CONTACT NETWORK HISTORY PROJECT. How Captain Vallejo and Dr Burkes Made Contact with Mission Rama. The North American and South American Contact Networks Meet. Joseph Burkes MD 2015 In the spring of 1993 Captain Joe Vallejo and I attended a three-day in-depth CSETI training held at Robson’s Mining World. It was a rough and ready desert resort outside of Phoenix. He was working as a jet pilot for United Airlines and eventually achieved the highly desired status of a “line 747 Captain. GIORGIO PIACENZA’S IMPORTANT ROLE At the contact training event Joe met Giorgio Piacenza a Peruvian member of Rama. Giorgio told Joe about the work that Rama was doing in California under the leadership of Dr. Fernando Limaco who is a retired dental surgeon and living in the Bay Area. In 1990 Dr Limaco was part of the Rama team that trekked deep into the Peruvian jungle to have a rendezvous with extraterrestrials. This historic encounter took place on the eastern foothills of the Andes Mountains in a remote area known as Paititi. There Sixto Paz Wells and his companions were allegedly taken onboard an ET craft as part of a cooperative venture with what they describe as “spiritually advanced extraterrestrials.’ In the fall of 1993 Captain Vallejo started attending Rama activities in the Bay Area. He told me that as a United Captain it was easy for him to catch shuttle flights from Burbank Airport up to San Francisco. AT THE AMERICAN PUBLIC HEALTH ASSOCIATION’S ANNUAL MEETING Meeting Dr. Limaco for the first time is something I suspect that few can easily forget. I recall meeting him in 1993 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. Short, robust, with copper colored skin, he was the very image of the indigenous people of the Andes. His dark eyes were set deep into his face. When he spoke his eyes shinned with a passionate intensity. I had no doubt that the individual standing before me possessed enormous physical strength and personal determination. I had rented a booth for CSETI at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting. It was a big affair with over ten thousand health professionals and representatives of the pharmaceutical and medical supply companies. I set up a modest booth next to hundreds of others that advertized various health programs and medical products. It was a rather audacious thing to for me to do. There I was a practicing ER doctor and I was openly advocating the program of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence headed by a contactee. Dr Steven Greer at the time was also an ER physician. To my surprise when Dr Limaco showed up at the Convention center he volunteered to help me staff the booth. He looked on as I “worked” the crowd by inviting fellow healthcare professionals to see UFO videos and join our radical campaign of conducting fieldwork in remote locations in an attempt to interact with UFO intelligence. To my surprise many shared stories about their UFO sightings and over forty signed up for our mailing list. MY PAST MEDICAL ACTIVISM Having worked as a physician activist in International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War made it easier for me to mix politics with medicine. Admittedly the UFO issue did not carry the same prestige as the doctor’s peace movement that was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1985. Nevertheless I put aside any reservations I might have about being identified with such a fringe topic and I openly promoted Dr. Greer’s cause in that highly public venue. Dr Limaco and I spent several hours chatting in Spanish and English at the table. I was impressed by his intense devotion to Rama’s mission of building fraternal relations with what he described as the “extraterrestrials.” As I learned more about Rama’s contact techniques and goals, I couldn’t help seeing many similarities to Dr. Greer’s CSETI Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind Initiative. CAPTAIN JOE VALLEJO MEETS THE RAMA LEADER Some fifteen years after joining Rama, Joe had no trouble recalling how he had met Dr. Limaco at the San Francisco International Airport. On the phone Joe had described his appearance to Fernando so that he could easily recognize the captain at the United Terminal. He was wearing his blue uniform and flight bag. Dr Limaco drove up in an old sedan and took Joe to his place to meet the family. INTENSE PREPARATIONS FOR CONTACT WORK Captain Joe started attending Rama meetings but soon expressed some reservations about the way they prepared for fieldwork. Once a month Fernando invited contact workers into his home to practice the mental exercises that were designed to facilitate contact. According to the captain meetings sometimes lasted all day on both Saturday and Sunday and involved chanting, group meditation, prayer and the consumption of only vegetarian food. Joe also learned that the more experienced Rama people ate strictly fruit for three days prior to doing fieldwork, and some only consumed water while in the field. Later he acknowledged that these practices of fasting and prolonged meditation were well-established techniques to open “spiritual centers” in the body. However in 1993 after working with CSETI for over a year, where such rigor was not routine, Joe said that he found the Rama approach a bit extreme. As I recall he even ventured to use the “C” word, indicating that he thought Rama’s methods were a bit “cult like.” My view of Rama’s preparation for contact was different from his. I knew that many of the Latin