Joseph Burkes MD 2026
Introduction: The term “Screen Memories” was the title of a psychoanalytic paper written by Dr. Sigmund Freud published in 1899. He proposed that such recollections were trivial or distorted memories from childhood that masked or replaced more traumatic events.
Since the 1980s the UFO literature describing alleged alien abductions have suggested that screen memories have been created during some Close Encounters with non-human(alien) beings and that these false memories serve to cover up the shock of interacting with non-human beings. Memories of owls or other birds, sometimes being abnormally large are cited as examples of screen memories. In Steven Spielberg’s 2026 movie “Disclosure Day” the heroine recalled being led to glowing fairy-tale type cottage (instead of a spacecraft) by animals such as a fox, deer and a cardinal (instead of aliens) during her abduction.
For over two decades I have discussed how UFO intelligences, using what I believe are their colossal mental abilities, are apparently implanting false memories into the consciousness of some contact experiencers. I imagine that this capacity is so robust that it may be quite difficult to distinguish such “memory implants” from recollections of experiences not manufactured by non-human intelligences (NHIs). The following question has been raised: if screen memories are implants, then why can’t recollections of entire “abduction scenarios” be psi-mediated implanted memories? I call such recollections “Virtual Experiences of the Third Kind” (VE-3s), or “Virtual Memories.”
An Important Proviso.
I must offer the following caveat: I am not suggesting that all Encounters of the Third and Fourth Kinds (non-human beings seen and onboard experiences respectively) are false recollections. In my judgment, physical encounters with beings popularly called “aliens” are truly happening in a physical sense. Again, the challenge for both witnesses and researchers alike is to distinguish between recollections of psi-mediated “implanted” memories and non-implanted ones.
An American Physician/parapsychologist’s Work with Uri Geller
In a detailed paper linked below, I described a report from Andrija Puharich MD as an example of Virtual Memory. It appeared in his book “Uri, a journal of mystery of Uri Geller.” It was published in 1974, and can be read for free as a pdf file on the internet. Below I describe a second case supportive of Virtual Memory as a mechanism of contact with NHIs. First however, some additional background information would be helpful.
The Virtual Experience Model Evolved out of Field Investigations
For five years during the 1990s I was a volunteer contact team coordinator for the Center for the Study of ET Intelligence (CSETI). Our group of UFO investigators facilitated Human Initiated Contact Events (HICE) popularly known as Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (CE-5s). Our work involved going to remote locations where we meditated and projected mental messages requesting contact with the non-human intelligences associated with UFOs. At the time we all assumed that they were extraterrestrials.
Our efforts were rewarded with the appearance of red and yellow orbs at our research sites. In addition, different members of our team had sightings of what appeared to be structured objects while driving around the Los Angeles area. These encounters included: a broad daylight sighting of a classic flying saucer, a one-hundred-foot wing shaped object that flew over my car on the Santa Monica Freeway and a glowing thirty foot in diameter globe seen hovering above the home of Dotha Weybourne, the senior member of my team. She stated that as the “craft” flew above her driveway she received a telepathic message to the effect that, “You were looking for us, well here we are.” These sighting events occurred in 1992 and 1993. The message that non-human intelligences seemed to be sending to us was that they could track our movements and stage “programmed” sightings for us whenever and wherever they chose.
In 1993 an EKG technician at my place of work who I call “Misha” joined the team. He, like the CSETI Director Steven Greer MD, had the remarkable ability to request sightings of UFOs and with other witnesses present what are now called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) would manifest. I designated such high-level contact experiencers “prime contactees.” In my judgment they have ongoing direct telepathic communication with UFO intelligences. I made it a high priority to seek out other such remarkable individuals to facilitate our human initiated contact efforts.
As my volunteer contact work progressed, I learned that UAP intelligences could create what for want of a better term what can be called “visual displays.” Pursuing contact work in a group setting revealed that some members of the team were reporting seeing UFOs, while equally skilled observers watching the same section of sky said they saw nothing unusual. These disparate observations led me to developing what I came to call the “Virtual Experience Model” for UAP investigations. The model describes consciousness-based mechanisms of contact with UAP non-human intelligences, one of which as described above is a “Virtual Experience of the Third Kind.”
