HICE

The term and its variants

Event versus Experience

Both expansions come from the same source. Burkes's essay introducing the term states: "The designation HICE stands for Human Initiated Contact Experience, or Event."¹ In a 2024 revision he explains his preference for Event on the ground that an event "suggests something concrete has transpired," while experience carries a vaguer, more subjective connotation.² The Experience variant circulates regardless. A March 2019 interview with Burkes on New Thinking Allowed, an interview platform devoted to consciousness research and parapsychology, runs under the title Human Initiated Contact Experiences, and practitioner websites pair the Experiences form with CE-5 as a direct synonym.^5,15

Why some researchers and practitioners prefer HICE over CE-5

Two reasons recur in the published record. The first is classification. CE-5 only makes sense as the fifth rung of the close-encounter ladder that grew out of Hynek's 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, so anyone adopting the label inherits that scheme and its later extensions. Burkes argues for "a term that is descriptive of what Rahma and many other groups are doing, without having to explain the origins and meanings of the Hynek-Vallee schema."^1,6 The second is ownership. CE-5 is identified with Steven Greer, who founded the Center for the Study of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, known as CSETI, in 1990 and made human-initiated contact its program. Burkes, who coordinated a CSETI contact team in Los Angeles, recounts being told he could not publish his team's fieldwork reports online under a Los Angeles CSETI banner, and he writes that "a term not associated with him is an additional reason to use it," pointing to what he calls the controversial aspects of the CSETI director's persona.^1,2,7 HICE, on this account, is a way to talk about the practice without ranking it on a scale or advertising a brand.

HICE, CE-5, and human-initiated contact

The three terms nest inside one another. Human-initiated contact is the plain descriptive phrase for the activity, and the standard reference definition of Greer's fifth kind uses exactly that language: in his usage CE-5 means "human initiated contact and communication with extraterrestrial life."⁷ HICE compresses the phrase into an acronym that names a single episode, so a contact group can log a HICE the way an older literature logged a sighting. CE-5 names the same episode as a category on the Hynek-derived scale. In practice the terms are interchangeable, and HICE users routinely gloss the acronym as "aka CE5" so readers know what is meant.^3,12

Historical development

The practice is older than either label. In Peru, groups that formed around Sixto Paz Wells after his initial contact experience of 1974 grew into Mission Rama, a contact network that prepared members with meditation, concentration techniques, and scheduled field gatherings at which encounters were expected. Paz Wells formally dissolved the organization in 1990, and successor groups continued under the name Rahma.^12,13 Burkes cites Rama as evidence that organized human-initiated contact work predates the CE-5 brand, which is part of his case for a generic term.¹

The CE-5 label itself is layered. Hynek's 1972 scale defined three close-encounter categories, covering close-range sightings, physical effects, and observed entities. After his death in 1986 other writers extended the scale, and Jacques Vallee published an expanded scheme in his 1990 book Confrontations. The fifth kind is now most associated with Greer, in whose usage individuals or groups apply specific protocols, chiefly contact meditation together with sounds or signals, to invite interaction.⁶ Burkes joined that effort early. He coordinated a CSETI working group in Los Angeles from 1992 to 1997, and he states that he coined HICE in 1995 while considering a departure from the organization: "HICE is the alternative term for CE5 that I coined in 1995."^1,3

Circulation and reach

HICE has not displaced CE-5 in public use. Greer's 2020 documentary Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact Has Begun carried the older label to a mass audience, and the organized practice networks kept it. ETLetsTalk, founded in 2012 by Kosta Makreas and Hollis Polk, organizes global CE-5 contact work and claims a community of more than one million people, a figure that comes from the organization itself.^7,14 HICE moves through a narrower channel. It appears in Burkes's blog Contact Underground and his Medium essays, in consciousness-research interviews, in social media contact groups, and on practitioner sites that list the two terms side by side. Burkes was still making the case for the term in an October 2025 essay, which shows its continued and deliberate use three decades after its coinage, even as CE-5 remains the more widely recognized label.^4,5,15

HICE in research on contact experiencers

Survey research on people who report contact exists, and it is the natural place to look for the term. The largest such effort came from the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences, known as FREE, which ran two quantitative surveys totaling 554 questions between 2016 and 2018 and drew 3,256 respondents reporting contact with non-human intelligence.^8,10 The results, published in 2018 by R. Hernandez, R. Davis, R. Scalpone, and R. Schild in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, found that roughly 70 percent of respondents described positive life changes following their experiences. The published study does not use the acronym HICE.⁸

