Joseph Burkes MD 2024
Introduction: In this detailed narrative I describe the circumstances of how I met a fellow ER physician named Steven Greer MD in 1992. This was the beginning of my participation in facilitating human-initiated contact events involving the non-human intelligence(s) responsible for what are now called UAP. I had a six-year association with the Center for the Study of ET Intelligence during which I helped organize contact teams in cities primarily in Western North America. I resigned from the CSETI leadership in 1998 but have continued to promote the efforts of volunteer activists that I call the “Contact Underground.”
In December of 1990, our home in West Los Angeles was undergoing a major renovation. I needed something to distract me from the stressful situation of trying to live in house that was 80 percent demolished during the remodel. In addition, to pay for the project, I was working a great deal of overtime in our hospital’s emergency room. I was experiencing considerable stress from the combination of challenges both at home and at work.
After overnights at the hospital, I had the following day off. Driving south on the 405 Freeway from the San Fernando Valley in the morning was no easy task. I faced a wall of traffic as commuters slowly climbed over the hill to West LA. Once home, it took me several hours to unwind. Sleeping for a few hours after a nightshift was sheer bliss. On a fateful afternoon, I awoke from a nap, and it was raining. The rainy season in Southern California was always kind of special for me. The warm sunny climate in LA was monotonous compared to New York City where I grew up. After moving out West, I always longed for the changing seasons that somehow put me in touch with nature despite being in Manhattan. I recall a poignant conversation I had on this topic with a fellow physician who was also from back East. We were on duty in the Coronary Care Unit. He said that the longing for change of seasons was like an old unfortunate love affair, that despite the passage of time, one never quite gets over.
It was dusk when Yael, the children and I finished diner. I needed to get out of the house. So, I decided to walk in the rain to the Mar Vista Branch of the Public Library. I was looking for some light reading. The librarian showed me the new books section and for no apparent reason, one title caught my eye. It was “The Gulf Breeze Sightings” by Ed and Francis Walters. The book described a wave of flying saucer sightings that had occurred in a small town on the Gulf Coast of Florida not far from Pensacola. The hardback that I leafed through in the library contained strikingly clear photos of what were purported to be ET spacecraft. Ed Walters who was a building contractor allegedly had taken them with a polaroid camera.
It was not my first introduction to flying saucers. For light reading while in college I readChariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken. It was a best seller that promoted the theory that advanced technologies of ancient civilizations were the gifts from space aliens. Von Däniken’s claims were disputed by professional archeologists. Nevertheless, three decades later, it was the inspiration for a popular tabloid style TV series called “Ancient Aliens.”
The town of Gulf Breeze remained a UFO hotspot for several years during the late 1980s and early 1990s. It would have considerable personal importance not only because The Gulf Breeze Sightingswas the first UFO book that I had read in two decades, but also because the town of Gulf Breeze would be the place where a major human initiated contact event would take place in March of 1992. The video of that encounter was to play a significant role in propelling me into flying saucer research.
After checking the book out on my library card, I carefully tucked The Gulf Breeze Sightingsunder by jacket to protect it from the rain and headed back home. For some strange reason, for the first time in my life the UFO subject held a tremendous interest for me. As a child I loved science fiction. I had read all the classics, HG Wells and Jules Verne and the more modern ones such as Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles” and Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series.
I remembered enjoying 1975 TV movie The UFO Incident about the Betty and Barney Hill. They were an interracial couple active in the Civil Rights Movement. The story of their alleged alien abduction was made famous by John Fuller’s best-selling book The Interrupted Journey. I recall walking in Greenwich Village as a child with my big sister back in the 1960s. As we approached a tall handsome African American man, she told to take a good look at him because, someday he was going to be a famous actor. His name was James Earl Jones. He starred in the 1975 TV movie playing the part of Benny Hill.
During the winter of 1990-1991, the remodel of our West LA home was going from bad to worse. The roof had not been completed, and winter storms were hammering us with rain. To keep myself distracted, I read one UFO book after another. I learned that many skilled observers, pilots, police officers and military personnel had detailed observations of what appeared to be craft under intelligent control that defied the laws of aeronautics. Unknown objects were observed silently hovering, then accelerating instantaneously to tremendous velocities. Numerous sightings occurred involving simultaneous visual and radar observations. In some of the cases, objects carried out seemingly impossible maneuvers such as right angle turns while moving at high speeds. After reading many books on the subject, I realized that not only were UFOs real but also that there had been a massive coverup by governments and mass media concerning the reality of the phenomenon and its importance.
