u/Contactunderground

Mystery Lights in the Santa Susana Pass 

September 4, 1992

 The newly formed CSETI Los Angeles Working Group held a brief meeting at Drs. Eve and Dave Gordon’s home in a middle-class neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. Twelve researchers were present. From the Gordons’ we drove north in our separate vehicles and reconvened at the head of the trail that lead to our research site in the Santa Susana Pass. It was late when we arrived, 10:30 PM on a Friday night. Most of the Working Group investigators present had already put in a full day’s work at their regular jobs. I was gratified to find that the enthusiasm of the team was quite high.

OUR RANKS WERE THINNED

Our numbers however had considerably decreased from the first outing a week before. On that occasion 40 prospective UFO investigators had trudged up the high desert trail which led to a spectacular lookout point. It was there that CSETI Director, Dr. Steven Greer, had demonstrated the “ET contact protocols.” One causality from that first night of fieldwork involved a heavy-set woman who had twisted her ankle on the dark rocky trail. She would never go out with our team again. 

There had been other problems as well. One researcher/trainee, in violation of the contact protocols, brought a 15-year-old boy with her. She claimed that his “parents wouldn’t mind” his doing UFO field work. In the early days of the CE-5 Initiative, Working Group participation was almost exclusively limited to consenting adults who have undergone training. Since no special arrangements had been made with the boy’s legal guardians to allow him to participate, this teenager was advised not to come back.  Other individuals had dropped out because the reality of contact work didn’t quite fit their preconceived notions. Some complained after going out into the field that, “it was too cold,” or “it was too windy, ...... and “anyway the spaceships didn’t show up.”

This second night of fieldwork was very different from our first attempt at contacting what we imagined was extraterrestrial intelligence. Not only were we far fewer in number, but more importantly we were going out without the assistance of Dr. Steven Greer. He was already being described in the UFO community as, “The man who can call in the spacecraft.” I wondered if we could ever make contact without his presence. I feared my inexperienced leadership wouldn’t “cut the mustard” when it came to what Greer called “vectoring in spacecraft.” 

HAVING A “SAFE AREA” WAS PART OF THE CONTACT PROTOCOLS

During the 20-minute climb up the trail, we found a quiet place that we designated as our “safe area”. Finding such a place was part of the usual fieldwork protocols. If Working Group members became frightened during a close encounter, they could be escorted to the “safe area” by a “buddy “to “cool off.” Our “safe area” was selected just over the ridge that separated our sky watch site from the 118 Freeway. From this safety zone any frightened individual could securely look down to the road where our vehicles were parked.  Steven Greer had emphasized the importance of having a compassionate attitude towards coworkers who become frightened during contact work.  Let’s face it, we are just human and individuals can get overwhelmed by some of the bizarre manifestations of non-human intelligence.  Little did we know when selecting the site, that this designated “cooling off zone” would be the very place where a strange interactive experience would later ensue.

A FORM OF THOUGHT PROJECTION WAS EMPLOYED

At a 11 PM we reached our research site. Under slightly overcast skies we set up our folding aluminum chairs. While sitting quietly in a tight circle, we started a guided meditation. The technique that we had learned from Dr. Greer is called, “Coherent Thought Sequencing” or “CTS” for short. It involves thought projection and visualizations.  To be effective, according to Dr. Greer, it requires reaching some appreciation of the unbounded aspects of consciousness. “Unbounded” means in this context the quality of consciousness or mind that is not limited by any measure of time and space. This document can not provide a detailed description of Coherent Though Sequencing. Both the theory and practice of CTS had been the focus of much of our all day CSETI seminar held just 6 days before.

NIGHT WAS TURNED INTO DAY

As we sat there under slightly overcast skies in quiet meditation, suddenly a powerful burst of light struck the contact team. My eyes were closed at the time, nevertheless the light was so intense that my entire visual field flashed white. Several members of the group sat up in surprise and opened their eyes to see what was going on. Those who had experienced the burst of light with eyes open, agreed that it was lightning like. The light appeared to have emanated from the southeast. Strangely there was no associated thunder with this brilliant flash, nor was there any storm activity in the area. The light had virtually turned night into day. The next instant it was gone. We found ourselves sitting in the darkness again listening to the gentle sounds of nature. During the next few minutes as we attempted to resume CTS, the flashes hit us several more times. There was no rain in our vicinity, nor was it particularly humid. Not one researcher could ever recall having witnessed such a strange event.  This occurrence did not correspond to any type of known atmospheric phenomenon. I personally have not witnessed anything quite like it since.

IT IS BETTER NOT TO HIKE ALONE IN REMOTE LOCATIONS

For several hours we alternated quiet meditation with sky watch activities. We signaled toward the partially overcast sky with powerful lights. At approximately 1:00 AM Saturday morning September 5th, a few members of the team took leave of the site. It was quite isolated. For safety purposes we hiked down to the vehicles in small groups. There are important historic reasons to be security conscious in this rather lonely place. Our site was less than a mile from the Box Canyon, home of the murderous Charles Manson clan. They had been responsible for a number of grisly murders some 20 years before. During the 1990s the Los Angeles area was even more dangerous. We therefore deemed it wise not to hike alone on the lonely mountain trail.

A CO-WORKER FROM THE MEDICAL CENTER WAS ON OUR CONTACT TEAM

Shirley Jones, a respiratory technician from my hospital, was among those departing early. She had to get up for a 7AM shift that very same morning. Not being much of a night person, she was eager to get home. Shirley and I had already worked together at the hospital for over 13 years when we discovered we had a mutual interest in UFOs.  Although well into middle age, Shirley easily passed for a woman 10 or 15 years her junior. She was blond with deep blue eyes. Shirley was quite fun loving and sported a broad smile. She walked with a kind of a bounce that looked a little like skipping. Over the years I always enjoyed working with her. In the ER she was known for her gentleness in reassuring panicky respiratory patients who were struggling to catch a breath.

Apparently by chance Shirley and I discovered our common interest in UFOs. My interest in the flying saucer phenomenon dates to December of 1990, when for no particular reason I picked up a book titled “The Gulf Breeze Sightings.” It contained strikingly clear photos that were purported to be of ET spacecraft. Curious I read more. After quietly studying the phenomenon for a year and a half, I summoned up the courage to attend my first public UFO meeting. That was my first mistake.

At the UFO Expo West held in May of 1992, I wandered into Dr. Greer’s workshop. Well 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 however that since Dr.  Greer and I were both Emergency Room physicians, there would be little harm in attending his workshop. I was very surprised to walk in and find Shirley sitting front row center. 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 none. I hoped Shirley could keep my presence at a UFO meeting as “our little secret.”  Shirley’s interest in UFOs, unlike mine, had been long-standing. I soon discovered that she was a skilled meditator and knowledgeable in Eastern philosophy. Shirley later told me that she had a Ph.D. in psychology and did counseling part time. Among her patients were “experiencers” of Close Encounters of the Third and Fourth Kinds. She did all this while working full time as a respiratory therapist at our medical center. Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention that she was also a professional photographer Shirley had a small business doing portraits and covering weddings. All these talents would later be put to good use during CE-5 Working Group research activities.

Now let’s return to our September 4-5 night’s research outing. As you might recall, I was flying solo as Working Group Coordinator. The only other times I had gone out into the field was either with Steven Greer, or with other experienced volunteer contact workers. I was doing my darndest to effectively lead a group composed of people who for the most part had just started working together. It was well past midnight when decided to break camp and call it a night. When small groups of researchers including Shirley began leaving the site separately, I became concerned. I imagined that it would be better if we all left together.  This was in order to maintain the group’s cohesiveness as well as for security purposes. Shirley reached her car at about 1:30 AM. She drove southeast across the San Fernando Valley towards Panorama City where she lived. Little did she know what was about to happen to her and the rest of the team. In just a few short moments we would experience something that can only be characterized as very “high strangeness.”

Those of us still at the site packed up our gear headed down the trail about a half an hour behind the others. Tired and a little cold, we moved slowly in the dark. We did not want to trip and fall on the way down.  As I reached the top of the hill that separated us from the Santa Susana Pass, I looked back for a moment to the south. The view of the San Fernando Valley was truly spectacular. Before me was a sea of twinkling lights. Across an enormous grid like display formed by home and streetlights, an occasional slowly moving car could be seen in the distance. The panorama spanned some 10 miles, all the way to the Santa Monica Mountains to the south. I felt a sense of accomplishment. Although I had never done this type of UFO research before, I realized that in a certain sense I had successfully passed my first leadership test.

Despite whatever doubts and insecurities I might have, I was becoming a contact team leader.

Of course, I had ambitiously hoped for a major sighting of a structured craft. Like everyone else I wanted to see a “real UFO.” If that were my only measure of success, then this first night’s outing was somewhat disappointing. On the other hand, those lightning-like flashes were something out of the ordinary.  I wondered if our efforts would eventually be successful. Would we ever really establish contact with “ETI”?  I would just have to be patient and wait to see what would happen next.

Moving cautiously in the dark, I found my way down the steep trail.  I soon noticed that several members of the team had stopped in front of me. They had reached the “safety” area and were looking intently to the north, towards Rock Peak State Park. About a third of a mile away and perhaps 300 feet above us, we saw two powerful lights. They were perched high up on the ridgeline of the steep hill that bordered north side of the 118 Freeway. 

MISTERY LIGHTS SIGNALED AT US 

“Hello”, I thought, “This is very strange.” How could someone get way up there on that deserted hillside?  And what were they doing there at 1:45 in the morning?  No houses or roads were visible anywhere near that ridge. Who could possibly be up there?

The lights seemed much larger than our signal lanterns. They were almost the size of searchlights, about one to two feet across. The one on the left was perched higher up on the mountainside than the one on the right. Less than 100 feet separated them. The light on the right side was directed somewhat away from us. It was pointing downward and to the right, sending its beam across the San Fernando Valley to the southeast.  The direction of its beam was quite significant as we later learned. It was pointing in the exact direction that Shirley had taken as she drove home across the Valley.

As we stared at the lights in wonder, the left one was clearly signaling on and off. Through binoculars we could discern that the right one was shining past a small tree or shrub.  The plant was growing on a tiny ledge jutting out from the steep hillside. This would later enable us to find the exact location where the mysterious lights had been situated. 

 

Angrily I thought,” Who the hell is up there in the middle of the night?” Maybe campers? Or perhaps they were some wild teenagers who were making mischief by mocking us with their lights? Who else but our contact team would be running around in the dark on a Friday night that had now turned into Saturday morning?

I attempted to interact with the lights by signaling back at them. At first, they fired in what appeared to be a random fashion. I couldn’t seem to easily get their attention. During contact work we use the term “photon talk” to describe how we attempt to interact with anomalous lights by signaling back and forth with them. We used a predetermined sequence of flashes. If the object signaled back in the same fashion, then we knew primitive communication has been established. I was hoping to get those strange lights to mimic my pattern of flashes.

ALEX AYRES’ SUGGESTION WAS EXTREMELY HELPFUL

Alex Ayres was a member of our team who worked as a screenwriter for the motion picture industry. An avid runner, he was tall with fair skin and athletic. No intellectual lightweight, he told me that he earned a baccalaureate from Harvard University. In addition, he reportedly held two masters’ degrees, one in psychology, `the other in film writing. 

Earlier that evening at the research site, he had suggested that I might try a more complex pattern of signaling than just one or two flashes at a time. Alex had the idea that if any unknowns would imitate a more complex pattern of light bursts, there would be no doubt that we had established communication. He instructed me to try a series of three bursts, A simple flash, then pause 3 seconds, followed by 2 flashes with another pause of 3 seconds, then ending with 3 more flashes.

As we observed the mystery lights on the hillside, we were able to discern several important details about them. They were not only much larger and more powerful than our halogen battery powered lanterns, but they were also highly sophisticated in their operation. The one on the right was multi-directional. We could see its beam sweep searchlight fashion across the dusty hillside. It smoothly changed its direction several times. We watched in silence. The left one was pointing directly at us. It too demonstrated a number of different functions. This beacon could produce a steady beam as well as a rapid strobe like effect. It could signal on off with tremendous speed. The other light demonstrated a variable rheostat effect as well. In other words, it could flare up in brightness and then decrease its luminosity, gently fading out over several seconds. These were far more complex functions than our primitive signal lanterns were capable of.

The powerful lights used by contact teams in our network were inexpensive, costing only about $50 and could be purchased from mail order houses. My light was called “The Light Bazooka.” It had a simple on-off trigger switch. When extinguished, the light took slightly less than one second to fade out completely. As a former peace activist, I thought it ironic that I was shooting off bursts from my “Light Bazooka” while supposedly trying to peacefully interact with the “ET visitors.” Regardless of the catalogue title, the lights were quite useful. Thus, during fieldwork, I “blasted away” with them for the cause of “interplanetary peace and cooperation.” My primitive “Bazooka” did not vary its fade out time. Once the trigger was released it always required nearly one second to go completely off. In addition, it didn’t have a strobe like function. In military parlance, if my light was the equivalent of a “bazooka” the ones facing us on the ridgeline were about equal to laser guided howitzers.

For several minutes I repeatedly fired my signal lantern at the hillside.  At first, it was to no avail. With simple flashes I couldn’t get any kind of interaction going with whomever or whatever up there on the ridge. I decided to follow Alex’s advice and signal at the mystery lights in the more complex pattern that he had suggested earlier. Then something incredible occurred.  The light on the left that appeared to be pointing directly at us, fired back with a single bright flash. Then suddenly it went silent. I shivered in excitement. Was it waiting for a response from me? I again sent out the pattern of light bursts as Alex had instructed me to do. Flash! I counted, “one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. Flash! Flash!  Then, “one  one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, “Flash! Flash! Flash! At that moment something quite remarkable happened. The left light signaled back by exactly mimicking my complex pattern.  My heart started to accelerate. Each time I completed a short phrase of “photon talk” an exact strobe reply flashed back from the hillside. The speed of the response was uncanny. Even before the light had faded from my primitive device, the rapid strobe burst mimicked my signal. Flash! Flash!..Reply! Reply! Three seconds later Flash!  Flash! Flash! Reply! Reply! Reply!

CONSCIOUSNESS CONNECTION SEEMED LIKELY

It was very strange indeed. How could someone a few thousand feet away respond with such incredible speed and such perfect timing? It was almost as if my finger on the trigger of the “light bazooka”, was linked to an electronic circuit that produced an instantaneous strobe reply. Later my attempts to accurately reproduce this type of rapid interactive signaling with my contact team coworkers was totally unsuccessful. Our primitive equipment simply could not fire with the same speed and effectiveness as those sophisticated lights that faced us during the morning of September 5^(th), 1992. 

I wondered could this type of precise interaction be evidence of a consciousness link between my team and ETI? That is of course if whoever was signaling at us were extraterrestrials. A proposition I could hardly accept at that time.  Especially since was our first night out as a team.

The CSETI protocols were supposed to prepare us for such interactions with non-human intelligence. But this seemed too much too fast. There had to be another explanation. The uncannily perfect timing of the powerful light signaling back at me made me uneasy. As unlikely as it might seem, I suspected however some kind of consciousness-mediated communication was truly going on.

Our protocols designated such signaling back and forth in an intelligible fashion as “lock on with lights.” The “Center” however did not only use lights. It also trained its researchers in elementary ESP or “psi” techniques. This includes attempts at remote viewing and thought projection. If extrasensory communication between contact team members and ET crews actually occurred, Dr Greer would designate the link as “lock on with consciousness.” For those who think this a wildly radical notion, I can only refer such skeptics to the growing literature documenting the use of applied psi by worldwide military and intelligence services. 

Now back to our September 5, 1992, encounter. Signaling back and forth with individuals unknown is all very well and good. Nevertheless, I had no proof whatsoever at that point that this interaction was with the alleged ETs. After all, we had no sighting of a structured craft hovering in the sky. The lights themselves were not even in the sky, but rather perched on the ridgeline. What kind of self-respecting UFO would signal at us from the ground?  I therefore reasoned it was probably some prankster up there who was playing tricks on us. “A bunch of crazy teenagers having fun on the weekend,” I reasoned.

I thought this despite the totally desolate appearance of the cliff on which the lights were situated. I speculated about the likelihood that there were probably campsites on top of that hill. “Yes of course”, I surmised, “campsites with running water, electricity and a road to bring up the powerful and sophisticated lights.”

All these possibilities went through my mind as we signaled back and forth for several minutes. It was getting late, and my team was already breaking up. Despite Alex’s requests to stay a bit longer and continue the “photon talk,” I was cold and tired. I did not want us to leave the site like a bunch of stragglers, one at a time. I suggested that we call it a night and as a team hike down together. Following this request, the remainder of the Working Group gladly started down the rocky trail to the cars waiting for us on the road below. 

“Tomorrow,” I suggested, “we can send a scout team up to the ledge on the cliff.” It was from there that one light was seen clearly shining past a small tree. We would then know how those “tricksters” had gotten all the necessary equipment up onto the ridge to enable them to “mock” us with those strange lights. After all it was really late. It was time to go home and get some rest!

SCOUTS HAD TO ROCK CLIMB TO REACH THE REMOTE RIDGE 

Several days later I ran into Shirley at the hospital. I wanted to tell her about the strange lights and what our scouts had found up on that lonely ridge. They reported that there were no campsites, no running water nor electric power. There was no paved road to provide easy access. The only path up towards the ridge was an old fire trail. And that was situated behind a locked gate that blocked the path of any car that might try to drive up the hill. The entire area was part of Rocky Peak State Park, a protected wilderness that at the time had no facilities whatsoever. It was for day hikers only. To make this point perfectly clear a prominent sign reading “DAY USE ONLY” was posted on the side of the locked gate. 

Thus, our trusty scouts had no easy access to the ridge once they had scaled the hill. They had to rock climb, over rattlesnake infested boulders, to reach the ledge where one of lights was positioned. The solitary dwarf pine tree that clung to the rock face readily identified it. Through its branches we had seen one of the lights shining.  

SHIRLEY JONES DESCRIBES A HIGH STRANGENESS EVENT

Before I could finish telling Shirley about our experience and what the scouts had discovered, she interrupted me,

“Wait Joe, I’ve got to tell you what happened to me”

An event of apparent high strangeness had transpired during Shirley’s ride home. It occurred at about 1:40 AM, as she was driving across the San Fernando Valley in her Chevy Astro Van. At a distance of about 2 miles from our research site, she suddenly felt a violent shaking of her vehicle. She had gone over some railroad tracks less than a minute before, but this shaking was definitely far more of a jolt than that. Her van shook violently as if it were going over a series of potholes.  Shirley was aware that I had grown up in New York City where she too had resided for a few years. We both knew how bad the roads were back there. So, I understood exactly what she meant when she added “it was like going over the kind of potholes they have back East.”

The shaking of car her occurred around the same time that the rest of us were hiking down the trail from our research site. As the vibration of her vehicle increased, Shirley jammed on the brakes. She told me that at first, she thought she had a blowout. Before getting out of her car, she glanced in her rear-view mirrors and carefully looked around the vehicle. 

After all, an unaccompanied woman driving down the mean LA streets late at night just can’t be too careful. Come to think of it, after working in a Los Angeles area ER, I can assure you that no one can be too careful out there on a Friday night at 2AM. Shirley, brave heart that she was and true to her Scottish background, summoned her courage and got out of her car to check out the situation. 

She exited the van expecting to find a flat tire or even worse. To her surprise the vehicle checked out perfectly. The road she that she had just driven over reportedly looked fine. She apparently had not gone over a series of potholes as she had first thought. It was then that Shirley looked up and saw the lights.

On the ridgeline shining out from the hillside, she saw our two mystery lights. She recalled the one on the right was flashing on and off. It appeared to be signaling directly at her! The other light, (the one that I would be interacting with in a few minutes appeared less bright to her.) While standing by the side of her car, she wondered if we too could see the lights. They appeared to be coming from the hills directly behind our research site.

I told Shirley what we had experienced. She listened in silence.  I was somewhat perplexed that she didn’t seem surprised at all.  She accepted the anomalous nature of the events with perfect equanimity. She did not seem frightened about what had happened to her. I later found out that Shirley, as well as several other members of the team, were not strangers to the high strangeness associated with this type of work. Several members of the group apparently had previous interactive experiences with what appeared to be non-human intelligence. At that moment I had a lot to learn about the contact project, and even more to learn about the individual members of my team.

SPECULATIVE ANALYSIS OF OUR FIELD INVESTIGATION

What was I to make of all this? What was the significance of these highly anomalous experiences that occurred during our initial fieldwork?  As I reviewed and analyzed what had transpired, my theory about “crazed” teenagers being responsible for the mystery lights seemed less and less likely. 

First, we had been hit by powerful lightning like flashes of light while doing Coherent Thought Sequencing. I had no easy explanation for this.  Later we encountered anomalous lights that were rather sophisticated.  And I got the opportunity to interact with one of them at the very spot we had designated as our “safety area.” The rapidity of the light’s response to my signaling made me consider the possibility of a consciousness link between myself and the intelligence responsible for those lights. At about the same time, a Working Group member experienced a violent shaking of her car. This led her to stop the vehicle and look up and see one of the lights signaling in her direction. What could it all mean?

First of all, to skeptics I would like to state for the record that I have considered the null hypothesis. Yes, it’s possible that there is no special significance to any of these events. The lightning-like flashes were possibly unusual manifestations of a prosaic phenomenon, namely the weather.  In addition, ordinary humans could have engineered the mystery lights. That they had somehow gotten past the locked gate was certainly not impossible. But what would have been their motivation? To rock climb in the dark through “rattlesnake land” for a prank seemed rather unlikely.  Whoever had mounted such a complex operation must have had a very good reason. They had to be very well equipped as well. All this accomplished so that “they” (whoever that might be) could mock our light work and play games signaling at us? It just didn’t make sense. 

Moving further in this rather illogical line of reasoning, yes perhaps Shirley had gone over some potholes and that’s what shook her car. When she exited her vehicle, she simply missed seeing the road hazard due to the late hour and her being tired. One could just say that it was coincidence that she then looked up towards the pass at that exact moment and saw the lights. Moving further out on the limb, a debunker would probably say that perhaps Shirley’s part of the story was a complete fabrication. After all, she was the only witness to the strange things that she experienced on the road. According to self-styled debunker’s logic, “of course she made the whole thing up.”

From my perspective however, that would go against everything I know about her. We eventually worked together in the hospital for nearly twenty-five years when she suddenly died from a cardiac arrest. I never knew her true age, but my guess is that she was in her early sixties when this sad event happened.

It is my judgment that she was an honest and sincere individual. I was her contact team leader for several years and we spent many long nights carrying out group sky watch activities together.  The thought that she would deliberately prevaricate is not likely. In my opinion her lying to me on this subject is even more preposterous than the possibility that we had indeed contacted non-human intelligence, an intelligence whose technology could cause her vehicle to vibrate to stop her and compel her see the light.

 

It is my judgment that if we pursue want-to-be debunker’s brand of illogic, which often masquerades as “conventional wisdom,” then we will never understand anything about this phenomenon. It is my opinion that if we are to make any sense of this strange subject of UFOs, then we should do as contact groups request. And that is to deliberately interact with the alleged ETs in protocol fashion and then faithfully record our findings. Only in a diligent, industrious and well-intentioned effort, can we hope to expand human knowledge in this area. The possibility that extraterrestrial civilizations are visiting our planet warrants this kind of reasonable and responsible approach.

What I have reported here is by no means unique. The UFO literature is full of similar reports of mysterious lights, bizarre atmospheric like effects and anomalous physical phenomenon.  What is different about contact team operations is that these occurrences take place under very special circumstances, namely during deliberate attempts to interact with the intelligence that is presumably responsible for them. 

I am suggesting it was no accident that the lightning like flashes hit us during our meditation. If our thought projections while in a meditative state are successful in establishing communication, might not we receive an answer while we are sending the “welcoming” message? As in this case, a “reply” that for an instant turned night into day, certainly served to get our attention. At the same time it served to underscore the importance of meditation to facilitate communication with a non-human intelligence of that might be extraterrestrial.

I’ve already discussed the difficulties of getting up to the ridgeline at night. This would necessitate getting past a locked gate and avoiding rattlers while rock climbing over boulders in the dark. All that certainly presents considerable logistic problems. At least for humans it would. For a technologically sophisticated star faring culture, it might be a lot easier. And to further support this assessment, I point out that advanced civilizations might readily have at their disposal consciousness communication systems that would allow them to coordinate their light work with me in such a deft manner. 

Even the place where the “photon talk” took place has significance. The exchange ironically occurred at the very section of trail that we had designated as our “safety zone.” Our “cooling off” place was indeed the site where our encounter “heated up.” While light signaling back and forth is a rather primitive form of communication, the display of irony bespeaks of a more complex exchange with an intelligence capable of humor.

Shirley’s high strangeness experience was perhaps the most powerful reminder of what our presumed ET collaborators are able and willing to do to get our attention. We can only speculate as to what kind of advanced technology (possibly electromagnetic) that could have caused such a violent shaking of her car at some distance from our research site.  It truly seems as if something or somebody really wanted her to stop and “see the light!”  If the UFO phenomenon is caused by advanced intelligences attempting to assist mankind, it is my hope that “they” (whoever they might be) keep on trying to help us “see the light.”

A Bit More of Discussion and the Conclusion of this Report.

For those hearty souls who have been so kind as to wade through this detailed narrative, I salute you. I endeavor to describe how a UFO contact network operates by focusing on the fieldwork experience of one individual team, namely my own.  In my opinion, we have entered a collaborative relationship with the non-human intelligence responsible for the flying saucer phenomenon. The high strangeness component of these experiences, the inexplicable nature of the interactions tends to suggest that something truly unearthly is going on. Skeptics would of course correctly point out,” You have no proof!” Yes, that is certainly true. The historic landing of an ET craft and off planet experience by a contact team with video recorders on has not occurred yet. For that matter it may never take place.

Nevertheless, citizen teams are seeking contact all around the world. In my opinion this development indicates that something truly remarkable is going on at this point in the Earth’s history. For those reading this narrative, I urge you to consider that we are witnessing “alien civilizations” that are staging limited interactions with humankind. And this process is part of a much larger path leading towards open and direct contact. 

I would be the first to agree that such encounters are ambiguous, full of uncertainty, and at times they are frustrating for us.  As one who has worked in the non-human/human contact networks attempting to build a positive and peaceful relationship, I believe that the price is well worth it.

In the next chapter linked below, I describe several red glowing objects that hovered in the sky to the north of our research site in the Santa Susana Pass. I also report on an encounter with two Black Hawk helicopters that buzzed our contact team while hiking in Rocky Peak State Park. This occurred one night as an advanced party of our contact team operated near a high security research facility of the US Department of Energy.  Please stay tuned and keep watching the skies!

Mysterious flashes turning night into day, powerful lights that signaled my team from a remote ridge line & a vehicle shook violently as it was being driven away from our research site.All this and more are described in this detailed report from the Contact Underground.Mystery Lights in the Santa Susana Pass

September 4, 1992

 The newly formed CSETI Los Angeles Working Group held a brief meeting at Drs. Eve and Dave Gordon’s home in a middle-class neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. Twelve researchers were present. From the Gordons’ we drove north in our separate vehicles and reconvened at the head of the trail that lead to our research site in the Santa Susana Pass. It was late when we arrived, 10:30 PM on a Friday night. Most of the Working Group investigators present had already put in a full day’s work at their regular jobs. I was gratified to find that the enthusiasm of the team was quite high.

