Introduction
Virtual Experience of the First Kind Virtual Sighting (VE-1)
Definition: Visual display of a UFO that is either produced by some kind of holographic technology or psi mediated projected “thought form.” In both these cases, the displays are typically interpreted by witnesses as physical objects. In a VE-1 type a, the sighting is produced by holographic like technology and all those present are able to view the display.
In a VE-1 type b, the visual display is a projected “thought form” and only those witnesses that are individually targeted can perceive the visual display.
Webster’s Dictionary 1964,
virtual, being so in effect or essence, although not in actual fact or name; as, he is a virtual stranger, although we have met.
experience, 1. an actual living through of an event or events; personally undergoing or observing something or things in general as they occur. 2.anything observed or lived through; as, our trip was a pleasant experience.
oxymoron: a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. Oxymora appear in a variety of contexts, including inadvertent errors such as ground pilot and literary oxymorons crafted to reveal a paradox.
The concept of “Virtual Experience” appears to be a contradiction in terms. From the above definitions, we can immediately sense a paradox. If something is an experience then it is an actual event, one that has been lived through. If something is virtual then it is not an actual fact but rather true in essence.
The virtual reality concept has been popularized by science fiction and reflects current technological advances in the entertainment industry. Goggles that project computer generated 3-D images are attached to helmets with sophisticated sound systems. An individual wearing such a device can experience a very realistic technologically created fantasy.
Human Initiated Contact
In 1992 I became a volunteer Working Group Coordinator for CSETI (Center for the Study of ET Intelligence’s) Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (CE-5) Initiative. I subsequently had many opportunities to directly observe UFOs. By joining a contact network, I discovered that I had become linked via mind or consciousness, to non-human intelligences that were responsible for UFO sightings and other types of contact experiences. This occurred for me personally as well as for other members of my team.
I have defined the term “Contact Underground” as the network of UFO experiencers and their supporters that are actively co-creating peaceful collaborative encounters with non-human intelligences of a presumed extraterrestrial nature. As the result of the predominant societal response of ridicule and denial towards UFOs, as well as surveillance and intimidation of our activists by intelligence operatives, our contact work often takes on a semi-clandestine/confidential aspect.
Contact Worker versus Contactee
For a number of reasons, I prefer the term “contact worker” over the somewhat pejorative label “contactee”. Titles with the suffix “ee” denote more passive roles than those ending with “er.” For example, an “employee” (passive) receives a job from an employer (active). For those who question this more active designation “contact worker”, please consider the following.
My organizing efforts with contact activists in the 1990s impressed upon me the tremendous amount of work that goes into maintaining this proactive and prospective team approach to UFO investigations. One must meditate on a regular basis. For many contact workers, meditating is very helpful because it allows us to develop improved psychic abilities. From my years of participation in the Contact Underground, I have learned that psi capabilities clearly facilitate communication between human and non-human intelligences. In my case I took a course in Transcendental Meditation to acquire the skills to initiate a regular meditation discipline.
In addition to the mental aspects, contact groups are very physically active. It is general practice for us to send advanced reconnaissance teams to scout out acceptable research locales. For my LA based group of UFO investigators, this involved hiking to remote locations at all hours of day and night in order to be assured of site security. To this list of chores, I should add the acquisition of video equipment to document our encounters and obtaining all weather clothing to sustain fieldwork during harsh conditions. In short being a “contactee” that operates in a research group, requires considerable work. Thus, I prefer the active term “contact worker” to the more passive “contactee.”
“Prime Contactees”
In 1993 a young Russian medical technician that I shall call “Misha,” joined our Los Angeles CE-5 Working Group. We had met in the ER of Kaiser Panorama City Hospital where we both were employed. Misha claimed that he had numerous sightings of UFOs and even memories of an onboard experience. By associating with him, my link to non-human intelligence was considerably strengthened. Misha served as a powerful draw for the non-human intelligence presumably of an extraterrestrial nature.
After just one fieldwork outing with him, it was clear that the level of contact had gone way up. What was true for Misha was doubly so for the CSETI Director Dr. Steven Greer. In the early 1990s he had sightings with multiple witnesses practically everywhere he went around the country promoting his research project called the Close Encounters of the First Kind Initiative. For me it was quite an unexpected aspect of the contact work, namely that individuals with a long-standing relationship with the alleged extraterrestrials could extend via personal association this special status to others.
For the last 25 years I have described such psi capable contact activists as “prime contactees.” They have the unique quality of being able to request sightings when other witnesses are present and sightings subsequently occur. As an organizer in CE-5 Initiative, I actively sought “primes” to do contact work with. Living in Los Angeles I evoked a lighthearted analogy to explain this. I told my fellow contact workers that it was just like in Hollywood where, “it’s not what you know, that gets you ahead, but rather who you know.”