I encouraged my son Jonathan to write a book report on David Jacobs’ Secret Lives. At the time, I had no idea that the hypnotic regression techniques employed by alien abduction theorists such as Dr. Jacobs, a historian, and Budd Hopkins a fine art painter, were fraught with problems. These included the potential for implanting false memories into their hypnotic subjects. This is because hypnosis involves placing subjects into a highly suggestible mental state. Often individuals who suspect that they have had encounters with UFO associated non-human intelligences experience “missing time.” This means that they have no memory of what transpired during what might have been a UFO contact incident. Alien abduction researchers falsely believe that hypnosis in their hands is an accurate way of retrieving suppressed memories. However, if the hypnotist, viewed by the subject as an authority figure, asks leading questions, the subject may confabulate (fantasize), and in the process create a false narrative that corresponds to the hypnotist’s point of view.
After quietly studying the phenomenon for a year and a half, I decided to join a UFO research group The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) was established over fifty years ago. It has thousands of members in the USA with local investigative teams in most states. Their focus was, and still is, on producing UFO sighting reports. Thousands of reports are analyzed every year and according to MUFON only a small percentage, perhaps ten to twenty percent are bona fide “unknowns.” The rest are labelled misidentifications of prosaic phenomena, such as meteors, rocket launches, aircraft, planets, or birds.
After sending in my application to be a medical consultant for MUFON, I summoned the courage to attend my first public UFO meeting. It was the May 1992 UFO Expo West held at the LAX Hilton. My son Jonathan was interested, so he came along with me. Arriving at the exhibitors’ hall, I experienced a bit of culture shock. The atmosphere was carnival like. There were booths promoting the use of crystals for spiritual development, alien themed jewelry, posters, books, and masks. There were even hypnotherapists promoting regression therapy to “investigate” past lives and alleged alien abductions.
Dr. Steven Greer the Director of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) was a featured speaker at the UFO Expo. It was just a week after the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. The pungent aroma of burnt-out buildings was still quite strong in our “city of the angels.” I wandered into a lecture hall at the LAX Hilton. It was one third empty. At the podium stood a tall blond, bearded, well-dressed man in his mid-thirties. With an athletic build, wearing glasses and a tweed jacket, he looked like a cross between a university professor and a college basketball coach. He introduced himself to the Expo audience by simply stating, “My name is Dr. Steven Greer.” Emergency room physicians by trade, we shared the same occupation. I was curious to hear what my fellow ER doc had to say about the UFO phenomenon. I was immediately impressed by what I heard.
Dr. Greer’s called for a citizen’s diplomatic mission to what he described as the “extraterrestrials.” This involved going to UFO hotspots and attempting to attract the phenomenon and interact by signaling with lights. The project was of interest for me because I had been a citizen’s diplomacy peace activist during the Cold War. As a member of several delegations of medical workers, I had traveled repeatedly to the former Soviet Union to meet with other physicians to discuss the medical consequences of nuclear warfare and the dangers of the nuclear arms race. I also had served as a member of the Board of Directors of “Physicians for Social Responsibility.” This group was the US affiliate of “International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.” That organization won the Nobel Prize in 1985 for its campaign that brought western and Soviet physicians together to educate both the public and political leaders about the threats that nuclear weapons posed.
At UFO Expo West, the CSETI Director called his outreach program the Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (CE-5) Initiative. Dr. Greer chose “CE-5” to fit into to the popular Close Encounters categories of two professional scientists, Drs. J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee. Joseph Allen Hynek was a tenured professor of Astronomy and a consultant for the Air Force’s UFO investigation in the 1950s and 60s called “Project Blue Book.” That government program was closed in 1969 with the conclusions of the Condon Report that claimed there was no national defense implications or scientific value in further studying flying saucers. Dr. Vallee is a venture capitalist and computer scientist who worked with Dr Hynek. Vallee later went on to be part of the team of engineers that created the internet. Dr. Vallee has become a leading expert in UFO topic. He has written many important books on the topic and has for over three decades questioned the ET explanation for flying saucers. This maverick stance has earned him the title of being a “heretic among heretics.”
