CE5

CE-5, "Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind", is the label Steven Greer's CSETI uses for human-initiated contact: people going out to a site and trying to bring a craft or its occupants to them, rather than waiting for a sighting. The name extends J. Allen Hynek's scale of close encounters, which stops at a fourth kind, abduction. The practice is also called a Human Initiated Contact Event (HICE).

The protocols

Joseph Burkes, a former CSETI volunteer coordinator, describes them as follows. He says they were developed by Greer and his assistant Shari Adamiak.

1. Consciousness connection. Regular meditation, at home and in the field, to enable what is described as telepathic communication.
2. Site selection. Somewhere remote enough to avoid interference but reachable, ideally near past sightings.
3. Lights. Powerful lights to attract and signal craft.
4. Decorum. No alcohol, smoking, drugs, sex or weapons at the site.
5. Mental preparation. Assume the visitors are not hostile, examine your motives and keep the team united.

Precedent and criticism

The same account notes an earlier tradition of scheduled field contacts in Peru: Mission Rama, begun in 1974, ran its own meditation- and automatic-writing-based events. Burkes says Greer did not take his protocol from Rama.

Burkes, who led CE-5 teams in Southern California in the 1990s, now argues that no protocol is better than another, because outcomes were predetermined by the intelligences involved, and that CSETI's version was closer to an intelligence operation than to science. Both his description of the protocols and his verdict rest on his own account.