Photograph by Dr. Steven Greer and Star, LLC

A shooting star sizzled across the sky. Everyone went “oooh” like they were watching fireworks. It was something, at least.

By the time I got to Temecula, the UFOs had already been spotted. According to Manny Lopez — a local and my campsite neighbor at Native Falls Campground, just a few miles from the city’s wine trail — they had been seen two nights earlier. Lopez had brought his family out to camp for his son’s twelfth birthday on July 27 — the same day as mine. (Even more numerically eerie: our birthdays were 27 years apart.) As we tended our campsites and shot the shit, I asked, “You ever see any UFOs out here?” Lopez’s expression said: how the hell did you know that? He pointed to the sky. “We noticed some type of lights in the mountain range beyond us,” he said, “and they just weren’t any type of regular lights. They weren’t even flashing. It was like a half circle over the mountain range. That light would come on, stay on for a couple seconds, then turn off. Then it would be in another part. It wasn’t a regular circle, but more like an oblong circle, and the middle was kind of fuzzy.”

Photograph by Artem Peretiatko, iStock / Getty Images Plus

Later that evening, “I looked out in the distance and saw what I thought was probably an airplane moving away from us,” he recalled. “When we were going inside, I noticed it was getting closer and closer. I called my wife back outside. Once I got to see the lights in real close range, I noticed there was no body in-between them, and they were moving in sequence. It sounded kind of like a helicopter, but had more of a deeper, slower hum. It sounded too far away for how close those lights were. Then when it went right over us. The middle, where the body should have been, just looked misty. It wasn’t going super-fast or super-slow.”

Lopez watched whatever it was fade into the distance, then turned to his wife Amy. “What the fuck was that? I’ve never seen anything like that!” He searched local internet chat spaces to see if anybody else had seen it. Nobody had.

According to the National UFO Reporting Center, there have been more than 149,000 UFO sightings around the world (and counting) — and that’s just the most “credible and interesting cases” since the center started keeping track in 1995. The center’s database is organized by where the craft was seen and what shape it was. Shape categories include things like orbs, flashes, fireballs, and what Lopez saw, which would likely fall in the “oval” or “other” category.

Lopez’s story sparked a flame of excitement within me. I was, after all, about to attend as the first night of the CE5 Contact & Consciousness conference, hosted by renowned ufologist Dr. Steven Greer at Callaway winery and drawing curious folks from all over the world. When I told Lopez that a famous ufologist was in town, his sighting seemed to start making sense to him; perhaps Greer had attracted some interstellar attention.

Dr. Greer’s technique

If you’re not responsible for one of the 800 million views of Dr. Steven Greer’s documentaries, here’s a quick bio: Greer, 69, is a former emergency-room doctor who founded The Disclosure Project in 1993. The disclosure he’s after is from the government; he wants to know what they know about extra-terrestrials. As a result, he has lot of friends and maybe even more enemies. On Greer’s website, hundreds of open-sourced government documents have been archived for civilians to view for no charge. (However, a registration e-mail address is required.)

What I find most interesting about Greer is his chosen method for making contact with extra-terrestrials. It’s called CE5, or close encounters of the fifth kind, and it is a human-initiated encounter, one that uses expanded consciousness, achieved through meditation, to make peaceful contact with ET civilizations. Greer created CE5 in 1990, and during this three-day conference, a group of 500 curious people would participate in mass CE5 events led by him. I was curious: was this some hoaxed bullshit? Or was Greer sincere?

Even though this event would involve mass participation, CE5 doesn’t depend on size. According to the CE5 app guidelines, assembling a team of no more than six to eight people is recommended. Even solo CE5 is an option for those courageous or curious enough. The key thing: the group’s mindset should be unified. From the app: “ETs are very considerate of those who are not ready to manifest overtly and will cater their presence to the least-prepared member of the group.” If you’re showing fear, don’t expect them to come kick it with you.