J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee’s Close Encounters nomenclature has been used by groups like Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), to categorize and analyze UFO events as part of what are deemed to be scientific investigations of the phenomenon. These are:
1. Close Encounter of the First Kind (CE-1) is a UFO sighting that is within five hundred feet of the witness.
2. A Close Encounter of the Second Kind (CE-2) is a UFO event in which the craft produces physical effects, such as interfering with the functioning of a vehicle or landing traces.
3. A Close Encounter of the Third Kind (CE-3) is a contact event in which a non-human being(alien)/entity is encountered.
4. Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind are those in which a human subject is taken aboard an “alien spacecraft.”
Steven Greer added a fifth category, one in which humans intentionally contact the so-called aliens (extraterrestrials) presumably piloting them. At his presentation he described how CSETI had developed a set of protocols involving three main contact modalities.
These were:
1.signaling with powerful lights
2.playing anomalous tones that according to Dr. Greer had been recorded within a crop circle
3. thought projection, i.e., telepathy (Consciousness mediated protocols will be discussed in the next blog of this series)
He then went on to explain the rationale for the triad of techniques, that he called, “sight, sound and consciousness.” Dr. Greer referred to an article titled, “Calling All UFOs” to explain why he used powerful lights to attract flying saucers. Coincidentally, the article was written by a founding member of my initial Los Angeles based contact team, Preston Dennett. Preston described sightings of UFOs during outdoor events that employed powerful lights and lasers. In one instance occurring in San Diego in 1978, a special effects light technician named Rick Liebert set up a laser light show atop an office building. In apparent response, a large V shaped UAP appeared with ten lights on its bottom. It was reportedly seen by multiple witnesses. During another light show event near the Los Angeles La Brea Tar Pits, according to Mr. Lieber, UFOs showed up there as well.
Another of the CE-5 contact tools employed during fieldwork involved playing “anomalous tones” that were reportedly recorded in a crop circle. It had a kind of trilling sound with a metallic edge to it. Steven Greer told us that in 1989, an electrical engineer Pat Delgado was doing an interview with BBC TV while they were in a crop circle. Suddenly, a strange vibrating, trilling sound was heard. The hum was according to Dr. Greer extremely loud and penetrating. A BBC camera allegedly costing tens of thousands of British pounds was destroyed when the trilling occurred. In a 2023 exchange with crop circle expert Colin Andrews, I was informed that this account was not entirely accurate. In any case the above explanation of the tone’s origins was what Steven Greer MD offered back in the 1990s. In a subsequent report I will go into greater detail about the origin of the tones.
The CSETI Director went on to state in 1992 that the original anomalous sound recorded by Pat Delgado was engineered so that each audio clip was ½ the speed of the previous sound bite. This was done four times resulting in a recording that in the final segment was 1/32 speed of the original. The result was a bimodal sound reminiscent of a heartbeat. During CE-5 field investigations, researchers even today still play this anomalous sound in its original form followed by its slowed down versions. This trilling sound as used by CE-5 contact teams be heard at the following link:
The CSETI Director explained his rationale for playing these tones during fieldwork. He presumed that the non-human intelligence responsible for both the crop circles and the anomalous trilling sound was extraterrestrial in nature. This was the very intelligence that he wanted his CE-5 Initiative teams to engage during field investigations. Thus, playing something of theirs, might be interpreted as an indication of a willingness to interact with the “ETs.” In his training workshops, the CSETI Director gave the following explanation. He said that suppose you enter a home of someone you are meeting for the first time. Now imagine that you see your portrait on their mantelpiece. Naturally you would be drawn to the picture and inquire how it was obtained. By broadcasting an anomalous sound of a presumed ET origin, the hope was to attract that non-human intelligence to CE-5 research sites.
The third modality, using consciousness to interact with UFO intelligences. This involved the controversial topic of telepathy. It should be mentioned that in terms of telepathic communications with the non-human intelligences (NHIs) associated with UAPs, those claiming to have experienced Close Encounters of the Third and Fourth Kinds have reported such mental interactions for at least a half century. Steven Greer MD went on to discuss telepathic communications that reportedly have occurred during UFO sightings.
In Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Philip Imbrogno’s book Night Siege, several cases of apparent mental communication between UAP percipients and anomalous craft are described. These occurred during a wave of large boomerang shaped UFO sightings in the Hudson River Valley during the 1980s.
