CONTACT NETWORK HISTORY PROJECT:: a professor of nursing was reportedly camping when the encounter happened. 

Joseph Burkes MD 2018, updated 2026, in the comments section is an analysis of Dr. Steven Greer’s role in the human initiated contact & UAP disclosure campaigns.

It has been said that consciousness is the “golden thread” that ties us to UFO intelligences.  If the ET hypothesis is correct, and UFOs are an extraterrestrial manifestation, then it is obvious that we are going to be very different from beings/intelligences responsible for flying saucers. After all, we don’t share a common history, language, or biological evolution, but what both humans and alleged ETs share, as conscious intelligent beings, is that we are awake and are aware of this wakefulness.

Perhaps we can share states of being that come from that clear quiet place that we call consciousness itself. For those of us who have met the “visitors” face to face, there exists the possibility of sharing a sense of peace and even joy. Although it may sound corny, as this narrative suggests we may also be able to communicate with and share love.

“COMING OUT” OF THE UFO CLOSET

In 1992, I joined a network of UFO investigators that were part of Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (CE-5) Initiative. We were engaged in what I like to call Human. Initiated Contact Events (HICE).  Following some rudimentary protocols, we repeatedly went out into the field at night in an attempt to attract Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) to our research sites. My initial enthusiastic support for network’s contact efforts led me to a rather daring action. Some would call it foolish. I decided to set up an  information booth about the CE-5 Initiative at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting. In 1992, it was held in Washington DC. My medical group partner Dr. David Gordon accompanied me. He had also volunteered to participate in our Los Angeles CE-5 Initiative Working Group.

The APHA’s annual meeting draws about 10,000 health professionals whose political views are more to the left than mainstream medicine’s. The American Public Health Association (APHA) has historically championed the health rights of women, ethnic minorities and workers. During the first few years of my medical career, I had actively participated in the Occupational Health and Safety section of the APHA. In 1979 I was co-founder of the Los Angeles Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a coalition of health care and legal professionals that endeavored through education and advocacy to make workplaces safer.

WORKING THE CROWD

At a beautiful new convention center in the nation’s capital, under a royal blue banner embroidered with the slogan “One Universe, One People!”, David and I “worked” the conference participants. A small TV monitor played dramatic footage of UFOs, while I called out to passersbys, “Would you like to see a UFO video?” Apparently quite a few did; over 250 nurses, doctors and administrators watched the film clips and chatted with us during the 3-day conference. About forty signed up for more information. The bravest shared their personal stories of sightings and other contact events.

A CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE THIRD KIND WITH LOVE

A PhD professor of nursing gave the most impressive report to me. From her convention badge I identified her as a faculty member from a major university. She watched the videos for a few minutes and then allowed me to interview her about her personal contact experience.

Some seven years before, she reportedly had a Close Encounter of the Third Kind. After nightfall while camping with her fiancée, her tent was filled with a very bright light. All around the campsite she could hear footsteps. Apparently from prior encounters she immediately realized that she was having a contact experience. The professor reported not being able to move but was fully awake. She could not stir her friend that was sound asleep beside her. One humanoid stuck his head into the tent. By her description, the being was the typical so-called “Gray,” big head with wrap-around eyes. My nursing colleague told me that she was happily excited and frightened at the same time.

The being quickly retreated, but she could see his shadow and those of several other similar beings on the walls of her tent that were illuminated by the flickering light of the campfire. She told me that she sent out the thought, “I love you.” In a flash she felt a forceful burst of electric type energy. The sensation surged through her body from the top of her head down to the tip of her toes. The non-human beings left her campsite, and the encounter was over.

There on the exhibit floor, under the bright lights with hundreds of booths and thousands of participants around us, she had described the experience simply, matter of fact, with just a touch of amazement. I was a perfect stranger to her, and yet she was willing to share her recollections of an intimate contact with what she believed were non-humans. 

I described to her the ambitious goals of the CE-5 Initiative. She listened politely but chose not to sign up for more information. After all, she was a professor at a major university and the notoriety of being a contact experiencer might cause her considerable professional harm. She wished me well in my campaign and walked away, disappearing into the crowd.

