A “Heads up” Contact Download 10/3/93, Joshua Tree National Monument

Joseph Burkes MD 1993, edited 2022

Introduction:

“Desert Site I” was our UFO fieldwork station in Joshua Tree National Monument. It was of one of two high desert research sites that my Los Angeles based contact team used from the spring of 1993 till the end of summer 1997. Site 1 was situated in what I called “the little Queen Valley.” At 4000 feet in elevation, we were about five hundred yards south of Queen Mountain that rose up another 1300 feet. To the south was a three-hundred-foot-high rock pile called Negro Hill. It blocked our view of main park road a few miles way. Negro Hill effectively provided us with cover and prevented anyone on the road from seeing the powerful lights that we were using. 

The Phoenix Team Coordinator Was Wayne Peterson 

The Oct 1993 outing was special for several reasons. It was our first time back to Joshua Tree since the previous spring when we had teamed up with Wayne Peterson’s Phoenix contact team to joint fieldwork together. It has been a lot of fun working with Wayne’s group, in part, because of his great sense of humor. We joked about the possibility of UFOs landing and our boarding them. Wayne had told us if such a momentous event occurred, we shouldn’t try to rearrange the furniture on the “ET spacecraft to give them better feng shui.” Wayne had a big belly laugh that was contagious. I was grateful that he, his Asian American wife Grace and the others had driven six hours across the desert to meet us.

During that previous investigation we had observed unique nocturnal light displays. Wayne called them “bursters.” Repeatedly, across the “little Queen Valley”, one at a time different hillsides suddenly became lit up. These illuminations were not particularly bright and faded out over about five to ten seconds. They “burst out” from no identifiable source, hence the name “bursters.”  This specific “visual display” only appeared during that May 1992 joint field investigation. I never again witnessed this type of anomalous event at Joshua Tree or at any other site during my subsequent decades of volunteer contact work. To my knowledge, no other team in the CE-5 network every reported witnessing a similar visual display. 

First Time in the Field with “Prime Contactee Misha” 

There was another reason that made our October 1993 outing special. It was the first time I did fieldwork with a young Russian Jewish immigrant that I call “Misha.” He was an EKG tech at the medical center where I was employed. After he worked with me for about a year, he made a somewhat outlandish claim. He told me that several years before he had experienced a vivid dream while living in Belarus. In this alleged dream, he traveled to America and did contact work with a tall bearded Jewish physician. Supposedly, according to Misha, when he first saw me in the ER, he recognized me as the doctor in his dream. 

Misha was important because he was an example of what I later would call “Prime Contactees.” These are high level contact experiencers that function as “human UFO magnets. They effectively draw the phenomena to them with repeated sightings and other kinds of anomalous contact events. Their UFO sightings often occur with other witnesses present. This serves to verify the Primes’ special relationship to UAP intelligences. For the next several years Misha became my guide into the High Strangeness aspects of UFO contactees. In December of 1993, Misha and I had missing time while driving back from Joshua Tree. This was part of a wave of High Strangeness Missing Time experiences that swept across the entire CE-5 network in the Western United States. (A link to the narrative describing these incidents appears at the end of this blog.)

The most important event that happened for me during the October 2, 1993, field investigation was that I experienced a telepathic communication that could be verified. It was a kind of “heads up” notification. I was informed when, where in the sky and the number of “UFOs” that were going to appear at our research station in the course of that night’s fieldwork. I will always recall that experience with excitement because it was the first time that I received accurate psi mediated data precognitively.  As strange as it may seem, I correctly perceived the time and direction of a UFO’s appearance prior to the event taking place. 

“Telepathic Override”

I remembered the CSETI Director had alerted contact activists that such psi mediated communications were possible. He also suggested that we discuss these “telepathic overrides” amongst the team when they occurred. On that October night in the high desert, I acquired information during our first guided meditation. It was between nine and ten p.m. The temperature was a comfortable 75 degrees with no wind. Seated on the soft desert sand in beach chairs, the team’s mood was peaceful and expectant. What happened to me was like watching a series of video clips with my mind’s eyes. The visual components were accompanied by abstract thoughts that told a story about contact events that were to unfold.  

At “the level of knowledge” I knew that our sighting was to occur at 2 a.m. sharp. The information had a certainty to it, like knowing that one plus one equals two. One craft would appear in the northwest sky at the appointed hour.   I shared this information with my co-workers soon after receiving it.  The youngest member of the team, Jason Caldwell, reportedly acquired the same precognitive message during our meditation but did not share his communication till after the sighting had transpired. Jason said that he did not “want to appear foolish.” And so, he did not mention his psychic impression.  

In 1993, I was doing many overnights in the ER and was sleep deprived. As team leader I took the prerogative of napping first while the others watched the sky, played anomalous sounds recorded in a crop circle and sent mental messages inviting any UFOs capable of responding to meet us under the stars. I told my team, “showtime is 2 a.m., one craft is going to appear in the northwest sky.” I added the proviso that they absolutely had to wake me up at 1:50 a.m. They did so, and ten minutes later the sighting unfolded as “predicted.” 

“Showtime!”