Mr. Edwin Hansen reportedly saw one such object while driving home on New Year’s Eve, 1982. He slowed his car and stated, “I thought to myself, ‘I wish it would come closer so that I can get a better look at it’, and as soon as this thought went through my mind, the object began to descend and head straight for my car… It was so huge that if filled up the entire sky.” Mr. Hansen reportedly became frightened and started honking his horn in an apparent attempt to scare it off. He stated, “I felt thoughts that weren’t my own, but a kind of voice telling me not to be afraid.”
Another of several sighting with apparent telepathic communication is described in Night Siege. Monique O’Driscoll was driving her daughter home on February 26, 1983. The UAP was described as a large boomerang-shaped brilliantly lit object that must have had “50 lights” on it. The witness stated, “I said to myself, ‘Oh please don’t go, I want to look at you some more.’ At that splint second, it stopped, made a complete turn, and then it was facing towards me. Then it started moving towards me, very slowly.”
These brief accounts describing the use of both powerful lights and telepathy to attract and interact with UFOs are representative of a much larger body of encounters. Dr. Richard Haines is a retired NASA psychology research scientist. He volunteered as a consultant for CSETI in the early 1990s. In his book titled CE-5: Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind, Dr. Haines reported on 242 cases from the world UFO literature documenting the robust nature of humans willfully interacting with UAP intelligences.1
An additional provision of CSETI contact protocols directed CE-5 investigative teams to position themselves in places that either were undergoing a current wave of sightings or were historically known to be frequented by flying saucers. Dr. Greer explained this by evoking “Sutton’s Law.” Willie Sutton was a bank robber during the 1930s who became notorious for his frequent prison escapes. When asked by the press why did he rob banks, his famous reply was, “Because that’s where the money is.”
In the spirit of “going where the money is”, during the UFO Expo West lecture the CSETI Director described a dramatic encounter he had with a group of about 40 people in Gulf Breeze Florida. The event had occurred on the night of March 1992. Coincidentally this was the very UFO hot spot that I had read about in the Walters’ book The Gulf Breeze Sightings that had triggered my burning interest in the UFO topic.
While listening to Dr. Greer at UFO Expo West, I became intrigued by the CE-5 approach to UFO investigations. At the time it seemed to me that CSETI Director combined what appeared to be high ideals, with the courage to actively go into the field and attempt to interact with the intelligence presumably responsible for the flying saucer phenomenon. With my growing interest in UFOs and my experience as a former international peace activist, I was excited by the possibility of having an actual UFO sighting as part of “a peace mission.”
In retrospect, I realize that it was quite naïve of me to imagine that interacting with the NHIs associated with flying saucers would be anything like the citizens’ diplomacy that I had engaged in during the 1980s. I had little awareness of how outrageous the CSETI program appeared to well established so called “scientific” groups of ufologists like the Mutual UFO Network.
Steven Macon Greer was seen by more mainstream UFO groups as merely just another “contactee.” This designation in my opinion was, and still is, pejorative because so much attention in the past has been on contactee cults. The label “contactee” refers to any individual who claims contact and/or communication with the non-human intelligences (NHIs) responsible for flying saucer phenomena. For six decades, contactees have been forcefully criticized by the self-declared more “scientific” ufologists whose underlying philosophy is physicalism. This doctrine asserts that mass and energy are primary and that mental phenomena including consciousness is merely an “emergent property” from brain activity. This metaphysical paradigm called “physicalism” or “materialism” stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy called idealism that asserts that “Mind” or “Consciousness” is primary.
MUFON has strived to appear more respectable than the contactees by claiming that their investigations are science based. MUFON, with chapters in almost every state, has been called the “nuts and bolts” wing of ufology. This is because they have focused on what they imagine is the “hardware” as described in sighting reports. The reports describe the shape, size, color, light array, flight characteristics and other physical parameters of the objects described by UFO percipients.
When I first got involved with UFO investigations, MUFON had been collecting such sighting reports by the thousands for over twenty years. These reports, however, were generated days, months even decades after the witnesses had seen something. Thus, the passage of time affected the accuracy of the recollections. By directly engaging the intelligence responsible for UFOs, researchers had the possibility of obtaining real time data of close encounters. In my mind this was a preferred approach to the challenge.