CE5, or close encounters of the fifth kind, is a human-initiated encounter, one that uses expanded consciousness, achieved through meditation, to make peaceful contact with ET civilizations.

Photograph by Dr. Steven Greer and Star, LLC

Your team can be anybody. Grab Mr. Fanetti, your old fifth-grade science teacher. Call your uncle Bobby who is living in his van down on an OB side street. Snag your homie Joe out of rehab for the night. (Greer recommends that the meditations and CE5 should be done sober anyway.) Once the team is assembled, bring what you would bring camping—chairs (zero gravity if possible), warm clothing, binoculars, flashlights, and so on. The main, and maybe most important, devices to have are star/satellite charts to help identify what you see in the sky. Planes are easy to identify by their flashing lights and consistent movement, but having a chart helps prevent mistaking stars for UFOs. Of course, there’s plenty of other stuff up there, from the International Space Station to SpaceX’s Starlink, but still. (And even some of that other stuff may not be “not of this earth.” During The Disclosure Project’s National Press Club event in June 2023, Dr. Greer claimed that many UFOs or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena are man-made. “The big story nobody is telling you,” he said, “is a large number of UAPs are in fact deep, black budget, electrogravitic, electromagnetic, propulsion devices based on the study of extra-terrestrial vehicles that began in the 1940s.”)

Okay, we’ve got our gear. Uncle Bobby has pulled some chairs from his van, Joe is carrying the binoculars and flashlight, and Mr. Fanetti is being trusted with the charts. Now we need a good spot. Let’s get out of the city, where light and noise pollution will kill any chances of an encounter, and out into nature.

Once the spot is established, “arrange the chairs in an inward-facing circle to allow the group to maintain a view in all directions.” Then there’s the moon factor. If the moon is big and bright, we may want to think about going out on a different night, when it’s fresh, or only a few days into its cycle. And another thing: if there are going to be celestial events like meteor showers or eclipses, it would be wise to take that into account.

Finally, it’s time for the most important part of the process: the meditation. This is when the UFOs are called in — peacefully and without fear. Fear will kill spiritual connection. The CE5 instructions say that you don’t have to be experienced with meditation to be effective, as long as you are sincere in your intentions for peaceful contact with the extra-terrestrials. (That’s the preferred term, according to Greer, who finds “alien” to be divisive.)

Now I’ll tell you how a CE5 event went with 500 people in attendance. But first, lectures: a series of them, given by Greer and his associates. One Universe, One People was the theme — not only of the conference, but also of Greer’s life’s project. His mission: to spread awareness of the importance of universal peace with ET civilizations, and to expose governmental or rogue operations’ behavior that works against harmony with the ETs. “How do you know if they’re lying in Washington?” Greer asked a jammed, steamy, wine barrel-lined room. “Their lips are moving.”

UFO whistleblower Michael Herrera shared his story. He wore a nervous demeanor and a pinky ring.

Photograph by Dr. Steven Greer and Star, LLC

Comments like that make it no surprise he isn’t very well received by the political elite, especially given his global influence. Greer went on to describe a recent event which he said he may or may not have been an attempt on his life. While he was riding his bicycle, his seat came off, causing him to hit the pavement. His shoulder was ripped apart, and one of his feet was broken so badly that it dangled from his leg. The spill happened in Washington D.C., he said.

Standing in front of a royal blue curtain, Greer surveyed the crowd, flashing an on-again, off-again smile. I sat with a mother/daughter duo with whom I’d had a glass of wine earlier that afternoon. Natasha was a history professor at Tulsa University, and her retired mother Rita told me they’d forgone their usual summer vacation p abroad to attend this conference. Natasha said it was her hope to create a curriculum surrounding UFOs.

“I’m surprised there’s not one already,” I said. “I don’t think it’s too far away.”

Sitting on the other side of them was a financial analyst from Amsterdam who called himself Arjen. He’d flown in specifically for the conference, but had not told his friends and family at home what he was up to. “I told them I was traveling to the U.S. for work,” he said.

