Two of the most prominent voices in UFO research have been moving in opposite directions for thirty years, and Dr. Steven Greer just said the quiet part out loud.
In a recently recorded video interview with journalist and author Dick Russell, Greer took direct aim at Linda Moulton Howe, the award-winning investigative reporter behind decades of research into animal mutilations, alien abductions, and extraterrestrial contact. He didn’t mince words. He called her the primary vehicle for what he describes as psychological warfare disinformation fed into the public through the UFO subculture.
That’s a serious charge. And it’s one that reveals a fault line running straight through the heart of the modern disclosure movement.
Two Visions, One Phenomenon
At the core of this dispute is a fundamental question: Are the intelligences behind UFOs a threat to humanity, or are they here to help?
Howe’s body of work, spanning decades of field investigations and interviews, has consistently documented accounts of alien abductions, animal mutilations, and encounters with beings that witnesses often describe as cold, clinical, or terrifying. Her reporting helped define the public’s image of the gray alien. She’s been a fixture at conferences and a trusted voice for experiencers who believe something sinister is happening.
Greer sees it completely differently. He has long argued that extraterrestrial civilizations are benevolent, that they pose no threat, and that the idea of hostile aliens is itself a manufactured narrative. In the interview, he said that nearly everything described as alien malevolence, including abductions and mutilations, is actually the work of covert human operations using advanced reverse-engineered technology. The goal, in his view, is to condition the public to accept an eventual staged alien threat that would justify military buildup on a planetary scale.
“The kingpin of disinformation that has been pushed into public awareness,” Greer said in the interview, “is the myth around alien malevolence, alien abductions, alien mutilations, all of which [were] stagecraft by humans using advanced technologies.”
The Snippy the Horse Connection
Greer anchored part of his argument in the story of Dr. John Altshuler, a Denver hematologist and pathologist who investigated the famous Snippy the horse mutilation case, widely considered the first documented animal mutilation on record.
According to Greer, Altshuler’s scientific analysis led him to conclude the mutilation was a high-tech human operation designed to look extraterrestrial. But that finding, Greer claims, was then hijacked by others, including Howe, and repackaged as evidence of alien harvest. He described her famous work in this area as built on research that was twisted from its original scientific conclusion.
Howe, for her part, has spent decades collecting witness testimony and physical evidence that she believes points directly to non-human involvement. Her documentary work on mutilations has been influential precisely because it takes the physical evidence seriously and refuses to dismiss the phenomenon as hoax or misidentification.
The CIA Shadow
This is where the conversation gets complicated, and frankly, where both sides deserve serious scrutiny.
Greer has argued for years that the intelligence community has actively seeded the UFO subculture with disinformation to steer public perception toward fear. He cited documents, whistleblower testimony, and his own meetings with senior intelligence and military figures going back to the early 1990s. In the interview, he described Howe’s perspective as aligned with a worldview, which she apparently shared with him privately in the early 1990s, that positioned extraterrestrials as dark or demonic forces.
Whether that’s a fair characterization of her current views is debatable. Howe has consistently framed her work as following the evidence wherever it leads, including testimony from military witnesses, government insiders, and experiencers who describe contact with beings they did not invite and could not control.
The question of CIA involvement in shaping UFO narratives is not invented by Greer. Declassified documents have confirmed that intelligence agencies took interest in public UFO perception during the Cold War. Whether that influence extends to specific researchers is a much harder claim to prove.
Why the Disagreement Matters Right Now
Greer made clear in the interview that this isn’t just a debate between two researchers with different data sets. He believes the framing of disclosure matters enormously, especially with the current political climate pushing the topic toward official acknowledgment.
If the dominant narrative entering any disclosure process is that extraterrestrials are a threat, he argues, the result will be militarization and potentially catastrophic conflict. He pointed to figures like Congresswoman Luna and commentators like Tucker Carlson echoing language about aliens as Satanic or demonic, and called it a dangerous echo of decades-old disinformation finally reaching mainstream political discourse.
Howe’s defenders would say that ignoring the testimony of thousands of abduction experiencers, or dismissing mutilation evidence as purely human activity, is its own form of intellectual dishonesty. If something genuinely harmful is happening to people and animals, downplaying it to maintain a positive narrative about ET visitors doesn’t serve the truth.
Where Does This Leave Readers?
Skeptics will find ammunition in both camps. Greer’s claims about CIA operations, crown princes, and assassination attempts are difficult to independently verify. Howe’s reliance on witness testimony and physical evidence has drawn methodological criticism over the years.
What’s clear is that these two researchers represent genuinely irreconcilable worldviews about the nature of the phenomenon. One says the visitors are waiting for us to wake up and invite peaceful contact. The other has spent decades documenting accounts suggesting the contact hasn’t been peaceful at all.
Both have been at this longer than most. Both believe they are following the evidence.
The rest of us are left to weigh two very different pictures of what might be happening in our skies and, if Greer is right about disclosure being imminent, what kind of world that truth gets released into.
Have proof that supports one of these two sides? Email Reports@ParaRational.com