In addition, I questioned the amount of “respectability” achieved by “nuts and bolts” researchers. MUFON’s efforts were made more difficult because of the following: for decades, the entire topic has been deliberately marginalized as the result of a de facto policy of ridicule and denial conducted by the federal government, the mass media, and the scientific establishment.
Although contactee new religions have been a consistent feature of the flying saucer landscape, clearly not all contactees and their supporters are part of such cults. Prominent contactees, until the 1970s, promoted their individual contact experiences as the focus of their outreach programs. Things changed in a big way when a group composed initially of Peruvian young people founded a contact network called Rama in 1974. Their leader was Sixto Paz Wells who was a college student that received telepathic communications via automatic writing from a self-declared extraterrestrial.
That initial mental contact was reportedly followed by physical encounters in the desert south of Lima Peru. Repeated flying saucer sightings at very close range occurred for Wells and his supporters. His group even claimed that their members were transported together to a moon of Jupiter by entering a dimensional portal called a “Xendra.”
Rama activists followed a strict program of vegetarianism and daily meditations that they believed were essential spiritual practices required to facilitate contact with non-human intelligences. Over the next two decades, the Rama group expanded their operations to many parts of Latin America, to Spain and other Spanish speaking regions including the USA. By the early 1990s, they claimed to have staged 25,000 individual contact experiences across the planet.
Thus, with the advent of Rama in 1974 and the CE-5 Initiative in the 1990s, contactees have been engaging UAP associated intelligences under fieldwork operations. In effect, some experiencers that believe they are in contact with UFO intelligences have gone from being “contactees” to become “contact workers.” I prefer this later designation because once I became a volunteer contact activist, I learned how much work was involved in such an ambitious endeavor.
It is important to note that words with “ee” endings suggest a passive role in English, as in “employee” or “payee.” The “er” or “or” endings suggest a more active role as in “worker”, “soldier”, or “mentor.” For those that have ever joined a contact team, or have carried out contact protocols on their own, reaching out to the intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon can involve much mental, physical, and most importantly spiritual work. Thus, in my judgment, the designation “contact worker” is superior to the label “contactee.”
I was about to join a subculture within a subculture without fully grasping the implications of my decision.
After the Dr. Greer’s lecture, I immediately went over to the CSETI table in the Expo vendor’s area. There was already a line of people queued up to speak to the CSETI Director. I was aware of how conservative the medical field was and not wanting to be identified as a “UFO nut”, I felt somewhat apprehensive about being seen at such a gathering. I figured that since Dr. Greer and I were both Emergency Room physicians, there would be little harm in attending his workshop that followed the lecture.
There were about thirty people in attendance. I was very surprised to find Shirley Jones there. She was a respiratory technician from my hospital. She seated front row center. When Shirley saw me, she wickedly pointed her finger at me, and laughingly teased, “Dr. Burkes, I didn’t know yooouuu were interested in UFOs.” I looked around the room quickly to see if anyone else from the hospital was present. To my relief, I found no one. I hoped Shirley could keep my presence at a UFO meeting as our little secret.”
During the presentation Dr. Greer showed video of his March 14th, 1992, Florida Gulf Coast encounter with not one but at least three UFOs. It was a field demonstration of the contact protocols at Santa Rosa Island near the road that connects Navarre Beach with the town of Gulf Breeze. There were over thirty people in attendance and multiple videos clearly showed three bright lights that approached the contact group. The sound strong wind coming off the ocean could be clearly heard. They were reported to be over twenty-five miles per hour. This point obviates the possibility that they were hot air balloons. Furthermore, the lights reportedly responded to the CSETI Director’s light by signaling back at him. Having attended several of his workshops in 1992, I can attest to the electrifying effect that the videos had on his audiences. This documentation played a significant role in piquing my curiosity to learn as much as I could about the work of the Center for the Study of ET Intelligence. Here is link to one of the videos:
For More Reports from the Contact Underground the following links are provided:
My human initiated contact team had immediate results when we started fieldwork, but they were not what I expected.
https://contactunderground.wordpress.com/2022/10/15/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 hyperlinks below.
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/
This report was first published in 1993 on my return from a CE5 investigation in the “Volcanic Zone” near the Mexico City. There our team witnessed multiple UFOs including a large triangular “craft” that signaled at us.
https://contactunderground.wordpress.com/2022/02/20/ufo-investigation-in-the-volcanic-zone/
Contact Underground 
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