Herrera’s harrowing encounter

Throughout the weekend, I noticed Greer was accompanied wherever he went by a heavy-breathing bull of man. My first thought was he was Greer’s personal bodyguard, and this turned out to be true. But he was more than that: he was UFO whistleblower Michael Herrera. He wore a nervous demeanor and a pinky ring. If mob movies have taught me anything, it’s that a man wearing a pinky ring doesn’t fuck around. At the same National Press Club event mentioned earlier, under oath and in front of congress, Herrera explained his UFO encounter. Here is his story; make of it what you will.

While serving as a U.S. Marine in 2009 and conducting a humanitarian relief mission after a 7.4 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia, Herrera’s unit was tasked with providing security and food/medical supplies to the ravished area. According to Herrera, the five-man relief unit stumbled upon a 300-foot man-made UFO being guarded by a rogue military unit. (It should also be noted that his five-man team was without communications during this encounter, for some reason.) The UFO was described as having an octagonal shape that rotated in a clockwise motion. The craft floated about fifteen to twenty feet off the ground, emitting an audible hum, like a guitar amp or transformer. “When we’d got to the clearing, which was down the hill, there was an opening that came up, and we see this [man-made UFO],” said Herrera. “It was massive. Very strange. As we got up close in a tactical column, we were intercepted by a team of eight guys.”

Herrera said that team held him and the other Marines at gunpoint with M4 assault rifles, which was surprising, because “they all had American dialects, American gear, black OTVs (outer tactical vests).” But they wore no insignias or any other way to signify who they were. Just black ball caps and black camo. “You could audibly hear them flow the safety selectors off,” Herrera stated. “They basically started yelling at us, telling us to put our hands up. Asking who were we with, what were we doing there. Threatened that they could kill us right then and there. They said we could get ‘lost in the jungle,’ [that they could] throw us out of a helicopter if they needed to.”

Each Marine was then patted down and disarmed. Once the rogue unit cleared the Marines’ weapons and dumped their ammunition, their military IDs were confiscated. Given that the rogue soldiers’ knew exactly where the Marines kept their IDs —left breast pocket — Herrera was led to believe they were former service members themselves.

Herrera claimed that while he was being searched, the man-made UFO rose up from where it was hovering and whizzed away. “It floated right above the tree line,” he said. “On each corner, it emanated a light that was either red, yellow, green, or blue. Only those four colors, I can distinctly remember. Once it got past that tree line, it shot over to the left, basically to where the ocean was. I would estimate it was going three, four, five-thousand miles-per-hour instantaneously. The coconuts on these trees weren’t even touched. It produced no sonic boom.”

Greer began a puja ceremony and guided our meditation. He told us that before going to med-school, he traveled around the world as a meditation teacher. “The total number of minds in the universe are one,” he reminded us.

Photograph by Dr. Steven Greer and Star, LLC

After the craft departed, Herrera said, the rogue unit gave them their weapons back — including their ammunition-filled magazines. The Men in Black escorted the Marines back up the slope, then told them they were not allowed to look back or talk about what they had just seen. To emphasize their point, two of the guys talked about whether or not they should smoke the five Marines.

Herrera said the team booked it back to their landing zone. There, an unhappy gunnery sergeant asked them why their guns were slung the way they were. They came up with an excuse, rather than tell him what had just happened. They then flew back to their ship, the USS Denver.

Onboard, they were debriefed by an admiral who Herrera said he’d never seen before. Herrera didn’t know whether the high-ranking officer had any connection to what his experience in the Indonesian jungle.

When the ship eventually returned to its homeport in Okinawa, Herrera received a call while on duty. He was told he was needed at the command post. “Oddly enough, there was nobody in the building,” he claimed, “except for one gentleman who was wearing Air Force dress blues that were missing a name tag. I gave him the proper greeting of the day; I gave him the salute. He pulled me into an office, and he said, ‘You’re not allowed to tell anybody in your chain of command. I don’t care if it’s a General, I don’t care if it’s anybody, you are not allowed to talk about what happened. You could go to prison for this, or you could be killed.’” Herrera was then handed a disclosure agreement he skimmed over before signing. The only thing he recalled remembering was that it had said something about Indonesia.