American contactees were not as wealthy as their North American counterparts. In my contact team based in LA for example we had no less than 3 physicians who worked at Kaiser, two PhD psychologists and a Harvard graduate who did quite well as a screen writer/producer in Hollywood. Captain Joe as a line officer for United was very well paid as well. SECURITY CONCERNS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED In contrast Dr Limaco’s team I imagined was mostly composed of immigrants, some newly arrived. Even those who were professionals in their nations of origin would be challenged by a new language new culture. Some probably didn’t have papers to work in the US. I later learned from Dr Limaco that he had assisted a Rama activist who was having problems with the INS, Immigration and Naturalization Service. He drove all he way to he Salinas Valley to help his comrade to avoid deportation. During my years of student anti-war activism in the 1960s I had been involved with security issues. This was because we were challenged by the presence of FBI informants, agent provocateurs and LAPD spies that penetrated our meetings. Some even covertly played minor roles in our leadership. This was in contrast to the fierce repression of dissidents in the former USSR and current day Cuba. Those regimes t usually imprisoned dissidents. Worse in my opinion was the behavior of Latin America military dictatorships supported by the US. In those countries death squads regularly killed students, trade union activists and other “subversives.” I suggested to my friend Joe that the Rama team might have security as well as spiritual needs for such a strict preparation for contact work. I didn’t understand enough about Rama to know if this was truly a legitimate issue, but I thought that within the ranks of Rama people there would be undocumented workers, or political refuges who might be very vulnerable to infiltrators who could easily call their names into the Migra (Latino name for the INS) as a way of disrupting Rama. POLITICAL VERSUS A SPIRITUAL APPROACH As a leftwing student visiting Latin America in the 1960s I had witnessed government violence against movements for social in both Mexico and Guatemala. I speculated that because of Rama’s established tradition of what appeared to be high-level contacts with extraterrestrials, their teams might become targets from the so-called “control groups” who were eager to keep a lid on the UFO situation. You see in 1993 I was quite a novice when it came to matters spiritual. I conceptualized my organizing within a political paradigm and I constantly relied on the council of people like Joe Vallejo and a man I call “Mark” who was the screenwriter. They assisted me to develop my leadership practices in a spiritually enlightened matter. I felt more comfortable working in a political activist’s mode in which security issues and defense against infiltration were operational. I suggested to Joe that Rama’s approach might be more sophisticated than first met the eye. I knew that Doctor Fernando and his assistants were highly intuitive and could pick up subtle hints about what kind of people were in their group. I told Joe that their days of meditating together and eating vegetarian food might be a kind of “poor man’s” security clearance. Joe knew from his youthful days of political activism in his homeland that intelligence agencies could spend thousands of dollars investigating to see if a potential agent was legitimate. We agreed Rama wouldn’t go that formal route. I asked him to imagine what the consciousness would be of an agent who was assigned the task of infiltrating Rama. He probably would be a big time meat eater who possibly liked booze and cigarettes. I could even see him take a liking to some of the younger women in Rama. A POOR MAN’S “SECURITY SYSTEM” Now place that individual in a crowded room with spiritually enlightened contact workers who are meditating, praying and eating just vegetables for two days. The stress of such a culture clash would be very hard to hide. I envisioned such an agent running screaming from Fernando’s house after just a few hours of such spiritual “torture.” After I finished my theorizing, Joe gave me a big smile, “ I see what you’re driving at,” he told me. “A poor man’s security check. It might be something like that.” We both laughed. A CAUSE FAR GREATER THAN EARTHLY CONCERNS It was a poignant moment however. Our political backgrounds were from opposite sides of the spectrum. I was a former left-wing student political activist, he worked the other side. Yet there we were together in a cause that transcended petty distinctions of terrestrial politics of Left versus the Right. We were united in something potentially far grander than the clumsy political battles of our youth. We firmly believed we were reaching out to people from the stars and in the process we had become good friends too. END OF PART 1 About the author: Dr Burkes volunteered as a Working Group Coordinator for the CE-5 Initiative from 1992 till 1998 when he left CSETI. He has continued to study the flying saucer phenomenon working with MUFON and the Peruvian contact network now called Rahma. Dr Burkes retired from the Southern California Pemanente Group after thirty years service in 2008. He is a board certified internal medicine physician and is licensed to practice in California.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 06:40:18 +0000
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