OUR RANKS WERE THINNED

Our numbers however had considerably decreased from the first outing a week before. On that occasion 40 prospective UFO investigators had trudged up the high desert trail which led to a spectacular lookout point. It was there that CSETI Director, Dr. Steven Greer, had demonstrated the “ET contact protocols.” One causality from that first night of fieldwork involved a heavy-set woman who had twisted her ankle on the dark rocky trail. She would never go out with our team again. 

There had been other problems as well. One researcher/trainee, in violation of the contact protocols, brought a 15-year-old boy with her. She claimed that his “parents wouldn’t mind” his doing UFO field work. In the early days of the CE-5 Initiative, Working Group participation was almost exclusively limited to consenting adults who have undergone training. Since no special arrangements had been made with the boy’s legal guardians to allow him to participate, this teenager was advised not to come back.  Other individuals had dropped out because the reality of contact work didn’t quite fit their preconceived notions. Some complained after going out into the field that, “it was too cold,” or “it was too windy, ...... and “anyway the spaceships didn’t show up.”

This second night of fieldwork was very different from our first attempt at contacting what we imagined was extraterrestrial intelligence. Not only were we far fewer in number, but more importantly we were going out without the assistance of Dr. Steven Greer. He was already being described in the UFO community as, “The man who can call in the spacecraft.” I wondered if we could ever make contact without his presence. I feared my inexperienced leadership wouldn’t “cut the mustard” when it came to what Greer called “vectoring in spacecraft.” 

HAVING A “SAFE AREA” WAS PART OF THE CONTACT PROTOCOLS

During the 20-minute climb up the trail, we found a quiet place that we designated as our “safe area”. Finding such a place was part of the usual fieldwork protocols. If Working Group members became frightened during a close encounter, they could be escorted to the “safe area” by a “buddy “to “cool off.” Our “safe area” was selected just over the ridge that separated our sky watch site from the 118 Freeway. From this safety zone any frightened individual could securely look down to the road where our vehicles were parked.  Steven Greer had emphasized the importance of having a compassionate attitude towards coworkers who become frightened during contact work.  Let’s face it, we are just human and individuals can get overwhelmed by some of the bizarre manifestations of non-human intelligence.  Little did we know when selecting the site, that this designated “cooling off zone” would be the very place where a strange interactive experience would later ensue.

A FORM OF THOUGHT PROJECTION WAS EMPLOYED

At a 11 PM we reached our research site. Under slightly overcast skies we set up our folding aluminum chairs. While sitting quietly in a tight circle, we started a guided meditation. The technique that we had learned from Dr. Greer is called, “Coherent Thought Sequencing” or “CTS” for short. It involves thought projection and visualizations.  To be effective, according to Dr. Greer, it requires reaching some appreciation of the unbounded aspects of consciousness. “Unbounded” means in this context the quality of consciousness or mind that is not limited by any measure of time and space. This document can not provide a detailed description of Coherent Though Sequencing. Both the theory and practice of CTS had been the focus of much of our all day CSETI seminar held just 6 days before.

NIGHT WAS TURNED INTO DAY

As we sat there under slightly overcast skies in quiet meditation, suddenly a powerful burst of light struck the contact team. My eyes were closed at the time, nevertheless the light was so intense that my entire visual field flashed white. Several members of the group sat up in surprise and opened their eyes to see what was going on. Those who had experienced the burst of light with eyes open, agreed that it was lightning like. The light appeared to have emanated from the southeast. Strangely there was no associated thunder with this brilliant flash, nor was there any storm activity in the area. The light had virtually turned night into day. The next instant it was gone. We found ourselves sitting in the darkness again listening to the gentle sounds of nature. During the next few minutes as we attempted to resume CTS, the flashes hit us several more times. There was no rain in our vicinity, nor was it particularly humid. Not one researcher could ever recall having witnessed such a strange event.  This occurrence did not correspond to any type of known atmospheric phenomenon. I personally have not witnessed anything quite like it since.

IT IS BETTER NOT TO HIKE ALONE IN REMOTE LOCATIONS

For several hours we alternated quiet meditation with sky watch activities. We signaled toward the partially overcast sky with powerful lights. At approximately 1:00 AM Saturday morning September 5th, a few members of the team took leave of the site. It was quite isolated. For safety purposes we hiked down to the vehicles in small groups. There are important historic reasons to be security conscious in this rather lonely place. Our site was less than a mile from the Box Canyon, home of the murderous Charles Manson clan. They had been responsible for a number of grisly murders some 20 years before. During the 1990s the Los Angeles area was even more dangerous. We therefore deemed it wise not to hike alone on the lonely mountain trail.

A CO-WORKER FROM THE MEDICAL CENTER WAS ON OUR CONTACT TEAM

Shirley Jones, a respiratory technician from my hospital, was among those departing early. She had to get up for a 7AM shift that very same morning. Not being much of a night person, she was eager to get home. Shirley and I had already worked together at the hospital for over 13 years when we discovered we had a mutual interest in UFOs.  Although well into middle age, Shirley easily passed for a woman 10 or 15 years her junior. She was blond with deep blue eyes. Shirley was quite fun loving and sported a broad smile. She walked with a kind of a bounce that looked a little like skipping. Over the years I always enjoyed working with her. In the ER she was known for her gentleness in reassuring panicky respiratory patients who were struggling to catch a breath.

Apparently by chance Shirley and I discovered our common interest in UFOs. My interest in the flying saucer phenomenon dates to December of 1990, when for no particular reason I picked up a book titled “The Gulf Breeze Sightings.” It contained strikingly clear photos that were purported to be of ET spacecraft. Curious I read more. After quietly studying the phenomenon for a year and a half, I summoned up the courage to attend my first public UFO meeting. That was my first mistake.

At the UFO Expo West held in May of 1992, I wandered into Dr. Greer’s workshop. Well 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 however that since Dr.  Greer and I were both Emergency Room physicians, there would be little harm in attending his workshop. I was very surprised to walk in and find Shirley sitting front row center. 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 none. I hoped Shirley could keep my presence at a UFO meeting as “our little secret.”  Shirley’s interest in UFOs, unlike mine, had been long-standing. I soon discovered that she was a skilled meditator and knowledgeable in Eastern philosophy. Shirley later told me that she had a Ph.D. in psychology and did counseling part time. Among her patients were “experiencers” of Close Encounters of the Third and Fourth Kinds. She did all this while working full time as a respiratory therapist at our medical center. Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention that she was also a professional photographer Shirley had a small business doing portraits and covering weddings. All these talents would later be put to good use during CE-5 Working Group research activities.

Now let’s return to our September 4-5 night’s research outing. As you might recall, I was flying solo as Working Group Coordinator. The only other times I had gone out into the field was either with Steven Greer, or with other experienced volunteer contact workers. I was doing my darndest to effectively lead a group composed of people who for the most part had just started working together. It was well past midnight when decided to break camp and call it a night. When small groups of researchers including Shirley began leaving the site separately, I became concerned. I imagined that it would be better if we all left together.  This was in order to maintain the group’s cohesiveness as well as for security purposes. Shirley reached her car at about 1:30 AM. She drove southeast across the San Fernando Valley towards Panorama City where she lived. Little did she know what was about to happen to her and the rest of the team. In just a few short moments we would experience something that can only be characterized as very “high strangeness.”

Those of us still at the site packed up our gear headed down the trail about a half an hour behind the others. Tired and a little cold, we moved slowly in the dark. We did not want to trip and fall on the way down.  As I reached the top of the hill that separated us from the Santa Susana Pass, I looked back for a moment to the south. The view of the San Fernando Valley was truly spectacular. Before me was a sea of twinkling lights. Across an enormous grid like display formed by home and streetlights, an occasional slowly moving car could be seen in the distance. The panorama spanned some 10 miles, all the way to the Santa Monica Mountains to the south. I felt a sense of accomplishment. Although I had never done this type of UFO research before, I realized that in a certain sense I had successfully passed my first leadership test.

Despite whatever doubts and insecurities I might have, I was becoming a contact team leader.

Of course, I had ambitiously hoped for a major sighting of a structured craft. Like everyone else I wanted to see a “real UFO.” If that were my only measure of success, then this first night’s outing was somewhat disappointing. On the other hand, those lightning-like flashes were something out of the ordinary.  I wondered if our efforts would eventually be successful. Would we ever really establish contact with “ETI”?  I would just have to be patient and wait to see what would happen next.

Moving cautiously in the dark, I found my way down the steep trail.  I soon noticed that several members of the team had stopped in front of me. They had reached the “safety” area and were looking intently to the north, towards Rock Peak State Park. About a third of a mile away and perhaps 300 feet above us, we saw two powerful lights. They were perched high up on the ridgeline of the steep hill that bordered north side of the 118 Freeway. 

MISTERY LIGHTS SIGNALED AT US 

“Hello”, I thought, “This is very strange.” How could someone get way up there on that deserted hillside?  And what were they doing there at 1:45 in the morning?  No houses or roads were visible anywhere near that ridge. Who could possibly be up there?

The lights seemed much larger than our signal lanterns. They were almost the size of searchlights, about one to two feet across. The one on the left was perched higher up on the mountainside than the one on the right. Less than 100 feet separated them. The light on the right side was directed somewhat away from us. It was pointing downward and to the right, sending its beam across the San Fernando Valley to the southeast.  The direction of its beam was quite significant as we later learned. It was pointing in the exact direction that Shirley had taken as she drove home across the Valley.

As we stared at the lights in wonder, the left one was clearly signaling on and off. Through binoculars we could discern that the right one was shining past a small tree or shrub.  The plant was growing on a tiny ledge jutting out from the steep hillside. This would later enable us to find the exact location where the mysterious lights had been situated. 

 

Angrily I thought,” Who the hell is up there in the middle of the night?” Maybe campers? Or perhaps they were some wild teenagers who were making mischief by mocking us with their lights? Who else but our contact team would be running around in the dark on a Friday night that had now turned into Saturday morning?

I attempted to interact with the lights by signaling back at them. At first, they fired in what appeared to be a random fashion. I couldn’t seem to easily get their attention. During contact work we use the term “photon talk” to describe how we attempt to interact with anomalous lights by signaling back and forth with them. We used a predetermined sequence of flashes. If the object signaled back in the same fashion, then we knew primitive communication has been established. I was hoping to get those strange lights to mimic my pattern of flashes.

ALEX AYRES’ SUGGESTION WAS EXTREMELY HELPFUL

Alex Ayres was a member of our team who worked as a screenwriter for the motion picture industry. An avid runner, he was tall with fair skin and athletic. No intellectual lightweight, he told me that he earned a baccalaureate from Harvard University. In addition, he reportedly held two masters’ degrees, one in psychology, `the other in film writing. 

Earlier that evening at the research site, he had suggested that I might try a more complex pattern of signaling than just one or two flashes at a time. Alex had the idea that if any unknowns would imitate a more complex pattern of light bursts, there would be no doubt that we had established communication. He instructed me to try a series of three bursts, A simple flash, then pause 3 seconds, followed by 2 flashes with another pause of 3 seconds, then ending with 3 more flashes.

As we observed the mystery lights on the hillside, we were able to discern several important details about them. They were not only much larger and more powerful than our halogen battery powered lanterns, but they were also highly sophisticated in their operation. The one on the right was multi-directional. We could see its beam sweep searchlight fashion across the dusty hillside. It smoothly changed its direction several times. We watched in silence. The left one was pointing directly at us. It too demonstrated a number of different functions. This beacon could produce a steady beam as well as a rapid strobe like effect. It could signal on off with tremendous speed. The other light demonstrated a variable rheostat effect as well. In other words, it could flare up in brightness and then decrease its luminosity, gently fading out over several seconds. These were far more complex functions than our primitive signal lanterns were capable of.

The powerful lights used by contact teams in our network were inexpensive, costing only about $50 and could be purchased from mail order houses. My light was called “The Light Bazooka.” It had a simple on-off trigger switch. When extinguished, the light took slightly less than one second to fade out completely. As a former peace activist, I thought it ironic that I was shooting off bursts from my “Light Bazooka” while supposedly trying to peacefully interact with the “ET visitors.” Regardless of the catalogue title, the lights were quite useful. Thus, during fieldwork, I “blasted away” with them for the cause of “interplanetary peace and cooperation.” My primitive “Bazooka” did not vary its fade out time. Once the trigger was released it always required nearly one second to go completely off. In addition, it didn’t have a strobe like function. In military parlance, if my light was the equivalent of a “bazooka” the ones facing us on the ridgeline were about equal to laser guided howitzers.

For several minutes I repeatedly fired my signal lantern at the hillside.  At first, it was to no avail. With simple flashes I couldn’t get any kind of interaction going with whomever or whatever up there on the ridge. I decided to follow Alex’s advice and signal at the mystery lights in the more complex pattern that he had suggested earlier. Then something incredible occurred.  The light on the left that appeared to be pointing directly at us, fired back with a single bright flash. Then suddenly it went silent. I shivered in excitement. Was it waiting for a response from me? I again sent out the pattern of light bursts as Alex had instructed me to do. Flash! I counted, “one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. Flash! Flash!  Then, “one  one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, “Flash! Flash! Flash! At that moment something quite remarkable happened. The left light signaled back by exactly mimicking my complex pattern.  My heart started to accelerate. Each time I completed a short phrase of “photon talk” an exact strobe reply flashed back from the hillside. The speed of the response was uncanny. Even before the light had faded from my primitive device, the rapid strobe burst mimicked my signal. Flash! Flash!..Reply! Reply! Three seconds later Flash!  Flash! Flash! Reply! Reply! Reply!

CONSCIOUSNESS CONNECTION SEEMED LIKELY

It was very strange indeed. How could someone a few thousand feet away respond with such incredible speed and such perfect timing? It was almost as if my finger on the trigger of the “light bazooka”, was linked to an electronic circuit that produced an instantaneous strobe reply. Later my attempts to accurately reproduce this type of rapid interactive signaling with my contact team coworkers was totally unsuccessful. Our primitive equipment simply could not fire with the same speed and effectiveness as those sophisticated lights that faced us during the morning of September 5^(th), 1992. 

I wondered could this type of precise interaction be evidence of a consciousness link between my team and ETI? That is of course if whoever was signaling at us were extraterrestrials. A proposition I could hardly accept at that time.  Especially since was our first night out as a team.

The CSETI protocols were supposed to prepare us for such interactions with non-human intelligence. But this seemed too much too fast. There had to be another explanation. The uncannily perfect timing of the powerful light signaling back at me made me uneasy. As unlikely as it might seem, I suspected however some kind of consciousness-mediated communication was truly going on.

Our protocols designated such signaling back and forth in an intelligible fashion as “lock on with lights.” The “Center” however did not only use lights. It also trained its researchers in elementary ESP or “psi” techniques. This includes attempts at remote viewing and thought projection. If extrasensory communication between contact team members and ET crews actually occurred, Dr Greer would designate the link as “lock on with consciousness.” For those who think this a wildly radical notion, I can only refer such skeptics to the growing literature documenting the use of applied psi by worldwide military and intelligence services. 

Now back to our September 5, 1992, encounter. Signaling back and forth with individuals unknown is all very well and good. Nevertheless, I had no proof whatsoever at that point that this interaction was with the alleged ETs. After all, we had no sighting of a structured craft hovering in the sky. The lights themselves were not even in the sky, but rather perched on the ridgeline. What kind of self-respecting UFO would signal at us from the ground?  I therefore reasoned it was probably some prankster up there who was playing tricks on us. “A bunch of crazy teenagers having fun on the weekend,” I reasoned.

I thought this despite the totally desolate appearance of the cliff on which the lights were situated. I speculated about the likelihood that there were probably campsites on top of that hill. “Yes of course”, I surmised, “campsites with running water, electricity and a road to bring up the powerful and sophisticated lights.”

All these possibilities went through my mind as we signaled back and forth for several minutes. It was getting late, and my team was already breaking up. Despite Alex’s requests to stay a bit longer and continue the “photon talk,” I was cold and tired. I did not want us to leave the site like a bunch of stragglers, one at a time. I suggested that we call it a night and as a team hike down together. Following this request, the remainder of the Working Group gladly started down the rocky trail to the cars waiting for us on the road below. 

“Tomorrow,” I suggested, “we can send a scout team up to the ledge on the cliff.” It was from there that one light was seen clearly shining past a small tree. We would then know how those “tricksters” had gotten all the necessary equipment up onto the ridge to enable them to “mock” us with those strange lights. After all it was really late. It was time to go home and get some rest!

SCOUTS HAD TO ROCK CLIMB TO REACH THE REMOTE RIDGE 

Several days later I ran into Shirley at the hospital. I wanted to tell her about the strange lights and what our scouts had found up on that lonely ridge. They reported that there were no campsites, no running water nor electric power. There was no paved road to provide easy access. The only path up towards the ridge was an old fire trail. And that was situated behind a locked gate that blocked the path of any car that might try to drive up the hill. The entire area was part of Rocky Peak State Park, a protected wilderness that at the time had no facilities whatsoever. It was for day hikers only. To make this point perfectly clear a prominent sign reading “DAY USE ONLY” was posted on the side of the locked gate. 

Thus, our trusty scouts had no easy access to the ridge once they had scaled the hill. They had to rock climb, over rattlesnake infested boulders, to reach the ledge where one of lights was positioned. The solitary dwarf pine tree that clung to the rock face readily identified it. Through its branches we had seen one of the lights shining.  

SHIRLEY JONES DESCRIBES A HIGH STRANGENESS EVENT

Before I could finish telling Shirley about our experience and what the scouts had discovered, she interrupted me,

“Wait Joe, I’ve got to tell you what happened to me”

An event of apparent high strangeness had transpired during Shirley’s ride home. It occurred at about 1:40 AM, as she was driving across the San Fernando Valley in her Chevy Astro Van. At a distance of about 2 miles from our research site, she suddenly felt a violent shaking of her vehicle. She had gone over some railroad tracks less than a minute before, but this shaking was definitely far more of a jolt than that. Her van shook violently as if it were going over a series of potholes.  Shirley was aware that I had grown up in New York City where she too had resided for a few years. We both knew how bad the roads were back there. So, I understood exactly what she meant when she added “it was like going over the kind of potholes they have back East.”

The shaking of car her occurred around the same time that the rest of us were hiking down the trail from our research site. As the vibration of her vehicle increased, Shirley jammed on the brakes. She told me that at first, she thought she had a blowout. Before getting out of her car, she glanced in her rear-view mirrors and carefully looked around the vehicle. 

After all, an unaccompanied woman driving down the mean LA streets late at night just can’t be too careful. Come to think of it, after working in a Los Angeles area ER, I can assure you that no one can be too careful out there on a Friday night at 2AM. Shirley, brave heart that she was and true to her Scottish background, summoned her courage and got out of her car to check out the situation. 

She exited the van expecting to find a flat tire or even worse. To her surprise the vehicle checked out perfectly. The road she that she had just driven over reportedly looked fine. She apparently had not gone over a series of potholes as she had first thought. It was then that Shirley looked up and saw the lights.

On the ridgeline shining out from the hillside, she saw our two mystery lights. She recalled the one on the right was flashing on and off. It appeared to be signaling directly at her! The other light, (the one that I would be interacting with in a few minutes appeared less bright to her.) While standing by the side of her car, she wondered if we too could see the lights. They appeared to be coming from the hills directly behind our research site.

I told Shirley what we had experienced. She listened in silence.  I was somewhat perplexed that she didn’t seem surprised at all.  She accepted the anomalous nature of the events with perfect equanimity. She did not seem frightened about what had happened to her. I later found out that Shirley, as well as several other members of the team, were not strangers to the high strangeness associated with this type of work. Several members of the group apparently had previous interactive experiences with what appeared to be non-human intelligence. At that moment I had a lot to learn about the contact project, and even more to learn about the individual members of my team.

SPECULATIVE ANALYSIS OF OUR FIELD INVESTIGATION

What was I to make of all this? What was the significance of these highly anomalous experiences that occurred during our initial fieldwork?  As I reviewed and analyzed what had transpired, my theory about “crazed” teenagers being responsible for the mystery lights seemed less and less likely. 

First, we had been hit by powerful lightning like flashes of light while doing Coherent Thought Sequencing. I had no easy explanation for this.  Later we encountered anomalous lights that were rather sophisticated.  And I got the opportunity to interact with one of them at the very spot we had designated as our “safety area.” The rapidity of the light’s response to my signaling made me consider the possibility of a consciousness link between myself and the intelligence responsible for those lights. At about the same time, a Working Group member experienced a violent shaking of her car. This led her to stop the vehicle and look up and see one of the lights signaling in her direction. What could it all mean?

First of all, to skeptics I would like to state for the record that I have considered the null hypothesis. Yes, it’s possible that there is no special significance to any of these events. The lightning-like flashes were possibly unusual manifestations of a prosaic phenomenon, namely the weather.  In addition, ordinary humans could have engineered the mystery lights. That they had somehow gotten past the locked gate was certainly not impossible. But what would have been their motivation? To rock climb in the dark through “rattlesnake land” for a prank seemed rather unlikely.  Whoever had mounted such a complex operation must have had a very good reason. They had to be very well equipped as well. All this accomplished so that “they” (whoever that might be) could mock our light work and play games signaling at us? It just didn’t make sense. 

Moving further in this rather illogical line of reasoning, yes perhaps Shirley had gone over some potholes and that’s what shook her car. When she exited her vehicle, she simply missed seeing the road hazard due to the late hour and her being tired. One could just say that it was coincidence that she then looked up towards the pass at that exact moment and saw the lights. Moving further out on the limb, a debunker would probably say that perhaps Shirley’s part of the story was a complete fabrication. After all, she was the only witness to the strange things that she experienced on the road. According to self-styled debunker’s logic, “of course she made the whole thing up.”

From my perspective however, that would go against everything I know about her. We eventually worked together in the hospital for nearly twenty-five years when she suddenly died from a cardiac arrest. I never knew her true age, but my guess is that she was in her early sixties when this sad event happened.

It is my judgment that she was an honest and sincere individual. I was her contact team leader for several years and we spent many long nights carrying out group sky watch activities together.  The thought that she would deliberately prevaricate is not likely. In my opinion her lying to me on this subject is even more preposterous than the possibility that we had indeed contacted non-human intelligence, an intelligence whose technology could cause her vehicle to vibrate to stop her and compel her see the light.

 

It is my judgment that if we pursue want-to-be debunker’s brand of illogic, which often masquerades as “conventional wisdom,” then we will never understand anything about this phenomenon. It is my opinion that if we are to make any sense of this strange subject of UFOs, then we should do as contact groups request. And that is to deliberately interact with the alleged ETs in protocol fashion and then faithfully record our findings. Only in a diligent, industrious and well-intentioned effort, can we hope to expand human knowledge in this area. The possibility that extraterrestrial civilizations are visiting our planet warrants this kind of reasonable and responsible approach.

What I have reported here is by no means unique. The UFO literature is full of similar reports of mysterious lights, bizarre atmospheric like effects and anomalous physical phenomenon.  What is different about contact team operations is that these occurrences take place under very special circumstances, namely during deliberate attempts to interact with the intelligence that is presumably responsible for them. 

I am suggesting it was no accident that the lightning like flashes hit us during our meditation. If our thought projections while in a meditative state are successful in establishing communication, might not we receive an answer while we are sending the “welcoming” message? As in this case, a “reply” that for an instant turned night into day, certainly served to get our attention. At the same time it served to underscore the importance of meditation to facilitate communication with a non-human intelligence of that might be extraterrestrial.

I’ve already discussed the difficulties of getting up to the ridgeline at night. This would necessitate getting past a locked gate and avoiding rattlers while rock climbing over boulders in the dark. All that certainly presents considerable logistic problems. At least for humans it would. For a technologically sophisticated star faring culture, it might be a lot easier. And to further support this assessment, I point out that advanced civilizations might readily have at their disposal consciousness communication systems that would allow them to coordinate their light work with me in such a deft manner. 

Even the place where the “photon talk” took place has significance. The exchange ironically occurred at the very section of trail that we had designated as our “safety zone.” Our “cooling off” place was indeed the site where our encounter “heated up.” While light signaling back and forth is a rather primitive form of communication, the display of irony bespeaks of a more complex exchange with an intelligence capable of humor.

Shirley’s high strangeness experience was perhaps the most powerful reminder of what our presumed ET collaborators are able and willing to do to get our attention. We can only speculate as to what kind of advanced technology (possibly electromagnetic) that could have caused such a violent shaking of her car at some distance from our research site.  It truly seems as if something or somebody really wanted her to stop and “see the light!”  If the UFO phenomenon is caused by advanced intelligences attempting to assist mankind, it is my hope that “they” (whoever they might be) keep on trying to help us “see the light.”

A Bit More of Discussion and the Conclusion of this Report.

For those hearty souls who have been so kind as to wade through this detailed narrative, I salute you. I endeavor to describe how a UFO contact network operates by focusing on the fieldwork experience of one individual team, namely my own.  In my opinion, we have entered a collaborative relationship with the non-human intelligence responsible for the flying saucer phenomenon. The high strangeness component of these experiences, the inexplicable nature of the interactions tends to suggest that something truly unearthly is going on. Skeptics would of course correctly point out,” You have no proof!” Yes, that is certainly true. The historic landing of an ET craft and off planet experience by a contact team with video recorders on has not occurred yet. For that matter it may never take place.

Nevertheless, citizen teams are seeking contact all around the world. In my opinion this development indicates that something truly remarkable is going on at this point in the Earth’s history. For those reading this narrative, I urge you to consider that we are witnessing “alien civilizations” that are staging limited interactions with humankind. And this process is part of a much larger path leading towards open and direct contact. 

I would be the first to agree that such encounters are ambiguous, full of uncertainty, and at times they are frustrating for us.  As one who has worked in the non-human/human contact networks attempting to build a positive and peaceful relationship, I believe that the price is well worth it.

In the next chapter linked below, I describe several red glowing objects that hovered in the sky to the north of our research site in the Santa Susana Pass. I also report on an encounter with two Black Hawk helicopters that buzzed our contact team while hiking in Rocky Peak State Park. This occurred one night as an advanced party of our contact team operated near a high security research facility of the US Department of Energy.  Please stay tuned and keep watching the skies!

View of the Western San Fernando Valley from the Santa Susana Pass

Mystery Lights in the Santa Susana Pass 

September 4, 1992

 The newly formed CSETI Los Angeles Working Group held a brief meeting at Drs. Eve and Dave Gordon’s home in a middle-class neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. Twelve researchers were present. From the Gordons’ we drove north in our separate vehicles and reconvened at the head of the trail that lead to our research site in the Santa Susana Pass. It was late when we arrived, 10:30 PM on a Friday night. Most of the Working Group investigators present had already put in a full day’s work at their regular jobs. I was gratified to find that the enthusiasm of the team was quite high.

OUR RANKS WERE THINNED

Our numbers however had considerably decreased from the first outing a week before. On that occasion 40 prospective UFO investigators had trudged up the high desert trail which led to a spectacular lookout point. It was there that CSETI Director, Dr. Steven Greer, had demonstrated the “ET contact protocols.” One causality from that first night of fieldwork involved a heavy-set woman who had twisted her ankle on the dark rocky trail. She would never go out with our team again. 