About the author: Joseph Burkes MD: I volunteered as a Working Group Coordinator for the CE-5 Initiative from 1992 till 1998. I continued to study the flying saucer phenomenon working with the Peruvian based contact network now called Rahma and more recently as a medical consultant for the Foundation for Research into ET and Extraordinary Experiences, (FREE). I am co-author of the book “Paths to Contact” edited by Jeff Becker. Preston Dennett and I are co-authors of a chapter that deals with UFO medical healings in FREE’s 2018 compendium, “Beyond UFOs”. The Consciousness and Contact Research Institute (CCRI) has published a compendium titled “A Greater Reality” edited by Reinerio Hernandez. My chapter is titled “Human Initiated Contact, the Consciousness Connection and the Virtual Experience Model.”
A free pdf file of this chapter can be downloaded at:

Click to access Burkes%20-%20Report%20from%20the%20Contact%20Underground.pdf

I retired from the Southern California Permanente Medical Group after thirty years of service in 2008 and am a board-certified internal medicine physician. I am licensed to practice in California.

For additional reports from the Contact Underground the following links are provided:

Amazing Synchronicities, Sightings and other Bizarre Events facilitated LA CE-5 Working Group Operations During the early 1990s.

My human initiated contact team had immediate results when we started fieldwork, but they were not what I expected.

Mystery Lights in the Santa Susana Pass

An Act of Flying Saucer Sabotage at the DOE’s Santa Susana Laboratory

In 2006 while serving as the admitting physician at Kaiser Panorama City, I interviewed a retired physical plant engineer who worked at the Department of Energy Lab in Santa Susana. He described an apparent act of sabotage by a rotating metallic disc that he and another engineer encountered on the base. The DOE facility was just a few thousand yards away from our Los Angeles CE5 team’s research site in the Santa Susana Pass. There on several occasions we staged Human Initiated Contact Events (HICE). For the complete narrative click on the hyperlink below.

https://contactunderground.org/2022/08/31/an-act-of-flying-saucer-sabotage-at-the-does-santa-susana-laboratory/

Staging Human Initiated Contact Events (HICE) adjacent to a high security research lab involved challenges of surveillance for my team.
https://contactunderground.wordpress.com/2022/05/19/did-a-fateful-phone-call-trigger-the-appearance-of-blackhawk-helicopters-during-contact-work/

Comments:

 Norman Michael Murburg Jr: Love is the basis of connection. It was all along. It is how we transcend the density of this dimensionality into the next. One need not be erudite to live and convey it. It is the currency of exchange for inter dimensionality and spiritual transcendence.

TR: Feel free not to answer this … Do you still support Greer? Peace.

J. Burkes MD: Dr. Greer’s contribution to the cause of cosmic peace must be acknowledged despite what his many critics call his personal and political limitations. He has popularized the consciousness techniques of human empowered contact in the English-speaking world that are similar to the ones that the Peruvian based network called Rama had developed in the 1970s. In my judgement, however, Dr. Greer developed his “contact protocols” independently from Mission Rama as he apparently only became aware of their work in 1993 after my Los Angeles CE-5 team became involved with Rama activists in California.   

Grant Cameron in his book “Managing Magic” has categorized Dr. Greer as one of several “messiahs” who have been recruited by the intelligence community to serve as a conduit for disseminating within the UFO subculture a carefully constructed mixture of genuine information and disinformation. As documented in “Managing Magic” this has been part of the US Executive Branch’s “gradual acclimatization program” to prepare the world for the realization that UFOs are real and are really important. 

I should point out that Dr. Greer is different from the other so-called “messiahs”, Bill Moore in the 1980s and more recently Tom Delonge, in that Steven Greer MD in my opinion has had direct telepathic communication with UAP intelligence for decades.  Thus, in a sense he functions as a kind of “agent of influence” for both the so-called “ETs” and the US Central Intelligence Agency working under the auspices of the President of the United States. The Office of the US President according to Grant Cameron’s analysis, is running the UFO coverup and the President is not “out of the loop.” This is in contrast to what I imagine Dr. Greer’s CIA “handlers” have informed him. Dr. Greer’s relationships with intelligence officials in my view is not a bad thing. This is because the opposition to UAP confirmation and disclosure by certain cliques within the military intelligence industrial complex is ferocious. Dr. Greer has described his working with the “white hats” in the Executive Branch, i.e. operatives that are pushing for more openness. 

Executive Branch intelligence services played a significant role in facilitating the testimony of important Disclosure Project witnesses at the May 2001 CSETI Press Conference. That event was the template for a number of citizen disclosure projects that followed. 
Thus, having a “UFO Intel asset” working with UAP intelligences and the US Executive Branch in the form of Dr. Greer, moves the planet closer to the realization that the alleged aliens are non-hostile and approachable. In my view, an important next step in the contact drama would be the creation of powerful planetary peace movement that could signal to UAP intelligences humanity’s readiness for higher levels of contact. Such a peace campaign could conceivably link UAP contact with possible solutions for the fundamental problems that our civilization is facing. 

