Review of Dr. Steven Greer’s Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Fascinating and Poignant

Traci L. Slatton
7 min readMay 19, 2020

--

I had the happy fortune to meet Budd Hopkins before he died. We shared a mutual friend, an elderly journalist, a skeptic, who had read the Project Blue Book materials with Budd.

I met Budd again through the auspices of my husband sculptor Sabin Howard. Many people know Budd Hopkins was a prominent UFOlogist; fewer are aware that Budd was an accomplished artist whose abstract expressionist paintings hang in the MOMA. Sabin and I visited Budd at his home in Cape Cod, where he graciously showed us what he was working on at the time, a Portal Project of beauty and simplicity.

Unidentified Flying Objects, and extraterrestrials, have fascinated me since I was a little girl and read Erich Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods.

Have we been visited by beings from other star systems?

Madonna with Saint Giovannino

And what the heck are those flying ships in Renaissance paintings like Ghirlandaio’s Madonna and Saint Giovannino? Small figures in Ghirlandaio’s ravishing work stare up at the illuminated craft, holding their hands to shield their eyes. Ghirlandaio, the teacher of no less a divine student than Michelangelo, meant that ship to be noticed.

I put one specific question to Budd twice, separated by a few years. I asked, “Budd, are they really here in the physical? They’re definitely here in the astral plane. But are ETs really here in the physical realm?”

Both times, Budd replied, “They’re here in the physical. We have physical evidence.”

I can not confirm his statement. I haven’t seen that evidence for myself. Nor have I experienced the terrifying abductions studied by Hopkins and other researchers such as Pulitzer-prize-winning psychiatrist Dr. John Mack.

But I know that advanced non-human intelligences exist. This knowledge is the common outcome of a simple meditation practice. While in graduate school, I undertook a regular practice of meditation. As metaphysical tracts throughout the millennia explain, such a practice opens the mind to other realms. The ‘siddhis’ are well documented.

The years I spent as a hands-on energy healer also contributed to my personal storehouse of transpersonal experiences.

Budd Hopkins’ negative view of ETs and unidentified flying objects puzzled me. In altered states of mind or in my wonderful flying dreams, I have experienced only positive interactions with non-human, stellar intelligences. Sometimes those beings seem neutral toward me, as if they’re just floating by, observing. Usually they emanate peaceful good intentions.

Yet people in the healing world assured me that extra-terrestrials mean harm. Colleagues told terrifying stories of abduction and experimentation.

It was a thorny dilemma: how to reconcile my individual experiences, which were positive, with the first-hand accounts of invasion and abduction by Mengele-minded creatures who treat humans like insects or rodents for scientific examination.

So it was with interest that I discovered Dr. Stephen Greer’s work a few years ago, and with anticipation that I participated in crowd-funding for his documentary film Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind.

Dr. Greer has a formidable background in the science of human consciousness. A former emergency room doctor, Greer studied meditation, Sanskrit, the use of mantras, and the ritual of pujas from the time he was a teenager. He has published books and released documentaries and he seems to have the ear of practical, grounded folks at the highest levels of society, government, and the military. He speaks with riveting authority and intelligence.

Dr. Greer claims that extra-terrestrials have been visiting us for a long time. Our military has been shooting them down for decades. Roswell involved downed craft. Through the years, certain groups, via unacknowledged special access projects, have extracted and replicated technology that is far ahead of what is commonly available now.

Greer compiled evidence from hundreds of sources. He gathered a group of impressive and credible sources, and he presented the people and the evidence at a televised press conference at the National Press Club in Washington DC in May, 2001.

Disclosure has already happened, according to Dr. Greer, even if my old friend the skeptical journalist never got to ‘kick a tire.’

Dr. Greer posits that the ETs visit us by way of transdimensional technology, using the science of consciousness. He reasons that the distances are so vast that any species who can travel across the cosmos must travel faster than the speed of light. And the way to exceed the speed of light is through the speed of thought, which is instantaneous, or nearly so.

