NOTES FROM THE CONTACT UNDERGROUND
My daughter Julia gave me a DVD of the movie for Fathers’ Day over a decade ago. My old VHS copy had fallen apart. As soon as I heard the theme song, I was taken back to a happy time, more than a quarter of a century ago. It was when my wife Yael and I were raising a family in Southern California. It was a magical time when I first joined the loose network of activists that I like to call the “Contact Underground.”
For five years in the 1990s, I was running contact teams out to the high desert, mostly to Joshua Tree. There, we co-created with UFO intelligence what I now call Human Initiated Contact Events (HICE), aka Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (CE-5). This involved meditation, projecting mental messages of welcome and signaling with lights. These activities were often associated with the appearance of UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
As part of our training to overcome fear, I suggested that new volunteers watch “Communion” at home, alone and in the dark. I found the experience enlightening as to how much work I too needed to do in the fear managing department.
During that time three decades ago, I awakened to a spiritual world that I had probably yearned for all my life. My agnostic upbringing had denied me a conventional religious experience. Thus, in my forties, I found an opportunity to explore, “all that there is” within the Contact Underground. Listening to Eric Clapton’s guitar theme song for the movie, I once again feel the yearnings of a then much younger activist who embarked upon a strange, sometimes frightening and always magical journey that we call contact.
Joseph Burkes MD
Contact Underground 