How might one discover that memory implants are happening to contact experiencers?
The first clue was an account published in Dr. Andrija Puharich’s book about Uri Geller. While in Israel together, the American physician/parapsychologist investigated Geller’s psychic abilities and UFO connections. In Chapter Six of Puharich’s “Uri”, a dramatic and extremely strange sequence of events is chronicled. That chapter describes how two sets of witnesses had dramatically different recollections of recent occurrences.
(A detailed analysis of what was reported is available in the article linked below)
Writing in his book on Uri Geller, Dr. Puharich stated,
“These two days’ events numbed me. Sarah and Uri experienced one sequence, and Ila and I experienced another, in the same time frame. I had discovered the truth about Uri’s deepest secret, had held a gun in my hand that felt real, and had had a phone call experience that is real in my mind to this day. But most of all I realized that the four of us had had an experience imprinted on our minds by what could only be the agency of IS” (Puharich’ abbreviation for Intelligence Spectra, i.e., Extraterrestrial Intelligence).
“I finally learned that, given the existence of IS, I could never again know which of my experiences were directly imposed upon me by IS and which were not.”
Over two decades ago when I first shared my “Virtual Memory” concept suggesting that some contact experiences reflected psi-mediated memory implants, the reactions from fellow investigators were uniformly negative. One prominent researcher, a retired NASA psychologist who had been a consultant for CSETI wrote me that he didn’t like my theory at all. In a terse email he suggested that if what I proposed were true, then “all bets were off” for all human free will and all human history. Despite these negative reactions to the model, I was not deterred and I continued to discuss this proposed psi-mediated mechanism for contact.
It has now been ten years since I last participated in what I call “Human Initiated Contact Events” (HICE) aka as CE-5s. The discipline of all night vigils in remote locations became an increasing challenge after I started my seventh decade of life. Nevertheless, I have corresponded with the next generation of contact activists offering them support for what I still consider an important exercise in an arena of might be called “interspecies communication.”
Background for a Second Case Supportive of Virtual Memory
In 2019 I received a report supportive of “Virtual Memory” from a team of volunteer contact workers headed by a young man I shall call “Bart Cazares”, a pseudonym. He lived in a rural part of Southeastern United States. Bart was in his early thirties when he became active in the CE-5 network and we corresponded over several months in 2019.
His story was an unusual one. A victim of street violence, Bart was shot during a robbery attempt. A bullet reportedly punctured his lung and transected his spinal cord at the T-4/T-5 level. Thus, he had to use a wheelchair. During surgery to repair his lung, Bart reported experiencing an NDE. He described it as happening,
“Right before they were able to get a chest tube in there and replace much of my blood lost. During this incident I personally believe I got a good glimpse at “the other side” and how absolutely beautiful it is and that changed my whole perspective on everything in life. It was paradigm shifting in a big way.”
His focus on spiritual matters involved a regular meditation practice and reading about such topics as ET contact and spirit guides.
On August, 21, 2017, he reportedly had an impressive UAP sighting. It was the night solar eclipse. Bart described it as follows:
“Me and my best friend were in his back yard. We were still going through some rough times and I was trying to be as spiritual as possible and find my path and was reaching out for help without consciously being aware of it at the time. I was in a state of deep meditation and was attempting to use my third eye and direct energy towards the cosmos and this single encounter has changed both of our lives in enormous ways. Let me explain a little.
While I was attempting to direct this energy to the cosmos, I got a tunnel type vision, lost sense of self, all awareness of my body and my surroundings and I had a conscious thought enter my head that was not my own that simply said “gaze upwards”. I did this and approximately three miles from our location I witnessed three lights that appeared to just be three bright orbs of light from a distance but all moving in formation. As I directed my energy towards this object, it came closer and I didn’t want to interrupt my buddy’s meditation because I didn’t know what he was experiencing, but I had to get his attention.
