UFO Week - Battle for Disclosure : A Documentary Review
/UFO WEEK - BATTLE FOR DISCLOSURE
My Rating: 1/2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Another in a long line of self-serving, money-grab documentaries from the narcissistic to the point of being messianic, Dr. Steven Greer.
Day four of UFO Week is here and today’s topic is the newest documentary from legendary ufologist Steven Greer, Battle for Disclosure.
The film, which runs one hour and forty-one minutes and is directed by Brent and Blake Cousins, was released on December 10th and is available to rent on video on demand. I rented it the day it came out and paid $1.99, but I have since went back to check the price and has been listed at $9.99 one day and $3.99 another.
The hard truth is the film isn’t worth $1.99, nevermind $9.99 or $3.99.
Steven Greer has produced a bevy of documentaries in recent years. The Lost Century: And How to Reclaim It (2023), Contact: The CE-5 Experience (2023), UFO: Endgame to Disclosure (2023), The Cosmic Hoax: An Expose (2021), Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (2020), Unacknowledged (2017) and Siruis (2013) are among the titles.
These films all share one very prominent feature…namely Steven Greer talking mostly about Steven Greer and how much Steven Greer knows.
If you don’t know who Steven Greer is…here is a primer. Steven Greer, or more accurately Dr. Steven Greer, is a physician turned ufologist who claims to have been an advisor of sorts to numerous presidents and governments officials over the years on the subject of ufos. How he became so close to the halls of power has never adequately been explained, but Greer does have pictures of himself with various big wigs, so there’s that.
Greer claims he saw a ufo as a kid and again as a teen and that he has some deep connection with them. Apparently, it is a very strong connection because he actually claims to be able to summon them.
And thus, we get to the crux of Dr. Greer. Dr. Greer has the distinct whiff of the grift to him, and that stench is quite odious. Greer obviously has a messiah complex as indicated by the fact that he, and he alone, has been bequeathed special powers and the he, and he alone, is the holder of special, secret knowledge. In this way Greer’s school of ufology feels more like a cult than a scientific exploration.
Greer’s ufo thesis is that aliens are a benevolent bunch who want to give humanity free energy technology that will release us from the bondage of our evil overlords and unleash a utopia here on earth. To be clear…I WANT Greer’s thesis to be correct. But Greer is such a shady character and seeming charlatan that I can’t help but dismiss his ideas even when some of them are somewhat believable.
For example, in Battle for Disclosure, Greer talks about how a lot of ufo sightings are actually human made crafts that were reverse engineered from alien craft byu a dep state cabal. Greer’s argument is that these human-made ufos are “illegal”…and he can “prove it in a court of law”, because the government didn’t disclose the technology…or something like that.
Greer’s legal grandstanding feels like just another example of his messiah complex…like who gives a shit if Steven Greer can “prove in a court of law” that the dark deep state is up to ufo shenanigans…because you aren’t going to get it into a court of law…that’s how the game works.
Throughout the film Greer, with a peculiar, ever-present and diabolically persistent, booger-free nose hair saluting out of his left nostril, declares that HE could prove his case in court…but then never actually meticulously makes his case for the cameras.
Battle for Disclosure is structured in such a way that it is obviously made for people who have been closely following Greer’s films and philosophy over the years. It hits the ground running from the get go and doesn’t give much context, expecting viewers to know the backstory already.
In another peculiar move, Greer goes out of his way in the first third of the film to berate, diminish and ultimately dismiss journalist Ross Coulthart, and whistleblowers David Grusch and Lue Elizondo as deceptive scions of the deep state. He doesn’t specifically lay out his case against them but just attacks them.
Now, many of my friends in the ufo community (I have a lot of them), think very highly of people like Grusch and Elizondo and Christopher Mellon. They are all in on these guys and hang on their every word. I, on the other hand, am not and do not. I look at these characters with the most jaundiced of eyes. I don’t trust them because to trust members, or former members, of the intelligence community, is a fool’s errand. These people are professional liars and they are very good at manipulation. To be clear, I don’t dismiss everything they say out of hand, I am just skeptical of what they say and more importantly, why they may be saying it.
The problem, of course, is that Greer attacking Elizondo and Grusch and their ilk without making a viable and clear case against them, doesn’t do much to damage their credibility nor does it elevate his…it just makes him seem petty and jealous of all the mainstream attention those guys get.
In the last third of the film the narrative shifts to a collection of men recounting their experiences with ufos of one type or another. These men, all military men at the time of their encounters, tell compelling but often-times preposterous tales – all of which Greer substantiates through his alleged unnamed insider sources in the deep state.
The first story is from former US Marine Michael Herrera, who claims to have stumbled upon a human trafficking operation in Indonesia run by black ops guys that used ufo/alien tech. He said his superiors were pissed at him and his team about their discovery and told him to keep his mouth shut.
Another story was told by DC Long, who while working on a military base saw technology that could use some strange sound wave technology of some sort to lift massive blocks of granite. When Long refused to sign an NDA regarding what he saw, the government destroyed his father’s construction business and confiscated all his equipment. Long’s father never spoke to him again until he was on his deathbed.
The third story is from Steven Digna Jr., who saw a ufo while doing live fire drills on a military base. Digna is in such a diminished physical and mental state at the time of shooting his interview, that it is preceded by a disclaimer of sorts telling the viewer that these guys have been through the ringer and it’s taken a deadly toll on their lives.
Digna’s story is, frankly, the most believable, but he is in such a fragile physical and emotional state it is difficult to watch him or to know if he is telling the truth.
The final story comes from Eric Hecker, who worked for the Navy and Raytheon and went to Antarctica to work security there. Hecker claims he saw a directed energy weapons system there that is capable of creating earthquakes. He claims it is the largest telescope that is also a phased array transmitter – a sort of air traffic control for UFOs – and is capable of faster than light communications. Hecker claims this weapons/communications system is above and beyond nations…it’s a transnational program that answers to no government.
The stories told by these men are pretty fascinating. I found Hecker’s the most chilling, Digna’s the most believable, Long’s the saddest, and Herrera’s the most bizarre and incomprehensible. Your mileage may vary.
As for the Battle for Disclosure as a whole, I found it to be a poorly constructed, muddled and jumbled mess of a cinematic venture. It is less a document designed to inform or convince than it is a money grab from those already converted to the Church of Greer.
Battle for Disclosure, or any of Greer’s films for that matter, are not really useful for the majority of ufologists, nor are they a good place to start for newbies, as they are too fantastical and Greer is too aggressively grating and dubious a spokesman to be convincing.
The bottom line is, while I am immensely skeptical to the point of devout disbelief, I do hope that Steven Greer is right and that E.T. is coming to save our home and free us from the villains who currently rule our world, but that doesn’t make his documentaries good or worth watching or very informative. They are, for the most part, pretty much a waste of time….and if you’re a dope like me…a waste of money too.
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