There had been other problems as well. One researcher/trainee, in violation of the contact protocols, brought a 15-year-old boy with her. She claimed that his “parents wouldn’t mind” his doing UFO field work. In the early days of the CE-5 Initiative, Working Group participation was almost exclusively limited to consenting adults who have undergone training. Since no special arrangements had been made with the boy’s legal guardians to allow him to participate, this teenager was advised not to come back.  Other individuals had dropped out because the reality of contact work didn’t quite fit their preconceived notions. Some complained after going out into the field that, “it was too cold,” or “it was too windy, ...... and “anyway the spaceships didn’t show up.”

This second night of fieldwork was very different from our first attempt at contacting what we imagined was extraterrestrial intelligence. Not only were we far fewer in number, but more importantly we were going out without the assistance of Dr. Steven Greer. He was already being described in the UFO community as, “The man who can call in the spacecraft.” I wondered if we could ever make contact without his presence. I feared my inexperienced leadership wouldn’t “cut the mustard” when it came to what Greer called “vectoring in spacecraft.” 

HAVING A “SAFE AREA” WAS PART OF THE CONTACT PROTOCOLS

During the 20-minute climb up the trail, we found a quiet place that we designated as our “safe area”. Finding such a place was part of the usual fieldwork protocols. If Working Group members became frightened during a close encounter, they could be escorted to the “safe area” by a “buddy “to “cool off.” Our “safe area” was selected just over the ridge that separated our sky watch site from the 118 Freeway. From this safety zone any frightened individual could securely look down to the road where our vehicles were parked.  Steven Greer had emphasized the importance of having a compassionate attitude towards coworkers who become frightened during contact work.  Let’s face it, we are just human and individuals can get overwhelmed by some of the bizarre manifestations of non-human intelligence.  Little did we know when selecting the site, that this designated “cooling off zone” would be the very place where a strange interactive experience would later ensue.

A FORM OF THOUGHT PROJECTION WAS EMPLOYED

At a 11 PM we reached our research site. Under slightly overcast skies we set up our folding aluminum chairs. While sitting quietly in a tight circle, we started a guided meditation. The technique that we had learned from Dr. Greer is called, “Coherent Thought Sequencing” or “CTS” for short. It involves thought projection and visualizations.  To be effective, according to Dr. Greer, it requires reaching some appreciation of the unbounded aspects of consciousness. “Unbounded” means in this context the quality of consciousness or mind that is not limited by any measure of time and space. This document can not provide a detailed description of Coherent Though Sequencing. Both the theory and practice of CTS had been the focus of much of our all day CSETI seminar held just 6 days before.

NIGHT WAS TURNED INTO DAY

As we sat there under slightly overcast skies in quiet meditation, suddenly a powerful burst of light struck the contact team. My eyes were closed at the time, nevertheless the light was so intense that my entire visual field flashed white. Several members of the group sat up in surprise and opened their eyes to see what was going on. Those who had experienced the burst of light with eyes open, agreed that it was lightning like. The light appeared to have emanated from the southeast. Strangely there was no associated thunder with this brilliant flash, nor was there any storm activity in the area. The light had virtually turned night into day. The next instant it was gone. We found ourselves sitting in the darkness again listening to the gentle sounds of nature. During the next few minutes as we attempted to resume CTS, the flashes hit us several more times. There was no rain in our vicinity, nor was it particularly humid. Not one researcher could ever recall having witnessed such a strange event.  This occurrence did not correspond to any type of known atmospheric phenomenon. I personally have not witnessed anything quite like it since.

IT IS BETTER NOT TO HIKE ALONE IN REMOTE LOCATIONS

For several hours we alternated quiet meditation with sky watch activities. We signaled toward the partially overcast sky with powerful lights. At approximately 1:00 AM Saturday morning September 5th, a few members of the team took leave of the site. It was quite isolated. For safety purposes we hiked down to the vehicles in small groups. There are important historic reasons to be security conscious in this rather lonely place. Our site was less than a mile from the Box Canyon, home of the murderous Charles Manson clan. They had been responsible for a number of grisly murders some 20 years before. During the 1990s the Los Angeles area was even more dangerous. We therefore deemed it wise not to hike alone on the lonely mountain trail.

A CO-WORKER FROM THE MEDICAL CENTER WAS ON OUR CONTACT TEAM

Shirley Jones, a respiratory technician from my hospital, was among those departing early. She had to get up for a 7AM shift that very same morning. Not being much of a night person, she was eager to get home. Shirley and I had already worked together at the hospital for over 13 years when we discovered we had a mutual interest in UFOs.  Although well into middle age, Shirley easily passed for a woman 10 or 15 years her junior. She was blond with deep blue eyes. Shirley was quite fun loving and sported a broad smile. She walked with a kind of a bounce that looked a little like skipping. Over the years I always enjoyed working with her. In the ER she was known for her gentleness in reassuring panicky respiratory patients who were struggling to catch a breath.

Apparently by chance Shirley and I discovered our common interest in UFOs. My interest in the flying saucer phenomenon dates to December of 1990, when for no particular reason I picked up a book titled “The Gulf Breeze Sightings.” It contained strikingly clear photos that were purported to be of ET spacecraft. Curious I read more. After quietly studying the phenomenon for a year and a half, I summoned up the courage to attend my first public UFO meeting. That was my first mistake.

At the UFO Expo West held in May of 1992, I wandered into Dr. Greer’s workshop. Well 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 however that since Dr.  Greer and I were both Emergency Room physicians, there would be little harm in attending his workshop. I was very surprised to walk in and find Shirley sitting front row center. 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 none. I hoped Shirley could keep my presence at a UFO meeting as “our little secret.”  Shirley’s interest in UFOs, unlike mine, had been long-standing. I soon discovered that she was a skilled meditator and knowledgeable in Eastern philosophy. Shirley later told me that she had a Ph.D. in psychology and did counseling part time. Among her patients were “experiencers” of Close Encounters of the Third and Fourth Kinds. She did all this while working full time as a respiratory therapist at our medical center. Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention that she was also a professional photographer Shirley had a small business doing portraits and covering weddings. All these talents would later be put to good use during CE-5 Working Group research activities.

Now let’s return to our September 4-5 night’s research outing. As you might recall, I was flying solo as Working Group Coordinator. The only other times I had gone out into the field was either with Steven Greer, or with other experienced volunteer contact workers. I was doing my darndest to effectively lead a group composed of people who for the most part had just started working together. It was well past midnight when decided to break camp and call it a night. When small groups of researchers including Shirley began leaving the site separately, I became concerned. I imagined that it would be better if we all left together.  This was in order to maintain the group’s cohesiveness as well as for security purposes. Shirley reached her car at about 1:30 AM. She drove southeast across the San Fernando Valley towards Panorama City where she lived. Little did she know what was about to happen to her and the rest of the team. In just a few short moments we would experience something that can only be characterized as very “high strangeness.”

Those of us still at the site packed up our gear headed down the trail about a half an hour behind the others. Tired and a little cold, we moved slowly in the dark. We did not want to trip and fall on the way down.  As I reached the top of the hill that separated us from the Santa Susana Pass, I looked back for a moment to the south. The view of the San Fernando Valley was truly spectacular. Before me was a sea of twinkling lights. Across an enormous grid like display formed by home and streetlights, an occasional slowly moving car could be seen in the distance. The panorama spanned some 10 miles, all the way to the Santa Monica Mountains to the south. I felt a sense of accomplishment. Although I had never done this type of UFO research before, I realized that in a certain sense I had successfully passed my first leadership test.

Despite whatever doubts and insecurities I might have, I was becoming a contact team leader.

Of course, I had ambitiously hoped for a major sighting of a structured craft. Like everyone else I wanted to see a “real UFO.” If that were my only measure of success, then this first night’s outing was somewhat disappointing. On the other hand, those lightning-like flashes were something out of the ordinary.  I wondered if our efforts would eventually be successful. Would we ever really establish contact with “ETI”?  I would just have to be patient and wait to see what would happen next.

Moving cautiously in the dark, I found my way down the steep trail.  I soon noticed that several members of the team had stopped in front of me. They had reached the “safety” area and were looking intently to the north, towards Rock Peak State Park. About a third of a mile away and perhaps 300 feet above us, we saw two powerful lights. They were perched high up on the ridgeline of the steep hill that bordered north side of the 118 Freeway. 

MISTERY LIGHTS SIGNALED AT US 

“Hello”, I thought, “This is very strange.” How could someone get way up there on that deserted hillside?  And what were they doing there at 1:45 in the morning?  No houses or roads were visible anywhere near that ridge. Who could possibly be up there?

The lights seemed much larger than our signal lanterns. They were almost the size of searchlights, about one to two feet across. The one on the left was perched higher up on the mountainside than the one on the right. Less than 100 feet separated them. The light on the right side was directed somewhat away from us. It was pointing downward and to the right, sending its beam across the San Fernando Valley to the southeast.  The direction of its beam was quite significant as we later learned. It was pointing in the exact direction that Shirley had taken as she drove home across the Valley.

As we stared at the lights in wonder, the left one was clearly signaling on and off. Through binoculars we could discern that the right one was shining past a small tree or shrub.  The plant was growing on a tiny ledge jutting out from the steep hillside. This would later enable us to find the exact location where the mysterious lights had been situated. 

 

Angrily I thought,” Who the hell is up there in the middle of the night?” Maybe campers? Or perhaps they were some wild teenagers who were making mischief by mocking us with their lights? Who else but our contact team would be running around in the dark on a Friday night that had now turned into Saturday morning?

I attempted to interact with the lights by signaling back at them. At first, they fired in what appeared to be a random fashion. I couldn’t seem to easily get their attention. During contact work we use the term “photon talk” to describe how we attempt to interact with anomalous lights by signaling back and forth with them. We used a predetermined sequence of flashes. If the object signaled back in the same fashion, then we knew primitive communication has been established. I was hoping to get those strange lights to mimic my pattern of flashes.

ALEX AYRES’ SUGGESTION WAS EXTREMELY HELPFUL

Alex Ayres was a member of our team who worked as a screenwriter for the motion picture industry. An avid runner, he was tall with fair skin and athletic. No intellectual lightweight, he told me that he earned a baccalaureate from Harvard University. In addition, he reportedly held two masters’ degrees, one in psychology, `the other in film writing. 

Earlier that evening at the research site, he had suggested that I might try a more complex pattern of signaling than just one or two flashes at a time. Alex had the idea that if any unknowns would imitate a more complex pattern of light bursts, there would be no doubt that we had established communication. He instructed me to try a series of three bursts, A simple flash, then pause 3 seconds, followed by 2 flashes with another pause of 3 seconds, then ending with 3 more flashes.

As we observed the mystery lights on the hillside, we were able to discern several important details about them. They were not only much larger and more powerful than our halogen battery powered lanterns, but they were also highly sophisticated in their operation. The one on the right was multi-directional. We could see its beam sweep searchlight fashion across the dusty hillside. It smoothly changed its direction several times. We watched in silence. The left one was pointing directly at us. It too demonstrated a number of different functions. This beacon could produce a steady beam as well as a rapid strobe like effect. It could signal on off with tremendous speed. The other light demonstrated a variable rheostat effect as well. In other words, it could flare up in brightness and then decrease its luminosity, gently fading out over several seconds. These were far more complex functions than our primitive signal lanterns were capable of.

The powerful lights used by contact teams in our network were inexpensive, costing only about $50 and could be purchased from mail order houses. My light was called “The Light Bazooka.” It had a simple on-off trigger switch. When extinguished, the light took slightly less than one second to fade out completely. As a former peace activist, I thought it ironic that I was shooting off bursts from my “Light Bazooka” while supposedly trying to peacefully interact with the “ET visitors.” Regardless of the catalogue title, the lights were quite useful. Thus, during fieldwork, I “blasted away” with them for the cause of “interplanetary peace and cooperation.” My primitive “Bazooka” did not vary its fade out time. Once the trigger was released it always required nearly one second to go completely off. In addition, it didn’t have a strobe like function. In military parlance, if my light was the equivalent of a “bazooka” the ones facing us on the ridgeline were about equal to laser guided howitzers.

For several minutes I repeatedly fired my signal lantern at the hillside.  At first, it was to no avail. With simple flashes I couldn’t get any kind of interaction going with whomever or whatever up there on the ridge. I decided to follow Alex’s advice and signal at the mystery lights in the more complex pattern that he had suggested earlier. Then something incredible occurred.  The light on the left that appeared to be pointing directly at us, fired back with a single bright flash. Then suddenly it went silent. I shivered in excitement. Was it waiting for a response from me? I again sent out the pattern of light bursts as Alex had instructed me to do. Flash! I counted, “one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. Flash! Flash!  Then, “one  one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, “Flash! Flash! Flash! At that moment something quite remarkable happened. The left light signaled back by exactly mimicking my complex pattern.  My heart started to accelerate. Each time I completed a short phrase of “photon talk” an exact strobe reply flashed back from the hillside. The speed of the response was uncanny. Even before the light had faded from my primitive device, the rapid strobe burst mimicked my signal. Flash! Flash!..Reply! Reply! Three seconds later Flash!  Flash! Flash! Reply! Reply! Reply!

CONSCIOUSNESS CONNECTION SEEMED LIKELY

It was very strange indeed. How could someone a few thousand feet away respond with such incredible speed and such perfect timing? It was almost as if my finger on the trigger of the “light bazooka”, was linked to an electronic circuit that produced an instantaneous strobe reply. Later my attempts to accurately reproduce this type of rapid interactive signaling with my contact team coworkers was totally unsuccessful. Our primitive equipment simply could not fire with the same speed and effectiveness as those sophisticated lights that faced us during the morning of September 5^(th), 1992. 

I wondered could this type of precise interaction be evidence of a consciousness link between my team and ETI? That is of course if whoever was signaling at us were extraterrestrials. A proposition I could hardly accept at that time.  Especially since was our first night out as a team.

The CSETI protocols were supposed to prepare us for such interactions with non-human intelligence. But this seemed too much too fast. There had to be another explanation. The uncannily perfect timing of the powerful light signaling back at me made me uneasy. As unlikely as it might seem, I suspected however some kind of consciousness-mediated communication was truly going on.

Our protocols designated such signaling back and forth in an intelligible fashion as “lock on with lights.” The “Center” however did not only use lights. It also trained its researchers in elementary ESP or “psi” techniques. This includes attempts at remote viewing and thought projection. If extrasensory communication between contact team members and ET crews actually occurred, Dr Greer would designate the link as “lock on with consciousness.” For those who think this a wildly radical notion, I can only refer such skeptics to the growing literature documenting the use of applied psi by worldwide military and intelligence services. 

Now back to our September 5, 1992, encounter. Signaling back and forth with individuals unknown is all very well and good. Nevertheless, I had no proof whatsoever at that point that this interaction was with the alleged ETs. After all, we had no sighting of a structured craft hovering in the sky. The lights themselves were not even in the sky, but rather perched on the ridgeline. What kind of self-respecting UFO would signal at us from the ground?  I therefore reasoned it was probably some prankster up there who was playing tricks on us. “A bunch of crazy teenagers having fun on the weekend,” I reasoned.

I thought this despite the totally desolate appearance of the cliff on which the lights were situated. I speculated about the likelihood that there were probably campsites on top of that hill. “Yes of course”, I surmised, “campsites with running water, electricity and a road to bring up the powerful and sophisticated lights.”

All these possibilities went through my mind as we signaled back and forth for several minutes. It was getting late, and my team was already breaking up. Despite Alex’s requests to stay a bit longer and continue the “photon talk,” I was cold and tired. I did not want us to leave the site like a bunch of stragglers, one at a time. I suggested that we call it a night and as a team hike down together. Following this request, the remainder of the Working Group gladly started down the rocky trail to the cars waiting for us on the road below. 

“Tomorrow,” I suggested, “we can send a scout team up to the ledge on the cliff.” It was from there that one light was seen clearly shining past a small tree. We would then know how those “tricksters” had gotten all the necessary equipment up onto the ridge to enable them to “mock” us with those strange lights. After all it was really late. It was time to go home and get some rest!

SCOUTS HAD TO ROCK CLIMB TO REACH THE REMOTE RIDGE 

Several days later I ran into Shirley at the hospital. I wanted to tell her about the strange lights and what our scouts had found up on that lonely ridge. They reported that there were no campsites, no running water nor electric power. There was no paved road to provide easy access. The only path up towards the ridge was an old fire trail. And that was situated behind a locked gate that blocked the path of any car that might try to drive up the hill. The entire area was part of Rocky Peak State Park, a protected wilderness that at the time had no facilities whatsoever. It was for day hikers only. To make this point perfectly clear a prominent sign reading “DAY USE ONLY” was posted on the side of the locked gate. 

Thus, our trusty scouts had no easy access to the ridge once they had scaled the hill. They had to rock climb, over rattlesnake infested boulders, to reach the ledge where one of lights was positioned. The solitary dwarf pine tree that clung to the rock face readily identified it. Through its branches we had seen one of the lights shining.  

SHIRLEY JONES DESCRIBES A HIGH STRANGENESS EVENT

Before I could finish telling Shirley about our experience and what the scouts had discovered, she interrupted me,

“Wait Joe, I’ve got to tell you what happened to me”

An event of apparent high strangeness had transpired during Shirley’s ride home. It occurred at about 1:40 AM, as she was driving across the San Fernando Valley in her Chevy Astro Van. At a distance of about 2 miles from our research site, she suddenly felt a violent shaking of her vehicle. She had gone over some railroad tracks less than a minute before, but this shaking was definitely far more of a jolt than that. Her van shook violently as if it were going over a series of potholes.  Shirley was aware that I had grown up in New York City where she too had resided for a few years. We both knew how bad the roads were back there. So, I understood exactly what she meant when she added “it was like going over the kind of potholes they have back East.”

The shaking of car her occurred around the same time that the rest of us were hiking down the trail from our research site. As the vibration of her vehicle increased, Shirley jammed on the brakes. She told me that at first, she thought she had a blowout. Before getting out of her car, she glanced in her rear-view mirrors and carefully looked around the vehicle. 

After all, an unaccompanied woman driving down the mean LA streets late at night just can’t be too careful. Come to think of it, after working in a Los Angeles area ER, I can assure you that no one can be too careful out there on a Friday night at 2AM. Shirley, brave heart that she was and true to her Scottish background, summoned her courage and got out of her car to check out the situation. 

She exited the van expecting to find a flat tire or even worse. To her surprise the vehicle checked out perfectly. The road she that she had just driven over reportedly looked fine. She apparently had not gone over a series of potholes as she had first thought. It was then that Shirley looked up and saw the lights.

On the ridgeline shining out from the hillside, she saw our two mystery lights. She recalled the one on the right was flashing on and off. It appeared to be signaling directly at her! The other light, (the one that I would be interacting with in a few minutes appeared less bright to her.) While standing by the side of her car, she wondered if we too could see the lights. They appeared to be coming from the hills directly behind our research site.

I told Shirley what we had experienced. She listened in silence.  I was somewhat perplexed that she didn’t seem surprised at all.  She accepted the anomalous nature of the events with perfect equanimity. She did not seem frightened about what had happened to her. I later found out that Shirley, as well as several other members of the team, were not strangers to the high strangeness associated with this type of work. Several members of the group apparently had previous interactive experiences with what appeared to be non-human intelligence. At that moment I had a lot to learn about the contact project, and even more to learn about the individual members of my team.

SPECULATIVE ANALYSIS OF OUR FIELD INVESTIGATION

What was I to make of all this? What was the significance of these highly anomalous experiences that occurred during our initial fieldwork?  As I reviewed and analyzed what had transpired, my theory about “crazed” teenagers being responsible for the mystery lights seemed less and less likely. 

First, we had been hit by powerful lightning like flashes of light while doing Coherent Thought Sequencing. I had no easy explanation for this.  Later we encountered anomalous lights that were rather sophisticated.  And I got the opportunity to interact with one of them at the very spot we had designated as our “safety area.” The rapidity of the light’s response to my signaling made me consider the possibility of a consciousness link between myself and the intelligence responsible for those lights. At about the same time, a Working Group member experienced a violent shaking of her car. This led her to stop the vehicle and look up and see one of the lights signaling in her direction. What could it all mean?

First of all, to skeptics I would like to state for the record that I have considered the null hypothesis. Yes, it’s possible that there is no special significance to any of these events. The lightning-like flashes were possibly unusual manifestations of a prosaic phenomenon, namely the weather.  In addition, ordinary humans could have engineered the mystery lights. That they had somehow gotten past the locked gate was certainly not impossible. But what would have been their motivation? To rock climb in the dark through “rattlesnake land” for a prank seemed rather unlikely.  Whoever had mounted such a complex operation must have had a very good reason. They had to be very well equipped as well. All this accomplished so that “they” (whoever that might be) could mock our light work and play games signaling at us? It just didn’t make sense. 

Moving further in this rather illogical line of reasoning, yes perhaps Shirley had gone over some potholes and that’s what shook her car. When she exited her vehicle, she simply missed seeing the road hazard due to the late hour and her being tired. One could just say that it was coincidence that she then looked up towards the pass at that exact moment and saw the lights. Moving further out on the limb, a debunker would probably say that perhaps Shirley’s part of the story was a complete fabrication. After all, she was the only witness to the strange things that she experienced on the road. According to self-styled debunker’s logic, “of course she made the whole thing up.”

From my perspective however, that would go against everything I know about her. We eventually worked together in the hospital for nearly twenty-five years when she suddenly died from a cardiac arrest. I never knew her true age, but my guess is that she was in her early sixties when this sad event happened.

It is my judgment that she was an honest and sincere individual. I was her contact team leader for several years and we spent many long nights carrying out group sky watch activities together.  The thought that she would deliberately prevaricate is not likely. In my opinion her lying to me on this subject is even more preposterous than the possibility that we had indeed contacted non-human intelligence, an intelligence whose technology could cause her vehicle to vibrate to stop her and compel her see the light.

 

It is my judgment that if we pursue want-to-be debunker’s brand of illogic, which often masquerades as “conventional wisdom,” then we will never understand anything about this phenomenon. It is my opinion that if we are to make any sense of this strange subject of UFOs, then we should do as contact groups request. And that is to deliberately interact with the alleged ETs in protocol fashion and then faithfully record our findings. Only in a diligent, industrious and well-intentioned effort, can we hope to expand human knowledge in this area. The possibility that extraterrestrial civilizations are visiting our planet warrants this kind of reasonable and responsible approach.

What I have reported here is by no means unique. The UFO literature is full of similar reports of mysterious lights, bizarre atmospheric like effects and anomalous physical phenomenon.  What is different about contact team operations is that these occurrences take place under very special circumstances, namely during deliberate attempts to interact with the intelligence that is presumably responsible for them. 

I am suggesting it was no accident that the lightning like flashes hit us during our meditation. If our thought projections while in a meditative state are successful in establishing communication, might not we receive an answer while we are sending the “welcoming” message? As in this case, a “reply” that for an instant turned night into day, certainly served to get our attention. At the same time it served to underscore the importance of meditation to facilitate communication with a non-human intelligence of that might be extraterrestrial.

I’ve already discussed the difficulties of getting up to the ridgeline at night. This would necessitate getting past a locked gate and avoiding rattlers while rock climbing over boulders in the dark. All that certainly presents considerable logistic problems. At least for humans it would. For a technologically sophisticated star faring culture, it might be a lot easier. And to further support this assessment, I point out that advanced civilizations might readily have at their disposal consciousness communication systems that would allow them to coordinate their light work with me in such a deft manner. 

Even the place where the “photon talk” took place has significance. The exchange ironically occurred at the very section of trail that we had designated as our “safety zone.” Our “cooling off” place was indeed the site where our encounter “heated up.” While light signaling back and forth is a rather primitive form of communication, the display of irony bespeaks of a more complex exchange with an intelligence capable of humor.

Shirley’s high strangeness experience was perhaps the most powerful reminder of what our presumed ET collaborators are able and willing to do to get our attention. We can only speculate as to what kind of advanced technology (possibly electromagnetic) that could have caused such a violent shaking of her car at some distance from our research site.  It truly seems as if something or somebody really wanted her to stop and “see the light!”  If the UFO phenomenon is caused by advanced intelligences attempting to assist mankind, it is my hope that “they” (whoever they might be) keep on trying to help us “see the light.”

A Bit More of Discussion and the Conclusion of this Report.

For those hearty souls who have been so kind as to wade through this detailed narrative, I salute you. I endeavor to describe how a UFO contact network operates by focusing on the fieldwork experience of one individual team, namely my own.  In my opinion, we have entered a collaborative relationship with the non-human intelligence responsible for the flying saucer phenomenon. The high strangeness component of these experiences, the inexplicable nature of the interactions tends to suggest that something truly unearthly is going on. Skeptics would of course correctly point out,” You have no proof!” Yes, that is certainly true. The historic landing of an ET craft and off planet experience by a contact team with video recorders on has not occurred yet. For that matter it may never take place.

Nevertheless, citizen teams are seeking contact all around the world. In my opinion this development indicates that something truly remarkable is going on at this point in the Earth’s history. For those reading this narrative, I urge you to consider that we are witnessing “alien civilizations” that are staging limited interactions with humankind. And this process is part of a much larger path leading towards open and direct contact. 

I would be the first to agree that such encounters are ambiguous, full of uncertainty, and at times they are frustrating for us.  As one who has worked in the non-human/human contact networks attempting to build a positive and peaceful relationship, I believe that the price is well worth it.

In the next chapter linked below, I describe several red glowing objects that hovered in the sky to the north of our research site in the Santa Susana Pass. I also report on an encounter with two Black Hawk helicopters that buzzed our contact team while hiking in Rocky Peak State Park. This occurred one night as an advanced party of our contact team operated near a high security research facility of the US Department of Energy.  Please stay tuned and keep watching the skies!

Mystery Lights in the Santa Susana Pass 

September 4, 1992

 The newly formed CSETI Los Angeles Working Group held a brief meeting at Drs. Eve and Dave Gordon’s home in a middle-class neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. Twelve researchers were present. From the Gordons’ we drove north in our separate vehicles and reconvened at the head of the trail that lead to our research site in the Santa Susana Pass. It was late when we arrived, 10:30 PM on a Friday night. Most of the Working Group investigators present had already put in a full day’s work at their regular jobs. I was gratified to find that the enthusiasm of the team was quite high.

OUR RANKS WERE THINNED

Our numbers however had considerably decreased from the first outing a week before. On that occasion 40 prospective UFO investigators had trudged up the high desert trail which led to a spectacular lookout point. It was there that CSETI Director, Dr. Steven Greer, had demonstrated the “ET contact protocols.” One causality from that first night of fieldwork involved a heavy-set woman who had twisted her ankle on the dark rocky trail. She would never go out with our team again. 

There had been other problems as well. One researcher/trainee, in violation of the contact protocols, brought a 15-year-old boy with her. She claimed that his “parents wouldn’t mind” his doing UFO field work. In the early days of the CE-5 Initiative, Working Group participation was almost exclusively limited to consenting adults who have undergone training. Since no special arrangements had been made with the boy’s legal guardians to allow him to participate, this teenager was advised not to come back.  Other individuals had dropped out because the reality of contact work didn’t quite fit their preconceived notions. Some complained after going out into the field that, “it was too cold,” or “it was too windy, ...... and “anyway the spaceships didn’t show up.”