So, he looked up and neither of us could believe our eyes. It was sitting within 1/8th mile of us, hovering completely silently, slowly rotating vertically as opposed to your horizontally “flying saucer”. It was a black triangle, embodied by a bright circular ring. At each angle that the circle met the triangle, there were spheres of the most beautiful light that seemingly went through a color spectrum that we haven’t even seen yet in the 3D. These orbs when concentrated on gave off great emotions.”
Moments after having this emotionally charged UFO sighting, Bart and his friend in Bart’s words reportedly witnessed,
“three military looking jets screaming over civilian airspace right after this encounter at an illegal altitude (way too low). They basically buzzed us, and then immediately took off in the same exact flight path as the object we had just had the experience with.”
This particular detail resonates with me personally because in January of 1996, my contact team was operating in Joshua Tree National Monument. We had a pair of sightings of golden globes at night. Soon after daybreak my team was buzzed by three waves of fighter bombers. They were flying east, which was the direction that we had anticipated our next sighting would occur. (For details on that encounter a link below titled “And then the Sky Exploded.”
During and after this contact event, Bart reportedly experienced what are described as “contact downloads.” At the level of knowledge, he became aware that his soul’s journey involved reincarnations, some of which might have been the lives of beings on other star systems. As part of a channeling process, Bart allegedly was informed that non-human intelligences were, “… waking up ‘starseeds’ via this method on a grassroots level for those who could be potentially most useful to change the course of humanity as a whole for the following generations to come.”
In 2019 when I read Bart’s statement about “starseeds”, I didn’t know what to make of such claims. I thought the notion was perhaps merely part of a New Age belief system, one that casts volunteer contact workers in a heroic light and allowing them to imagine that they have been chosen, perhaps at the soul level, to be part of a spiritual transformation guided by benevolent non-human intelligences. Now, seven years later, after witnessing a growing number of experiencers bravely sharing their personal stories of contacts and spiritual transformations, I am more willing to accept that the plan described by Bart might indeed be unfolding.
A Virtual Experience of the Third Kind
Bart recruited several members of his family living in the same household to do contact work. This included his nephew who I shall call “Joe.”
Bart reported the appearance of anomalous nocturnal lights and orbs in response to their contact efforts. There was also a large structured craft that reportedly flew slightly directly over their house. One incident Bart described was supportive of the mechanism of contact that I call a “Virtual Experience of the Third Kind or “Virtual Memory.”
The CE-5 Contact protocols encourage employing a type of “buddy system” when facilitating human initiated contact events. This is designed to give emotional support to team members and keep the investigations safe. During one night of skywatching outside their home, Bart and his nephew “Joe” were “buddies.” Bart said that Joe was a mature teenager who was extremely trustworthy.
Bart reported their having a number of sightings of anomalous lights in the sky as well as unusual ground activity consisting of what appeared to be poltergeist phenomenon. This was described as small stones on the ground moving on their own and reportedly striking the house.
According to Bart, his nephew wanted to stay outside for 30 minutes after the conclusion of their fieldwork. After about an hour, Bart and three other members of the household became concerned, because Joe did not report back in. For the next thirty minutes they searched for Joe, checking all the rooms in the home, texting him, and searching round the outside of their home.
Bart described the situation as follows:
“My buddy was trying to face some previous fear he’d been dealing with and said he’d come meet us in 30 mins. We’d been dealing with activity at ground level for a couple hours and he wanted to have some personal time to experience it all on his own. Well, quite some time passed and he never came back inside.
1.We went to check on him and he wasn’t outside where we left him.
2.We searched the inside of the residence we were at up and down and he was nowhere to be found.
3.Also, we never heard him or saw him come in.
He wasn’t answering cell phone calls or texts and the messages we were sending were getting somewhat serious, as we were getting a bit worried. After searching the residence up and down, three of us went outside with flashlights to look around for him. We couldn’t find him anywhere and My nerves were getting really worked up by this point.
