The Disclosure Project and CSETI

CSETI (the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, founded 1990) and the Disclosure Project (founded 1993) are Steven Greer's organizations: the first teaches human-initiated contact through the CE5 protocols; the second assembles government and military witnesses to press for an end to UFO secrecy.

Greer, then an emergency physician, built CSETI around group contact fieldwork, and the Disclosure Project around his claim that hundreds of cleared witnesses would testify to Congress given protection.

The May 9, 2001 National Press Club event remains the project's landmark: over 20 witnesses, military officers, controllers, and technicians, gave brief accounts and called for hearings, drawing global coverage and record webcast traffic. Greer's briefing documents circulated to officials; he says he briefed CIA and White House figures in the 1990s, meetings partly documented. CSETI's CE5 work continued in parallel: nighttime field expeditions, training retreats, and later a popular app, with participants reporting light phenomena. The documentaries Sirius (2013) and Unacknowledged (2017) carried both operations to streaming audiences and funded further work.

Greer throughout; 2001 witnesses including John Callahan (FAA) and various officers; filmmaker collaborators.

Active: expeditions, events, and media continue through the PURSUE era, with Greer dismissing official processes as managed disclosure and claiming his own witness pipeline.

The project's legacy splits cleanly. The 2001 event is credited across the field, including by critics, as the template the 2023 hearings fulfilled. The evidentiary record around Greer's showcases is the counterweight: the Atacama specimen's genomic debunking, contested claims around witnesses' representations, monetized retreats, and CE5 videos analysts attribute to flares, satellites, and expectation. Skeptics also document the disclosure-laundering pattern in Greer-adjacent promotions. The organizations thus function as both the movement's proof of concept and its standing credibility tax.