Exactly at two in the morning, one red glowing orb appeared in the northwest. It silently moved westward in the sky above Queen Mountain. About 30 degrees up from the horizon. It was heading east by southeast. With arm fully extended, the orb had the size of about one finger’s width. In the black night sky, its speed and distance from us was hard to determine. The team’s estimates of the distance ranged from one to three miles. My guess was not more than a mile. As it passed our position on the desert floor, it slightly changed its direction and accelerated due east; the red orb quickly disappeared. The sighting lasted no more than ten seconds.  

While meditating I acquired additional information. It was like a dream, but I was totally awake. In my mind’s eye I “saw” a series of images that could be described as short video clips. These were accompanied by information about what I was “seeing” at the level of knowledge. I “viewed” what I imagined was an “ET scout ship” heading towards our location. I watched a saucer shaped craft flying close to the ground moving rapidly through desert valleys. We were its destination. The image was akin to viewing a scene through night vision/infra-red glasses. The saucer was softly glowing a dark red, the desert surface and mountains were white against a dark sky.  In a packet like transmission of information, I was allowed to perceive a complex relationship between the scout ship’s young crew, who seemed to be quite eager for contact to the point of exuberance, and a “higher echelon of ETs” in a more distant large cigar shaped “command vehicle.” I got the impression that the saucer’s crew was being held on a “tight leash” while “senior officials” were coolly weighing the decision as to how to proceed with us. The decision was made, and it was to be a flyby.

The Saucer “Opens up” for me

The image of the saucer then took on a grainy appearance like it was from an old black and white movie. It was as if there was a fine grid between me and the saucer. Then an even more bizarre scene appeared my mind’s eye. The side of the saucer closest to me pealed open and I could look inside.  It reminded me of the way old fashion sardine cans were opened when I was a child. They had a straight metal key attached to the lid. By turning the key round and round, the lid wrapped around the key and the can was opened. The same thing appeared to happen to the outer wall of the saucer. Once opened, inside I saw beings that fit the typical stereotype, i.e., small gray beings. They were operating controls and scurrying around a central pillar that I imagined had something to do with the craft’s propulsion. Their movements were so rapid and precise that I suddenly realized why some contact experiencers described this group of alleged ETs as “insectoid.” 

I encounter an Ancient Wise “ET”

In addition to these visual impressions, I also “saw” a senior ET official seated behind a desk. He appeared to be humanoid, ancient and of the so-called Zeta Reticulum race of beings. The room in which he sat was pitch black of ill-defined dimensions. A spotlight beam of white light illuminated him. He was using a tablet to write symbols. They appeared to be some kind of hieroglyphics. The way in which he effortlessly and artistically inscribed them on a tablet at his desk, reminded me of an oriental Zen master painting beautiful Chinese ideograms. I was led to believe that each symbol represented a complex thought that possibly explained the amount of information contained in several pages of human text. This “being” was clearly a senior leader of great authority.

As I approached him gingerly, like a humble student standing before a great professor or scientist, he became aware of my presence. He slowly looked up and I saw an impassive gray face, wrinkled with age lines. Although I perceived no emotion expressed on his face, I thought that I had detected some slight amusement at my being there. The message that I received from him was simple. It had three parts to it. I did not “hear” him speak, so presumably it was conveyed telepathically. The communication went was as follows:
 “YOU ARE A YOUNG RACE,” and as I received this thought the scene began to fade. Just before his image disappeared, I perceived the second part of the message, “YOU HAVE A LOT TO LEARN.”   In a flash my audience with this great being was over. Nevertheless, a third part of his communication softly resounded in my mind several hours later. After the UFO had swiftly and silently flown by our position in the desert, his final thought came in as, “AND WE ARE GOING TO TEACH YOU!”

Addendum: On another social media page I was asked the question. Do you still experience these “downloads?”




My answer: No, I don’t, although I wish things were otherwise. The contact downloads occurred intensively during a 3-month period in the fall and winter of 1993. Then sporadically for another two years. Most of the downloads were what one might call, “awake dreams.” In my mind’s eye, I saw a series of images like video clips. They were mostly in black and white and sometimes had a grainy quality to them. These visual impressions were associated with my receiving “packet of information” that provided a kind of narration to the visual components of the experiences.  

As you might imagine, given that I was a contact team leader, I was most eager for communications to continue. What made “heads up” messages during fieldwork so special was that the information about the subsequent sightings could be verified as accurate by multiple witnesses. Alas, such advanced notifications happened only twice during fieldwork.  

‪I complained to my fellow CE-5 Working Group Coordinator Wayne Peterson. He was the team leader in Phoenix Arizona.  He said, “Don’t worry Joe. The ETs just wanted to show you that this was something you could do. They gave you a class titled ‘Channeling 101.’ The course was over, so the lessons stopped.” His explanation made sense to me and I let go of my frustration. 

I share this information on social media in the hope that it will be helpful to the current generation of volunteer contact workers. Wayne, Working Group Coordinator for Phoenix died eight years ago. Shari, WG Coordinator for Denver, died in 1998. I am now in my 8th decade of life. I am pleased to see that there are many enthusiastic young people in the next generation of contact activists that will carry on the work.

The blog linked directly below describes a missing time event during a CE5 field investigation. It was one of three missing time occurrences that tracked through the CE-5 network in the Western USA in 1993.

Missing Time on Highway 62

Missing Time on Highway 62