We finally all went back inside and sat down trying to figure out what we could have missed, still texting him to get in contact ASAP and letting him know if it was some kind of joke, nobody was laughing at this point.
Finally, I went to a back room and he was laying on the bed with the lights off. I was dumbfounded. I had absolutely no clue as to how he would have slipped by everyone in the house to get to that room (not to mention we checked that room before we went looking for him and it was empty).
From his account, he came inside through a door we all would have had sight of, didn’t even stay out the full 30 mins after we left because he felt like he was being watched or that something was very close and kept hearing footsteps, weird vocalizations, and more and got weirded out.
He said he spoke with us all (every one of us) when he came in and said he had a conversation with me and told everyone goodnight, grabbed a water from the kitchen, and then went to that room and decided to go to sleep. If he had walked the route he said, even IF he came in alone without speaking at all, we would have seen and heard him.
The contradictory things were all over the place and immediately apparent.
1.He never came in through the door he claimed when he claimed or we all would have witnessed and heard it.
2.He said he saw one of us playing a gaming system and that individual was not playing the gaming system,
3. There were no water bottles in the refrigerator he claimed to have grabbed one from and none in the room he went to after he’d claimed he grabbed one.
4.Each and every one of us knew we had not talked to him and he hadn’t had conversations with us or told us goodnight or we obviously would have never gone out looking for him for 30 mins or so.
5. Altogether he was missing for about an hour but swore up and down he had talked to us all and was so certain he’d done everything he had said he’d done that he thought we were all in on some extensive joke being played on him. When he started realizing this wasn’t the case, I saw him shook like I haven’t seen him before.
He’s a very honest and respectable man and was certain that all these things had occurred that definitely did not. I immediately started thinking he had some type of implanted false memories due to the intensity of the anomalous activity when we were outside, but there was absolutely no way I could explain how he got into that room after we had checked it before we went looking for him and after we had seen he wasn’t outside and he wasn’t there, but later on ended up there with nobody noticing him.
When I looked at him I noticed he had no shirt on (and he said he didn’t remember taking it off), as well as his skin looked reddish or flush around his face and upper chest. Close to his eyes there small were white circles around them, and the farther out it was all a flushed reddish look on his face and chest and upper arms. He reported nothing much abnormal except for a sore spot behind his jaw line almost up behind his ear. He said it was a bit lumpy and sore and that he felt really drained of energy the following morning but still swore up and down that we were mistaken and that the memories he had were real.
Now that a little time has passed, he doesn’t understand at all what happened that night and honestly, I could understand implanting false memories but it’s hard for me to understand how he got in that bedroom and seemingly snuck by everyone in the house in the process of doing so.”
I Interviewed the Witness
After receiving this report from Bart, he set up a telephone interview for me with his nephew whose recollections were just as his uncle describes in the above account. My impression from the interview was that the young man was a reliable witness and he was sincerely perplexed by what had happened to him.
In my judgment this report supports the Virtual Experience Model’s “Virtual Memory” as a psi mediated mechanism of contact with non-human intelligences. In this account as in Puharich’s case, individuals involved with non-human intelligences had dramatically different recollections of recent events.
Conclusion
I understand that this proposed model might be extremely disturbing for both UFO experiencers and investigators. It potentially could undermine a large portion of the data base that is called “ufology” that relies on the recollections of witnesses interacting with non-human intelligences, beings who might possess the ability to psychically implant false memories. I encourage UFO witnesses and contact experiencers to consider the possibility that “Virtual Memories” and other psi-mediated mechanisms of contact are occurring.
To read about Dr. Puharich’s work with Uri Geller that supports the Virtual Memory mechanism, the following link is provided:
In the link posted below, I report on the January 1996 incident during which my team was buzzed by three waves of fighter-bombers:
https://contactunderground.org/2022/07/11/and-then-the-sky-exploded-incident-at-joshua-tree-january-1996/