THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 22, 1995 TAG: 9503220671
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ROY A. BAHLS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines
ARE WE ALONE AMONG the mind-boggling billions of stars in the vastness of the Universe? What if our planet is not the lone oasis of intelligent life, and other civilizations have found their way here?
Dr. Steven M. Greer is convinced that we are being visited by extraterrestrial life forms. And he feels that it's high time everyone learns the truth about them.
Greer, founder and international director of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI), will present some of his evidence Friday and Saturday at Hampton's Virginia Air and Space Center/Hampton Roads History Center.
Greer, who believes that these visitors are not hostile, became interested in the subject as a youngster.
``I was 8 or 9,'' said Greer, 39, in a recent phone interview, ``when I had a sighting of a disk-shaped craft that convinced me that it was certainly not an airplane or anything conventional.''
There were to be other such encounters for Greer and in 1990 he decided to form CSETI in Asheville, N.C., and organize a world-wide effort to establish communication.
With the findings from his organization's Project Starlight, he hopes to convince government leaders, scientists and the public to acknowledge these visitors and establish a peaceful dialogue.
``What we are doing is identifying and distilling the best scientific evidence,'' Greer said. ``We go all over the world and locate the best pilot cases, the best landing cases and the best photographs. We are going to add to that some never-published official government documents that are smoking guns.''
The organization's Rapid Mobilization Investigative Teams of scientists and researchers try to communicate with these visitors using lights, lasers and auditory tones.
``You don't pull out a gun or chase them with jet fighters armed with missiles,'' he said. ``You go out with the right scientific and diplomatic approach.''
While on one such outing in southern England in July of 1992, Greer said one of the disk-shaped crafts flew over the same field they were in.
``This thing came within a few hundred feet of us and only 10 feet above the ground,'' he said. ``It signaled to us for about 10 or 15 minutes. It was an extraordinary event.''
Greer believes the U.S. government has obtained a number of these crafts and their occupants. He refers to the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book, which documented unidentified flying objects from 1952 to 1969, as a smokescreen. The real research, he said, was being conducted in secrecy.
``This is the most tightly guarded secret that ours or any other government has ever had,'' he said. ``That technology is a pandora's box. So there is an aspect of this that I understand the secrecy around.''
Reports of unexplainable crafts and their occupants are not a recent phenomena and Greer points to a combination of reasons for the many sightings since the 1940s.
``I think a big red flag went up when we developed not only nuclear weapons but also began exploring space,'' he said. ``Any interplanetary group that would be observing our planet would take this as a very alarming development.''
Greer feels that these life forms are waiting for humans to educate themselves and mature before they will contact us.
``They may be a quarter million years more advanced than we are technologically,'' he said. ``Their technology will look like magic to us. I don't think that we should be running around thinking these are gods in flying saucers that we should worship. We need to take this in a very rational way.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Dr. Steven Greer became fascinated by extraterrestrial life after
spotting a disk-shaped craft that wasn't an airplane.
Graphic
LECTURE FRIDAY, SATURDAY
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
by CNB