This second night of fieldwork was very different from our first attempt at contacting what we imagined was extraterrestrial intelligence. Not only were we far fewer in number, but more importantly we were going out without the assistance of Dr. Steven Greer. He was already being described in the UFO community as, “The man who can call in the spacecraft.” I wondered if we could ever make contact without his presence. I feared my inexperienced leadership wouldn’t “cut the mustard” when it came to what Greer called “vectoring in spacecraft.” 

HAVING A “SAFE AREA” WAS PART OF THE CONTACT PROTOCOLS

During the 20-minute climb up the trail, we found a quiet place that we designated as our “safe area”. Finding such a place was part of the usual fieldwork protocols. If Working Group members became frightened during a close encounter, they could be escorted to the “safe area” by a “buddy “to “cool off.” Our “safe area” was selected just over the ridge that separated our sky watch site from the 118 Freeway. From this safety zone any frightened individual could securely look down to the road where our vehicles were parked.  Steven Greer had emphasized the importance of having a compassionate attitude towards coworkers who become frightened during contact work.  Let’s face it, we are just human and individuals can get overwhelmed by some of the bizarre manifestations of non-human intelligence.  Little did we know when selecting the site, that this designated “cooling off zone” would be the very place where a strange interactive experience would later ensue.

A FORM OF THOUGHT PROJECTION WAS EMPLOYED

At a 11 PM we reached our research site. Under slightly overcast skies we set up our folding aluminum chairs. While sitting quietly in a tight circle, we started a guided meditation. The technique that we had learned from Dr. Greer is called, “Coherent Thought Sequencing” or “CTS” for short. It involves thought projection and visualizations.  To be effective, according to Dr. Greer, it requires reaching some appreciation of the unbounded aspects of consciousness. “Unbounded” means in this context the quality of consciousness or mind that is not limited by any measure of time and space. This document can not provide a detailed description of Coherent Though Sequencing. Both the theory and practice of CTS had been the focus of much of our all day CSETI seminar held just 6 days before.

NIGHT WAS TURNED INTO DAY

As we sat there under slightly overcast skies in quiet meditation, suddenly a powerful burst of light struck the contact team. My eyes were closed at the time, nevertheless the light was so intense that my entire visual field flashed white. Several members of the group sat up in surprise and opened their eyes to see what was going on. Those who had experienced the burst of light with eyes open, agreed that it was lightning like. The light appeared to have emanated from the southeast. Strangely there was no associated thunder with this brilliant flash, nor was there any storm activity in the area. The light had virtually turned night into day. The next instant it was gone. We found ourselves sitting in the darkness again listening to the gentle sounds of nature. During the next few minutes as we attempted to resume CTS, the flashes hit us several more times. There was no rain in our vicinity, nor was it particularly humid. Not one researcher could ever recall having witnessed such a strange event.  This occurrence did not correspond to any type of known atmospheric phenomenon. I personally have not witnessed anything quite like it since.

IT IS BETTER NOT TO HIKE ALONE IN REMOTE LOCATIONS

For several hours we alternated quiet meditation with sky watch activities. We signaled toward the partially overcast sky with powerful lights. At approximately 1:00 AM Saturday morning September 5th, a few members of the team took leave of the site. It was quite isolated. For safety purposes we hiked down to the vehicles in small groups. There are important historic reasons to be security conscious in this rather lonely place. Our site was less than a mile from the Box Canyon, home of the murderous Charles Manson clan. They had been responsible for a number of grisly murders some 20 years before. During the 1990s the Los Angeles area was even more dangerous. We therefore deemed it wise not to hike alone on the lonely mountain trail.

A CO-WORKER FROM THE MEDICAL CENTER WAS ON OUR CONTACT TEAM

Shirley Jones, a respiratory technician from my hospital, was among those departing early. She had to get up for a 7AM shift that very same morning. Not being much of a night person, she was eager to get home. Shirley and I had already worked together at the hospital for over 13 years when we discovered we had a mutual interest in UFOs.  Although well into middle age, Shirley easily passed for a woman 10 or 15 years her junior. She was blond with deep blue eyes. Shirley was quite fun loving and sported a broad smile. She walked with a kind of a bounce that looked a little like skipping. Over the years I always enjoyed working with her. In the ER she was known for her gentleness in reassuring panicky respiratory patients who were struggling to catch a breath.

Apparently by chance Shirley and I discovered our common interest in UFOs. My interest in the flying saucer phenomenon dates to December of 1990, when for no particular reason I picked up a book titled “The Gulf Breeze Sightings.” It contained strikingly clear photos that were purported to be of ET spacecraft. Curious I read more. After quietly studying the phenomenon for a year and a half, I summoned up the courage to attend my first public UFO meeting. That was my first mistake.

At the UFO Expo West held in May of 1992, I wandered into Dr. Greer’s workshop. Well 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 however that since Dr.  Greer and I were both Emergency Room physicians, there would be little harm in attending his workshop. I was very surprised to walk in and find Shirley sitting front row center. 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 none. I hoped Shirley could keep my presence at a UFO meeting as “our little secret.”  Shirley’s interest in UFOs, unlike mine, had been long-standing. I soon discovered that she was a skilled meditator and knowledgeable in Eastern philosophy. Shirley later told me that she had a Ph.D. in psychology and did counseling part time. Among her patients were “experiencers” of Close Encounters of the Third and Fourth Kinds. She did all this while working full time as a respiratory therapist at our medical center. Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention that she was also a professional photographer Shirley had a small business doing portraits and covering weddings. All these talents would later be put to good use during CE-5 Working Group research activities.

Now let’s return to our September 4-5 night’s research outing. As you might recall, I was flying solo as Working Group Coordinator. The only other times I had gone out into the field was either with Steven Greer, or with other experienced volunteer contact workers. I was doing my darndest to effectively lead a group composed of people who for the most part had just started working together. It was well past midnight when decided to break camp and call it a night. When small groups of researchers including Shirley began leaving the site separately, I became concerned. I imagined that it would be better if we all left together.  This was in order to maintain the group’s cohesiveness as well as for security purposes. Shirley reached her car at about 1:30 AM. She drove southeast across the San Fernando Valley towards Panorama City where she lived. Little did she know what was about to happen to her and the rest of the team. In just a few short moments we would experience something that can only be characterized as very “high strangeness.”

Those of us still at the site packed up our gear headed down the trail about a half an hour behind the others. Tired and a little cold, we moved slowly in the dark. We did not want to trip and fall on the way down.  As I reached the top of the hill that separated us from the Santa Susana Pass, I looked back for a moment to the south. The view of the San Fernando Valley was truly spectacular. Before me was a sea of twinkling lights. Across an enormous grid like display formed by home and streetlights, an occasional slowly moving car could be seen in the distance. The panorama spanned some 10 miles, all the way to the Santa Monica Mountains to the south. I felt a sense of accomplishment. Although I had never done this type of UFO research before, I realized that in a certain sense I had successfully passed my first leadership test.

Despite whatever doubts and insecurities I might have, I was becoming a contact team leader.

Of course, I had ambitiously hoped for a major sighting of a structured craft. Like everyone else I wanted to see a “real UFO.” If that were my only measure of success, then this first night’s outing was somewhat disappointing. On the other hand, those lightning-like flashes were something out of the ordinary.  I wondered if our efforts would eventually be successful. Would we ever really establish contact with “ETI”?  I would just have to be patient and wait to see what would happen next.

Moving cautiously in the dark, I found my way down the steep trail.  I soon noticed that several members of the team had stopped in front of me. They had reached the “safety” area and were looking intently to the north, towards Rock Peak State Park. About a third of a mile away and perhaps 300 feet above us, we saw two powerful lights. They were perched high up on the ridgeline of the steep hill that bordered north side of the 118 Freeway. 

MISTERY LIGHTS SIGNALED AT US 

“Hello”, I thought, “This is very strange.” How could someone get way up there on that deserted hillside?  And what were they doing there at 1:45 in the morning?  No houses or roads were visible anywhere near that ridge. Who could possibly be up there?

The lights seemed much larger than our signal lanterns. They were almost the size of searchlights, about one to two feet across. The one on the left was perched higher up on the mountainside than the one on the right. Less than 100 feet separated them. The light on the right side was directed somewhat away from us. It was pointing downward and to the right, sending its beam across the San Fernando Valley to the southeast.  The direction of its beam was quite significant as we later learned. It was pointing in the exact direction that Shirley had taken as she drove home across the Valley.

As we stared at the lights in wonder, the left one was clearly signaling on and off. Through binoculars we could discern that the right one was shining past a small tree or shrub.  The plant was growing on a tiny ledge jutting out from the steep hillside. This would later enable us to find the exact location where the mysterious lights had been situated. 

 

Angrily I thought,” Who the hell is up there in the middle of the night?” Maybe campers? Or perhaps they were some wild teenagers who were making mischief by mocking us with their lights? Who else but our contact team would be running around in the dark on a Friday night that had now turned into Saturday morning?

I attempted to interact with the lights by signaling back at them. At first, they fired in what appeared to be a random fashion. I couldn’t seem to easily get their attention. During contact work we use the term “photon talk” to describe how we attempt to interact with anomalous lights by signaling back and forth with them. We used a predetermined sequence of flashes. If the object signaled back in the same fashion, then we knew primitive communication has been established. I was hoping to get those strange lights to mimic my pattern of flashes.

ALEX AYRES’ SUGGESTION WAS EXTREMELY HELPFUL

Alex Ayres was a member of our team who worked as a screenwriter for the motion picture industry. An avid runner, he was tall with fair skin and athletic. No intellectual lightweight, he told me that he earned a baccalaureate from Harvard University. In addition, he reportedly held two masters’ degrees, one in psychology, `the other in film writing. 

Earlier that evening at the research site, he had suggested that I might try a more complex pattern of signaling than just one or two flashes at a time. Alex had the idea that if any unknowns would imitate a more complex pattern of light bursts, there would be no doubt that we had established communication. He instructed me to try a series of three bursts, A simple flash, then pause 3 seconds, followed by 2 flashes with another pause of 3 seconds, then ending with 3 more flashes.

As we observed the mystery lights on the hillside, we were able to discern several important details about them. They were not only much larger and more powerful than our halogen battery powered lanterns, but they were also highly sophisticated in their operation. The one on the right was multi-directional. We could see its beam sweep searchlight fashion across the dusty hillside. It smoothly changed its direction several times. We watched in silence. The left one was pointing directly at us. It too demonstrated a number of different functions. This beacon could produce a steady beam as well as a rapid strobe like effect. It could signal on off with tremendous speed. The other light demonstrated a variable rheostat effect as well. In other words, it could flare up in brightness and then decrease its luminosity, gently fading out over several seconds. These were far more complex functions than our primitive signal lanterns were capable of.

The powerful lights used by contact teams in our network were inexpensive, costing only about $50 and could be purchased from mail order houses. My light was called “The Light Bazooka.” It had a simple on-off trigger switch. When extinguished, the light took slightly less than one second to fade out completely. As a former peace activist, I thought it ironic that I was shooting off bursts from my “Light Bazooka” while supposedly trying to peacefully interact with the “ET visitors.” Regardless of the catalogue title, the lights were quite useful. Thus, during fieldwork, I “blasted away” with them for the cause of “interplanetary peace and cooperation.” My primitive “Bazooka” did not vary its fade out time. Once the trigger was released it always required nearly one second to go completely off. In addition, it didn’t have a strobe like function. In military parlance, if my light was the equivalent of a “bazooka” the ones facing us on the ridgeline were about equal to laser guided howitzers.

For several minutes I repeatedly fired my signal lantern at the hillside.  At first, it was to no avail. With simple flashes I couldn’t get any kind of interaction going with whomever or whatever up there on the ridge. I decided to follow Alex’s advice and signal at the mystery lights in the more complex pattern that he had suggested earlier. Then something incredible occurred.  The light on the left that appeared to be pointing directly at us, fired back with a single bright flash. Then suddenly it went silent. I shivered in excitement. Was it waiting for a response from me? I again sent out the pattern of light bursts as Alex had instructed me to do. Flash! I counted, “one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. Flash! Flash!  Then, “one  one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, “Flash! Flash! Flash! At that moment something quite remarkable happened. The left light signaled back by exactly mimicking my complex pattern.  My heart started to accelerate. Each time I completed a short phrase of “photon talk” an exact strobe reply flashed back from the hillside. The speed of the response was uncanny. Even before the light had faded from my primitive device, the rapid strobe burst mimicked my signal. Flash! Flash!..Reply! Reply! Three seconds later Flash!  Flash! Flash! Reply! Reply! Reply!

CONSCIOUSNESS CONNECTION SEEMED LIKELY

It was very strange indeed. How could someone a few thousand feet away respond with such incredible speed and such perfect timing? It was almost as if my finger on the trigger of the “light bazooka”, was linked to an electronic circuit that produced an instantaneous strobe reply. Later my attempts to accurately reproduce this type of rapid interactive signaling with my contact team coworkers was totally unsuccessful. Our primitive equipment simply could not fire with the same speed and effectiveness as those sophisticated lights that faced us during the morning of September 5^(th), 1992. 

I wondered could this type of precise interaction be evidence of a consciousness link between my team and ETI? That is of course if whoever was signaling at us were extraterrestrials. A proposition I could hardly accept at that time.  Especially since was our first night out as a team.

The CSETI protocols were supposed to prepare us for such interactions with non-human intelligence. But this seemed too much too fast. There had to be another explanation. The uncannily perfect timing of the powerful light signaling back at me made me uneasy. As unlikely as it might seem, I suspected however some kind of consciousness-mediated communication was truly going on.

Our protocols designated such signaling back and forth in an intelligible fashion as “lock on with lights.” The “Center” however did not only use lights. It also trained its researchers in elementary ESP or “psi” techniques. This includes attempts at remote viewing and thought projection. If extrasensory communication between contact team members and ET crews actually occurred, Dr Greer would designate the link as “lock on with consciousness.” For those who think this a wildly radical notion, I can only refer such skeptics to the growing literature documenting the use of applied psi by worldwide military and intelligence services. 

Now back to our September 5, 1992, encounter. Signaling back and forth with individuals unknown is all very well and good. Nevertheless, I had no proof whatsoever at that point that this interaction was with the alleged ETs. After all, we had no sighting of a structured craft hovering in the sky. The lights themselves were not even in the sky, but rather perched on the ridgeline. What kind of self-respecting UFO would signal at us from the ground?  I therefore reasoned it was probably some prankster up there who was playing tricks on us. “A bunch of crazy teenagers having fun on the weekend,” I reasoned.

I thought this despite the totally desolate appearance of the cliff on which the lights were situated. I speculated about the likelihood that there were probably campsites on top of that hill. “Yes of course”, I surmised, “campsites with running water, electricity and a road to bring up the powerful and sophisticated lights.”

All these possibilities went through my mind as we signaled back and forth for several minutes. It was getting late, and my team was already breaking up. Despite Alex’s requests to stay a bit longer and continue the “photon talk,” I was cold and tired. I did not want us to leave the site like a bunch of stragglers, one at a time. I suggested that we call it a night and as a team hike down together. Following this request, the remainder of the Working Group gladly started down the rocky trail to the cars waiting for us on the road below. 

“Tomorrow,” I suggested, “we can send a scout team up to the ledge on the cliff.” It was from there that one light was seen clearly shining past a small tree. We would then know how those “tricksters” had gotten all the necessary equipment up onto the ridge to enable them to “mock” us with those strange lights. After all it was really late. It was time to go home and get some rest!

SCOUTS HAD TO ROCK CLIMB TO REACH THE REMOTE RIDGE 

Several days later I ran into Shirley at the hospital. I wanted to tell her about the strange lights and what our scouts had found up on that lonely ridge. They reported that there were no campsites, no running water nor electric power. There was no paved road to provide easy access. The only path up towards the ridge was an old fire trail. And that was situated behind a locked gate that blocked the path of any car that might try to drive up the hill. The entire area was part of Rocky Peak State Park, a protected wilderness that at the time had no facilities whatsoever. It was for day hikers only. To make this point perfectly clear a prominent sign reading “DAY USE ONLY” was posted on the side of the locked gate. 

Thus, our trusty scouts had no easy access to the ridge once they had scaled the hill. They had to rock climb, over rattlesnake infested boulders, to reach the ledge where one of lights was positioned. The solitary dwarf pine tree that clung to the rock face readily identified it. Through its branches we had seen one of the lights shining.  

SHIRLEY JONES DESCRIBES A HIGH STRANGENESS EVENT

Before I could finish telling Shirley about our experience and what the scouts had discovered, she interrupted me,

“Wait Joe, I’ve got to tell you what happened to me”

An event of apparent high strangeness had transpired during Shirley’s ride home. It occurred at about 1:40 AM, as she was driving across the San Fernando Valley in her Chevy Astro Van. At a distance of about 2 miles from our research site, she suddenly felt a violent shaking of her vehicle. She had gone over some railroad tracks less than a minute before, but this shaking was definitely far more of a jolt than that. Her van shook violently as if it were going over a series of potholes.  Shirley was aware that I had grown up in New York City where she too had resided for a few years. We both knew how bad the roads were back there. So, I understood exactly what she meant when she added “it was like going over the kind of potholes they have back East.”

The shaking of car her occurred around the same time that the rest of us were hiking down the trail from our research site. As the vibration of her vehicle increased, Shirley jammed on the brakes. She told me that at first, she thought she had a blowout. Before getting out of her car, she glanced in her rear-view mirrors and carefully looked around the vehicle. 

After all, an unaccompanied woman driving down the mean LA streets late at night just can’t be too careful. Come to think of it, after working in a Los Angeles area ER, I can assure you that no one can be too careful out there on a Friday night at 2AM. Shirley, brave heart that she was and true to her Scottish background, summoned her courage and got out of her car to check out the situation. 

She exited the van expecting to find a flat tire or even worse. To her surprise the vehicle checked out perfectly. The road she that she had just driven over reportedly looked fine. She apparently had not gone over a series of potholes as she had first thought. It was then that Shirley looked up and saw the lights.

On the ridgeline shining out from the hillside, she saw our two mystery lights. She recalled the one on the right was flashing on and off. It appeared to be signaling directly at her! The other light, (the one that I would be interacting with in a few minutes appeared less bright to her.) While standing by the side of her car, she wondered if we too could see the lights. They appeared to be coming from the hills directly behind our research site.

I told Shirley what we had experienced. She listened in silence.  I was somewhat perplexed that she didn’t seem surprised at all.  She accepted the anomalous nature of the events with perfect equanimity. She did not seem frightened about what had happened to her. I later found out that Shirley, as well as several other members of the team, were not strangers to the high strangeness associated with this type of work. Several members of the group apparently had previous interactive experiences with what appeared to be non-human intelligence. At that moment I had a lot to learn about the contact project, and even more to learn about the individual members of my team.

SPECULATIVE ANALYSIS OF OUR FIELD INVESTIGATION

What was I to make of all this? What was the significance of these highly anomalous experiences that occurred during our initial fieldwork?  As I reviewed and analyzed what had transpired, my theory about “crazed” teenagers being responsible for the mystery lights seemed less and less likely. 

First, we had been hit by powerful lightning like flashes of light while doing Coherent Thought Sequencing. I had no easy explanation for this.  Later we encountered anomalous lights that were rather sophisticated.  And I got the opportunity to interact with one of them at the very spot we had designated as our “safety area.” The rapidity of the light’s response to my signaling made me consider the possibility of a consciousness link between myself and the intelligence responsible for those lights. At about the same time, a Working Group member experienced a violent shaking of her car. This led her to stop the vehicle and look up and see one of the lights signaling in her direction. What could it all mean?

First of all, to skeptics I would like to state for the record that I have considered the null hypothesis. Yes, it’s possible that there is no special significance to any of these events. The lightning-like flashes were possibly unusual manifestations of a prosaic phenomenon, namely the weather.  In addition, ordinary humans could have engineered the mystery lights. That they had somehow gotten past the locked gate was certainly not impossible. But what would have been their motivation? To rock climb in the dark through “rattlesnake land” for a prank seemed rather unlikely.  Whoever had mounted such a complex operation must have had a very good reason. They had to be very well equipped as well. All this accomplished so that “they” (whoever that might be) could mock our light work and play games signaling at us? It just didn’t make sense. 

Moving further in this rather illogical line of reasoning, yes perhaps Shirley had gone over some potholes and that’s what shook her car. When she exited her vehicle, she simply missed seeing the road hazard due to the late hour and her being tired. One could just say that it was coincidence that she then looked up towards the pass at that exact moment and saw the lights. Moving further out on the limb, a debunker would probably say that perhaps Shirley’s part of the story was a complete fabrication. After all, she was the only witness to the strange things that she experienced on the road. According to self-styled debunker’s logic, “of course she made the whole thing up.”

From my perspective however, that would go against everything I know about her. We eventually worked together in the hospital for nearly twenty-five years when she suddenly died from a cardiac arrest. I never knew her true age, but my guess is that she was in her early sixties when this sad event happened.

It is my judgment that she was an honest and sincere individual. I was her contact team leader for several years and we spent many long nights carrying out group sky watch activities together.  The thought that she would deliberately prevaricate is not likely. In my opinion her lying to me on this subject is even more preposterous than the possibility that we had indeed contacted non-human intelligence, an intelligence whose technology could cause her vehicle to vibrate to stop her and compel her see the light.

 

It is my judgment that if we pursue want-to-be debunker’s brand of illogic, which often masquerades as “conventional wisdom,” then we will never understand anything about this phenomenon. It is my opinion that if we are to make any sense of this strange subject of UFOs, then we should do as contact groups request. And that is to deliberately interact with the alleged ETs in protocol fashion and then faithfully record our findings. Only in a diligent, industrious and well-intentioned effort, can we hope to expand human knowledge in this area. The possibility that extraterrestrial civilizations are visiting our planet warrants this kind of reasonable and responsible approach.

What I have reported here is by no means unique. The UFO literature is full of similar reports of mysterious lights, bizarre atmospheric like effects and anomalous physical phenomenon.  What is different about contact team operations is that these occurrences take place under very special circumstances, namely during deliberate attempts to interact with the intelligence that is presumably responsible for them. 

I am suggesting it was no accident that the lightning like flashes hit us during our meditation. If our thought projections while in a meditative state are successful in establishing communication, might not we receive an answer while we are sending the “welcoming” message? As in this case, a “reply” that for an instant turned night into day, certainly served to get our attention. At the same time it served to underscore the importance of meditation to facilitate communication with a non-human intelligence of that might be extraterrestrial.

I’ve already discussed the difficulties of getting up to the ridgeline at night. This would necessitate getting past a locked gate and avoiding rattlers while rock climbing over boulders in the dark. All that certainly presents considerable logistic problems. At least for humans it would. For a technologically sophisticated star faring culture, it might be a lot easier. And to further support this assessment, I point out that advanced civilizations might readily have at their disposal consciousness communication systems that would allow them to coordinate their light work with me in such a deft manner. 

Even the place where the “photon talk” took place has significance. The exchange ironically occurred at the very section of trail that we had designated as our “safety zone.” Our “cooling off” place was indeed the site where our encounter “heated up.” While light signaling back and forth is a rather primitive form of communication, the display of irony bespeaks of a more complex exchange with an intelligence capable of humor.

Shirley’s high strangeness experience was perhaps the most powerful reminder of what our presumed ET collaborators are able and willing to do to get our attention. We can only speculate as to what kind of advanced technology (possibly electromagnetic) that could have caused such a violent shaking of her car at some distance from our research site.  It truly seems as if something or somebody really wanted her to stop and “see the light!”  If the UFO phenomenon is caused by advanced intelligences attempting to assist mankind, it is my hope that “they” (whoever they might be) keep on trying to help us “see the light.”

A Bit More of Discussion and the Conclusion of this Report.

For those hearty souls who have been so kind as to wade through this detailed narrative, I salute you. I endeavor to describe how a UFO contact network operates by focusing on the fieldwork experience of one individual team, namely my own.  In my opinion, we have entered a collaborative relationship with the non-human intelligence responsible for the flying saucer phenomenon. The high strangeness component of these experiences, the inexplicable nature of the interactions tends to suggest that something truly unearthly is going on. Skeptics would of course correctly point out,” You have no proof!” Yes, that is certainly true. The historic landing of an ET craft and off planet experience by a contact team with video recorders on has not occurred yet. For that matter it may never take place.

Nevertheless, citizen teams are seeking contact all around the world. In my opinion this development indicates that something truly remarkable is going on at this point in the Earth’s history. For those reading this narrative, I urge you to consider that we are witnessing “alien civilizations” that are staging limited interactions with humankind. And this process is part of a much larger path leading towards open and direct contact. 

I would be the first to agree that such encounters are ambiguous, full of uncertainty, and at times they are frustrating for us.  As one who has worked in the non-human/human contact networks attempting to build a positive and peaceful relationship, I believe that the price is well worth it.

In the next chapter linked below, I describe several red glowing objects that hovered in the sky to the north of our research site in the Santa Susana Pass. I also report on an encounter with two Black Hawk helicopters that buzzed our contact team while hiking in Rocky Peak State Park. This occurred one night as an advanced party of our contact team operated near a high security research facility of the US Department of Energy.  Please stay tuned and keep watching the skies!

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INTRODUCTION: In 2007 I was told the following account that reportedly occurred that year. Because of the sensitive nature of the encounter, I have not described it publicly until now. Given what appears to be increasing openness by US Executive Branch on the topic of UAP and the fact that nearly 20 years have passed, I share it on social media.

CONTACT EVENTS: “Edwardo” (pseudonym) a Latino contact activist working with the network now known as Rahma had a UFO encounter with a team that he had personally organized. It occurred on the slopes of Mount Shasta. In response to their telepathic request for an encounter, a saucer shaped craft was attracted to their fieldwork site. A telepathic communication reportedly specified that the mostly young people in the group were not suitable for experiencing a landing and boarding. Instead, Edwardo and a mother of a ten-year-old, “Maria” were selected. They remained on site after the young people headed home. The thirty foot in diameter saucer reportedly returned and was prepared to land. At this point a telepathic message was received indicating that although the couple was permitted to depart in the craft, there was no assurance that they would be returned. This was unacceptable to Maria and the saucer flew off. 
After dropping Maria off at home in San Francisco at approximately 3AM in the morning, Edwardo was driving at high speed south on US 280. He reportedly heard a robotic telepathic voice stating, “Get off the Road!” He chose to ignore the warning and reportedly argued with the voice in his head and demanded an explanation. He again reported hearing the command, “Get off the road!” A few moments later his old sedan entered a wall of fog so thick that he had zero visibility and the reflected light of his headlights blinded him. 

Eduardo said that he took his foot off the gas and was hoping to gradually slow down and pull off onto the shoulder. Suddenly he heard a rush of air and the old springs in the backseat creaked as they were compressed. Someone or something was now in the backseat. Unable to safely take his eyes off the road and turn around, he could only glance in the rearview mirror.

