CSETI

CSETI, the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is the organization through which Steven Greer ran his contact project. It is best known for the CE-5 initiative: volunteer field teams that go out at night, meditate, and signal to craft with lights in the hope of initiating contact. One account puts its founding in 1990.

Inside view

Most of what follows comes from one former volunteer, Joseph Burkes, a retired physician who says he coordinated a CE-5 working group in Southern California for CSETI from 1992 into the late 1990s. He wrote about it on his own blog, Contact Underground, decades afterwards. None of it is corroborated elsewhere, and he now disagrees with the organization, so read it as one hostile insider's account.

• Protocol. Preparation was guided meditation. In the field, teams visualized deep space, then the galaxy, the solar system, the planet and finally the exact site, and stated their wish for peaceful contact. The most advanced technique was "Coherent Thought Sequencing", which he describes as remote viewing. He compares this with the Peruvian group Mission Rama, which relied on multi-day meditation, strict vegetarianism and all-night chanting.
• His verdict. Burkes came to see CSETI's investigations as "more akin to an intelligence operation than anything that should be called 'science'". He says the organization controlled the time and place of encounters and, through its preparation, influenced who joined teams, and that many participants had already had sightings or missing time. He rejects the idea that it practiced "citizens diplomacy".
• Contacts with government. He reports that CSETI's inner circle negotiated a December 1993 meeting with CIA Director James Woolsey, on the understanding that cooperation would not interfere with CE-5 operations. He also says Naval Intelligence had a liaison to the group in Commander Willard Miller, with the collaboration running until about 2013, and that Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine reportedly offered funding. This sits alongside Greer's own account of Stubblebine in the 1992 hotel-suite questioning and the $2 billion offer, both of which also rest on Greer's testimony. Miller's role in the April 1997 Pentagon meeting is the best-documented part of this picture.
• Surveillance. Burkes attributes monitoring of his own team (a man in a parked car, two men at a state park, an unmarked one-man helicopter) to the "control group". He labels the piece speculative, admits some sightings could be coincidence, and offers no evidence.