Steven Greer implies Defense Department bribed Garry Nolan to falsify Atacama 'alien' report with $3.2 million grant
In a new YouTube video made up of clips of a speech given by ufologist Steven Greer and outtakes from his various media products, Greer makes a number of extreme claims about the miscarried human fetus known in UFO circles as the “Atacama Humanoid” and falsely believed to be an alien. These include allegations that the dead fetus is part of a race of alien-like small creatures that currently live in Chile and that a vast conspiracy has pressured credulous scientist Dr. Garry P. Nolan into falsifying his investigation into the body, which concluded that it was human. Greer has attacked Nolan and his research into the Atacama fetus for years now, often using similar or more extreme language.
In the video, Greer is heard alleging that the native people of Chile believe in a race of miniature creatures, whom he claims they call “Gentiles,” reinforcing an old colonialist trope that Native Americans are secretly the Lost Tribes of Israel.
In alleging that the body could not be kept alive under any known medical procedure (to which: no fooling; it’s dead), Greer also makes the odd claim that Chile “may” have no neonatal intensive care unit. I don’t know what he has against Chile, but the country does have actual hospitals and doctors and everything. I checked, and there are indeed NICUs in Chile, and not only that, they have been written about in nursing journals, in both English and Spanish.
Greer complains that in 2013 Nolan told Greer that he thought the body could not represent a single mutation, but shortly after receiving a $3.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to map ovarian cancer cell lineages, he changed his tune and stopped advocating for a mysterious origin of the Atacama fetus. “By the time he began to start running the genetic tests and workups, it seems that he had been told by someone to say it was a deformed human,” Greer claims.
This implication of conspiracy doesn’t match the actual records of events. Nolan’s team made a number of eyebrow-raising assertions in their analysis of the Atacama fetus, and their cavalier attitude toward the ethics of testing presumed human remains received serious criticism from other experts in the field. Had the Defense Department wanted to bury the results, surely Nolan would have avoided making controversial claims that cast doubt on his understanding of his own subject matter.
Greer went on to allege that there is an “orchestration” releasing a mixture of true and false information about the fetus as part of a series of “scams” designed to deceive the public. “It’s very worrisome,” Greer said.
Why might the government want to “scam” the public? Greer says it is a conspiracy by oil companies who feared that crashed flying saucers might produce more efficient engines that would spell “the end of oil” and force lazy billionaires to innovate or face still competition from the Third World. Apparently, Greer’s belief is that technological inefficiency is necessary to maintain capitalist kleptocracy, so therefore superior technologies must be suppressed. I can’t help but feel that this is a paranoid reflection of actual U.S. government policies, which work to privilege some industries over others and to subsidize unprofitable industries for political reasons. As Greer’s tirade descends into a Marxist critique of late capitalism, it’s rather painful that Greer seems unable to fully embrace his leftist critique and instead channels what might otherwise have been activism for economic equality into a fetish for the trappings of state and capitalist power structures.
Near the end of the video, he speculates that UFO disclosure is a threat to the 1% because it “would change forever their grip on that power.” Are we really at such a point in society that economic inequality has to be understood as a conspiracy of, for, or against space aliens because a UFO invasion is more believable than even modest social and economic reforms? I am tempted to make a reference to Adrian Veidt’s Watchmen masterplan, but I fear it might give Greer ideas.
Anyway, it’s nice that ufologists aren’t bothering to hide their real concerns anymore, or to more or less openly concede that UFOs are simply window-dressing for political and social issues that they seem to feel unable to discuss directly.