There he saw the dark shape of a person. His impression that this being was not human. As the vehicle continued to slow down in dense fog, Edwardo reportedly heard another sudden whooshing sound, now to his right. The passenger seat now contained a being that was very tall, approximately seven-feet in height. It was wearing a helmet and dressed in coveralls. The being was curled into fetal position, head bent down but still touching the roof; its legs were flexed in a cramped position.
Eduardo stated that his car gradually decelerated in dense fog. He reportedly wanted to take a good look at the beings in his car, but trying to avoid an accident he kept looking forward. After an indetermined amount of time, probably less than a minute, he heard the springs in the back seat decompress and in a sudden rush of air both beings vanished. 

DISCUSSION:
When presenting an astounding account such as this, one naturally asks about the credibility of the witness. In my judgment “Eduardo” was a totally reliable volunteer contact worker with whom I very much wanted to do fieldwork in 2007, especially after I heard this account. Unfortunate circumstances involving what could have been a fatal car accident sadly prevented me from working with Eduardo. The incident involved a telepathic override that my driver received when we were driving up. a mountain road looking for a place to do contact work with Eduardo (This is described in my detailed report on Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/Experiencers/comments/1cs6gol/a_telepathic_override_that_probably_saved_my_life

A Brief History of the Rama Contact Network Rama

I first heard of Eduardo in the 1990s, when a member of my Los Angeles CE-5 team, 747 United pilot Captain Joe Vallejo, started doing fieldwork with the Latino contact network then called “Rama.” It was founded in 1974 in Lima Peru around the contact experiences of a university student named Sixto Paz Wells. Mission Rama (Its original name) used automatic writing to communicate with UFO associated non-human intelligences. Psi capable activists who received accurate information in this manner were called “antennas.” When three antennas working separately received the same message, it was deemed accurate and this communication was used to set the time and place for encounters with what the Rama people believed were “ET” spacecraft. 
The remarkable success of Mission Rama in facilitating “encuentros programados” (Spanish for programmed encounters) allowed their network to spread across Latin America. By 1993 when I met one of their regional leaders in San Francisco, a retired Peruvian dental surgeon named Fernando Limaco, it was estimated that the “Mission” had facilitated over 25,000 individual encounters with “los extraterrestres” (ETs).

Eduardo Was a Refugee from Latin Americal
Eduardo reached adulthood in his homeland during a time of civil war. Forced to join one of the warring factions in the 1980s, he subsequently deserted and fled to the United States where he worked in a service industry and subsequently started a family. In the 1990s when Captain Vallejo and I made contact with the Rama network, Eduardo was heavily involved in the spiritual aspect of the Rama. All the top activists were strict vegans. Leading up to fieldwork, volunteer Rama contact workers spent weekends together in prayer and meditation, fasting, or consuming only fruits and vegetable soups. All these preparations were done exclusively in Spanish. It was their belief that such cleansing practices facilitated contact and communication with spiritually enlightened extraterrestrials who they considered to be “hermanos mayores” (Spanish for older brothers).

Security for Rama’s Contact Work Was a Concern

Eduardo according to Captain Vallejo was active in Rama during the 199Os at a Rama site called “Shasta.” This designation was for Shasta County and not Mount Shasta located in Siskiyou County, over 25 miles away from the Rama fieldwork site. I got the impression that using the name “Shasta” was a deliberate choice. I strongly suspected this was part of Dr. Fernando Limaco’s effort to maintain confidentiality and site security. Captain Vallejo repeatedly told me that Fernando, never liked to talk about their contact work on the phone. Directions to get to the property that Rama activists owned in Shasta County were never written down, or emailed. Instead, participants in their “encuentros” (encounters) were selected by personal invitation only and had to be guided to the fieldwork site by trusted members of the group. 
During the 1970s in Peru, Rama activists reported repeatedly entering what they believed were interdimensional portals called “Xendras” that allegedly serves as teleportation devices. Captain Vallejo in August of 1994 described to me an electrifying experience when the Rama people opened up just such a portal in Shasta. 

Rama Opened a Dimensional Portal in Northern California

A group of approximately 50 Latino contact workers were present that night. Most of them drove up from the San Francisco Bay area where the bulk of Rama people came from.  According to Captain Vallejo while chanting “Om”, a purple orb appeared in the field adjacent to the group. It hovered perfectly still about eight feet above the ground. This purple light then extended downward forming a doorway like structure. 

In groups of seven, the Rama people were permitted to enter the portal and experience a Xendra. Joe’s team was the last group to go in. He said that the space within the portal felt “cramped like being in an elevator.” He noted a distortion of sound, and as they chanted inside the tight space with ill-defined dimensions, it sounded like they were “speaking under water.” Since the group of fifty had been chanting “Om” for over an hour, the participants outside were clearly becoming fatigued. As volume of the chanting decreased, the team inside the Xendra noticed that the walls seem to be collapsing around them. Joe told me that he didn’t want to find out what would happen if the Xendra closed with his group inside. The others in the portal apparently felt the same way and they all chanted “Om” more forcefully. To their relief the Xendra stayed open, the walls reconstituted and the space felt less cramped. Joe’s group was then able to exit safely. 
When I heard of this account, I realized that the US Executive Branch Intelligence Services would understandably take a great interest in the activities of the Rama people. At first when Joe started flying up to the Bay Area on weekends to meditate, pray and fast with his hosts, he thought their practices were a bit extreme. They were in sharp contrast to the less stringent contact protocols that we employed as part of the Dr. Greer’s CE-5 Initiative. Joe even used the expression “cult like” to describe their rigorous preparations. 

I Thought Rigorous Spiritual Practices Might Have Served a Security Function 

Cognizant of how US counterintelligence might want to penetrate Rama, I had a different interpretation of the Rama protocols. I suggested that they might not only serve to “raise the spiritual vibration” of contact teams, but also could be a way of spending many hours with new recruits, one of whom on a rare occasion might be an intelligence operative. I somewhat naively assumed that counterintelligence types would break down from the “spiritual torture” of prayer, fasting and meditation. Joe and I had a good laugh on this topic and he suggested that Rama’s protocols perhaps functioned like “a poor man’s security check” to root out any want-to-be infiltrator.

In 2004 I had my first opportunity to do field work with Rama at the Shasta site. There I finally got to meet Eduardo in person. He was a heavy-set guy in his forties. Joe was good friends with Eduardo and many of the other seasoned contact activists. Despite my being the only Anglo there, I was made to feel very welcomed. I also had an opportunity to learn how far off base I was in my notion that the Rama protocols could be used as a “security check.”
A Counterintelligence Operative Made a Confession with a Special Request

As the story went, there had been an infiltrator, but he wasn’t the beer drinking macho man that I had somewhat foolishly envisioned. She was a mature woman, fluent in Spanish who may have had an academic background. This individual had reportedly been active with Rama for several months after which she dropped out. About a year later she returned with a special request. She revealed that she had been working for a US intelligence organization and that she regretted what she had done. She was reportedly very ill with a life-threatening diagnosis and asked for the Rama people to pray for her to be healed. They accepted her apology and included her in their prayers. Allegedly her condition subsequently improved. 

How I learned About the Offer to Board and the Teleportation Incident
Captain Vallejo continued working with Rama after he retired from United Airlines as a 747 pilot in 2005. I accompanied him to do fieldwork in Shasta County in 2004, 2006 and 2008. I met Eduardo during those trips and he appeared at a MUFON meeting I spoke at in San Jose in 2007. There I met his wife and teenage daughters that had accompanied him to see “el médico norteamericano” (North American doctor) who had done Rama fieldwork with their father. At that MUFON meeting I learned about what happened at Mount Shasta when he was offered the chance to have an onboard experience. As described above, the other individual selected was compelled to decline because no assurance was given that they would be returned.

Surveillance and Harassment

At that meeting Eduardo also told me about some of the harassment he was enduring. He assumed it was related to his volunteer work with Rama. Several time while driving on the highway at high speed, cars had attempted to push him off the roadway. On more than one occasion different civilian vehicles had driven alongside him in traffic. The driver then pointed his hand in the shape of pistol, aimed and “fired” at him. Eduardo didn’t mention black helicopters flying over his home (a common complaint among high level contactees), but if I recall correctly, he reported that large black sedans suspiciously parked across the street from his home. This reported combination of surveillance and harassment has been the main reason why I have not published this account for nearly two decades. 
I believe it is important to acknowledge that Eduardo’s group at Mount Shasta operated separately from the main Rama group whose property was located southwest from that dormant volcano. By handpicking the team, Eduardo could personally prepare them for high level fieldwork and avoid the security concerns involving Fernando’s group that often had between fifty and one hundred participants.  

As mentioned previously, in 2007 Eduardo’s team succeeded in attracting a saucer shaped craft that hovered near them. It was reportedly less than 100 feet off the ground.  When the craft arrived, however, the group of mainly young people couldn’t control their emotions. They reportedly went wild, shouting, waving their arms and running around. Only the older more mature members of the group, Eduardo and a mother of a ten-year-old were deemed appropriate for boarding. The crew of the saucer informed Eduardo telepathically that the craft would drop out of view, but remain in the area till the younger members of the team had departed. As described previously, when the saucer returned, Eduardo’s co-worker refused the offer to board because no assurance that they would be allowed to return was given. This was unacceptable to her. Eduardo told me that he would have gladly boarded. 

It is significant to note the advice I received in 1992 when I became a Working Group Coordinator for Dr. Steven Greer’s Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind Initiative. The Director of the Center for the Study of ET Intelligence informed our teams that if boarding privileges of an “ET” craft were offered, there would be no assurances that we would be returned. Over the years when I was actively involved in fieldwork, I pondered the meaning of the Director’s counsel concerning boarding. The best explanation I came up with was that it was a kind of test of our trust in UFO Intelligences. If we truly believed that our contact efforts were an expression of brotherhood and sisterhood made large, if we could experience unqualified love and solidarity with the non-human intelligences that we were interacting with, then we would not need to set conditions for our return. I discuss this question further in the link below for “Human Initiated Contact Events, (HICE), and “Boarding Privileges.” 

In 2007 learning of Eduardo’s offer to board an “ET craft” fired my ambition. I was working with a contact activist that I call “Janie Krieger” in the San Jose area. We decided to look for a local site in the foothills of the Coastal Range to do fieldwork with Eduardo.  We had heard that there was a seldom used county park up a mountain road that might be a good location. 

One afternoon in June of 2007, we drove up a narrow two-lane road towards the park. On right side was a steep hillside with no shoulder. On the other side of the pavement was a ravine. As Janie and I climbed up the mountain in her VW Bug, I became increasingly apprehensive. The road was devoid of traffic but treacherous with sharp blind curves that obscured the path ahead. Suddenly Janie said that we have to get off of the road. She stated, “I just got the message that we have to pull off the road.” I agreed because I too was feeling a sense of danger but had received no clear message as she had. As I wrote in the report linked previously, “But what were we supposed to do? On one side of the road was a hundred-foot drop into the ravine. On the other side was the wall of the mountain with no pullouts or highway shoulder in sight… Fortunately, on one of the straight portions of the road we found a narrow shoulder. If we parked with one side of the Bug almost touching the rock face, we were mostly off the road. I got out of the car from the driver’s side because she had parked flush against the hillside. We then pressed ourselves against the wall of rock and waited.”

“In less than two minutes, we suddenly heard the roar of car engines. Around the curve there suddenly appeared two muscular sedans with thick tires designed for racing. I was shocked. The young male drivers were actually racing neck to neck down the narrow mountain road and they were taking up both lanes!.. Janie and I looked at each other in disbelief. If she had not received the warning to get off the road immediately, we probably would have been killed. With the ravine on one side and the rock face on the other, there was no place for us to go. Her tiny VW Bug would have been crushed and likely flung into the ravine like a child’s toy.”

When I returned home and told my wife what had happened, she made me promise that I would not expose myself to such a dangerous situation again. For the next six months I focused on finishing up my internal medicine career. I was to do fieldwork one more time with Fernando’s group at Shasta in 2008, but I lost track of Edwardo. It is curious to note that both “Eduardo” and “Janie” both received the identical telepathic message, ”to get off the road!”, albeit under very different circumstances. 

In 2014, I received permission from Dr. Limaco to use his real name in my reports. Prior to that I had called him “Dr. Ricardo.” By that time the Rama group had new leadership as the next of generation of contact activists took over fieldwork, mostly on the slopes of Mount Shasta. UFO researcher Grant Cameron has written two books about doing volunteer contact work with Rahma, UFOs and Encounters with the Non-Ordinary at Mount Shasta and The Portals and UFOs of Mount Shasta.

Link for post “Human Initiated Contact Events and Landing Privileges” 

https://www.reddit.com/r/aliens/comments/1ddptto/while_alone_walking_along_a_deserted_country_path/

.

Introduction: In 2007 I was told the following account. Because of the sensitive nature of the encounter, I have not described it publicly until now. Given what appears to be increasing openness by US Executive Branch on the topic of UAP and the fact that nearly 20 years have passed, I share it on social media.

Synopsis: “Edwardo” (pseudonym) a Latino contact activist working with the network now known as Rahma had a UFO encounter with a team that he had personally organized. It occurred on the slopes of Mount Shasta. In response to their telepathic request for an encounter, a saucer shaped craft was attracted to their fieldwork site. A telepathic communication reportedly specified that the mostly young people in the group were not suitable for experiencing a landing and boarding. Instead, Edwardo and a mother of a ten-year-old, “Maria” were selected. They remained on site after the young people headed home. The thirty foot in diameter saucer reportedly returned and was prepared to land. At this point a telepathic message was received indicating that although the couple was permitted to depart in the craft, there was no assurance that they would be returned. This was unacceptable to Maria and the saucer flew off. 
After dropping Maria off at home in San Francisco at approximately 3AM in the morning, Edwardo was driving at high speed south on US 280. He reportedly heard a robotic telepathic voice stating, “Get off the Road!” He chose to ignore the warning and reportedly argued with the voice in his head and demanded an explanation. He again reported hearing the command, “Get off the road!” A few moments later his old sedan entered a wall of fog so thick that he had zero visibility and the reflected light of his headlights blinded him. 

Eduardo said that he took his foot off the gas and was hoping to gradually slow down and pull off onto the shoulder. Suddenly he heard a rush of air and the old springs in the backseat creaked as they were compressed. Someone or something was now in the backseat. Unable to safely take his eyes off the road and turn around, he could only glance in the rearview mirror. There he saw the dark shape of a person. His impression that this being was not human. As the vehicle continued to slow down in dense fog, Edwardo reportedly heard another sudden whooshing sound, now to his right. The passenger seat now contained a being that was very tall, approximately seven-feet in height. It was wearing a helmet and dressed in coveralls. The being was curled into fetal position, head bent down but still touching the roof; its legs were flexed in a cramped position.
Eduardo stated that his car gradually decelerated in dense fog. He reportedly wanted to take a good look at the beings in his car, but trying to avoid an accident he kept looking forward. After an indetermined amount of time, probably less than a minute, he heard the springs in the back seat decompress and in a sudden rush of air both beings vanished. 

Discussion:
When presenting an astounding account such as this, one naturally asks about the credibility of the witness. In my judgment “Eduardo” was a totally reliable volunteer contact worker with whom I very much wanted to do fieldwork in 2007, especially after I heard this account. Unfortunate circumstances involving what could have been a fatal car accident sadly prevented me from working with Eduardo. The incident involved a telepathic override that my driver received when we were driving up. a mountain road looking for a place to do contact work with Eduardo (This is described in my detailed report on Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/Experiencers/comments/1cs6gol/a_telepathic_override_that_probably_saved_my_life

I first heard of Eduardo in the 1990s, when a member of my Los Angeles CE-5 team, 747 United pilot Captain Joe Vallejo, started doing fieldwork with the Latino contact network then called “Rama.” It was founded in 1974 in Lima Peru around the contact experiences of a university student named Sixto Paz Wells. Mission Rama (Its original name) used automatic writing to communicate with UFO associated non-human intelligences. Psi capable activists who received accurate information in this manner were called “antennas.” When three antennas working separately received the same message, it was deemed accurate and this communication was used to set the time and place for encounters with what the Rama people believed were “ET” spacecraft. 
The remarkable success of Mission Rama in facilitating “encuentros programados” (Spanish for programmed encounters) allowed their network to spread across Latin America. By 1993 when I met one of their regional leaders in San Francisco, a retired Peruvian dental surgeon named Fernando Limaco, it was estimated that the “Mission” had facilitated over 25,000 individual encounters with “los extraterrestres” (ETs).
Eduardo became a young man in his homeland during a time of civil war. Forced to join one of the warring factions in the 1980s, he subsequently deserted and fled to the United States where he worked in a service industry and subsequently started a family. In the 1990s when Captain Vallejo and I made contact with the Rama network, Mario was heavily involved in the spiritual aspect of the Rama. All the top activists were strict vegans. Leading up to fieldwork, volunteer Rama contact workers spent weekends together in prayer and meditation, fasting, or consuming only fruits and vegetable soups. All these preparations were done exclusively in Spanish. It was their belief that such cleansing practices facilitated contact and communication with spiritually enlightened extraterrestrials who they considered to be “hermanos mayores” (Spanish for older brothers).

Eduardo according to Captain Vallejo was active in Rama during the 199Os at a Rama site called “Shasta.” This designation was for Shasta County and not Mount Shasta located in Siskiyou County, over 25 miles away from the Rama fieldwork site. I got the impression that using the name “Shasta” was a deliberate choice. I strongly suspected this was part of Dr. Fernando Limaco’s effort to maintain confidentiality and site security. Captain Vallejo repeatedly told me that Fernando, never liked to talk about their contact work on the phone, Directions to get to the property that Rama activists owned in Shasta County were never written down, or emailed. Instead, participants in their “encuentros” (encounters) were selected by personal invitation only and had to be guided to the fieldwork site by trusted members of the group. 
During the 1970s in Peru, Rama activists reported repeatedly entering what they believed were interdimensional portals called “Xendras” that allegedly serves as teleportation devices. Captain Vallejo in August of 1994 described to me an electrifying experience when the Rama people opened up just such a portal in Shasta. 

A group of approximately 50 Latino contact workers were present that night. Most of them drove up from the San Francisco Bay area where the bulk of Rama people came from.  According to Captain Vallejo while chanting “Om”, a purple orb appeared in the field adjacent to the group. It hovered perfectly still about eight feet above the ground. This purple light then extended downward forming a doorway like structure. 

In groups of seven, the Rama people were permitted to enter the portal and experience a Xendra. Joe’s team was the last group to go in. He said that the space within the portal felt “cramped like being in an elevator.” He noted a distortion of sound, and as they chanted inside the tight space with ill-defined dimensions, it sounded like they were “speaking under water.” Since the group of fifty had been chanting “Om” for over an hour, the participants outside were clearly becoming fatigued. As volume of the chanting decreased, the team inside the Xendra noticed that the walls seem to be collapsing around them. Joe told me that he didn’t want to find out what would happen if the Xendra closed with his group inside. The others in the portal apparently felt the same way and they all chanted “Om” more forcefully. To their relief the Xendra stayed open, the walls reconstituted and the space felt less cramped. Joe’s group was then able to exit safely. 
When I heard of this account, I realized that the US Executive Branch Intelligence Services would understandably take a great interest in the activities of the Rama people. At first when Joe started flying up to the Bay Area on weekends to meditate, pray and fast with his hosts, he thought their practices were a bit extreme. They were in sharp contrast to the less stringent contact protocols that we employed as part of the Dr. Greer’s CE-5 Initiative. Joe even used the expression “cult like” to describe their rigorous preparations. 

Cognizant of how US counterintelligence might want to penetrate Rama, I had a different interpretation of the Rama protocols. I suggested that they might not only serve to “raise the spiritual vibration” of contact teams, but also could be a way of spending many hours with new recruits, one of whom on a rare occasion might be an intelligence operative. I somewhat naively assumed that counterintelligence types would break down from the “spiritual torture” of prayer, fasting and meditation. Joe and I had a good laugh on this topic and he suggested that Rama’s protocols perhaps functioned like “a poor man’s security check” to root out any want-to-be infiltrator.

In 2004 I had my first opportunity to do field work with Rama at the Shasta site. There I finally got to meet Eduardo in person. He was a heavy-set guy in his forties. Joe was good friends with Eduardo and many of the other seasoned contact activists. Despite my being the only Anglo there, I was made to feel very welcomed. I also had an opportunity to learn how far off base I was in my notion that the Rama protocols could be used as a “security check.”

As the story went, there had been an infiltrator, but he wasn’t the beer drinking macho man that I had somewhat foolishly envisioned. She was a mature woman, fluent in Spanish who may have had an academic background. This individual had reportedly been active with Rama for several months after which she dropped out. About a year later she returned with a special request. She revealed that she had been working for a US intelligence organization and that she regretted what she had done. She was reportedly very ill with a life-threatening diagnosis and asked for the Rama people to pray for her to be healed. They accepted her apology and included her in their prayers. Allegedly her condition subsequently improved. 
Captain Vallejo continued working with Rama after he retired from United Airlines as a 747 pilot in 2005. I accompanied him to do fieldwork in Shasta County in 2006 and 2008. I met Eduardo during those trips and he appeared at a MUFON meeting I spoke at in San Jose in 2007. There I met his wife and teenage daughters that had accompanied him to see “el médico norteamericano” (North American doctor) who had done Rama fieldwork with their father. At that MUFON meeting I learned about what happened at Mount Shasta when he was offered the chance to have an onboard experience. As described above, the other individual selected was compelled to decline because no assurance was given that they would be returned. 
At that meeting Eduardo also told me about some of the harassment he was enduring. He assumed it was related to his volunteer work with Rama. Several time while driving on the highway at high speed, cars had attempted to push him off the roadway. On more than one occasion different civilian vehicles had driven alongside him in traffic. The driver then pointed his hand in the shape of pistol, aimed and “fired” at him. Eduardo didn’t mention black helicopters flying over his home (a common complaint among high level contactees), but if I recall correctly, he reported that large black sedans suspiciously parked across the street from his home.

I believe it is significant to note that Eduardo’s group at Mount Shasta operated separately from the main Rama group whose property was located southwest from that dormant volcano. By handpicking the team, Eduardo could personally prepare them for high level fieldwork and avoid the security concerns involving Fernando’s group that often had between fifty and one hundred participants.  

As mentioned previously, in 2007 Eduardo’s team succeeded in attracting a saucer shaped craft that hovered near them. It was reportedly less than 50 feet off the ground.  When the craft arrived, however, the group of mainly young people couldn’t control their emotions. They reportedly went wild, shouting, waving their arms and running around. Only the older more mature members of the group, Eduardo and a mother of a ten-year-old were deemed appropriate for boarding. The crew of the saucer informed Eduardo telepathically that the craft would drop out of view, but remain in the area till the younger members of the team had departed. As described previously, when the saucer returned, Eduardo’s co-worker refused the offer to board because no assurance that they would be allowed to return was given. This was unacceptable to her. Eduardo told me that he would have gladly boarded. 

Hearing about the offer of boarding an ET craft fired my ambition. I was working with a contact activist that I call “Janie Krieger” in the San Jose area. We decided to look for a local site in the foothills of the Coastal Range to do fieldwork with Eduardo.  We had heard that there was a seldom used county park up a mountain road that might be a good location. 

One afternoon in June of 2007, we drove up a narrow two-lane road towards the park. On right side was a steep hillside with no shoulder. On the other side of the pavement was a ravine. As Janie and I climbed up the mountain in her VW Bug, I became increasingly apprehensive. The road was devoid of traffic but treacherous with sharp blind curves that obscured the path ahead. Suddenly Janie said that we have to get off of the road. She stated, “I just got the message that we have to pull off the road.” I agreed because I too was feeling a sense of danger but had received no clear message as she had. As I wrote in the report linked previously, “But what were we supposed to do? On one side of the road was a hundred-foot drop into the ravine. On the other side was the wall of the mountain with no pullouts or highway shoulder in sight… Fortunately, on one of the straight portions of the road we found a narrow shoulder. If we parked with one side of the Bug almost touching the rock face, we were mostly off the road. I got out of the car from the driver’s side because she had parked flush against the hillside. We then pressed ourselves against the wall of rock and waited.”

“In less than two minutes, we suddenly heard the roar of car engines. Around the curve there suddenly appeared two muscular sedans with thick tires designed for racing. I was shocked. The young male drivers were actually racing neck to neck down the narrow mountain road and they were taking up both lanes!.. Janie and I looked at each other in disbelief. If she had not received the warning to get off the road immediately, we probably would have been killed. With the ravine on one side and the rock face on the other, there was no place for us to go. Her tiny VW Bug would have been crushed and likely flung into the ravine like a child’s toy.”

When I returned home and told my wife what had happened, she made me promise that I would not expose myself to such a dangerous situation again. For the next six months I focused on finishing up my internal medicine career. I was to do fieldwork one more time with Fernando’s group at Shasta in 2008, but I lost track of Edwardo. In 2014 I received permission from Dr. Limaco to use his real name in my reports. Prior to that I had called him “Dr. Ricardo.” The Rama group had new leadership as the next of generation of contact activists took over fieldwork, mostly on the slopes of Mount Shasta. UFO researcher Grant Cameron has written two books about doing fieldwork with Rahma UFOs and Encounters with the Non-Ordinary at Mount Shasta and The Portals and UFOs of Mount Shasta.

Introduction: In 2007 I was told the following account. Because of the sensitive nature of the encounter, I have not described it publicly until now. Given what appears to be increasing openness by US Executive Branch on the topic of UAP and the fact that nearly 20 years have passed, I share it on social media.

Synopsis: “Edwardo” (pseudonym) a Latino contact activist working with the network now known as Rahma had a UFO encounter with a team that he had personally organized. It occurred on the slopes of Mount Shasta. In response to their telepathic request for an encounter, a saucer shaped craft was attracted to their fieldwork site. A telepathic communication reportedly specified that the mostly young people in the group were not suitable for experiencing a landing and boarding. Instead, Edwardo and a mother of a ten-year-old, “Maria” were selected. They remained on site after the young people headed home. The thirty foot in diameter saucer reportedly returned and was prepared to land. At this point a telepathic message was received indicating that although the couple was permitted to depart in the craft, there was no assurance that they would be returned. This was unacceptable to Maria and the saucer flew off. 
After dropping Maria off at home in San Francisco at approximately 3AM in the morning, Edwardo was driving at high speed south on US 270. He reportedly heard a robotic telepathic voice stating, “Get off the Road!” He chose to ignore the warning and reportedly argued with the voice in his head and demanded an explanation. He again reported hearing the command, “Get off the road!” A few moments later his old sedan entered a wall of fog so thick that he had zero visibility and the reflected light of his headlights blinded him. Eduardo said that he took his foot off the gas and was hoping to gradually slow down and pull off onto the shoulder. Suddenly he heard a rush of air and the old springs in the backseat creaked as they were compressed. Someone or something was now in the backseat. Unable to safely take his eyes off the road and turn around, he could only glance in the rearview mirror. There he saw the dark shape of a person. His impression that this being was not human. As the vehicle continued to slow down in dense fog, Edwardo reportedly heard another sudden whooshing sound, now to his right. The passenger seat now contained a being that was very tall, approximately seven-feet in height. It was wearing a helmet and dressed in coveralls. The being was curled into fetal position, head bent down but still touching the roof; its legs were flexed in a cramped position.
Eduardo stated that his car gradually decelerated in dense fog. He reportedly wanted to take a good look at the beings in his car, but trying to avoid an accident he kept looking forward. After an indetermined amount of time, probably less than a minute, he heard the springs in the back seat decompress and in a sudden rush of air both beings vanished. 

