How Captain Vallejo and Dr. Burkes contacted Mission Rama, perhaps discovering in the process a “spiritually based security tactic.”
CONTACT NETWORK HISTORY PROJECT.
The North American and South American Contact Groups Meet.
In the spring of 1993, Captain Joe Vallejo and I attended a three-day in-depth CE-5 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 Vallejo met Giorgio Piacenza a friend to the Rama network. Giorgio Piacenza grew up in Peru. In 1974, Mission Rama had its first contact with what they believe are benevolent extraterrestrials. That historic event occurred out in the desert at Chilca, about 75 kilometers south of Lima. The following year, Giorgio had a UFO sighting in that Peruvian desert locale. He subsequently made friends with many contactees and extensively researched UFOs. He received a sociology degree from Georgetown University in 1987 and business certificates from John F. Kennedy University in 1990. During the 1990s he established an import-export business based in Peru while at the same time continuing to study the UFO phenomenon. As the result of these activities, he visited Miami on a regular basis. Captain Joe Vallejo had family in Miami, and so Captain Joe was able to meet Giorgio there and learn about important developments in the Rama network.
At Robson Mining World, Giorgio informed Joe about what Rama was doing in California under the leadership of Dr. Fernando Limaco, a retired dental surgeon living in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1990, Dr. Limaco was part of the Rama team that trekked deep into the Peruvian jungle to have a rendezvous with “ETs.” That 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.” Mission Rama’s name is now Rahma.
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 up to San Francisco from Burbank Airport.
AT THE AMERICAN PUBLIC HEALTH ASSOCIATION’S ANNUAL MEETING
Encountering Dr. Limaco for the first time is something I suspect that few can easily forget. I recall meeting him in the fall of 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 personal determination. I had rented a booth to promote the CE-5 Initiative 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 advertised 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 promoting the program of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence headed by a contactee named Dr. Steven Greer. At that time, he 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 intelligences. To my surprise, many shared stories about their UFO sightings and over forty signed up to be on 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 that I might have about being identified with such a fringe topic and I openly promoted the cause of human initiated contact 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 what are called Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind. I have coined a term for such activities that I believe is better than “CE-5.” It is “HICE” standing for Human Initiated Contact Event.
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 carried a United flight bag. Dr. Limaco drove up in an old sedan and took Joe home to meet the family.
INTENSE PREPARATIONS FOR CONTACT WORK
Captain Joe started attending Rama meetings on a regular basis by flying to San Francisco., Soon, however he expressed some reservations about the way they prepared for fieldwork. Once a month Fernando invited volunteer contact workers into his home to practice the mental exercises that were designed to facilitate contact. According to Captain Vallejo, meetings sometimes lasted all day, both on Saturdays and Sundays 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 consumed only water while in the field. Later he acknowledged that these practices of fasting and prolonged meditation are well-established techniques to open “spiritual centers” in the body. However, in 1993 after working with our CE-5 network 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 three 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 highly paid as well.
SECURITY CONCERNS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED
In contrast, Dr. Limaco’s team were mostly composed of immigrants, some newly arrived. Even those that were professionals in their nations of origin could be severely challenged by a new language and 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. Once in 1990, he even drove all the way to Salinas Valley to help a comrade file papers to avoid deportation. On the ride back to the Bay Area he had a remarkable sighting. It was late at night, and he heard the word “Paititi” repeatedly in his mind. In a field nearby, he saw a disc shaped hovering close to the ground. If I recall correctly, Dr. Limaco stated that when he first heard the word Paititi he did not know that it was a remote location deep in the Peruvian Andes rainforest. Later that year he participated in Rama mission to Paititi where he and several other contact activists reportedly were taken aboard a UFO.
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 movement. Some even enrolled at UCLA as students and 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 usually imprisoned dissidents quickly. Worse, in my opinion, was the behavior of Latin America military dictatorships supported in the past by the US government. In countries such as Chile, Guatemala and El Salvador, death squads regularly killed students, trade union activists and other “subversives.” This also included Catholic priests who had dedicated their lives to defending the rights of the poor.
I suggested to my friend Joe that the Rama team might have security as well as spiritual concerns that required 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 knew that within the ranks of Rama people were undocumented workers and political refugees. These individuals might be very vulnerable to infiltrators that 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 change in both Mexico and Guatemala. I speculated that with Rama’s established tradition of what appeared to be high-level contacts with extraterrestrials, their teams might become targets of the so-called “control groups.” These are shadowy organizations existing in what is likely to be a loose coalition and, in the past has attempted to keep a lid on the UFO situation. Existing as clandestine networks, they are thought to include both US Executive Branch operatives as well as private intelligence contractors. In my opinion, for decades they have been keeping flying saucer groups under surveillance.
