CSETI
CSETI (Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1990 by Steven Greer dedicated to establishing peaceful, bilateral contact with non-human civilizations through coherent consciousness protocols — and to achieving full public UAP disclosure through the Disclosure Project, its whistleblower testimony division launched in 2001.
Founding and mission
CSETI was formally established in 1990 after Greer — then a practicing emergency physician in North Carolina — concluded that contact with non-human civilizations was both possible and essential and that the prerequisite was a human initiative, not a passive wait for official acknowledgment. In a 2012 radio appearance with filmmaker Amardeep Kaleka, Greer described the founding impetus as rooted in a citizens' diplomacy model analogous to Cold War-era medical exchanges: "It's sort of like during the darkest days of the Cold War when Physicians for Social Responsibility were sending medical doctors over to the Soviet Union to sort of have a dialogue... There needs to be a citizens diplomatic effort." The organization's founding premise is that extraterrestrial intelligences have been monitoring humanity and responding to coherent collective consciousness for decades, and that a structured, reproducible protocol for initiating such contact could be developed by trained civilian teams operating anywhere on Earth. CSETI distinguishes itself from UFO investigation organizations by explicitly pursuing bilateral contact rather than documentation of events, and by operating from the position that extraterrestrial visitors are non-hostile and that the adversarial framing promoted by military and intelligence programs is a deliberate misdirection.
Coherent consciousness contact (CE-5)
CSETI's contact methodology, called CE-5 (Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind), involves groups of trained human participants using meditation, remote viewing-style intention, and coherent consciousness protocols to invite contact with NHI craft. CSETI claims thousands of successful contact events in which structured craft have responded to CE-5 group invitations with light signals, physical approaches, or direct communication. The CE-5 methodology is described by Greer as bilateral — distinguishing it from CE-1 through CE-4 events in which humans are passive witnesses or subjects.
The CE-5 protocol as practiced by CSETI teams involves: a structured meditation bringing participants into a state of shared coherent thought projection; vectoring — directing NHI craft to a specific location using visualized coordinates transmitted in thought; the use of specific light signals (typically coherent laser or high-powered flashlight sequences) and audio tones to identify the group's location and intention; and documentation of response phenomena including craft approach, light interactions, and instrumental readings. Greer describes the mechanism as fundamentally based on universal consciousness — the capacity of awareness to communicate non-locally across any distance — rather than any physical signal-propagation system.
CE-5 events are reported to occur under a significant operational constraint: the threat environment created by advanced weapons systems targeting non-human craft — which Greer describes as scalar quantum-potential weapons operating beyond the speed of light — means that ET craft rarely manifest as fully solid three-dimensional objects during CE-5 sessions. Greer states that craft will typically appear briefly in three-dimensional form or as plasma-light phenomena and then vanish to avoid detection and targeting by ground-based radar and satellite systems.
Contact accounts
Among the accounts documented by CSETI, Greer describes a CE-5 session conducted in the mountains outside Tucson with approximately 25–30 participants. During the session, Greer and others heard footsteps approaching from behind the meditation circle — the sound of movement from an entity that was invisible (cloaked). At his direction, filmmaker and screenwriter David Marconi (who wrote Enemy of the State) captured a still photograph that Greer states shows an ET entity of crane-shaped head morphology positioned between two participants, one of whom had experienced severe hearing loss since adolescence. A separate account describes a CE-5 session conducted inside the Great Pyramid of Giza during a chanting event, in which an emerald green plasma sphere materialized inside the chamber and moved around it — an event CSETI states is archived in its CE-5 Contact app.
Disclosure Project
In May 2001, CSETI hosted a National Press Club briefing in Washington, D.C. at which 21 government, military, and intelligence witnesses testified about their direct knowledge of UAP and the suppression of the phenomenon. The briefing included testimony from Edgar Mitchell, military radar operators, FAA officials, and former intelligence officers. The full testimonies — from over 400 witnesses — are archived in the Disclosure Project Briefing Document (2001) and the Witness Testimony series. By 2023, Greer stated he had accumulated 755 whistleblowers across government, military, and corporate programs — with the full Disclosure Project Intelligence Archive comprising 8–10 terabytes of data being organized for delivery to congressional investigators and intelligence community contacts. Five CSETI-affiliated whistleblowers were brought before Congress by Greer to testify in closed session about first-hand knowledge of classified programs involving retrieved non-human technology.
Orion Project
CSETI's companion organization, the Orion Project, was established to develop and release free energy and zero-point energy technologies identified through CSETI's intelligence network as having been classified within US government and corporate programs. Greer states that teams of scientists working with CSETI have identified multiple functional devices and energy systems that were seized, suppressed, or whose inventors were threatened or killed. The Orion Project's mission is to bring at least one such device through independent verification and into public knowledge, circumventing the suppression mechanisms Greer documents.
CE-5 Contact app
CSETI offers a CE-5 Contact training application available in major app stores, which Greer describes as a comprehensive home-study program covering remote viewing, coherent thought projection, and the full CE-5 contact protocol. The app includes archived CE-5 event recordings, training meditations, and documentation of contact events accumulated over CSETI's history, including the Great Pyramid plasma sphere recording. Greer states the app enables genuine CE-5 contact for individuals and small groups worldwide who have no prior training, citing accounts from practitioners in Eastern Europe and elsewhere who reported craft responses during solo sessions.
CE-5 protocol origin
Greer described the CE-5 contact protocols as having been co-developed through a direct experience of non-human consciousness rather than as a purely human invention. In a 2025 interview with Jesse Michels on the American Alchemy podcast, Greer stated that during an experience in which he was in a non-ordinary state of awareness at a location where the distinctions of space-time were different, he and the non-human intelligences present "co-created and invented the CE-5 contact protocols." Greer characterised the experience as collaborative — a human consciousness experiencing the ET state of awareness from within — and as physically real despite its dreamlike quality.
Greer separately described CE-5 work as operating at the boundary of human remote viewing capability and a higher-order "electromagnetic trans-dimensional interface with consciousness and mind and technology" — distinguishing the practical CE-5 contact method accessible to any civilian group from the higher-level NHI interface framework.
CE-5 initiative (Art Bell interview)
In an interview with Art Bell broadcast on the Dark Matter radio programme, Greer described the CE-5 initiative — which he said had been running for approximately twenty years at the time of the recording — as a training programme for civilians in remote viewing-style contact consciousness, culminating in documented CE-5 events encompassing photographic, video, and electronic evidence as well as physical proximity encounters with ET beings at locations including Joshua Tree National Park.
CSETI as interplanetary diplomatic initiative
In his 2009 Project Camelot interview with Kerry Cassidy and Bill Ryan, Greer described CSETI as an "interplanetary, interstellar diplomatic initiative" — characterising it as the primary and founding programme of his three parallel operations, with the Disclosure Project and the energy technology programme as secondary tracks running concurrently at equal priority. Greer also recounted that following his early successful CE-5 contact work in Florida near Pensacola, the intelligence community identified that CSETI possessed working contact methodology and "came after me like a pack of rottweilers."