Contact Network History Project. An Experiencer Reports Flying a Saucer while in the Left Seat.

Joseph Burkes MD 2016

Thank-you to Dr. Burkes for this important story. Many experiencers report having been allowed to pilot the flying saucer. The Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial Experiences in fact places the figure at 13%. This story involving 747 pilots give support to those who have had the experience.

Back in the 1990s Captain Joe Vallejo was one of the founding members of our Los Angeles CE-5 team. With over 20 years experience as a commercial jet pilot, he was a great asset to our investigations. Like many airline pilots, he and his entire crew had a sighting while in the air.  It was a daylight event that occurred during the 1980s. The unknown was a cylindrical shaped glowing UFO, about a hundred feet long. It steadily paced their jet at a distance of several miles. Reportedly it was not picked up by onboard or control tower radar. The sighting lasted several minutes. Captain Vallejo looked away for a few seconds and when he turned back, the UFO was gone.

MENTAL COMMUNICATION PRECEDES PHYSICAL CONTACT.

  

During my team’s first month of field investigations one of my co-workers that I will call “Mark” had a telepathic communication while we were practicing the contact protocols in the Santa Susanna Pass. Mark was a screenwriter in Hollywood. He held a baccalaureate from Harvard and two masters degrees, one in psychology and the other in film writing. He was knowledgeable in a wide range of topics including mysticism and channeling. I was just a beginning meditator but Mark was very experienced in this discipline.

On night while in the field during meditation, at the level of knowledge, he received the message that mental communication preceded physical contact and that specialized training would be provided for those individuals that might be offered an opportunity to consciously board ET craft. I recall our discussing the possibility that such instruction would be given while the human subjects were dreaming.  For this reason as team leader I paid special attention to any UFO dreams that fellow contact activists might report.

THE “BUDDY SYSTEM” WAS EMPLOYED

The CSETI contact protocols as developed by Dr Greer and his loyal assistant Shari Adamiak included the proviso that each working group member should have a “buddy” that would keep a look out for the other. Research sites were typically in remote locations often on hill or mountaintops and having a “buddy” was thought to be a reasonable safety precaution.

Captain Joe Vallejo’s buddy was a man that I will call “Ernie,” Ernesto in Spanish. He was from Venezuela and since Joe and Ernesto were the only two Hispanic males on our team, they naturally gravitated to each other and became “buddies.” Ernesto had his first sighting of a UFO during his childhood when he was visiting his grandma out in the Venezuelan countryside. She was apparently quite psychic. He described her as a “curadera,” a healer. One night Ernesto saw something strange in the sky and he asked her what it could be. Her reply in Spanish to the child when translated is; “It ‘s just the star people who visit us in their ships.”

Years later when Ernie reportedly brought up their sighting, with a frightened expression on her face his grandma denied ever telling him such a thing. When he tried to bring it up again she said that she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

 AN ADVANCE TEAM TO CHECK OUT POTENTIAL SITES

It was the fall of 1994 and we had already gone through three local research sites in the LA area. All were abandoned because of security issues. We had been intermittently using Joshua Tree as our fieldwork laboratory Indeed it was a treasure chest of UFO activity, but the high desert is terribly hot for at least 4 months a year, and Joshua Tree is a three and a half hour drive from LA. We needed to find a site closer to Los Angeles. As was our custom, I organized an advance team to scope out a potential location for warm weather investigations.

Frazier Park is located less than an hour from the San Fernando Valley where most of my team hailed from. It is located next to Los Osos National Forest that has elevations up to over 8000 feet. Captain Joe Vallejo and Ernie accompanied me on the drive. We used Joe’s 4-wheel drive Isuzu SUV. On arrival it was afternoon; the forest was a cold and breezy. The campsites were located at the lower elevations and were completely empty.

As we bounced around in his 4-wheel drive vehicle, Joe entertained us with his pilot stories. Working his way up through the ranks during his flying career, he had flown a wide range of “equipment,” pilots’ lingo for aircraft. From small Cessnas as a flight instructor at the Van Nuys Airport, to cargo planes in Saudi Arabia, he took every rough and ready job he could find to get the experience and flight hours to enable him to apply for employment with the major airlines. In 1994 Joe had been a professional pilot for twenty-five years and was at the top of his career. He had recently been promoted and was now flying for United in the  “left seat” (captain’s chair) He commanded the most expensive and technologically sophisticated jet in the fleet, the Boeing 747.

A JET PILOT’S STRANGE DREAM

Joe shared with Ernie and me a recent dream that he had. It was a happy one. He found himself at the controls of a UFO flying above a beautiful forested mountain range. His instructor, who Joe suspected was not human, somewhat surprisingly was in the right seat. Joe was pleasantly in the captain’s chair. The controls were literally out of this world. The craft was flown by a mental interface between the saucer and the pilot.

After hearing this account we had a lively discussion of what it might mean. Eventually there were five pilots in the Western USA CE-5 working groups. Two were “line captains” for large carriers. I joked saying something like,” You guys are so greedy. You’re not content to fly every craft made her on Earth. You want to get promoted to Starfleet.”

Joe had to agree that it was the best UFO dream any pilot could ask for. I went on to fantasize about a day, hopefully not too far in the future, when contactee pilots on furlough from their “day jobs” would be entrusted to land ET craft during a celebration of first contact. The human crews I imagined could minimize any perception of threat from the incoming saucers.

“Just think of it Joe.” I said, “You could get on the squawk box and say. “This is Captain Vallejo on leave from United Airlines. I’m piloting ET craft “Friendship One” and we are coming in for a landing. Over and out!

It was a sweet fantasy and we all had a good laugh.

A STRANGE FORGETFULNESS

Joe Vallejo had an impressive memory. His command of the esoteric literature was phenomenal. He had read all the classics of UFO investigation in English as well as the extensive reports from Latin American contactees. He had mastered several disciplines of meditation and even studied out of body travel at the Monroe institute. He was also serving as my liaison with Mission Rama and later served as my guide allowing me to do field work with them. At that time back in the 1990s this was something few North American UFO investigators ever got an opportunity to do. Over the years Captain Joe taught me a great deal and with his travel experience and knowledge of diverse cultures, I couldn’t help but think of him as a kind of Renaissance man.

A year or so after our trip to Los Osos National Forrest, Captain Vallejo excitedly told me about what he described as a really far out dream. “Get this Joe,” he told me. “There I was in the pilot’s seat flying a UFO over a forest. And the really weird thing is that there weren’t any controls. I was flying the thing with my mind!”

I listened intently. I asked him if he had ever had a similar dream. He told me that he had not. I asked again.

 ”Are you sure?”

“No such dream” was his reply.

To this I said, “You were in the left seat.”

A puzzled expression covered his countenance.

I then recounted our past scouting party in Los Osos National Forest. I reminded him how his buddy Ernesto was with us and that he had described the exact same dream to both Ernie and me. He nodded his head slowly as the memory came back to him.

“How could I have forgotten such a thing?” he asked me.

I really don’t know the answer to his question. For a man of his impressive memory, as an activist who was and still is dedicated to the cause of cosmic peace, I have trouble imagining that he could easily forget the wish dream of so many pilots that have witnessed UFOs and then wanted to fly them.

Maybe he forgot because someone or something wanted him to forget. I imagined that it was part of my “mission” as “team leader” to notice these strange lapses of memory and alert others. If so then please “listen up” and consider that such surprising bouts of forgetfulness just might be a deliberate and subtle evidence of contact. Or as Ernesto’s “curadera” grandma said, “it’s just the star people who visit us in their ships.”