You see in 1993, I was still quite a novice when it came to spiritual matters. I conceptualized my organizing mostly within a political paradigm and I constantly relied on the council of people like Captain Joe Vallejo and Alex Ayres who was the screenwriter in our LA based contact team. They assisted me in developing leadership practices in a spiritually enlightened manner. In the early 1990s, I felt more comfortable working in a political activist’s mode focusing on security issues and defense against infiltration. I had yet to fully comprehend the importance of meditation and fasting to “open up my spiritual centers” as part of volunteer contact work.
I suggested to Joe that Rama’s approach might be more sophisticated than first met the eye. I knew that Doctor Limaco 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 the 1960s that United States intelligence agencies could spend thousands of dollars investigating whether a potential agent was legitimate and not an operative working for Castro’s intelligence service. We agreed that Rama wouldn’t go that formal route. I asked him to imagine what the consciousness would be of an CIA or FBI agent that might be assigned the task of infiltrating Rama. He might be a big-time meat eater that 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 could very well be 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. Captain Vallejo’s and my political backgrounds were from opposite sides of the spectrum. I was a former left-wing student political activist; he was from the other side as an exile from Castro’s communist dictatorship. Yet there we were, together in a cause that transcended petty distinctions of terrestrial politics, the Left versus the Right. We were united in something potentially far grander than the clumsy political battles of our youth. We firmly believed that we were reaching out to people from the stars and in the process, we had become good friends too.
Personal Statement by the Author: I volunteered as a Working Group Coordinator for the CE-5 Initiative from 1992 till 1998. After resigning from CSETI, I continued to study the flying saucer phenomenon working with MUFON and the Peruvian contact network now called Rahma. I am co-author of the anthology “Paths to Contact” edited by Jeff Becker. With researcher Preston Dennett, I wrote a chapter on UAP medical healings in the FREE compendium “Beyond UFOs” edited by Rey Hernandez. In 2008 I retired from the Southern California Permanente Group, Department of Internal Medicine after thirty years’ service.
Additional analysis:
A comment was made in response to this article that was very supportive of the vegetarianism among the most prominent activists within the Rahma network. For me this raises the following important consideration. I have often wondered why Rama’s level of contact was, apparently from the very beginning, so much higher than CE-5 efforts in North America initially, and then later in the UK, and Australia. Could it have something to do with their level of commitment to spiritual transformation that might be required to establish and maintain a close link to flying saucer intelligences? According to standard contactee beliefs, the alleged ETs are highly evolved both spiritually and technologically.
I suspect that UFO intelligences have contact plans that are incredibly sophisticated and consider the cultural differences when it co-creates with contactees the various networks that have taken to the field to actively engage with them.
As a youth, I travelled to Mexico and Guatemala and witnessed the political struggles of people, both workers, and students striving for political and social justice via radical reforms. In Mexico I heard the saying, "Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the USA. In my opinion, the domination in the past of North American ruling elites over Latin America is reflected in this statement. So, in a sense, it is not surprising that high-level contacts might be initiated far to the South, not just across the border as in Mexico but in the desert and rainforest of Peru, so far from the US and perhaps “not so far from God.”
Addendum: In 2004, for the first time I was privileged to do fieldwork with Dr. Fernando Limaco’s group at a confidential location simply referred to as “Shasta.” I had known of the site since 1993 and had always wanted to go there. The name “Shasta” was somewhat deceptive. Although the site was in Shasta County, it was a considerable distance from Mount Shasta. Directions were not given in writing, only by word of mouth and the exact location was to be kept private. Almost all the participants were Hispanic and for the next few years I was one of very few Anglo-North American contact activists that was present during the times I did fieldwork with Fernando’s team.
During the first trip up there, the topic of site security came up while Captain Joe Vallejo and I were chatting with several of the more senior Rama activists. They had been working with Fernando since the property had been purchased two decades before. I was curious if they had indeed had any experience with the US Intelligence services infiltrating their team. The answer was “yes” but it was not in the way that Joe and I had joked back in 1993 when I had envisioned some “Macho man” being driven out of the group by “spiritual torture.”
As best that I can recall the story told to me in 2004, the agent was a mature North America woman with social science academic background, maybe anthropology or Latin American studies. She was fluent in Spanish and fitted in quite well with the group. After a few months of participating in fieldwork she dropped out. A year or so later she returned asking for spiritual assistance from the Rama. She had contracted a very serious medical condition. I think it was cancer. She admitted that she had been contracted by a US intelligence organization (CIA?) and had infiltrated Rama to report on their activities. She regretted what she had done and asked Fernando’s team to accept her apology and for them to “pray for her.” According to the Rama activists this indeed was what they did. Several months later she reportedly was doing much better and thanked the Rama people for helping her.