The publishing venues place this work in frontier science. The Journal of Scientific Exploration is published by the Society for Scientific Exploration, founded in 1982 to give sustained scholarly attention to topics that mainstream journals rarely take up, including ufology and parapsychology.⁹ The pattern holds across the adjacent literature. A 2025 review of experiencer research by Bob Davis and Russ Scalpone appeared in Mindfield Bulletin, the member publication of the Parapsychological Association, and a 2026 survey study of Phoenix Lights witnesses appeared in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. Neither uses the term HICE, which locates the acronym in practitioner writing rather than in the survey literature.^10,11

The link between the acronym and this survey literature runs through a person rather than through adopted terminology. Burkes co-wrote a chapter analyzing FREE survey data on medical healings reported by UAP contact experiencers for the anthology Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non Human Intelligence, and he presented HICE by name in his 2019 New Thinking Allowed interview, which described his use of visualization and meditation to initiate visual contact with UAP.⁵ No peer-reviewed paper using the term could be located for this entry. The documented record consists of blog essays, interviews, field reports, and practitioner websites.

The record around the term is young rather than settled. HICE has one identifiable coiner, a committed circle of users, and as of mid-2026 no adoption in the survey literature. What the acronym means, who uses it, and why it exists are on the record, and the practitioner literature is where the term does its work. Whether a research literature will form around the acronym is one of the live questions the field is working through.

What a HICE report typically contains

Because the term lives in practitioner fieldwork rather than in journals, the characteristic HICE document is the field report. Burkes's published accounts of his Los Angeles team show the standard elements: the date and site of the session, a roster of participants, the protocol used, a description of what was observed, and the names of corroborating witnesses. His account of the group's first weeks records three sightings between September 1 and September 24, 1992, names participants including a United Airlines captain and the author Preston Dennett, and cites the veteran investigator Ann Druffel in connection with the team's work.³

Protocol descriptions vary by lineage. CSETI-derived reports describe breath awareness, guided meditation, and Coherent Thought Sequencing, CSETI's name for its visualization exercise. Rama-derived reports describe preparatory fasting and dietary rules, circle formations with sustained chanting, and instructions received through psychically sensitive members called antennas, who set the time and place of what the lineage calls programmed encounters.¹² Less frequent but notable reports appear in the same stream, including missing-time episodes reported across western United States contact networks in 1993, a portal event called a Xendra reported at a Rama-associated site in 1994, and contact fieldwork in southern England in 1997. The record for these events is participant testimony, often from multiple witnesses at the same session.³

Documentation and research record

The documentation behind the term has three layers. The first is the practitioner field report, the running record that contact teams have kept since the early 1990s and that appears on Burkes's blog Contact Underground, in his Medium essays, and in anthologies such as Beyond UFOs. The second is survey data on contact experiencers, led by the FREE surveys, gathered from self-selected respondents and published through the Society for Scientific Exploration and allied venues.^8,9 The third is interview and commentary material, including the 2019 New Thinking Allowed conversation that carried the term to a wider audience. What the record does not yet contain is an instrumented dataset tying a pre-announced session to an independently tracked object, and practitioners themselves address why. Burkes writes that he prefers HICE for what he calls human empowered contact efforts, and he argues that conventional experimental design fits the subject poorly because, in his view, the other side chooses when and where contact occurs.⁴ Careful field teams also practice ordinary observational discipline. Satellites, aircraft, meteors, and lens artifacts appear over any night-sky vigil, and groups that log times, bearings, weather, and flight and satellite data give their reports a durable evidential value that narrative alone cannot supply.

Research perspectives

These perspectives are not mutually exclusive, and serious observers often hold several at once.

The record and open questions

Documented: The acronym expands as Human-Initiated Contact Event or Human-Initiated Contact Experience. Joseph Burkes, a retired internal medicine physician who coordinated a CSETI contact team from 1992 to 1997, states that he coined it in 1995, and his essays and interviews from 2019 onward are its documented public record. His stated rationale is that the term avoids the Hynek-derived numbering and avoids identification with Greer and CSETI. The major surveys of contact experiencers do not use the acronym.

Reported: Field reports labeled HICE describe group sessions built on meditation and signaling protocols, sightings of unusual lights during or after those protocols, and occasionally more dramatic events, including missing time and portal-like phenomena. Participants describe the contact as intentional and communicative, and survey respondents in the adjacent experiencer literature largely describe their contact experiences as positive.

Open questions: Whether a non-human intelligence lies behind the responses these field reports describe is the question the practice raises. No instrumented record yet permits independent evaluation of a specific session, which makes this a matter for better fieldwork rather than argument. Where the term itself lands is a narrower question, whether survey research adopts the acronym or it stays an alternative to CE-5 carried mainly by its coiner.

Frequently asked questions

What does HICE stand for?

HICE stands for Human-Initiated Contact Event or Human-Initiated Contact Experience. Both expansions come from Joseph Burkes, who coined the acronym in 1995 and prefers Event because it presents the episode as something that happened rather than a purely inward impression.^1,2

Is HICE the same thing as CE-5?

