Joseph Burkes MD is a Board-Certified Internal Medicine physician. He retired from the Southern California Permanente Group after 30 years of service in 2008. During the 1960s through the 1980s he was a volunteer peace and social justice activist working with Physicians for Social Responsibility, The United Farm Workers Union and pro-labor coalitions that were part of the occupational health and safety movement.

Joseph Burkes MD is a volunteer UFO investigator since 1992. He has worked with the Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind Initiative, the Peruvian network of contact workers known as “Rahma” and with FREE, The Foundation for Research into ET and Extraordinary Experiences.

His writings appear on social media and focus on the mechanisms of contact. These include the Virtual Experiencer Model that describes the role of illusion during Close Encounters and the intelligence-counterintelligence model for UFO investigations. Most importantly, Dr. Burkes believes that in order to establish full direct relations with the non-human intelligences associated with the flying saucer phenomenon, humanity needs to create a sustainable world peace based on social and environmental justice. This will require a spiritual transformation of humanity’s mass consciousness. In his view UFO intelligences are assisting humanity during this period of rapid change for Earth civilization.

Joseph Burkes MD is co-author of the book “Paths to Contact” edited by Jeff Becker. He also has co-authored a chapter on UAP medical healings with researcher Preston Dennett in the FREE compendium “Beyond UFOs” edited by Rey Hernandez. Dr. Burkes has submitted a chapter to a book to be published in 2021 by the Consciousness and Contact Research Institute (CCRI) with the title “ A Greater Reality.” The title of his article is “Human Initiated Contact: The Consciousness Connection."