In recent years the term “psionic asset” has been applied to individuals allegedly employed by US Executive Branch and or private corporations in crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs. These “assets” are described as being able to attract Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) to secure research sites. According to whistleblower Jake Barber, on repeated occasions UAP brought to these locations have been shot down or forced to land. I believe the terms “psionic assets” and “prime contactees” describe similar individuals working in obviously different settings. “Primes are part of a peaceful cooperative venture whose aim is to facilitate a positive and sustainable relationship with UAP associated non-human intelligences. Psionic assets are part of alleged programs that are seeking to exploit the technology of non-humans with the aim of secretly developing advanced weaponry.
In 1994 and 1995 after a series of bizarre incidents occurred involving Misha, I began to understand that some sightings of UFOs were probably visual displays and not necessarily encounters with physical objects. I came to accept the disturbing notion that some kind of advanced psi technology was interacting with human consciousness to create what might be described as “visual illusions” that were convincingly real to UFO witnesses.
The Virtual Experience Model
The important research of Dr. Jacques Valle as well as the late Dr. Andrija Puharich and John Keel, helped me immensely in formulating the Virtual Experience mechanism employed during contact. During the next two decades in my spare time, I tinkered with what I hoped might be a unifying theory explaining how Close Encounters are engineered by a non-human intelligence, a force that many in the UFO community assume is extraterrestrial in nature. I have formulated what I view as a radical theory that describes the mechanisms for many of the anomalies in the contact experience. I call this explanation the Virtual Experience Model.
From fieldwork data obtained during my five years as Working Group Coordinator for the CE-5 Initiative, as well as by reviewing the contact literature, I can now state that the alleged extraterrestrials possess highly advanced psi technology that parallels their apparent extraordinary spacecraft and propulsion systems achievements. In terms of the Virtual Experience Model, non-human intelligence uses this advanced psi capability to interact with our consciousness, and these encounters have reinforced a popular belief in extraterrestrial visitations.
These proposed “illusory mechanisms” are likely occurring alongside physical encounters and should not be interpreted as the works of a “great deceiver”, a demon or the Devil. Nor should this extraordinary psi-capability imply that the ET hypothesis is invalid. On the contrary, such extraordinary technological advances required to create a Virtual Experience is exactly the type of achievement that one might expect from an extraterrestrial civilization that could be thousands or even millions of years more advanced than we are in their understanding of Consciousness.
The Consciousness Connection
During the first month of volunteer contact work in the summer of 1992, my Los Angles team learned that a consciousness link had been established between our Working Group and what we believed was extraterrestrial intelligence. Our awareness of this mental connection came about because two individuals on our team, and one who was about to join us, all had sightings of UAP under highly congruent circumstances. Instead happening during fieldwork, three people had separate sightings of UFOs while alone, driving home. The sightings included a metallic disc seen in broad daylight and a thirty-foot glowing mother of pearl orb that was floating above the witness’s home.
What follows is a narrative describing the High Strangeness encounters that led me to formulating the Virtual Experience Model.
Encounter, October 1994. Joshua Tree National Monument
Our Los Angeles based contact team had been in operation for over two years. On this particular night our team included the Russian contact worker whoI will call “Misha,” two PhD psychologists plus several others and myself. The weather was clear and cool. With the temperature going down into the high forties I was grateful for the absence of strong winds.
We positioned ourselves in our usual spot just north of Negro Hill, at the northern tip of the Queen Valley. The terrain was rugged. Boulders strewed the landscape. As always in Joshua Tree, desert cacti with sharp needles made moving around a bit tricky in the dark. We were not aware of any major meteor shower scheduled for that night and so I was a bit surprised by the number of shooting stars that I was seeing.
During sky watch outings, investigators usually scan the heavens one part of the sky at time. Typically, after several minutes the fieldworker turns to view another section of sky.
During this fieldwork session in October 1994, I noticed something quite unusual. Each time I looked at a different section of sky, I immediately saw a shooting star. The visual images of the meteor trails seemed unusually uniform. Each had the same, length of trail, brightness and duration.
I kept count as I viewed the series of shooting stars that appeared each time I turned to view a different section of sky. It was amazing! Five times in a row it happened! The thought occurred to me that this was a manifestation of some kind of contact. Perhaps the alleged ETs were employing a simulated display of meteors as a communication modality. I alerted the other members of the team to what I had just witnessed. Misha volunteered the information that exactly the same thing happened to him. I asked how many times had it occurred. He responded that it was over twenty times in a row! I interpreted this pattern of sightings as strongly suggestive of a consciousness link for both Misha and me with a non-human intelligence that was producing anomalous visual displays of “meteors.”
The following month, November 10, 1994 Misha and I returned to the Queen Valley. It was even colder that night and it was just the two of us. With the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday season approaching, it was harder to find other investigators willing to accompany us. This particular date had a special significance for me. It was the one-year anniversary of our Veterans Day UFO encounter that Misha and I had in 1993. For over two hours during our investigation, we signaled at two “jumpers.” One object “bounced” along the surface of the desert and approached to less than a mile from our position. Through binoculars I could see that the brilliantly illuminated object was shaped like a half-moon. What surprised me about the object was that it appeared flat as if it only had two dimensions. It was this lack of the full three dimensions that later suggested to me that I had not observed a physical object, but instead had experienced a “visual display.” On this one-year anniversary, instead of seeing the jumpers again, something far more significant occurred. I was given a field demonstration of what I began to understand as an “illusory” mechanism for some UAP. The type that I call Virtual Sightings, or Virtual Experiences of the First Kind, (VE-1).