The two terms name the same activity, deliberate attempts to initiate contact through protocols such as group meditation and light signaling. CE-5 frames the activity as the fifth kind on the Hynek-derived close-encounter scale and is identified with Steven Greer's organization CSETI. HICE drops both commitments, and its users gloss it as another name for CE-5.^1,6,7

Who coined the term HICE?

Joseph Burkes, a retired internal medicine physician who coordinated a Los Angeles contact team for CSETI from 1992 to 1997, states that he coined HICE in 1995 while considering leaving the organization. His blog essays and a 2019 New Thinking Allowed interview are the term's main public record.^1,2,5

Is there any scientific research on HICE?

No peer-reviewed study using the term could be verified for this entry. The nearest body of work is survey research on contact experiencers, led by the FREE survey of 3,256 respondents published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 2018, and it does not use the acronym. That journal is published by the Society for Scientific Exploration, founded in 1982 to study frontier topics that mainstream journals rarely address.^8,9

What happens at a HICE or CE-5 event?

Reports describe small groups gathering at a field site, running preparation such as breath work, guided meditation, or chanting, directing intention toward contact, and watching the sky. CSETI-lineage groups use a visualization exercise called Coherent Thought Sequencing, while the older Peruvian Rama lineage scheduled encounters arranged through members regarded as psychic receivers.^6,12

Why do some contact groups avoid the CE-5 label?

Burkes's published account gives two reasons that generalize. The label carries the Hynek-Vallee classification with it, which many practitioners neither use nor need, and it is tied to Greer's brand and to controversy around his persona. Groups that predate CSETI, such as Rama, practiced human-initiated contact without the label, which strengthens the case for a generic term.^1,2,12

Sources and further reading

1. Burkes, Joseph. "CE-5 vs HICE (Human Initiated Contact Event)." Contact Underground, December 23, 2021. https://contactunderground.org/2021/12/23/ce-5-vs-hice-human-initiated-contact-event/
2. Burkes, Joseph. "What's in a Name? CE-5 vs HICE." Medium, June 15, 2024. https://medium.com/@jburkesmd/whats-in-a-name-ce-5-vs-hice-2610750e4861
3. Burkes, Joseph. "Human Initiated Contact Events (HICE) aka 'CE5' and the Consciousness Connection." Contact Underground, June 20, 2022. https://contactunderground.org/2022/06/20/human-initiated-contact-eventshice-and-the-consciousness-connection/
4. Burkes, Joseph. "Contactees, Human Initiated Contact Events (HICE) and the Consciousness Connection." Contact Underground, October 10, 2025. https://contactunderground.org/2025/10/10/contactees-human-initiated-contact-events-hice-and-the-consciousness-connection/
5. New Thinking Allowed Foundation. "Human Initiated Contact Experiences (HICE) with Joseph Burkes." Interview recorded March 30, 2019. https://newthinkingallowed.org/human-initiated-contact-experiences-hice-with-joseph-burkes/
6. Wikipedia. "Close encounter." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_encounter
7. Wikipedia. "Steven M. Greer." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_M._Greer
8. Hernandez, R., R. Davis, R. Scalpone, and R. Schild. "A Study on Reported Contact with Non-Human Intelligence Associated with Unidentified Aerial Phenomena." Journal of Scientific Exploration 32, no. 2, 2018. https://journalofscientificexploration.org/index.php/jse/article/view/1282
9. Wikipedia. "Society for Scientific Exploration." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Scientific_Exploration
10. Davis, Bob, and Russ Scalpone. "Interactions with Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and Non-Human Intelligences." Mindfield Bulletin 17, no. 1, Parapsychological Association, June 13, 2025. https://mindfieldbulletin.org/interactions-with-unidentified-aerial-phenomena-and-non-human-intelligences/
11. Scalpone, Russ, Lynne D. Kitei, and Brad Evans. "Prosocial Attitude Change in Response to an Anomalous Mass Sighting Event: The Phoenix Lights." Journal of Scientific Exploration 40, no. 1, 2026. https://journalofscientificexploration.org/index.php/jse/article/download/3659/2561
12. Burkes, Joseph. "Pieces on a Cosmic Chessboard: Contact Protocols of Rama and CSETI Briefly Compared." Contact Underground, June 20, 2024. https://contactunderground.org/2024/06/20/pieces-on-a-cosmic-chessboard-contact-protocols-of-rama-and-cseti-briefly-compared/
13. Wikipedia. "Sixto Paz Wells." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixto_Paz_Wells
14. ETLetsTalk. "About ETLetsTalk." https://www.etletstalk.com/about
15. Inner Peace Outer Joy. "Human Initiated Contact Experiences (HICE) / Close Encounters of the 5th Kind (CE5)." https://innerpeaceouterjoy.com/close-encounters-of-the-5th-kind-ce5/