United States.Disclosure Project · National Press Club conference (May 9, 2001)

On Wednesday, May 9, 2001, between 9 and 11 a.m., the ballroom of the National Press Club in Washington hosted the press conference of the Disclosure Project, the organization that emergency physician Steven M. Greer had founded in 1993. The call to the press announced 'over twenty' military, intelligence, government, corporate and scientific witnesses who would establish 'without any doubt' the reality of UFOs, extraterrestrial life forms, and the advanced energy and propulsion technologies derived from them. The confirmed attendees included John Callahan, former Division Chief of the FAA's Accidents and Investigations Branch; Master Sergeant Dan Morris, formerly of the Air Force and the NRO; Carol Rosin, a missile defense consultant and former spokesperson for Wernher von Braun; Major George A. Filer III, formerly of Air Force intelligence; retired Navy commander Graham Bethune; Michael Smith, a former Air Force air traffic controller; Army Sergeant Clifford Stone; and Robert Salas, a former Strategic Air Command missile launch officer.

Each witness spoke for a few minutes. Callahan repeated what he had already said about the ↗ case: that in 1987 the FAA gathered the radar data from the encounter of Japan Air Lines flight 1628 over Alaska and that, by his account, those present were told the meeting had never happened. Salas returned to the missile shutdown at ↗. Bethune described an object he saw in 1951 while flying between Iceland and Newfoundland. Attorney Daniel Sheehan, acting as legal counsel for the group, told reporters that during the Carter administration he had been shown photographs of a crashed object bearing symbols at the National Archives, and that he traced the images onto the cardboard back of his legal pad.

The demands were concrete: open congressional hearings, the first since the 1968 symposium of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics; a presidential executive order protecting witnesses bound by security oaths; the declassification of documents and projects; and a law banning space-based weapons. Greer said he had identified several hundred witnesses —more than a hundred videotaped and seventy transcribed— and that same day he handed out an April 2001 briefing document, co-signed with oceanographer Theodore C. Loder III of the University of New Hampshire, which included summaries of the ↗ and the ↗. The 573-page book 'Disclosure' carried the transcripts of sixty-nine of those witnesses.

Coverage was uneven. ABC News ran a story the same day and quoted James Oberg, a former NASA engineer and the network's space consultant, who cautioned that not everyone present shared Greer's theory of a worldwide cabal hiding extraterrestrial technology, and that they should not be mocked. Greer spoke of 250,000 people waiting for the webcast, a figure that rests only on his own statements. Greer himself later admitted being 'disappointed but not surprised' by the scant attention from the major media. The hearings never came.

The case's value lies not in what the witnesses said they had seen, most of which was already known, but in the format. For the first time an organized group put people with verifiable institutional posts before the press and asked Congress to hear them under oath, with legal protection. That same structure —credentialed witnesses, lawyers, a request for relief from security oaths— reappears in the 2013 Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, in the ↗ and in the ↗. Twenty-two years before Congress heard a whistleblower under oath, the request had already been made, in almost the same words.

The case also shows why it did not succeed. Philip Klass, in his skeptical newsletter of summer 2001, pointed out that the conference mixed the call for hearings with two other agendas: opposition to any missile defense system, which Greer framed as a weapon against extraterrestrial craft, and the promise of unlimited 'zero-point energy'. Klass added a point of method: Greer had refused him entry to a similar press conference in 1997 and, according to the reports, also turned away the representatives of the Fund for UFO Research. An event demanding transparency excluded its critics. Witness selection also showed documented cracks: in June 2002, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell asked the Sunday Express to have his name removed from the witness list, because he had no first-hand experience of the phenomenon and felt some of the project's conclusions went 'a step too far'. There is also a minor but telling detail: the press release presented Salas as a lieutenant colonel, when the rank he retired with was captain.

Greer's later drift —the contact protocols of his organization CSETI, the 2013 documentary 'Sirius', which presented the Atacama skeleton as extraterrestrial before it was genetically identified as human, and 'Unacknowledged' in 2017— finished separating the organizer from the witnesses he had gathered. That is why the case reads best in two layers. Some testimonies have value of their own and stand up in other files in the corpus, such as those of Callahan or Salas; others, such as the contractor-employee accounts collected later that fed stories like ↗, were never independently verified. And the frame that wrapped them made a reasonable request —to hear witnesses under oath— carry claims no one could check.