Paige Weber on Unsplash

This assumption evokes physicist Dr. William Tiller’s work on quantum physics and intentionality. Tiller, a Stanford University professor emeritus and founder of The Institute for Psychoenergetic Science, writes, “Human intention acts like a typical potential capable of creating robust effects in what we call physical reality.” (Tiller, William. Science and Human Transformation: Subtle Energies, Intentionality, and Consciousness. Walnut Creek, CA: Pavior Books, 1997).

Dr. Greer would probably say “Conscious intention…creates robust effects,” not limiting this theory to human consciousness.

Tiller goes so far as to posit the Tiller model, which states, “We are primarily elements of spirit, indestructible and eternal and ‘multiplexed’ in the Divine.” It’s that ‘multiplex’ that Greer touches on; it unites all beings who are consciously aware of being conscious. That is, who are awake.

Tiller’s model and Greer’s discourse bear strong similarities.

Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind explores these ideas with rich cinematography and engaging interviews. In fact, Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind tells a compelling story and tells it well.

This story, like all good stories, has protagonists and villains. The protagonists are We the People who want the truth and who also want to make peaceful contact with other citizens of the Universe. The ETs themselves, who are waiting for the inhabitants of Earth to mature into peaceful, open-hearted contact, are also good guys.

The villains are the war-mongering military-industrial complex who want to maintain their hegemony. And who also intend to stage a false-flag UFO invasion event specifically to terrify people on this planet into waging war with extraterrestrials. These “petro-Nazis,” as Greer calls them, maintain their vast wealth through cultivating war, fear, and dependence on fossil fuel oils.

According to Greer, they’re the ones brutally abducting people from their beds in the middle of the night, ‘stagecraft’ designed to further the ends of psychological warfare.

“Staged” UFO events feature craft with seams and rivets, Greer says. That’s the way to tell ours from theirs.

I have to wonder, if such corrupt, amoral folks have indeed planned a false flag UFO invasion, then how many innocent people have they deemed expendable? Have they calculated that 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 men, women, and children can be murdered so they can increase their wealth and power?

Greer also states that the new technologies gleaned from the downed ET craft could save the planet. They could also save us ordinary folk vast amounts of money. Those technologies are being sequestered by the very people about whom Eisenhower warned us in 1961, when he stated, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

Greer grimly insists that our liberties and the democratic process have been co-opted by this greedy, blood-thirsty complex.

The film doesn’t focus solely on the crisis of unwarranted influence that prevents humanity from achieving its highest, most benevolent aims. We see a plethora of vivid photographic and video footage of ET craft through the years. There are lights and orbs and partially-materialized ships appearing in fields. “Holy sh*t!” exclaims a CE5 participant, during a field outing to instigate peaceful contact with extraterrestrials.

One fascinating photo shows a being whose name is Bijou. Bijou appeared during a contact event. The participants saw only a glowing sphere. Dr. Greer pointed and said, “Take a photo there, now.”

The photo revealed what the human eye couldn’t see: a sparkly triangular-headed being with an appendage raised in greeting. There’s a discernible sweetness about the being.

And one of the participants in the event experienced a miraculous healing.

No one has ever been harmed by contact with these beings. Clearly, with their superior technology, if extra-terrestrials wanted to, they could annihilate us.

It’s poignant and heart-breaking to consider the Golden Age that awaits humankind once we have access to the suppressed free energy technologies. It’s appalling to think that a handful of people have made the decision to hide this technology and use it solely for their own ends. This technology belongs to all of us.

This poignance, this heart-break, this sense of ‘what if?’ underscores Dr. Greer’s film. Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind evokes thought, excitement, wonder, and personal responsibility. We each can be one of the 1% whose higher thoughts resonate all of us into an uplifted reality — a reality of universal community and good will.

Chang Duong on Unsplash

--

--

Traci L. Slatton
Traci L. Slatton

Written by Traci L. Slatton

Traci L. Slatton is a documentary filmmaker with Superhuman Film Productions and an international best-selling author.

Responses (4)