Discussion:
When presenting an astounding account such as this, one naturally asks about the credibility of the witness. In my judgment “Eduardo” was a totally reliable volunteer contact worker with whom I very much wanted to do fieldwork in 2007, especially after I heard this account. Unfortunate circumstances involving what could have been a fatal car accident sadly prevented me from working with Eduardo. The incident involved a telepathic override that my driver received when we were driving up. a mountain road looking for a place to do contact work with Eduardo (This is described in my detailed report on Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/Experiencers/comments/1cs6gol/a_telepathic_override_that_probably_saved_my_life

I first heard of Eduardo in the 1990s, when a member of my Los Angeles CE-5 team 747 United pilot Captain Joe Vallejo, started doing fieldwork with the Latino contact network then called “Rama.” It was founded in 1974 in Lima Peru around the contact experiences of a university student named Sixto Paz Wells. Mission Rama (Its original name) used automatic writing to communicate with UFO associated non-human intelligences. Psi capable activists who received accurate information in this manner were called “antennas.” When three antennas working separately received the same message, it was deemed accurate and this communication was used to set the time and place for encounters with what the Rama people believed were “ET” spacecraft. 
The remarkable success of Mission Rama in facilitating “encuentros programados” (Spanish for programmed encounters) allowed their network to grow across Latin America. By 1993 when I met one of their regional leaders in San Francisco, a retired Peruvian dental surgeon named Fernando Limaco, it was estimated that the “Mission” had facilitated over 25,000 individual encounters with “los extraterrestres” (ETs).
Eduardo became a young man in his homeland during a time of civil war. Forced to join one of the warring factions in the 1980s, he subsequently deserted and fled to the United States where he worked in a service industry and subsequently started a family. In the 1990s when Captain Vallejo and I made contact with the Rama network, Mario was heavily involved in the spiritual aspect of the Rama. All the top activists were strict vegans. Leading up to fieldwork, volunteer Rama contact workers spent weekends together in prayer and meditation, fasting, or consuming only fruits and vegetable soups. All these preparations were done exclusively in Spanish. It was their belief that such cleansing practices facilitated contact and communication with spiritually enlightened extraterrestrials who they considered to be “hermanos mayores” (Spanish for older brothers).

Eduardo according to Captain Vallejo was active in Rama during the 199Os at a Rama site called “Shasta.” This designation was for Shasta County and not Mount Shasta located in Siskiyou County, over 25 miles away from the Rama fieldwork site. I got the impression that using the name “Shasta” was a deliberate choice. I strongly suspected this was  part of Dr. Fernando Limaco’s effort to maintain confidentiality and site security. Captain Vallejo repeatedly told me that Fernando, never liked to talk about their contact work on the phone, Directions to get to the property that Rama activists owned in Shasta County were never written down, or emailed. Instead, participants in their “encuentros” (encounters) were selected by personal invitation only and had to be guided to the fieldwork site by trusted members of the group. 
During the 1970s in Peru, Rama activists reported repeatedly entering what they believed were interdimensional portals called “Xendras” that allegedly serves as teleportation devices. Captain Vallejo in August of 1994 described an electrifying experience when the Rama people opened up just such a portal in Shasta. 

A group of approximately 50 Latino contact workers were present that night. Most of them drove up from the San Francisco Bay area where the bulk of Rama people came from.  According to Captain Vallejo while chanting “Om”, a purple orb appeared in the field adjacent to the group. It hovered perfectly still about eight feet above the ground. This purple light then extended downward forming a doorway like structure. 

In groups of seven, the Rama people were permitted to enter the portal and experience a Xendra. Joe’s team was the last group to go in. He said that the space within the portal felt “cramped like being in an elevator.” He noted a distortion of sound, and as they chanted inside the tight space with ill-defined dimensions, it sounded like they were “speaking under water.” Since the group of fifty had been chanting “Om” for over an hour, the participants outside were clearly becoming fatigued. As volume of the chanting decreased, the team inside the Xendra noticed that the walls seem to be collapsing around them. Joe told me that he didn’t want to find out what would happen if the Xendra closed with his group inside. The others in the portal apparently felt the same way and they all chanted “Om” more forcefully. To their relief the Xendra stayed open, the walls reconstituted and the space felt less cramped. Joe’s group was then able to exit safely. 
When I heard of this account, I realized that the US Executive Branch Intelligence Services would understandably take a great interest in the activities of the Rama people. At first when Joe started flying up to the Bay Area on weekends to meditate, pray and fast with his hosts, he thought their practices were a bit extreme. They were in sharp contrast to the less stringent contact protocols that we employed as part of the Dr. Greer’s CE-5 Initiative. Joe even used the expression “cult like” to describe their rigorous preparations. 

Cognizant of how US counterintelligence might want to penetrate Rama, I had a different interpretation of the Rama protocols. I suggested that they might not only serve to “raise the spiritual vibration” of contact teams, but also could be a way of spending many hours with new recruits, one of whom on a rare occasion might be an intelligence operative. I somewhat naively assumed that counterintelligence types would break down from the “spiritual torture” of prayer, fasting and meditation. Joe and I had a good laugh on this topic and he suggested that Rama’s protocols perhaps functioned like “a poor man’s security check” to root out any want-to-be infiltrator.

In 2004 I had my first opportunity to do field work with Rama at the Shasta site. There I finally got to meet Eduardo in person. He was a heavy-set guy in his forties. Joe was good friends with Eduardo and many of the other seasoned contact activists. Despite my being the only Anglo there, I was made to feel very welcomed. I also had an opportunity to learn how far off base I was in my notion that the Rama protocols could be used as a “security check.”

As the story went, there had been an infiltrator, but he wasn’t the beer drinking macho man that I had somewhat foolishly envisioned. She was a mature woman, fluent in Spanish who may have had an academic background. This individual had reportedly been active with Rama for several months after which she dropped out. About a year later she returned with a special request. She revealed that she had been working for a US intelligence organization and that she regretted what she had done. She was reportedly very ill with a life-threatening diagnosis and asked for the Rama people to pray for her to be healed. They accepted her apology and included her in their prayers. Allegedly her condition subsequently improved. 
Captain Vallejo continued working with Rama after he retired from United Airlines as a 747 pilot in 2004. I accompanied him to do fieldwork in Shasta County in 2006 and 2008. I met Eduardo during those trips and he appeared at a MUFON meeting I spoke at in San Jose in 2007. There I met his wife and teenage daughters that had accompanied him to see “el médico norteamericano” (North American doctor) who had done Rama fieldwork with their father. At that MUFON meeting I learned about what happened at Mount Shasta when he was offered the chance to have an onboard experience. As described above, the other individual selected was compelled to decline because no assurance was given that they would be returned. 
At that meeting Eduardo also told me about some of the harassment he was enduring. He assumed it was related to his volunteer work with Rama. Several time while driving on the highway at high speed, cars had attempted to push him off the roadway. On more than one occasion different civilian vehicles had driven alongside him in traffic. The driver then pointed his hand in the shape of pistol, aimed and fired at him. Eduardo didn’t mention black helicopters, flying over his home (a common complaint among high level contactees) but if I recall correctly, he reported that large black sedans suspiciously parked across the street from his home.

I believe it is significant to note that Eduardo’s group at Mount Shasta operated separately from the main Rama group whose property was located southwest from that dormant volcano. By handpicking the team, Eduardo could personally prepare them for high level fieldwork and avoid the security concerns involving Fernando’s group that often involved between fifty and one hundred participants.  

Eduardo team succeeded in attracting a saucer shaped craft that hovered near them. It was reportedly less than 50 feet off the ground.  When the craft appeared, however, the group of mainly young people couldn’t control their emotions. They reportedly went wild, shouting, waving their arms and running around. Only the older more mature members of the group, Eduardo and a mother of a ten-year-old were deemed appropriate for boarding. The crew of the saucer informed Eduardo telepathically that the craft would drop out of view, but remain in the area till the younger members of the team had departed. As described previously, when the saucer returned, Eduardo’s co-worker refused the offer to board because no assurance of their returning was given. This was unacceptable to her. Eduardo told me that he would have gladly boarded. 

Hearing about the offer of boarding an ET craft fired my ambition. I was working with a contact activist that I call “Janie Krieger” in the San Jose area. We decided to look for a local site in the foothills of the Coastal Range to do fieldwork with Eduardo.  We had heard that there was a seldom used county park up a mountain road that might be a good location. One afternoon in June of 2007, we drove up a narrow two-lane road towards the park. On right side was a steep hillside with no shoulder. On the other side of the pavement was a ravine. As Janie and I climbed up the mountain in her VW Bug, I became increasingly apprehensive. The road was devoid of traffic but treacherous with sharp blind curves that obscured the path ahead. Suddenly Janie said that we have to get off of the road. She said, “I just got the message that we have to pull off the road.” I agreed because I too was feeling a sense of danger but had received no clear message as she had. As I wrote in the report linked previously, “ But what were we supposed to do? On one side of the road was a hundred-foot drop into the ravine. On the other side was the wall of the mountain with no pullouts or highway shoulder in sight… Fortunately, on one of the straight portions of the road we found a narrow shoulder. If we parked with one side of the Bug almost touching the rock face, we were mostly off the road. I got out of the car from the driver’s side because she had parked flush against the hillside. We then pressed ourselves against the wall of rock and waited.’

“In less than two minutes, we suddenly heard the roar of car engines. Around the curve there suddenly appeared two muscular sedans with thick tires designed for racing. I was shocked. The young male drivers were actually drag racing neck to neck down the narrow mountain road and they were taking up both lanes!.. Janie and I looked at each other in disbelief. If she had not received the warning to get off the road immediately, we probably would have been killed. With the ravine on one side and the rock face on the other, there was no place for us to go. Her tiny VW Bug would have been crushed and likely flung into the ravine like a child’s toy.”

When I returned home and told my wife what had happened, she made me promise that I would not expose myself to such a dangerous situation again. For the next six months I focused on finishing up my internal medicine career. I was to do fieldwork one more time with Fernando’s group at Shasta in 2008, but I lost track of Edwardo. In 2014 I received permission from Dr. Limaco to use his real name in my reports. Prior to that I had called him “Dr. Ricardo” Rama group had new leadership as the next of generation of contact activists took over fieldwork, mostly on the slopes of Mount Shasta. 

 

 

 

Introduction: In 2007 I was told the following account. Because of the sensitive nature of the encounter, I have not described it publicly until now. Given what appears to be increasing openness by US Executive Branch on the topic of UAP and the fact that nearly 20 years have passed, I share it on social media.

Synopsis: “Edwardo” (pseudonym) a Latino contact activist working with the network now known as Rahma had a UFO encounter with a team that he had personally organized. It occurred on the slopes of Mount Shasta. In response to their telepathic request for an encounter, a saucer shaped craft was attracted to their fieldwork site. A telepathic communication reportedly specified that the mostly young people in the group were not suitable for experiencing a landing and boarding. Instead, Edwardo and a mother of a ten-year-old, “Maria” were selected. They remained on site after the young people headed home. The thirty foot in diameter saucer reportedly returned and was prepared to land. At this point a telepathic message was received indicating that although the couple was permitted to depart in the craft, there was no assurance that they would be returned. This was unacceptable to Maria and the saucer flew off. 
After dropping Maria off at home in San Francisco at approximately 3AM in the morning, Edwardo was driving at high speed south on US 270. He reportedly heard a robotic telepathic voice stating, “Get off the Road!” He chose to ignore the warning and reportedly argued with the voice in his head and demanded an explanation. He again reported hearing the command, “Get off the road!” A few moments later his old sedan entered a wall of fog so thick that he had zero visibility and the reflected light of his headlights blinded him. Eduardo said that he took his foot off the gas and was hoping to gradually slow down and pull off onto the shoulder. Suddenly he heard a rush of air and the old springs in the backseat creaked as they were compressed. Someone or something was now in the backseat. Unable to safely take his eyes off the road and turn around, he could only glance in the rearview mirror. There he saw the dark shape of a person. His impression that this being was not human. As the vehicle continued to slow down in dense fog, Edwardo reportedly heard another sudden whooshing sound, now to his right. The passenger seat now contained a being that was very tall, approximately seven-feet in height. It was wearing a helmet and dressed in coveralls. The being was curled into fetal position, head bent down but still touching the roof; its legs were flexed in a cramped position.
Eduardo stated that his car gradually decelerated in dense fog. He reportedly wanted to take a good look at the beings in his car, but trying to avoid an accident he kept looking forward. After an indetermined amount of time, probably less than a minute, he heard the springs in the back seat decompress and in a sudden rush of air both beings vanished. 

Discussion:
When presenting an astounding account such as this, one naturally asks about the credibility of the witness. In my judgment “Eduardo” was a totally reliable volunteer contact worker with whom I very much wanted to do fieldwork in 2007, especially after I heard this account. Unfortunate circumstances involving what could have been a fatal car accident sadly prevented me from working with Eduardo. The incident involved a telepathic override that my driver received when we were driving up. a mountain road looking for a place to do contact work with Eduardo (This is described in my detailed report on Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/Experiencers/comments/1cs6gol/a_telepathic_override_that_probably_saved_my_life

I first heard of Eduardo in the 1990s, when a member of my Los Angeles CE-5 team 747 United pilot Captain Joe Vallejo, started doing fieldwork with the Latino contact network then called “Rama.” It was founded in 1974 in Lima Peru around the contact experiences of a university student named Sixto Paz Wells. Mission Rama (Its original name) used automatic writing to communicate with UFO associated non-human intelligences. Psi capable activists who received accurate information in this manner were called “antennas.” When three antennas working separately received the same message, it was deemed accurate and this communication was used to set the time and place for encounters with what the Rama people believed were “ET” spacecraft. 
The remarkable success of Mission Rama in facilitating “encuentros programados” (Spanish for programmed encounters) allowed their network to grow across Latin America. By 1993 when I met one of their regional leaders in San Francisco, a retired Peruvian dental surgeon named Fernando Limaco, it was estimated that the “Mission” had facilitated over 25,000 individual encounters with “los extraterrestres” (ETs).
Eduardo became a young man in his homeland during a time of civil war. Forced to join one of the warring factions in the 1980s, he subsequently deserted and fled to the United States where he worked in a service industry and subsequently started a family. In the 1990s when Captain Vallejo and I made contact with the Rama network, Mario was heavily involved in the spiritual aspect of the Rama. All the top activists were strict vegans. Leading up to fieldwork, volunteer Rama contact workers spent weekends together in prayer and meditation, fasting, or consuming only fruits and vegetable soups. All these preparations were done exclusively in Spanish. It was their belief that such cleansing practices facilitated contact and communication with spiritually enlightened extraterrestrials who they considered to be “hermanos mayores” (Spanish for older brothers).

Eduardo according to Captain Vallejo was active in Rama during the 199Os at a Rama site called “Shasta.” This designation was for Shasta County and not Mount Shasta located in Siskiyou County, over 25 miles away from the Rama fieldwork site. I got the impression that using the name “Shasta” was a deliberate choice. I strongly suspected this was  part of Dr. Fernando Limaco’s effort to maintain confidentiality and site security. Captain Vallejo repeatedly told me that Fernando, never liked to talk about their contact work on the phone, Directions to get to the property that Rama activists owned in Shasta County were never written down, or emailed. Instead, participants in their “encuentros” (encounters) were selected by personal invitation only and had to be guided to the fieldwork site by trusted members of the group. 
During the 1970s in Peru, Rama activists reported repeatedly entering what they believed were interdimensional portals called “Xendras” that allegedly serves as teleportation devices. Captain Vallejo in August of 1994 described an electrifying experience when the Rama people opened up just such a portal in Shasta. 

A group of approximately 50 Latino contact workers were present that night. Most of them drove up from the San Francisco Bay area where the bulk of Rama people came from.  According to Captain Vallejo while chanting “Om”, a purple orb appeared in the field adjacent to the group. It hovered perfectly still about eight feet above the ground. This purple light then extended downward forming a doorway like structure. 

In groups of seven, the Rama people were permitted to enter the portal and experience a Xendra. Joe’s team was the last group to go in. He said that the space within the portal felt “cramped like being in an elevator.” He noted a distortion of sound, and as they chanted inside the tight space with ill-defined dimensions, it sounded like they were “speaking under water.” Since the group of fifty had been chanting “Om” for over an hour, the participants outside were clearly becoming fatigued. As volume of the chanting decreased, the team inside the Xendra noticed that the walls seem to be collapsing around them. Joe told me that he didn’t want to find out what would happen if the Xendra closed with his group inside. The others in the portal apparently felt the same way and they all chanted “Om” more forcefully. To their relief the Xendra stayed open, the walls reconstituted and the space felt less cramped. Joe’s group was then able to exit safely. 
When I heard of this account, I realized that the US Executive Branch Intelligence Services would understandably take a great interest in the activities of the Rama people. At first when Joe started flying up to the Bay Area on weekends to meditate, pray and fast with his hosts, he thought their practices were a bit extreme. They were in sharp contrast to the less stringent contact protocols that we employed as part of the Dr. Greer’s CE-5 Initiative. Joe even used the expression “cult like” to describe their rigorous preparations. 

Cognizant of how US counterintelligence might want to penetrate Rama, I had a different interpretation of the Rama protocols. I suggested that they might not only serve to “raise the spiritual vibration” of contact teams, but also could be a way of spending many hours with new recruits, one of whom on a rare occasion might be an intelligence operative. I somewhat naively assumed that counterintelligence types would break down from the “spiritual torture” of prayer, fasting and meditation. Joe and I had a good laugh on this topic and he suggested that Rama’s protocols perhaps functioned like “a poor man’s security check” to root out any want-to-be infiltrator.

In 2004 I had my first opportunity to do field work with Rama at the Shasta site. There I finally got to meet Eduardo in person. He was a heavy-set guy in his forties. Joe was good friends with Eduardo and many of the other seasoned contact activists. Despite my being the only Anglo there, I was made to feel very welcomed. I also had an opportunity to learn how far off base I was in my notion that the Rama protocols could be used as a “security check.”

As the story went, there had been an infiltrator, but he wasn’t the beer drinking macho man that I had somewhat foolishly envisioned. She was a mature woman, fluent in Spanish who may have had an academic background. This individual had reportedly been active with Rama for several months after which she dropped out. About a year later she returned with a special request. She revealed that she had been working for a US intelligence organization and that she regretted what she had done. She was reportedly very ill with a life-threatening diagnosis and asked for the Rama people to pray for her to be healed. They accepted her apology and included her in their prayers. Allegedly her condition subsequently improved. 
Captain Vallejo continued working with Rama after he retired from United Airlines as a 747 pilot in 2004. I accompanied him to do fieldwork in Shasta County in 2006 and 2008. I met Eduardo during those trips and he appeared at a MUFON meeting I spoke at in San Jose in 2007. There I met his wife and teenage daughters that had accompanied him to see “el médico norteamericano” (North American doctor) who had done Rama fieldwork with their father. At that MUFON meeting I learned about what happened at Mount Shasta when he was offered the chance to have an onboard experience. As described above, the other individual selected was compelled to decline because no assurance was given that they would be returned. 
At that meeting Eduardo also told me about some of the harassment he was enduring. He assumed it was related to his volunteer work with Rama. Several time while driving on the highway at high speed, cars had attempted to push him off the roadway. On more than one occasion different civilian vehicles had driven alongside him in traffic. The driver then pointed his hand in the shape of pistol, aimed and fired at him. Eduardo didn’t mention black helicopters, flying over his home (a common complaint among high level contactees) but if I recall correctly, he reported that large black sedans suspiciously parked across the street from his home.

I believe it is significant to note that Eduardo’s group at Mount Shasta operated separately from the main Rama group whose property was located southwest from that dormant volcano. By handpicking the team, Eduardo could personally prepare them for high level fieldwork and avoid the security concerns involving Fernando’s group that often involved between fifty and one hundred participants.  

Eduardo team succeeded in attracting a saucer shaped craft that hovered near them. It was reportedly less than 50 feet off the ground.  When the craft appeared, however, the group of mainly young people couldn’t control their emotions. They reportedly went wild, shouting, waving their arms and running around. Only the older more mature members of the group, Eduardo and a mother of a ten-year-old were deemed appropriate for boarding. The crew of the saucer informed Eduardo telepathically that the craft would drop out of view, but remain in the area till the younger members of the team had departed. As described previously, when the saucer returned, Eduardo’s co-worker refused the offer to board because no assurance of their returning was given. This was unacceptable to her. Eduardo told me that he would have gladly boarded. 

Hearing about the offer of boarding an ET craft fired my ambition. I was working with a contact activist that I call “Janie Krieger” in the San Jose area. We decided to look for a local site in the foothills of the Coastal Range to do fieldwork with Eduardo.  We had heard that there was a seldom used county park up a mountain road that might be a good location. One afternoon in June of 2007, we drove up a narrow two-lane road towards the park. On right side was a steep hillside with no shoulder. On the other side of the pavement was a ravine. As Janie and I climbed up the mountain in her VW Bug, I became increasingly apprehensive. The road was devoid of traffic but treacherous with sharp blind curves that obscured the path ahead. Suddenly Janie said that we have to get off of the road. She said, “I just got the message that we have to pull off the road.” I agreed  because I too was feeling a sense of danger but had received no clear message as she had. As I wrote in the report linked previously, “ But what were we supposed to do? On one side of the road was a hundred-foot drop into the ravine. On the other side was the wall of the mountain with no pullouts or highway shoulder in sight… Fortunately, on one of the straight portions of the road we found a narrow shoulder. If we parked with one side of the Bug almost touching the rock face, we were mostly off the road. I got out of the car from the driver’s side because she had parked flush against the hillside. We then pressed ourselves against the wall of rock and waited.’

“In less than two minutes, we suddenly heard the roar of car engines. Around the curve there suddenly appeared two muscular sedans with thick tires designed for racing. I was shocked. The young male drivers were actually drag racing neck to neck down the narrow mountain road and they were taking up both lanes!.. Janie and I looked at each other in disbelief. If she had not received the warning to get off the road immediately, we probably would have been killed. With the ravine on one side and the rock face on the other, there was no place for us to go. Her tiny VW Bug would have been crushed and likely flung into the ravine like a child’s toy.”

When I returned home and told my wife what had happened, she made me promise that I would not expose myself to such a dangerous situation again. For the next six months I focused on finishing up my internal medicine career. I was to do fieldwork one more time with Fernando’s group at Shasta in 2008, but I lost track of Edwardo. In 2014 I received permission from Dr. Limaco to use his real name in my reports. Prior to that I had called him “Dr. Ricardo” Rama group had new leadership as the next of generation of contact activists took over fieldwork, mostly on the slopes of Mount Shasta. 

 

 

 

Introduction: In 2007 I was told the following account. Because of the sensitive nature of the encounter, I have not described it publicly until now. Given what appears to be increasing openness by US Executive Branch on the topic of UAP and the fact that nearly 20 years have passed, I share it on social media.

Synopsis: “Edwardo” (pseudonym) a Latino contact activist working with the network now known as Rahma had a UFO encounter with a team that he had personally organized. It occurred on the slopes of Mount Shasta. In response to their telepathic request for an encounter, a saucer shaped craft was attracted to their fieldwork site. A telepathic communication reportedly specified that the mostly young people in the group were not suitable for experiencing a landing and boarding. Instead, Edwardo and a mother of a ten-year-old, “Maria” were selected. They remained on site after the young people headed home. The thirty foot in diameter saucer reportedly returned and was prepared to land. At this point a telepathic message was received indicating that although the couple was permitted to depart in the craft, there was no assurance that they would be returned. This was unacceptable to Maria and the saucer flew off. 

After dropping Maria off at home in San Francisco at approximately 3AM in the morning, Edwardo was driving at high speed south on US 270. He reportedly heard a robotic telepathic voice stating, “Get off the Road!” He chose to ignore the warning and reportedly argued with the voice in his head and demanded an explanation. He again reported hearing the command, “Get off the road!” A few moments later his old sedan entered a wall of fog so thick that he had zero visibility and the reflected light of his headlights blinded him. Eduardo said that he took his foot off the gas and was hoping to gradually slow down and pull off onto the shoulder. 

Suddenly he heard a rush of air and the old springs in the backseat creaked as they were compressed. Someone or something was now in the backseat. Unable to safely take his eyes off the road and turn around, he could only glance in the rearview mirror. There he saw the dark shape of a person. His impression that this being was not human. As the vehicle continued to slow down in dense fog, Edwardo reportedly heard another sudden whooshing sound, now to his right. The passenger seat now contained a being that was very tall, approximately seven-feet in height. It was wearing a helmet and dressed in coveralls. The being was curled into fetal position, head bent down but still touching the roof; its legs were flexed in a cramped position.

Eduardo stated that his car gradually decelerated in dense fog. He reportedly wanted to take a good look at the beings in his car, but trying to avoid an accident he kept looking forward. After an indetermined amount of time, probably less than a minute, he heard the springs in the back seat decompress and in a sudden rush of air both beings vanished. 

Discussion: 
When presenting an astounding account such as this, one naturally asks about the credibility of the witness. In my judgment “Eduardo” was a totally reliable volunteer contact worker with whom I very much wanted to do fieldwork in 2007, especially after I heard this account. Unfortunate circumstances involving what could have been a fatal car accident sadly prevented me from working with Eduardo. The incident involved a telepathic override that my driver received when we were driving up. a mountain road looking for a place to do contact work with Eduardo (This is described in detail in my detailed report on Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/Experiencers/comments/1cs6gol/a_telepathic_override_that_probably_saved_my_life

I first heard of Eduardo in the 1990s, when a member of my Los Angeles CE-5 team 747 United pilot Captain Joe Vallejo, started doing fieldwork with the Latino contact network then called “Rama.” It was founded in 1974 in Lima Peru around the contact experiences of a university student named Sixto Paz Wells. Mission Rama (Its original name) used automatic writing to communicate with UFO associated non-human intelligences. Psi capable activists who received accurate information in this manner were called “antennas.” When three antennas working separately received the same message, it was deemed accurate and this communication was used to set the time and place for encounters with what the Rama people believed were “ET” spacecraft. 
The remarkable success of Mission Rama in facilitating “encuentros programados” (Spanish for programmed encounters) allowed their network to grow across Latin America. By 1993 when I met one of their regional leaders in San Francisco, a retired Peruvian dental surgeon named Fernando Limaco, it was estimated that the “Mission” had facilitated over 25,000 individual encounters with “los extraterrestres” (ETs).
Eduardo became a young man in his homeland during a time of civil war. Forced to join one of the warring factions in the 1980s, he subsequently deserted and fled to the United States where he worked in a service industry and subsequently started a family. In the 1990s when Captain Vallejo and I made contact with the Rama network, Mario was heavily involved in the spiritual aspect of the Rama. All the top activists were strict vegans. Leading up to fieldwork, volunteer Rama contact workers spent weekends together in prayer and meditation, fasting, or consuming only fruits and vegetable soups. All these preparations were done exclusively in Spanish. It was their belief that such cleansing practices facilitated contact and communication with spiritually enlightened extraterrestrials who they considered to be “hermanos mayores” (Spanish for older brothers).