Blow that whistle

Needless to say, Herrera has not remained silent. Happily for him (and others), Greer recently announced that UFO/UAP whistleblower protection is now available. A special access project (SAP) has been put into place to provide security for whistle-blowers. So, if you’ve got some shit to tell, and are afraid Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones will come erase your memory, rest assured, you will be looked out for. According to Greer’s website, if a whistleblower is threatened, the threatening individual will be identified, captured, and prosecuted. So, as it stands, Michael Herrera is protected.

Revelations disclosed by whistleblowers over The Disclosure Project’s 30 years of research include: “Two primary types of UFO/UAPs exist—extra-terrestrial vehicles and man-made electrogravatic propulsion vehicles.” Secondly, ET groups are not hostile to earth or humanity. It is not wise for us to try to take them down. Rather, the ETs are concerned about humans’ hostility towards them. Let’s be real: if they’re coming to check us out, they likely have the power to destroy us a million times over. So, I say, let’s just be cool with them, and maybe stop trying to reverse engineer their technology.

That brings us to the next revelation: ET technology has been reverse engineered, leading to breakthroughs in energy and propulsion. Then there’s the secret organization running these illegal operations without constitutional government oversight. If it exists, it poses a threat to national and world security, especially if U.S. Government oversight committees have been denied access to these illegal projects.

CE5: The first event

Following the second day of lectures from Greer, it was time for the first of two CE5 events. On that same day, I completed my thirty-ninth trip around the sun. Some 500 heartbeats beat their way into an area on the Callaway winery lawn. White folding chairs were set up for attendees, while others, including me, brought their own camping chairs. Radar tones pumped from nearby speakers. Tonality is the first step in contacting the ETs; it serves as a communication vehicle. As night fell, stars began to wink in a clear summer sky. Our chairs were pointed east, overlooking rows upon rows of wine vineyards. Arjen, my new pal from Amsterdam, posted his white folding chair next to mine. “I have another camping chair, but it’s back at the campground,” I told him. “I’ll bring it tomorrow for you.”

Once everybody was good and settled, Greer began a puja ceremony and guided our meditation. He told us that before going to med school, he traveled around the world as a meditation teacher. “The total number of minds in the universe are one,” he reminded us. “That is, consciousness is a singularity. It is not something that is divisible.” Greer stood next to his puja table and encouraged us to join in a simple three syllable mantra to get us into a meditational mindset. “Im nah mah. Im nah mah. Im nah mah.” 

After the mantra, we meditated, welcoming the ETs with love and peaceful intentions. I had little expectation of anything really happening. I watched airplanes, helicopters, the ISS (International Space Station), and other sky pollution float across the dark heavens. Greer held a powerful laser pointer, circling the space station, and other objects that might be confused for UFOs. Many people had their sky chart apps opened up.

After a couple of hours, we took a break, then came back for a couple hours more. It was past midnight, and the ETs must not have been feeling it. Maybe there was a better Saturday night party somewhere else in the galaxy. Oh well, there was still one more night to make contact. When I returned to the campsite that night, Manny Lopez was still up. He asked what had happened. “Man, I didn’t see shit,” I admitted before retiring to my tent. I kept the top cover off, in hopes of catching a quick sighting as I drifted into a peaceful slumber.

CE5: The second event

Night two: Sunday. There seemed to be fewer people this time. Some of the locals must have gone home. But Arjen and I added a new guy to our little group. Ray was a youngster, riding solo, who flew in from Massachusetts for the event. He wore hippie attire, and with his shoulder length blonde hair, he looked uncannily like Kurt Cobain.