I have not spoken to my former friend and colleague for 28 years but have kept up with the work of the CE-5ers via social media.

I don’t think of myself as a supporter of Dr. Greer because of our personal and political differences, but I can respect and honor the work we once did together that has continued with growth of the worldwide network of activists facilitating Human Initiated Contact Events (HICE) aka CE-5, that I call the “Contact Underground.” 

From my vantage point of being a peace and social justice advocate for over a half century and a contact activist for over three decades, I find useful the intelligence-counterintelligence model of UFO investigations. This was first put forward by Val Germann decades ago and which I have modified with a radically different political slant. 

Mr. Germann’s approach was from the point of view of what can be called “the control groups.” According to Val Germann’s analysis they probably view UFO intelligences as a kind of adversarial “higher intelligence agency.” My approach is perhaps more idealistic. I see UFO Intel as an important ally in the struggle to save our civilization from self-destruction. They should not be viewed as gods, or superior beings but rather as an inspiration for us to evolve spiritually, socially, and yes even politically. 

Dr. Greer’s many projects have been highly commercial and the negative attacks that he has received for their financial success could fill volumes. My sense is that if people saw his work in a more sympathetic light, as I have endeavored to do, they would conclude that his presence has done by far more good than his most vociferous critics are able to acknowledge. 

Dr. Greer, it should always be remembered, gave up medicine with all the perks and privileges of his being a highly paid and respected physician to become a full-time contact/disclosure activist. As I have written in the past, the long-term organizational needs of building a social movement around UFOs cannot be accomplished within the form of a small family business that has been CSETI’s operational mode for over 35 years. My guess is that new organizational forms will emerge as the number of contact and disclosure activists continue to grow. This, in my opinion, is the result of UFO Intel’s recruitment/outreach program that continues in both overt and subtle ways. 

Most critical, in this planetary struggle, is the level of acceptance to the reality of UFOs in both the ruling elites, that are still attempting to keep a lid on the situation, and the masses of people living on our planet. In my judgment, an “ET” presence threatens all terrestrial elites, but not the planet’s peoples. Thus, in this conflict-oriented model, to build a truly peaceful revolutionary movement we will need the masses to accept not only the reality and importance of UFOs, but also the possibility for cooperation with the intelligences associated with them. If humanity evolves sufficiently, we might be able to experience friendship with the beings responsible for the flying saucer phenomenon. In my judgment, however, at this violent and conflict laden stage of our development as a species, direct open relations are impossible with these “others” that experiencers now call “ET.” 

On a personal note, I must acknowledge that the CSETI Director’s special relationship with Executive Branch intelligence services may have provided during the 1990s our entire early contact network with a certain degree of protection. Steven Greer MD informed CE-5 Working Group Coordinators, Shari Adamiak in Denver, Wayne Peterson in Phoenix and my LA team as well, that one of the conditions he put forward in working with Executive Branch intelligence agencies was that our attempts to contact and communicate with “the ETs” would not be interfered with by them. This was of considerable importance because of the CIA and Air Force Office of Special Investigations historically had infiltrated, harassed and disrupted UFO groups as well as individual witnesses. Our teams were operating in remote locations (mountains and in deserts) and could have easily been targeted for a variety of dirty tricks. Although there were instances of surveillance of our teams during fieldwork, there was no clear-cut harassment.  

 David Haith: It was very brave of you Joseph to set up your stand at that convention event.
People talk of the stigma and taboo of UFO investigation – was there no ridicule from your peers or even a professional kickback as experienced by people like John Mack?

J. Burkes MD: Thank you for the question. UFO Intel recruited me to join the cause after I had been a tenured partner with our medical group for over ten years. I suspect that most of my medical colleagues, nurses and administrators knew I was a competent caring physician and as such was an asset to our organization. So, I was in a rather secure position to “come out of the closet” as a contact activist. Working in Southern California in a rather liberal community compared to say Alabama or Texas, I did not face the same kind of pressures contactees must endure elsewhere. In England, Scandinavia, and Central Europe the social pressures on contactee professionals in terms of “loss of face” are ferocious compared to the USA, at least in the so called “blue states.” 

As the saying goes, “The future has arrived! It is just not evenly distributed yet.”