Eduardo according to Captain Vallejo was active in Rama during the 199Os at a Rama site called “Shasta.” This designation was for Shasta County and not Mount Shasta located in Siskiyou County, over 25 miles away from the Rama fieldwork site. I got the impression that using the name “Shasta” was a deliberate choice. I strongly suspected this was  part of Dr. Fernando Limaco’s effort to maintain confidentiality and site security. Captain Vallejo repeatedly told me that Fernando, never liked to talk about their contact work on the phone, Directions to get to the property that Rama activists owned in Shasta County were never written down, or emailed. Instead, participants in their “encuentros” (encounters) were selected by personal invitation only and had to be guided to the fieldwork site by trusted members of the group. 
During the 1970s in Peru, Rama activists reported repeatedly entering what they believed were interdimensional portals called “Xendras” that allegedly serves as teleportation devices. Captain Vallejo in August of 1994 described an electrifying experience when the Rama people opened up just such a portal in Shasta. 

A group of approximately 50 Latino contact workers were present that night. Most of them drove up from the San Francisco Bay area where the bulk of Rama people came from.  According to Captain Vallejo while chanting “Om”, a purple orb appeared in the field adjacent to the group. It hovered perfectly still about eight feet above the ground. This purple light then extended downward forming a doorway like structure. 

In groups of seven, the Rama people were permitted to enter the portal and experience a Xendra. Joe’s team was the last group to go in. He said that the space within the portal felt “cramped like being in an elevator.” He noted a distortion of sound, and as they chanted inside the tight space with ill-defined dimensions, it sounded like they were “speaking under water.” Since the group of fifty had been chanting “Om” for over an hour, the participants outside were clearly becoming fatigued. As volume of the chanting decreased, the team inside the Xendra noticed that the walls seem to be collapsing around them. Joe told me that he didn’t want to find out what would happen if the Xendra closed with his group inside. The others in the portal apparently felt the same way and they all chanted “Om” more forcefully. To their relief the Xendra stayed open, the walls reconstituted and the space felt less cramped. Joe’s group was then able to exit safely. 

When I heard of this account, I realized that the US Executive Branch Intelligence Services would understandably take a great interest in the activities of the Rama people. At first when Joe started flying up to the Bay Area on weekends to meditate, pray and fast with his hosts, he thought their practices were a bit extreme. They were in sharp contrast to the less stringent contact protocols that we employed as part of the Dr. Greer’s CE-5 Initiative. Joe even used the expression “cult like” to describe their rigorous preparations. 

Cognizant of how US counterintelligence might want to penetrate Rama, I had a different interpretation of the Rama protocols. I suggested that they might not only serve to “raise the spiritual vibration” of contact teams, but also could be a way of spending many hours with new recruits, one of whom on a rare occasion might be an intelligence operative. I somewhat naively assumed that counterintelligence types would break down from the “spiritual torture” of prayer, fasting and meditation. Joe and I had a good laugh on this topic and he suggested that Rama’s protocols perhaps functioned like “a poor man’s security check” to root out any want-to-be infiltrator.

In 2004 I had my first opportunity to do field work with Rama at the Shasta site. There I finally got to meet Eduardo in person. He was a heavy-set guy in his forties. Joe was good friends with Eduardo and many of the other seasoned contact activists. Despite my being the only Anglo there, I was made to feel very welcomed. I also had an opportunity to learn how far off base I was in my notion that the Rama protocols could be used as a “security check.”

As the story went, there had been an infiltrator, but he wasn’t the beer drinking macho man that I had somewhat foolishly envisioned. She was a mature woman, fluent in Spanish who may have had an academic background. This individual had reportedly been active with Rama for several months after which she dropped out. About a year later she returned with a special request. She revealed that she had been working for a US intelligence organization and that she regretted what she had done. She was reportedly very ill with a life-threatening diagnosis and asked for the Rama people to pray for her to be healed. They accepted her apology and included her in their prayers. Allegedly her condition subsequently improved. 

Captain Vallejo continued working with Rama after he retired from United Airlines as a 747 pilot in 2004. I accompanied him to do fieldwork in Shasta County in 2006 and 2008. I met Eduardo during those trips and he appeared at a MUFON meeting I spoke at in San Jose in 2007. There I met his wife and teenage daughters that had accompanied him to see “el médico norteamericano” (North American doctor) who had done Rama fieldwork with their father. At that MUFON meeting I learned about what happened at Mount Shasta when he was offered the chance to have an onboard experience. As described above, the other individual selected was compelled to decline because no assurance was given that they would be returned. 

At that meeting Eduardo also told me about some of the harassment he was enduring. He assumed it was related to his volunteer work with Rama. Several time while driving on the highway at high speed, cars had attempted to push him off the roadway. On more than one occasion different civilian vehicles had driven alongside him in traffic. The driver then pointed his hand in the shape of pistol, aimed and fired at him. Eduardo didn’t mention black helicopters, flying over his home (a common complaint among high level contactees) but if I recall correctly, he reported that large black sedans suspiciously parked across the street from his home.

I believe it is significant to note that Eduardo’s group at Mount Shasta operated separately from the main Rama group whose property was located southwest from that dormant volcano. By handpicking the team, Eduardo could personally prepare them for high level fieldwork and avoid the security concerns involving Fernando’s group that often involved between fifty and one hundred participants.  

Eduardo team succeeded in attracting a saucer shaped craft that hovered near them. It was reportedly less than 50 feet off the ground.  When the craft appeared, however, the group of mainly young people couldn’t control their emotions. They reportedly went wild, shouting, waving their arms and running around. Only the older more mature members of the group, Eduardo and a mother of a ten-year-old were deemed appropriate for boarding. The crew of the saucer informed Eduardo telepathically that the craft would drop out of view, but remain in the area till the younger members of the team had departed. As described previously, when the saucer returned, Eduardo’s co-worker refused the offer to board because no assurance of their returning was given. This was unacceptable to her. Eduardo told me that he would have gladly boarded. 

Hearing about the offer of boarding an ET craft fired my ambition. I was working with a contact activist that I call “Janie Krieger” in the San Jose area. We decided to look for a local site in the foothills of the Coastal Range to do fieldwork with Eduardo.  We had heard that there was a seldom used county park up a mountain road that might be a good location. One afternoon in June of 2007, we drove up a narrow two-lane road towards the park. On right side was a steep hillside with no shoulder. On the other side of the pavement was a ravine. As Janie and I climbed up the mountain in her VW Bug, I became increasingly apprehensive. The road was devoid of traffic but treacherous with sharp blind curves that obscured the path ahead. Suddenly Janie said that we have to get off of the road. She said, “I just got the message that we have to pull off the road.” I agreed  because I too was feeling a sense of danger but had received no clear message as she had. As I wrote in the report linked previously, “ But what were we supposed to do? On one side of the road was a hundred-foot drop into the ravine. On the other side was the wall of the mountain with no pullouts or highway shoulder in sight… Fortunately, on one of the straight portions of the road we found a narrow shoulder. If we parked with one side of the Bug almost touching the rock face, we were mostly off the road. I got out of the car from the driver’s side because she had parked flush against the hillside. We then pressed ourselves against the wall of rock and waited.’

“In less than two minutes, we suddenly heard the roar of car engines. Around the curve there suddenly appeared two muscular sedans with thick tires designed for racing. I was shocked. The young male drivers were actually drag racing neck to neck down the narrow mountain road and they were taking up both lanes!.. Janie and I looked at each other in disbelief. If she had not received the warning to get off the road immediately, we probably would have been killed. With the ravine on one side and the rock face on the other, there was no place for us to go. Her tiny VW Bug would have been crushed and likely flung into the ravine like a child’s toy.”

When I returned home and told my wife what had happened, she made me promise that I would not expose myself to such a dangerous situation again. For the next six months I focused on finishing up my internal medicine career. I was to do fieldwork one more time with Fernando’s group at Shasta in 2008, but I lost track of Edwardo. In 2014 I received permission from Dr. Limaco to use his real name in my reports. Prior to that I had called him “Dr. Ricardo” Rama group had new leadership as the next of generation of contact activists took over fieldwork, mostly on the slopes of Mount Shasta. 

Surveillance of my Contact team in Southern California, a speculative analysis.

October 1992: I was the first to arrive at the Rocky Peak Road exit from the 118 Freeway. Adjacent to the highway was a small parking area nestled against the rock face on the north side of the Santa Susana Pass. There was barely enough room for a half dozen vehicles to park. I was volunteering as a “Working Group Coordinator” for the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI).

“PHOTON TALK” DURING A PREVIOUS OUTING

Just a few weeks before while doing night contact work in the pass, highly anomalous lights had signaled at our team from the steep walls of the north side of the canyon. This was on the southern border of Rocky Peak State Park. The lights were truly anomalous in that they were large, over a foot across and had some special features like strobe and slow flare up and dim functions. They were separated by perhaps one hundred feet. 

One was positioned on the sheer elevation of the canyon. To access it, one would have to be a rock climber of considerable skill. The second light was higher up on the rock face and perched on a ledge next to some scrub brush that clung to the cliff. 
On the night of this September 1992 encounter, while my team was climbing down the trail from the south side of the pass, one of these lights signaled at our team from across the 118 on the opposite side of the pass. With advice from a co-worker, Alex Ayres, I signaled back at the light in a specific pattern: one flash from my lantern, wait three seconds, then two flashes, then wait three seconds, finally three flashes from my halogen 500K candlepower “light bazooka.” 

To my surprise, the anomalous light on the ridge signaled back at me with a powerful strobe. One flash from me, and then an immediate strobe reply. The response was so fast that it occurred even before the light from my “bazooka” had faded.  Two signals from me, followed by strobe, strobe. Finally, three in a row from my lantern, flash, flash, flash, then three quick strobes in reply. The rapidity of the responses suggested there was a consciousness connection between me and whoever was signaling at us. 
On a subsequent field investigation adjacent to the Santa Susana Pass, our team had observed red orbs slowly in straight vertical lines moving up and down behind the cliffs that formed the southern border of Rocky Peak State Park. Now there were two reasons for me to move our research site into the park: the incident involving the powerful lights that had signaled at us, and the sightings of red orbs.
I was a novice contact team leader with only a handful of field investigations behind me. I wanted to thoroughly investigate any potential new research site before I brought the entire group to it. So, I devised the plan to scout out Rocky Peak State Park, first during the day and then again at night to make sure things were safe for the whole team.  

I was working in the ER at the Kaiser Panorama City Medical Center. As a result of this assignment, I had a flexible schedule. Thus, it was relatively easy to schedule an outing during an afternoon off. If I had remained in my internal medicine office-based practice it would have been much harder to find the time to do volunteer contact work. 

The Santa Susana Pass is located in the high desert in the northwest corner of Los Angeles County. It was sunny that October day, typical Southern California weather, hot and dry. The roar of the traffic on the 118 Freeway filled the canyon. It was a desolate place. The steep canyon walls on either side of the road were covered with sagebrush that clung to rock face. 

A BIG MAN IN A BLACK MERCEDES SEDAN

I couldn’t help noticing a large black Mercedes sedan illegally parked on the overpass that spanned the highway. The widows were rolled up. In the driver seat sat an enormous man with a white shirt and black tie.  He was wearing sunglasses and must have weighed 300 pounds. He looked like an actor from a James Bond movie, the kind of character that perhaps might be called “Mr. Big.” I imagined that his engine was running and he had the AC on full blast, otherwise that big black car in the hot sun would become an oven on wheels.

THE CSETI INTELLIGENCE CONNECTION

My level of vigilance was high, not just because I grew up in crime ridden New York City during the 1960s and was not accustomed to hiking in the desert, but also because of what I had learned from Dr Greer. At the beginning of the contact campaign that he called the “Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind Initiative,” he readily shared details of his interactions with intelligence operatives working for both the legal authorities and the more shadowy elements that he labeled “the control group.” This allegedly was a network of powerful corporate and government forces allegedly working to “keep a lid” on the UFO situation.

 Their clandestine program presumably was a highly sophisticated campaign of “perception management” using psychological warfare techniques that targeted the population and resulted in what has been called “the UFO Truth Embargo.” Key public influencers, journalists, academicians, politicians, and highly placed insiders in the Pentagon all had a role in convincing the American people that when it came to UFOs, “There was nothing to see there.”  Some three decades later former Pentagon David Grusch confirmed the existence of just such a program. 

After Dr. Greer’s workshops, it was his regular practice to talk to small groups of followers. Till late hours in the night he told amazing stories about the sequelae of the Gulf Breeze encounter in which four saucer shaped craft had signaled at his contact team. I considered this event to be of great importance. It had occurred on the night of March 14, 1992, just a short distance from the Pensacola Naval Station whose radar I suspected had picked up the encounter. The multiple video recordings of this event helped convince me and others to participate in Dr. Greer’s program of human initiated contact.

In addition, he informed his closest followers that in 1991 an active-duty Naval Intelligence Commander in full uniform had visited his home. His name is Will Miller. He reportedly served as of liaison between Dr. Greer and US Executive Branch intelligence services. This collaboration lasted for over two decades and according to Commander Wilson ended around 2013.

A few weeks after the Gulf Breeze encounter, Dr. Greer suddenly found himself invited to speak at an alien abduction conference.  The sponsoring organization was called “Treatment and Research for Experienced Anomalous Trauma) (TREAT).” There, several retired military offices who Dr. Greer suspected might be in “the control group” reportedly pulled the North Carolina physician aside and “grilled” him about what were his intentions with his new organization. In a leaked 2010 document called “Dead Man’s Trigger”, the CSETI Director explained that with the consciousness-based techniques of his center, he had discovered the “Rosetta Stone” for contacting what he called “ET intelligence.” And they were training groups of volunteers to engage UFO associated intelligences in the course of fieldwork. 

Several months later, as I waited for my scout team in the Santa Susana Pass, I was aware of these interactions between my medical colleague and people who would be described in Hollywood Westerns as “some pretty tough hombres.”  

THE PRESENCE OF MILITARY OFFICER TYPES AT ROCKY PEAK STATE PARK.

“Mr. Big” in the black Mercedes was the first clue that I things were a bit strange. Later just before the other members of LA CE-5 Working Group arrived, a civilian Jeep pulled up and out jumped a man in his early forties. He had a short mustache, athletic build, wearing shorts, sunglasses, and a baseball style cap. The brisk and focused way he moved suggested he was active, or retired military. 

About an hour later after the other volunteers for our scouting mission had joined me, we were hiking up to Rocky Peak. On the trail we passed another gentleman who looked like he might be related to the first. Although slightly heavier in build, he had the same kind of short mustache, sunglasses, and military bearing. What made their presence even more remarkable was that it was a weekday afternoon and the park was pretty much deserted. Running into one guy who might look like a military/intelligence officer could be coincidental, but two separate ones, maybe not.

LOW FLYING ONE-MAN CHOPPER WHEEZES BY

As we came down the steep trail to the parking area, we had an additional clue indicating something strange was going on. A one-man helicopter wheezed by us flying at low altitude through the narrow canyon that formed the Santa Susana Pass. It was so close to the 118 Freeway that from our position up on the trail we could actually look down directly into the cockpit. 

I knew such craft existed from photo books that I had perused as a child, but I had never seen one in flight. It was probably no more seventy yards from us as it raced by. I didn’t see any governmental or commercial emblem on the toy like chopper. My guess was that this “bird” was flying in violation of LA County regulations that prohibited low altitude flight over freeways. 

Our scouting mission to check out Rocky Peak for UFO research revealed that the trail up to our potential research site was quite doable. I suspected however that it would take the older and slower members of our team close to an hour to get up through the foothills to the base of the mountain. Fortunately, there was a large open flat area at the top of the trail. I thought, 

“What a great place for a flying saucer to land.”

The clearing from which Rocky Peak rose was several football-fields large and the best part was that we had encountered only one rattlesnake on the hike. This was going to work out just fine! Little did I know that our encounters with helicopters were just beginning.

Addendum: My suspicions about surveillance of our contact team back in the 1990s was reinforced by a report of alleged “ET” sabotage at the Santa Susana Department of Energy Laboratory located just a few miles away from our research site. In 2006 while working at the Kaiser Panorama City ER, I interviewed a patient who was retired maintenance engineer from the DOE lab. He told me that that around 1990 a water main had been severed. He and a co-worker followed the water line to a point where they found a section of the pipe had been cut out. The hole allegedly had clean margins as if made by a power tool.  A short distance away they saw a metallic disc, some 20 to 30 feet across. It was hovering just a few feet off the ground. After they called security, the craft reportedly took off at tremendous speed. 
According to the witness, this happened just a few years before my team in 1992 did fieldwork near the DOE lab. Given the CSETI Director’s involvement with US Executive Branch security services, and the apparent sabotage at the DOE base, our contact team’s open efforts to attract UFOs to that location likely triggered surveillance and would account for the events described in this report.   

Surveillance of my Contact team in Southern California, a speculative analysis.

October 1992: I was the first to arrive at the Rocky Peak Road exit from the 118 Freeway. Adjacent to the highway was a small parking area nestled against the rock face on the north side of the Santa Susana Pass. There was barely enough room for a half dozen vehicles to park. I was volunteering as a “Working Group Coordinator” for the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI).

“PHOTON TALK” DURING A PREVIOUS OUTING

Just a few weeks before while doing night contact work in the pass, highly anomalous lights had signaled at our team from the steep walls of the north side of the canyon. This was on the southern border of Rocky Peak State Park. The lights were truly anomalous in that they were large, over a foot across and had some special features like strobe and slow flare up and dim functions. They were separated by perhaps one hundred feet. 

One was positioned on the sheer elevation of the canyon. To access it, one would have to be a rock climber of considerable skill. The second light was higher up on the rock face and perched on a ledge next to some scrub brush that clung to the cliff. 
On the night of this September 1992 encounter, while my team was climbing down the trail from the south side of the pass, one of these lights signaled at our team from across the 118 on the opposite side of the pass. With advice from a co-worker, Alex Ayres, I signaled back at the light in a specific pattern: one flash from my lantern, wait three seconds, then two flashes, then wait three seconds, finally three flashes from my halogen 500K candlepower “light bazooka.” 

To my surprise, the anomalous light on the ridge signaled back at me with a powerful strobe. One flash from me, and then an immediate strobe reply. The response was so fast that it occurred even before the light from my “bazooka” had faded.  Two signals from me, followed by strobe, strobe. Finally, three in a row from my lantern, flash, flash, flash, then three quick strobes in reply. The rapidity of the responses suggested there was a consciousness connection between me and whoever was signaling at us. 
On a subsequent field investigation adjacent to the Santa Susana Pass, our team had observed red orbs slowly in straight vertical lines moving up and down behind the cliffs that formed the southern border of Rocky Peak State Park. Now there were two reasons for me to move our research site into the park: the incident involving the powerful lights that had signaled at us, and the sightings of red orbs.
I was a novice contact team leader with only a handful of field investigations behind me. I wanted to thoroughly investigate any potential new research site before I brought the entire group to it. So, I devised the plan to scout out Rocky Peak State Park, first during the day and then again at night to make sure things were safe for the whole team.  

I was working in the ER at the Kaiser Panorama City Medical Center. As a result of this assignment, I had a flexible schedule. Thus, it was relatively easy to schedule an outing during an afternoon off. If I had remained in my internal medicine office-based practice it would have been much harder to find the time to do volunteer contact work. 

The Santa Susana Pass is located in the high desert in the northwest corner of Los Angeles County. It was sunny that October day, typical Southern California weather, hot and dry. The roar of the traffic on the 118 Freeway filled the canyon. It was a desolate place. The steep canyon walls on either side of the road were covered with sagebrush that clung to rock face. 

A BIG MAN IN A BLACK MERCEDES SEDAN

I couldn’t help noticing a large black Mercedes sedan illegally parked on the overpass that spanned the highway. The widows were rolled up. In the driver seat sat an enormous man with a white shirt and black tie.  He was wearing sunglasses and must have weighed 300 pounds. He looked like an actor from a James Bond movie, the kind of character that perhaps might be called “Mr. Big.” I imagined that his engine was running and he had the AC on full blast, otherwise that big black car in the hot sun would become an oven on wheels.

THE CSETI INTELLIGENCE CONNECTION

My level of vigilance was high, not just because I grew up in crime ridden New York City during the 1960s and was not accustomed to hiking in the desert, but also because of what I had learned from Dr Greer. At the beginning of the contact campaign that he called the “Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind Initiative,” he readily shared details of his interactions with intelligence operatives working for both the legal authorities and the more shadowy elements that he labeled “the control group.” This allegedly was a network of powerful corporate and government forces allegedly working to “keep a lid” on the UFO situation.

 Their clandestine program presumably was a highly sophisticated campaign of “perception management” using psychological warfare techniques that targeted the population and resulted in what has been called “the UFO Truth Embargo.” Key public influencers, journalists, academicians, politicians, and highly placed insiders in the Pentagon all had a role in convincing the American people that when it came to UFOs, “There was nothing to see there.”  Some three decades later former Pentagon David Grusch confirmed the existence of just such a program. 

After Dr. Greer’s workshops, it was his regular practice to talk to small groups of followers. Till late hours in the night he told amazing stories about the sequelae of the Gulf Breeze encounter in which four saucer shaped craft had signaled at his contact team. I considered this event to be of great importance. It had occurred on the night of March 14, 1992, just a short distance from the Pensacola Naval Station whose radar I suspected had picked up the encounter. The multiple video recordings of this event helped convince me and others to participate in Dr. Greer’s program of human initiated contact.

In addition, he informed his closest followers that in 1991 an active-duty Naval Intelligence Commander in full uniform had visited his home. His name is Will Miller. He reportedly served as of liaison between Dr. Greer and US Executive Branch intelligence services. This collaboration lasted for over two decades and according to Commander Wilson ended around 2013.

A few weeks after the Gulf Breeze encounter, Dr. Greer suddenly found himself invited to speak at an alien abduction conference.  The sponsoring organization was called “Treatment and Research for Experienced Anomalous Trauma) (TREAT).” There, several retired military offices who Dr. Greer suspected might be in “the control group” reportedly pulled the North Carolina physician aside and “grilled” him about what were his intentions with his new organization. In a leaked 2010 document called “Dead Man’s Trigger”, the CSETI Director explained that with the consciousness-based techniques of his center, he had discovered the “Rosetta Stone” for contacting what he called “ET intelligence.” And they were training groups of volunteers to engage UFO associated intelligences in the course of fieldwork. 

Several months later, as I waited for my scout team in the Santa Susana Pass, I was aware of these interactions between my medical colleague and people who would be described in Hollywood Westerns as “some pretty tough hombres.”  

THE PRESENCE OF MILITARY OFFICER TYPES AT ROCKY PEAK STATE PARK.

“Mr. Big” in the black Mercedes was the first clue that I things were a bit strange. Later just before the other members of LA CE-5 Working Group arrived, a civilian Jeep pulled up and out jumped a man in his early forties. He had a short mustache, athletic build, wearing shorts, sunglasses, and a baseball style cap. The brisk and focused way he moved suggested he was active, or retired military. 

About an hour later after the other volunteers for our scouting mission had joined me, we were hiking up to Rocky Peak. On the trail we passed another gentleman who looked like he might be related to the first. Although slightly heavier in build, he had the same kind of short mustache, sunglasses, and military bearing. What made their presence even more remarkable was that it was a weekday afternoon and the park was pretty much deserted. Running into one guy who might look like a military/intelligence officer could be coincidental, but two separate ones, maybe not.

LOW FLYING ONE-MAN CHOPPER WHEEZES BY

As we came down the steep trail to the parking area, we had an additional clue indicating something strange was going on. A one-man helicopter wheezed by us flying at low altitude through the narrow canyon that formed the Santa Susana Pass. It was so close to the 118 Freeway that from our position up on the trail we could actually look down directly into the cockpit. 

I knew such craft existed from photo books that I had perused as a child, but I had never seen one in flight. It was probably no more seventy yards from us as it raced by. I didn’t see any governmental or commercial emblem on the toy like chopper. My guess was that this “bird” was flying in violation of LA County regulations that prohibited low altitude flight over freeways. 

Our scouting mission to check out Rocky Peak for UFO research revealed that the trail up to our potential research site was quite doable. I suspected however that it would take the older and slower members of our team close to an hour to get up through the foothills to the base of the mountain. Fortunately, there was a large open flat area at the top of the trail. I thought, 

“What a great place for a flying saucer to land.”

The clearing from which Rocky Peak rose was several football-fields large and the best part was that we had encountered only one rattlesnake on the hike. This was going to work out just fine! Little did I know that our encounters with helicopters were just beginning.

Addendum: My suspicions about surveillance of our contact team back in the 1990s was reinforced by a report of alleged “ET” sabotage at the Santa Susana Department of Energy Laboratory located just a few miles away from our research site. In 2006 while working at the Kaiser Panorama City ER, I interviewed a patient who was retired maintenance engineer from the DOE lab. He told me that that around 1990 a water main had been severed. He and a co-worker followed the water line to a point where they found a section of the pipe had been cut out. The hole allegedly had clean margins as if made by a power tool.  A short distance away they saw a metallic disc, some 20 to 30 feet across. It was hovering just a few feet off the ground. After they called security, the craft reportedly took off at tremendous speed. 
According to the witness, this happened just a few years before my team in 1992 did fieldwork near the DOE lab. Given the CSETI Director’s involvement with US Executive Branch security services, and the apparent sabotage at the DOE base, our contact team’s open efforts to attract UFOs to that location likely triggered surveillance and would account for the events described in this report.   

Scouting out a Contact Site in the High Desert: “Mr. Big,” Two Military Types and a One-man Chopper” 

Joseph Burkes MD 2014, updated 2026

Surveillance of my Contact team in Southern California, a speculative analysis.

October 1992: I was the first to arrive at the Rocky Peak Road exit from the 118 Freeway. Adjacent to the highway was a small parking area nestled against the rock face on the north side of the Santa Susana Pass. There was barely enough room for a half dozen vehicles to park. I was volunteering as a “Working Group Coordinator” for the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI).

“PHOTON TALK” DURING A PREVIOUS OUTING

Just a few weeks before while doing night contact work in the pass, highly anomalous lights had signaled at our team from the steep walls of the north side of the canyon. This was on the southern border of Rocky Peak State Park. The lights were truly anomalous in that they were large, over a foot across and had some special features like strobe and slow flare up and dim functions. They were separated by perhaps one hundred feet. 

One was positioned on the sheer elevation of the canyon. To access it, one would have to be a rock climber of considerable skill. The second light was higher up on the rock face and perched on a ledge next to some scrub brush that clung to the cliff. 
On the night of this September 1992 encounter, while my team was climbing down the trail from the south side of the pass, one of these lights signaled at our team from across the 118 on the opposite side of the pass. With advice from a co-worker, Alex Ayres, I signaled back at the light in a specific pattern: one flash from my lantern, wait three seconds, then two flashes, then wait three seconds, finally three flashes from my halogen 500K candlepower “light bazooka.” 