He seemed to enjoy being around like-minded people with whom he could be himself. Apparently, the last time he had been at a bar and tried talking about all this ET and meditation stuff to a patron, they had looked at him like he was a nutjob. We had met him during lunch break from the daytime lectures, and he clung on to us the rest of the night. We didn’t mind. Come as you are, Ray.

Following dinner, the three of us walked to my car to grab our gear for the night. I pulled out a couple of camping chairs and tossed one to Arjen. “Here, you take the zero-gravity chair,” I said. “It’s more comfortable and you’re a lot taller than me. You’ll be able to stretch out. Besides, you’re a visitor in my country, let me be a good host.” He graciously accepted and the three of us walked back to the lawn to get ready for round two. Ray lay on the grass.

Some 500 heartbeats beat their way into an area on the Callaway winery lawn. Radar tones pumped from nearby speakers. Tonality is the first step in contacting the ETs; it serves as a communication vehicle.

Photograph by Dr. Steven Greer and Star, LLC

The first part of the evening was like the first part of Saturday evening. Airplanes glided. The space station was still up there doing its thing. It was time for another break. People began to leave. It was getting late. However, there wasn’t a feeling of disappointment among those leaving. The weekend had been fun. The CE5 events were meant to be fun, no matter what happened. We all knew it was wise to go into them without expectation. When the break was over, those who had chosen to stay gathered back at the grass. There were conversations going on all around. Ray was laying on the grass next to Arjen’s feet. Arjen was kicked back in the zero-gravity chair, eyes closed, mouth agape. I stared out at the Big Dipper. A shooting star sizzled across the sky. Everyone went “oooh” like they were watching fireworks. It was something, at least.

Moments later, the chatter came to an abrupt halt. Did they see what I just saw? Was that what I think it was? A distinct bright white light on the bottom right of the Big Dipper had flashed for a few seconds then turned off. It had caught everyone’s attention. The crowd was silent, except for Arjen, who was still audibly snoring. “Wake up, you Dutch bastard!” I whispered through gritted teeth. “The ETs are here. Look!” I pointed to the sky and told him to watch the bottom part of the Big Dipper. Every 30 to 60 seconds or so, another light would appear for a few seconds, then turn off. They have to be UFOs, right? What else could they be?

Dr. Greer began to welcome them in with open mind and heart: “Let’s invite them to come as close as they can to this dimension. The sky and the field is filled with ET craft and shifted in a higher frequency, those from the worlds of light and the celestial. And in your heart and in your mind, you can feel and see together, and what you feel your sight can then see clearly.” They kept coming. More than one at a time. All mostly in one area. It was as if Greer had known they were going to show up. I looked for a projector or something that could possibly explain it. I hadn’t expected to see anything. Then I remembered the aerial lights Manny Lopez had described. The lights he had described were similar to these: they would turn on for a few seconds, then turn off. Turn on for a few seconds, then turn off.

Arjen, Ray, and I were the last ones to leave. Greer had slipped off somewhere while we stayed, staring into the sky. Our wallets were still in our pockets. We remained in the Callaway winery parking lot with my binoculars, watching the aerial lights turn on and turn off for hours. We didn’t understand how anybody could just leave. Maybe we just really wanted to believe they were UFOs. Maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe not.

It was about 2 am when the three of us finally parted ways. Off we went, back to our earthly realities of jobs, morning highways, sunburns, deep breaths, sufferings, tequila, unknown neighbors, and good live music. “Back to the Matrix?” Arjen asked me. I nodded. “Back to the Matrix.”

A couple weeks following the event, I reached out to Arjen to see how he was integrating the experience. Also to make sure I wasn’t crazy, and that what we’d seen really happened. In his words: “I already saw so much convincing evidence, that I’m sure they’re here. Also, there are other people I trust that talk about ET presence as if it is a very normal, logical thing. No hyperbole. The accounts are so numerous, detailed and consistent that it is actually really weird to dismiss them, because they don’t fit your world view? So, I knew they were for real, just hoped to see something. And I may well have.”