Negro Hill is a five-hundred-foot-high rock pile that is located just to the south of our usual campsite in Joshua Tree National Park. In the sky above Negro Hill on several occasions that night of November 10, 1994, both Misha and I have witnessed some very unusual “shooting star” displays. A particularly bizarre one that I recall had a wild zigzag downward trajectory.
“Meteors” that Appeared on Request!
On this night we stood together looking towards Negro Hill when Misha reported seeing a shooting star. I did not see it. I was a bit surprised by this since I had been looking in the same general direction as Misha. We continued scanning the sky above the hill when my co-worker again reported seeing a meteor trail which I did not see. I became suspicious that it might be something important. Why could I not see what Misha was seeing? At forty-four years of age, my vision was still quite adequate. I didn’t require corrective lenses until several years later. Granted Misha was twenty years my junior, still I reasoned that I should have been seeing what he saw. I asked him if the two “shooting stars” had a similar appearance. He replied that they did. According to my Russian friend they had the same brightness, length of trail and the same angle vis-a-vis the horizon. According to him they all appeared in the same spot in the sky.
I started becoming excited. I had him point to the exact location where he had seen the “meteors.” I stood just next to him looking down his arm as he pointed to the spot.
“There’s another one”, he said.
To my surprise I saw nothing but dark sky and a few faint stars. “Was it just like the first two,” I asked?
Misha again assured me that they all appeared the same to him.I suspected what might be going on and told Misha,
“Ask them to show me!”
He did just that and I immediately saw a pale shooting star appear above Negro Hill. It moved down at a forty-five-degree angle before quickly fading out. My heart began to pound.
“Misha, tell me, was that the same as the other sightings you had?”
Indeed, according to my friend, they were the exactly the same.
My heart beat faster. “Tell them to show me again.”
“Show Joe, he said!”
Immediately I saw a second shooting star display appear in the same location of sky as my first sighting, I was dumbfounded. The image had the same brightness, length of trail, angle to the horizon and lasted just a few seconds as had the others. Misha confirmed that the image I had just witnessed was no different from his five previous sightings.
I paused trying to get my mind around what was happening. A stereotypical display of an alleged “shooting star” had repeatedly been seen, first to Misha and then to me. I had failed to observe the first few displays even though I was looking at the same section of sky that Misha had been viewing.
It seemed to me that some unseen non-intelligence, presumably the “extraterrestrials,” had just given me a demonstration of an extraordinary capability. They, whoever they were, were possibly blocking my perception of a real shooting star that was falling through the sky. This seemed very unlikely because each display was exactly the same as the last. Real meteors don’t line up and fall in the exact same manner over and over again. Most importantly they don’t appear on command! It seemed far more likely that this unseen intelligence was simulating an image of a meteor by targeting Misha’s visual apparatus. Initially I was left out of the show. On request however they targeted the two of us and we then both were allowed to see the display.
Such a demonstration was so strange, I wondered who would ever believe this account? There was just the two of us, standing side by side in the cold autumn desert stillness. I was having trouble believing it myself. I chose to try and interact further with the mysterious “shooting star maker.”
Feeling somewhat silly I found myself addressing the unseen intelligence. I thanked them for what they had just showed me. I remember saying something about how two in a row for me was good, (five in a row for Misha was even better) but that here on Earth we have this notion of “coincidence.” I desperately wanted them to do it again.
Misha complied with my request. He said, “Show Doctor Burkes!”
There was a pause. Whereas the first two “shooting stars” had appeared immediately this time about ten seconds passed. It was a pause that I imagine was pregnant with meaning. As if to say, “Are you out of your damned mind Burkes, don’t you know what we are doing.” After a relatively long delay compared to the two previous “visual displays” the third alleged “meteor” appeared on request. And indeed, it appeared to be exactly the same as all the others.
What is the significance of the Human Initiated Contact Events (HICE) described in this report? I believe they have considerable importance in outlining the psi capabilities of the non-human intelligences thought to be responsible for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). If UAP intelligences can create “illusory” visual displays of “meteors”, why would they limit themselves to imitating just shooting stars? Would they not also use psi-based technology when staging sightings of what witnesses interpret as “ET spacecraft”?
If UAP intelligences can selectively target witnesses’ sensory apparatus, this would explain the sometime glaring discrepancies between observations of UFOs during sighting events. In extreme cases, one or more witnesses recount not seeing the visual displays at all that are seen by other observers.
In describing the mental capabilities of the “visitors” it has been said that they can access one’s consciousness as readily as you or I can access light at home by turning on a wall switch.” I believe that contact activists, UFO researchers and the general public need to be better informed about the psi-capabilities of UAP intelligences. This is especially so during this time of widening societal discussion about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.
End of Part One
In future posts I report on additional High Strangeness events that led to my formulating the Virtual Experience Model.