To my surprise, the anomalous light on the ridge signaled back at me with a powerful strobe. One flash from me, and then an immediate strobe reply. The response was so fast that it occurred even before the light from my “bazooka” had faded.  Two signals from me, followed by strobe, strobe. Finally, three in a row from my lantern, flash, flash, flash, then three quick strobes in reply. The rapidity of the responses suggested there was a consciousness connection between me and whoever was signaling at us. 
On a subsequent field investigation adjacent to the Santa Susana Pass, our team had observed red orbs slowly in straight vertical lines moving up and down behind the cliffs that formed the southern border of Rocky Peak State Park. Now there were two reasons for me to move our research site into the park: the incident involving the powerful lights that had signaled at us, and the sightings of red orbs.
I was a novice contact team leader with only a handful of field investigations behind me. I wanted to thoroughly investigate any potential new research site before I brought the entire group to it. So, I devised the plan to scout out Rocky Peak State Park, first during the day and then again at night to make sure things were safe for the whole team.  

I was working in the ER at the Kaiser Panorama City Medical Center. As a result of this assignment, I had a flexible schedule. Thus, it was relatively easy to schedule an outing during an afternoon off. If I had remained in my internal medicine office-based practice it would have been much harder to find the time to do volunteer contact work. 

The Santa Susana Pass is located in the high desert in the northwest corner of Los Angeles County. It was sunny that October day, typical Southern California weather, hot and dry. The roar of the traffic on the 118 Freeway filled the canyon. It was a desolate place. The steep canyon walls on either side of the road were covered with sagebrush that clung to rock face. 

A BIG MAN IN A BLACK MERCEDES SEDAN

I couldn’t help noticing a large black Mercedes sedan illegally parked on the overpass that spanned the highway. The widows were rolled up. In the driver seat sat an enormous man with a white shirt and black tie.  He was wearing sunglasses and must have weighed 300 pounds. He looked like an actor from a James Bond movie, the kind of character that perhaps might be called “Mr. Big.” I imagined that his engine was running and he had the AC on full blast, otherwise that big black car in the hot sun would become an oven on wheels.

THE CSETI INTELLIGENCE CONNECTION

My level of vigilance was high, not just because I grew up in crime ridden New York City during the 1960s and was not accustomed to hiking in the desert, but also because of what I had learned from Dr Greer. At the beginning of the contact campaign that he called the “Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind Initiative,” he readily shared details of his interactions with intelligence operatives working for both the legal authorities and the more shadowy elements that he labeled “the control group.” This allegedly was a network of powerful corporate and government forces allegedly working to “keep a lid” on the UFO situation.

 Their clandestine program presumably was a highly sophisticated campaign of “perception management” using psychological warfare techniques that targeted the population and resulted in what has been called “the UFO Truth Embargo.” Key public influencers, journalists, academicians, politicians, and highly placed insiders in the Pentagon all had a role in convincing the American people that when it came to UFOs, “There was nothing to see there.”  Some three decades later former Pentagon David Grusch confirmed the existence of just such a program. 

After Dr. Greer’s workshops, it was his regular practice to talk to small groups of followers. Till late hours in the night he told amazing stories about the sequelae of the Gulf Breeze encounter in which four saucer shaped craft had signaled at his contact team. I considered this event to be of great importance. It had occurred on the night of March 14, 1992, just a short distance from the Pensacola Naval Station whose radar I suspected had picked up the encounter. The multiple video recordings of this event helped convince me and others to participate in Dr. Greer’s program of human initiated contact.

In addition, he informed his closest followers that in 1991 an active-duty Naval Intelligence Commander in full uniform had visited his home. His name is Will Miller. He reportedly served as of liaison between Dr. Greer and US Executive Branch intelligence services. This collaboration lasted for over two decades and according to Commander Wilson ended around 2013.

A few weeks after the Gulf Breeze encounter, Dr. Greer suddenly found himself invited to speak at an alien abduction conference.  The sponsoring organization was called “Treatment and Research for Experienced Anomalous Trauma) (TREAT).” There, several retired military offices who Dr. Greer suspected might be in “the control group” reportedly pulled the North Carolina physician aside and “grilled” him about what were his intentions with his new organization. In a leaked 2010 document called “Dead Man’s Trigger”, the CSETI Director explained that with the consciousness-based techniques of his center, he had discovered the “Rosetta Stone” for contacting what he called “ET intelligence.” And they were training groups of volunteers to engage UFO associated intelligences in the course of fieldwork. 

Several months later, as I waited for my scout team in the Santa Susana Pass, I was aware of these interactions between my medical colleague and people who would be described in Hollywood Westerns as “some pretty tough hombres.”  

THE PRESENCE OF MILITARY OFFICER TYPES AT ROCKY PEAK STATE PARK.

“Mr. Big” in the black Mercedes was the first clue that I things were a bit strange. Later just before the other members of LA CE-5 Working Group arrived, a civilian Jeep pulled up and out jumped a man in his early forties. He had a short mustache, athletic build, wearing shorts, sunglasses, and a baseball style cap. The brisk and focused way he moved suggested he was active, or retired military. 

About an hour later after the other volunteers for our scouting mission had joined me, we were hiking up to Rocky Peak. On the trail we passed another gentleman who looked like he might be related to the first. Although slightly heavier in build, he had the same kind of short mustache, sunglasses, and military bearing. What made their presence even more remarkable was that it was a weekday afternoon and the park was pretty much deserted. Running into one guy who might look like a military/intelligence officer could be coincidental, but two separate ones, maybe not.

LOW FLYING ONE-MAN CHOPPER WHEEZES BY

As we came down the steep trail to the parking area, we had an additional clue indicating something strange was going on. A one-man helicopter wheezed by us flying at low altitude through the narrow canyon that formed the Santa Susana Pass. It was so close to the 118 Freeway that from our position up on the trail we could actually look down directly into the cockpit. 

I knew such craft existed from photo books that I had perused as a child, but I had never seen one in flight. It was probably no more seventy yards from us as it raced by. I didn’t see any governmental or commercial emblem on the toy like chopper. My guess was that this “bird” was flying in violation of LA County regulations that prohibited low altitude flight over freeways. 

Our scouting mission to check out Rocky Peak for UFO research revealed that the trail up to our potential research site was quite doable. I suspected however that it would take the older and slower members of our team close to an hour to get up through the foothills to the base of the mountain. Fortunately, there was a large open flat area at the top of the trail. I thought, 

“What a great place for a flying saucer to land.”

The clearing from which Rocky Peak rose was several football-fields large and the best part was that we had encountered only one rattlesnake on the hike. This was going to work out just fine! Little did I know that our encounters with helicopters were just beginning.

Addendum: My suspicions about surveillance of our contact team back in the 1990s was reinforced by a report of alleged “ET” sabotage at the Santa Susana Department of Energy Laboratory located just a few miles away from our research site. In 2006 while working at the Kaiser Panorama City ER, I interviewed a patient who was retired maintenance engineer from the DOE lab. He told me that that around 1990 a water main had been severed. He and a co-worker followed the water line to a point where they found a section of the pipe had been cut out. The hole allegedly had clean margins as if made by a power tool.  A short distance away they saw a metallic disc, some 20 to 30 feet across. It was hovering just a few feet off the ground. After they called security, the craft reportedly took off at tremendous speed.   

Surveillance of my Contact team in Southern California, a speculative analysis.

October 1992: I was the first to arrive at the Rocky Peak Road exit from the 118 Freeway. Adjacent to the highway was a small parking area nestled against the rock face on the north side of the Santa Susana Pass. There was barely enough room for a half dozen vehicles to park. I was volunteering as a “Working Group Coordinator” for the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI).

“PHOTON TALK” DURING A PREVIOUS OUTING

Just a few weeks before while doing night contact work in the pass, highly anomalous lights had signaled at our team from the steep walls of the north side of the canyon. This was on the southern border of Rocky Peak State Park. The lights were truly anomalous in that they were large, over a foot across and had some special features like strobe and slow flare up and dim functions. They were separated by perhaps one hundred feet. 

One was positioned on the sheer elevation of the canyon. To access it, one would have to be a rock climber of considerable skill. The second light was higher up on the rock face and perched on a ledge next to some scrub brush that clung to the cliff. 
On the night of this September 1992 encounter, while my team was climbing down the trail from the south side of the pass, one of these lights signaled at our team from across the 118 on the opposite side of the pass. With advice from a co-worker, Alex Ayres, I signaled back at the light in a specific pattern: one flash from my lantern, wait three seconds, then two flashes, then wait three seconds, finally three flashes from my halogen 500K candlepower “light bazooka.” 

To my surprise, the anomalous light on the ridge signaled back at me with a powerful strobe. One flash from me, and then an immediate strobe reply. The response was so fast that it occurred even before the light from my “bazooka” had faded.  Two signals from me, followed by strobe, strobe. Finally, three in a row from my lantern, flash, flash, flash, then three quick strobes in reply. The rapidity of the responses suggested there was a consciousness connection between me and whoever was signaling at us. 
On a subsequent field investigation adjacent to the Santa Susana Pass, our team had observed red orbs slowly in straight vertical lines moving up and down behind the cliffs that formed the southern border of Rocky Peak State Park. Now there were two reasons for me to move our research site into the park: the incident involving the powerful lights that had signaled at us, and the sightings of red orbs.
I was a novice contact team leader with only a handful of field investigations behind me. I wanted to thoroughly investigate any potential new research site before I brought the entire group to it. So, I devised the plan to scout out Rocky Peak State Park, first during the day and then again at night to make sure things were safe for the whole team.  

I was working in the ER at the Kaiser Panorama City Medical Center. As a result of this assignment, I had a flexible schedule. Thus, it was relatively easy to schedule an outing during an afternoon off. If I had remained in my internal medicine office-based practice it would have been much harder to find the time to do volunteer contact work. 

The Santa Susana Pass is located in the high desert in the northwest corner of Los Angeles County. It was sunny that October day, typical Southern California weather, hot and dry. The roar of the traffic on the 118 Freeway filled the canyon. It was a desolate place. The steep canyon walls on either side of the road were covered with sagebrush that clung to rock face. 

A BIG MAN IN A BLACK MERCEDES SEDAN

I couldn’t help noticing a large black Mercedes sedan illegally parked on the overpass that spanned the highway. The widows were rolled up. In the driver seat sat an enormous man with a white shirt and black tie.  He was wearing sunglasses and must have weighed 300 pounds. He looked like an actor from a James Bond movie, the kind of character that perhaps might be called “Mr. Big.” I imagined that his engine was running and he had the AC on full blast, otherwise that big black car in the hot sun would become an oven on wheels.

THE CSETI INTELLIGENCE CONNECTION

My level of vigilance was high, not just because I grew up in crime ridden New York City during the 1960s and was not accustomed to hiking in the desert, but also because of what I had learned from Dr Greer. At the beginning of the contact campaign that he called the “Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind Initiative,” he readily shared details of his interactions with intelligence operatives working for both the legal authorities and the more shadowy elements that he labeled “the control group.” This allegedly was a network of powerful corporate and government forces allegedly working to “keep a lid” on the UFO situation.

 Their clandestine program presumably was a highly sophisticated campaign of “perception management” using psychological warfare techniques that targeted the population and resulted in what has been called “the UFO Truth Embargo.” Key public influencers, journalists, academicians, politicians, and highly placed insiders in the Pentagon all had a role in convincing the American people that when it came to UFOs, “There was nothing to see there.”  Some three decades later former Pentagon David Grusch confirmed the existence of just such a program. 

After Dr. Greer’s workshops, it was his regular practice to talk to small groups of followers. Till late hours in the night he told amazing stories about the sequelae of the Gulf Breeze encounter in which four saucer shaped craft had signaled at his contact team. I considered this event to be of great importance. It had occurred on the night of March 14, 1992, just a short distance from the Pensacola Naval Station whose radar I suspected had picked up the encounter. The multiple video recordings of this event helped convince me and others to participate in Dr. Greer’s program of human initiated contact.

In addition, he informed his closest followers that in 1991 an active-duty Naval Intelligence Commander in full uniform had visited his home. His name is Will Miller. He reportedly served as of liaison between Dr. Greer and US Executive Branch intelligence services. This collaboration lasted for over two decades and according to Commander Wilson ended around 2013.

A few weeks after the Gulf Breeze encounter, Dr. Greer suddenly found himself invited to speak at an alien abduction conference.  The sponsoring organization was called “Treatment and Research for Experienced Anomalous Trauma) (TREAT).” There, several retired military offices who Dr. Greer suspected might be in “the control group” reportedly pulled the North Carolina physician aside and “grilled” him about what were his intentions with his new organization. In a leaked 2010 document called “Dead Man’s Trigger”, the CSETI Director explained that with the consciousness-based techniques of his center, he had discovered the “Rosetta Stone” for contacting what he called “ET intelligence.” And they were training groups of volunteers to engage UFO associated intelligences in the course of fieldwork. 

Several months later, as I waited for my scout team in the Santa Susana Pass, I was aware of these interactions between my medical colleague and people who would be described in Hollywood Westerns as “some pretty tough hombres.”  

THE PRESENCE OF MILITARY OFFICER TYPES AT ROCKY PEAK STATE PARK.

“Mr. Big” in the black Mercedes was the first clue that I things were a bit strange. Later just before the other members of LA CE-5 Working Group arrived, a civilian Jeep pulled up and out jumped a man in his early forties. He had a short mustache, athletic build, wearing shorts, sunglasses, and a baseball style cap. The brisk and focused way he moved suggested he was active, or retired military. 

About an hour later after the other volunteers for our scouting mission had joined me, we were hiking up to Rocky Peak. On the trail we passed another gentleman who looked like he might be related to the first. Although slightly heavier in build, he had the same kind of short mustache, sunglasses, and military bearing. What made their presence even more remarkable was that it was a weekday afternoon and the park was pretty much deserted. Running into one guy who might look like a military/intelligence officer could be coincidental, but two separate ones, maybe not.

LOW FLYING ONE-MAN CHOPPER WHEEZES BY

As we came down the steep trail to the parking area, we had an additional clue indicating something strange was going on. A one-man helicopter wheezed by us flying at low altitude through the narrow canyon that formed the Santa Susana Pass. It was so close to the 118 Freeway that from our position up on the trail we could actually look down directly into the cockpit. 

I knew such craft existed from photo books that I had perused as a child, but I had never seen one in flight. It was probably no more seventy yards from us as it raced by. I didn’t see any governmental or commercial emblem on the toy like chopper. My guess was that this “bird” was flying in violation of LA County regulations that prohibited low altitude flight over freeways. 

Our scouting mission to check out Rocky Peak for UFO research revealed that the trail up to our potential research site was quite doable. I suspected however that it would take the older and slower members of our team close to an hour to get up through the foothills to the base of the mountain. Fortunately, there was a large open flat area at the top of the trail. I thought, 

“What a great place for a flying saucer to land.”

The clearing from which Rocky Peak rose was several football-fields large and the best part was that we had encountered only one rattlesnake on the hike. This was going to work out just fine! Little did I know that our encounters with helicopters were just beginning. In the next chapter, Iin another posting I describe how two large black helicopters followed us up the trail to what I had imagined was a “perfect UFO research site.”

Addendum: My suspicions about surveillance of our contact team back in the 1990s was reinforced by a report of alleged “ET” sabotage at the Santa Susana Department of Energy Laboratory located just a few miles away from our research site. In 2006 while working at the Kaiser Panorama City ER, I interviewed a patient who was retired maintenance engineer from the DOE lab. He told me that that around 1990 a water main had been severed. He and a co-worker followed the water line to a point where they found a section of the pipe had been cut out. The hole allegedly had clean margins as if made by a power tool.  A short distance away they saw a metallic disc, some 20 to 30 feet across. It was hovering just a few feet off the ground. After they called security, the craft reportedly took off at tremendous speed. 
According to the witness, this happened just a few years before my team in 1992 did fieldwork near the DOE lab. Given the CSETI Director’s involvement with US Executive Branch security services, and the apparent sabotage at the DOE base, our contact team’s open efforts to attract UFOs to that location likely triggered surveillance and would account for the events described in this report.   

UFO historian Richard Dolan has described the initial reaction of many people to his passionate involvement with the subject. They express interest, might even describe something they saw on TV concerning the phenomenon, and then after a few minutes of his well-informed explanations, their eyes gloss over and they are clearly bored.

THE ROLE OF AUTHORITY FIGURES

Yes, it’s true; opinion polls indicate the public is interested in UFOs, now officially called UAP. Advertising executives have long known this, but the fascination is for most part quite superficial. Why is this? I suspect that it is because prior to the winter of 2017 most authority figures have essentially said that there’s nothing to it.

After all, the world is terribly complex. Thus, we rely on authorities to use vast amounts of data to make what we hope are reasonable decisions. Most people have little understanding of the technological “miracles” that science has achieved, but they are grateful and trust the devices, like planes, autos and computers to work reliably.

Needing to trust leaders, I suspect, might be built into our psychobiology. For a million years before civilization was established, hunter-gatherers worked in small groups to survive. Shamans that could use primitive psi abilities combined with careful observations of nature played important roles. Leadership was a question of life and death. Those clans that had the best leaders, the shamans and “sha-womans” that knew how to most successfully hunt animals, find healing herbs and deliver the babies, played critical roles in survival. Thus, most of us have a strong tendency to “follow the leader” and when this becomes extreme, “We the People” run the risk of becoming, “We the sheeple.”

LINKING UFOs TO SOLUTIONS FOR MAJOR PROBLEMS

For the UFO question to have a truly major impact on the mass consciousness, this subject will need to be transformed from an entertaining diversion and become a way of addressing the seemingly insurmountable problems our planet is facing. This is already being attempted by those within the UFO community that discuss the possibility of downloading into our technological culture the secrets of the energy propulsion systems of flying saucers. So-called “free energy” in one fell swoop might eliminate poverty and pollution, possibly even reversing global warming and ending world hunger.

Of course, for the so-called ETs to give us such devices, they might understandably insist on a peaceful transformation of our planet to replace what Ufologist Stanton Friedman called our perpetual state of “tribal warfare.” In the past such a proposition was an impossibly “hard sell” because military and political leaders, the mass media and academia all in service to ruling elites repeatedly insisted, “There is nothing to it.”

HE WHO PAYS THE PIPER CALLS THE TUNE

Clandestine forces determined to keep a lid on the UFO issue have been called “the control groups.” In the past, they employed a strategy of recruiting authority figures to block any significant discussion of flying saucers. Opinion makers that stepped out of line found that their access to funding would be cut off. This was done behind the scenes and has been quite effective in my opinion.

In the USA, the National Academy of Sciences made it perfectly clear that UFO studies are not part of the “legitimate” agenda for professional science. Scientists that stepped out of line could find themselves unable to secure grants thus ending their careers. This has now changed somewhat with the Galileo Project headed by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. It should be mentioned, however, that Dr. Loeb’s UAP detection project is reportedly supported in such a way so as not to take money from traditional scientific financial backers. Heavens forbid a UAP investigation might divert funding for “real science.”

In broadcast journalism in the past, talk show hosts that might inform the public in a detailed way about flying saucers could find themselves without corporate sponsors. We should not forget that major newspapers are controlled through their editorial boards that in turn are dependent on commercial advertising to continue publishing.

This analysis of the social mechanisms of the “UFO Truth Embargo” is not a conspiracy theory. I merely describe the way power works. In the former Soviet Union, it was the political dictatorship of the Communist Party that attempted to regulate almost every aspect of people’s lives. That social experiment failed miserably. In the West, however, social control is far more sophisticated, decentralized and uses the knowledge of social psychology called “public relations” to effectively manipulate the masses.

RESISTANCE TO CHANGE ALSO COMES FROM WITHIN

On the individual level, our tendency to identify with our thoughts leads to a profound attachments to old ideas. This resistance to changing one’s point of view flows from the ego itself. “Ego” in this context means identification with thought forms.  People strive to defend their religion, political ideology, or moral customs to the point where some would even kill to maintain them. Just look at the present situation in Middle East, or at the millions killed centuries ago during the Spanish Inquisition and the Protestant Reformation in Europe.

Something similar in my opinion applies to acknowledging that an “ET” and/or “interdimensional” explanation for the flying saucer phenomenon might be true. Such a realization threatens to radically change the conceptual paradigm of our entire civilization. Since humans so strongly identify with their present beliefs, it is understandable that many reject such a brave new worldview in which we might have to accept a potent non-human presence.

UFO INTELLIGENCE HAS A TIGER BY THE TAIL.

What about the intelligences responsible for flying saucers? Could “they” (whoever they ultimately turn out to be) simply fill the sky with structured craft? Or stage the proverbial “landing on the Whitehouse Lawn?” Such actions would certainly convince the masses that flying saucers are of the greatest importance. In my judgment, this scenario is the least likely to ever take place. Given the militaristic mindset of our civilization, a sudden realization of the reality of UFOs could be catastrophic. My guess is that careful gradual efforts to alert us of their importance is the game plan of both the intelligences responsible for the phenomenon and some elements of the establishment as well. I recommend Grant Cameron’s book “Managing Magic.” He shows how the US Executive Branch has pursued a gradual acclimatization project which runs in parallel to the coverup. 

So, what will it take to change mass public opinion on the flying saucer question? If the alleged “ETs” continue the present pattern of interactions, millions of individual sightings yearly interspersed with occasional massive waves, I imagine that there will be opportunities to slowly build public awareness by a responsible program of education.

RESPONSIBLE PROGRAM OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

This will require UFO enthusiasts to discipline the crazies in our midst, think creatively and most importantly of all build stable, well-financed organizations to carry out the educational campaign. All this will need to be done in opposition to the control groups that have great experience in manipulating public opinion and putting their spin on the limited disclosure efforts that has been going on.

“TURNING PAGES IN A PLAY BOOK”

Can we trust UFO intelligences to follow what we imagine is their existing “game plan” of gradually alerting humanity to their presence? I suppose not. UFO researcher Michael Lindemann once said that we should never assume that we can think like the so-called “aliens.” Nevertheless, the ever-changing pattern of interactions, as pointed out by UFO researcher Grant Cameron, appears to be as if the aliens have been turning the pages of a “play book.” This can be seen by the appearance of “Men in Black” in the 1950s, so called “alien abductions” starting in the 1960s and followed by crop circles reported in Southern England and then all over the world. While all this has been happening, tens of thousands of contact experiencers have described mental interactions with flying saucer intelligences. Many of these individuals are instilled with a sense of mission and are striving to convince their fellow “Earthlings” that we should look up and accept what our eyes are seeing.

In my judgment, UFO intelligences will continue to present us with new and creative ways of waking us up from our collective stupor concerning their “wonders in the sky.” I believe their presence is non-harmful and very likely beneficial for mankind. Bringing others to this hopeful perspective, I imagine, is a challenge that many contact and disclosure activists will continue to face for some time.

On December 26, 1993, I had an episode of shared missing time while driving home from Joshua Tree National Monument. At the high desert location my contact teammate and I had tried to facilitate a Human Initiated Contact Event (HICE) aka CE5.While headed back to Los Angeles in darkness, my co-worker noticed what we initially thought was a car driving behind us. This occurred in the ravine on highway 62 linking the Morongo Valley to the Desert Hot Springs area. My co-worker stated that suddenly an amber light appeared between the "headlights" of this alleged car.

Days later my teammate told me that the array of three lights slowly rose off the highway. I was not aware of this on that night of December 26th however, and so I urged my friend to stop the vehicle so that whatever was behind us could pass us by. As soon as we emerged from this ravine we pulled to the side of the road. There we had a view of entire Desert Hot Springs area. In the distance we could see the lights of Palms Springs and due south was a ten-thousand-foot elevation called San Jacinto Mountain. As the engine idled we saw three or four white lights in the sky to the southwest. They were slowly flying through the dark sky. The somewhat nonsensical thought occurred to me that they might be private pilots getting their “night flying time in” for certification.  In retrospect doing this as a group the day after Christmas seemed far-fetched.

A bright light suddenly appeared over the Palms Springs area. It rapidly approached us. At that point I felt dazed and without waiting for the “car” behind us to pass, we pulled back onto the road. Around that time, I strongly suspect we experienced missing time. Several days later, my teammate stated that he recalled having an onboard experience when we stopped on Highway 62. I noted the fact that I had experienced a break in the continuity of my consciousness during the ride back to Los Angeles. One moment I was sitting in darkness waiting for the “car behind us to pass“  and the next moment the sun was high in the sky and we were a few miles down the road.

Even more bizarre was the fact that this occurrence was one data point in a wave of missing time events across the entire CE-5 network in the Western United States. A few weeks before our fieldwork on December 26^(th) 1993, Ron Russell, a contact activist in Denver reported having missing time while sitting at home. Wayne Peterson’s CE-5 team also had not one but two episodes of missing time on December 27^(th) 1993. It reportedly happened outside of Phoenix Arizona

A few months later I started having vivid nightmares that had similar themes. I dreamed that I was in motor vehicles that were falling. In two out of the three dreams, I fell from a great height. 
The first dream involved a nighttime UFO field investigation. I was driving on a narrow dirt path located on a steep mountain ridgeline. I was in my old 4-wheeldrive Isuzu Trooper that I had purchased especially for doing contact work in remote locations. As the truck climbed up the mountain, the path became narrower and rockier. As I bounced around in the vehicle, my fear mounted. On both sides of the trail there was a drop off of perhaps five hundred feet. Despite the danger, the Isuzu Trooper kept climbing. On the right was a valley covered with dense pine trees. The path narrowed to just a few feet across and I experienced sheer terror as the Isuzu plunged down off the cliff to the right into the valley below. Instead of a crash, to my relief the dense trees cushioned my fall and the vehicle was stuck in the upper branches far above the ground. I woke up with the thought that I was lucky to be alive. 

The second nightmare occurred a few days later. Again, I was in my Isuzu Trooper at night. This time I was struggling to drive up a steep embankment above a deep lake. Pouring rain turned the dirt road into mud that was cascading down the embankment into the lake. The engine was racing but my Trooper had lost all traction. I was rapidly sliding backwards towards the deep water. The truck was going to enter the lake a high speed and I would surely drown trapped in my vehicle. I awoke in a state of panic. I was relieved because “it was only a dream.” 

In the third and final frightening dream I found myself in the future. It was broad daylight and I was traveling in some kind of racing vehicle on suspended white crystal highway. To the left below me was a spectacular futuristic city of white spires surrounding a wide beautiful blue lake. A thousand feet down, white sailboats leisurely floated across the water. My vehicle was accelerating as I rounded a curve. To my dismay, I saw that there were no guardrails. I lost control and my race car shot off the highway falling towards the lake a thousand feet below. At that moment I realized I was done for, in no way could I survive. A wave of sadness rolled over me. Before impact I woke up.  

Preston Dennett is an author/researcher who has published several dozen books on UFOs and the paranormal. He was a member of my CE-5 contact team back in the 1990s and we have kept up our friendship since. In 2023 on his YouTube channel, he posted a report titled “UFO Car-Lift Cases." Watching his presentation was cause for me to recall my recurring nightmares that occurred a few months after my missing time event while driving home from Joshua Tree.Recurrent dreams potentially are symbolic representations reflecting a wide range of trauma, including anomalous events.I strongly suspect, but in no way can prove, that my dreams of falling while in a vehicle were symbolic representations of the sheer terror that I may have experienced when our car was lifted off that dark Highway 62 so long ago. 

I am not posting a link to Preston’s YouTube presentation on this platform but it can be accessed by pasting the following phrase “Preston Dennett’s Car Lift Cases” into the YouTube search window.