses and make it easier for debunkers to explain away the whole thing. The heart of the conspiracy is a group called PI-40 which acts as a "shadow government" and even kills people who are willing to speak the truth.

None of this is a mystery to those familiar with new religious movements, or the wilder strands of the established world religions. They too speak of a conflict between the good and the evil, Light and Darkness. The evil powers in Greer's scenario may be human (they are the government conspirators of more conventional UFO-conspiracist scenarios), but their access to alien technology makes them, in effect, super-human. Note also the cultic paranoia about mind control, etc.

The solution is at hand, though! For several decades, Greer and his band of followers have promised "disclosure", the final revelation of all government UFO secrets. So far, nothing has come out of it, but hardly for the want of trying. Greer has founded the Disclosure Project and taken the fight to Washington DC, where he has organized hearings featuring important UFO witnesses, including astronaut Edgar Mitchell and former members of the U.S. military. Greer claims to have briefed high-ranking members of the U.S. administration, military and intelligence community on the UFO problem. Indeed, the first line in "Extraterrestrial Contact" is: "On December 13, 1993, my wife and I flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with President Clinton's first CIA Director, James Woolsey". Personally, I find it hard to believe that this latter day Adamski really has contacts with the Washington top brass, let alone other heads of state or the UN Secretary-General. It's fairly common that leaders of small alternative groups claim to have contacts with establishment figures. I encountered this phenomenon already in senior high school, when I interviewed the leader of a small fringe group for a school project - the man probably never had more than a dozen supporters, but claimed to be on a first name basis with the Swedish prime minister, styled himself "government advisor", etc. He also claimed to head an international organization with sections even in Black Africa! I strongly suspect that Greer's constant references to (usually anonymous) politicians and generals who made his acquaintance are of a similar character...

Perhaps that is just as good. Imagine what the CIA could do with this guy, had they really decided to recruit him! A curious fact about Greer's conspiracy theory is that it explicitly *doesn't* name the president, Congress, the military top brass or even the CIA or NSA as part of the conspiracy. Rather, the official organs of the U.S. government are portrayed as innocent dupes of the conspirators, which consists of private contractors and certain members of the administration and military which refuse to tell their secrets even to their superiors. In this manner, Greer can appeal to Bill Clinton, "brief" James Woolsey or shake hands with foreign leaders without fear of being implicated in the conspiracy himself. Except, of course, by other conspiracy theorists, who have spotted the contradiction...

Psychologically, the "disclosure" (which never seems to happen) seems to play the same role as the apocalypse in other religious systems. (Doesn't the Greek word apokalypsis actually mean disclosure? A co-incidence?) The problem with the disclosure is, of course, that it's dependent on the good will of the authorities. What if they decide not to disclose anything? For how long can the process be prolonged? There are two other, more gung-ho scenarios in Greer's speculations. One entails a phoney apocalypse staged by the conspirators: an attack on Earth by "evil aliens" that are actually conspirators in disguise. The other is a more classical scenario, in which the aliens (the real ones) move in to save humanity from self-destruction, perhaps when climate change becomes too difficult to handle with our feeble geo-engineering efforts. For those who can't wait, the CSETI promises a personal disclosure of the alien presence. For a large sum of money, one can join CSETI courses and excursions, and actually meet the aliens. CSETI claims to have contacted UFOs with the aid of everything from flash-lights to meditation. They call this CE-5, Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind. Since the aliens communicate telepathically, it is not necessary to actually encounter a physical alien craft. Meditation techniques work just as well. Presumably, the meetings with the space brothers give the supporters of this particular movement the motivation to continue their lobbying of Washington to disclose the truth to the rest of us. From the standpoint of the comparative religion scholar, these attempts to contact UFOs could be seen as a ritual.

Meditation, ritual acts, advanced beings offering techno-salvation, evil forces attacking the faithful, and a full "disclosure" (apocalypse) waiting in the future...

Yes, this is indeed Dr. Steven M. Greer's cargo cult. And, if we're not careful, the next world religion!

For a short while.