Dr. Joseph Burkes was born in New York City in 1949. After attending UCLA as an undergraduate, in 1976 he received his MD degree from Tufts University in Boston. From 1979 until retiring in 2008 he was a staff physician for Kaiser Permanente in Panorama City California. His area of specialization is general internal medicine. Dr. Burkes worked in primary care, geriatrics, occupational medicine and in the emergency room department of his medical group.
Joseph Burkes MD has participated in a number of peace and social justice movements of the last century. As a young child during the 1950s, he marched with other children demanding an end to nuclear bomb testing. Those detonations in the atmosphere resulted in strontium 90 being deposited in the bones of children that drank milk that was contaminated. During the 1960s he was a student activist working to end the war in Vietnam.
The following decade as a young doctor, he served as an organizer and medical consultant to the Los Angeles Committee on Occupational Safety and Health. That group was part of a nation-wide coalition of health and legal professionals that labored to make the American workplace safer.
In the 1980s, he was a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR). Its educational campaign focused on ending the nuclear arms race. In the Los Angeles chapter of PSR, Dr. Burkes served as head of Speaker Training and co-produced the physicians’ radio show, “Prescription for Survival.” He briefly served on the national board of Directors of PSR.
During the Cold War, he traveled to the former Soviet Union four times as part of the umbrella organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. This group received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for its educational campaign to warn world citizens and governments of the growing dangers of the nuclear arms race.
In May of 1992, less than a year after the fall of the Soviet Union, Dr. Burkes met fellow ER physician Dr. Steven Greer. For the next five years, Dr. Burkes was closely associated with Dr. Greer’s Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI). This research organization studied the UFO phenomenon by directly interacting with a non-human intelligence responsible for the appearance of some UFOs. CSETI under Dr. Greer’s leadership devised a set of contact protocols that allowed field investigators to carry out real-time research of the flying saucer phenomenon.
On Dr. Burkes’ first fieldwork session, with multiple other witnesses present, he observed an anomalous nocturnal light that fulfilled his definition of a UFO. Human initiated contact with the presumed intelligence responsible for UFOs is designated by CSETI as a Close-Encounter of the Fifth Kind (CE-5). The CSETI project facilitating these encounters has been called the CE-5 Initiative.
In August of 1992 Dr. Burkes was named as Los Angeles Working Group Coordinator for the CE-5 Initiative. He held this CSETI post till 1998. In the course of his contact work Dr. Burkes reports witnessing multiple CE-5s in the US, Mexico and England.
Dr. Burkes views his volunteer work in the contact network as an extension of his past efforts to establish peace and social justice. If the ET hypothesis is correct, as many researchers maintain, and non-human intelligence of an extraterrestrial nature is present on our planet, then a citizens’ outreach campaign is required to promote peaceful contacts.
In 1998 as the result of political and personal differences with the CSETI Director, Dr. Burkes resigned from his leadership position in the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. He continues to be interested in the flying saucer phenomenon and has worked with Mutual UFO Network, MUFON and the Peruvian based contact network now known as Mission Rahma.
Dr. Burkes has been married to Yael Bentovim since 1975. They have two adult offspring, Julia and Jonathan Burkes. The Burkes enjoy the company of 4 dogs and a 112-year-old desert tortoise called Moishe and reside in California..
