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John Burroughs

U.S. Air Force witness to the Rendlesham Forest incident of December 1980, who suffered permanent radiation injuries from the encounter and won an unprecedented VA disability settlement acknowledging UAP-related injuries.

FieldDetails
Full NameJohn Burroughs
Bornc. 1960
StatusALIVE
Current LocationUnited States
CategoryMilitary Witness

Assessment: AT RISK​

Burroughs is among the very few individuals whose UAP-related injuries have been formally acknowledged by the U.S. government. The classification of his medical records under Special Access Programs (SAPs) indicates the government considered his case sensitive enough to require the highest levels of secrecy. His continued advocacy for other UAP-injured veterans places him in an ongoing confrontational relationship with the defense establishment.

Current Situation​

Burroughs continues to advocate for military personnel who have suffered health effects from UAP encounters. He received a total medical disability settlement from the VA acknowledging he was injured in the line of duty in December 1980. He has spoken publicly about his experiences and pushed for greater transparency regarding the health risks UAP encounters pose to military personnel.

Background​

In December 1980, Airman First Class John Burroughs was stationed at RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk, England, a joint U.S.-UK air base, when a series of unexplained events occurred in the adjacent Rendlesham Forest. Over several nights (December 26-28, 1980), multiple U.S. Air Force personnel witnessed unexplained lights and a craft in the forest. The incident, often called "Britain's Roswell," is one of the most well-documented UAP encounters in military history.

Burroughs was among the servicemen who approached the object at close range. Following the encounter, he developed serious health problems including heart damage and vision impairment. Specifically, his anterior mitral valve was "badly shredded," requiring lifesaving heart surgery.

Dr. Christopher "Kit" Green, a former CIA medical officer with Top Secret/SCI clearance, examined Burroughs and identified the cause of his injuries as "broad-band non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation" -- radio frequencies linked to cardiac and neurological injuries in various classified and unclassified studies. Dr. Green confirmed publicly that Burroughs's medical records were among only a handful in his entire intelligence career that were formally classified, with embedded connections to Special Access Programs (SAPs), sensitive technologies, and electromagnetic field studies.

In 2015, the U.S. government made an unprecedented acknowledgment by granting Burroughs total medical disability through the VA, effectively confirming that he was injured by something at Rendlesham Forest in 1980.

Why This Person Matters​

  • One of the primary military witnesses to the Rendlesham Forest incident, one of the most well-documented UAP encounters in history
  • Suffered permanent, medically documented radiation injuries (cardiac and vision damage) from close-range UAP encounter
  • VA acknowledged his injuries were sustained in the line of duty in December 1980, effectively confirming the UAP encounter
  • His medical records were classified under Special Access Programs, indicating the government recognized the sensitive nature of the encounter
  • Dr. Kit Green (former CIA medical officer) identified the cause as broad-band non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation
  • His case represents one of the only instances where the U.S. government has formally acknowledged physical harm from a UAP encounter
  • Advocates for other veterans who have suffered UAP-related health effects

See Also​

  • David Grusch — UAP whistleblower who testified to Congress about recovered craft
  • Lue Elizondo — Former AATIP director and disclosure advocate
  • Ryan Graves — Navy pilot who testified before Congress about UAP encounters
  • Bob Lazar — Physicist who claims to have worked on alien craft near Area 51
  • Dylan Borland — Air Force veteran facing retaliation for UAP whistleblowing
  • Stefan Michalak — Civilian who suffered radiation burns from a close encounter at Falcon Lake

Other Shocking Stories​

  • Edward J. Ruppelt: First director of Project Blue Book and the man who coined the term "unidentified flying object," dead of...
  • Vimal Dajibhai: 24-year-old Marconi software engineer working on the Stingray torpedo system who plunged from the Clifton Suspension Bridge —...
  • Walter Haut: USAF public information officer at Roswell Army Air Field who authored the famous July 8, 1947, press release...
  • Andrew Hall: 33-year-old British Aerospace engineering manager found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning with a hosepipe connected to his car...

Sources​

This information was built by Grok and Claude AI research.

The Dead & Missing
Phil Schneider

Age 48. Catheter wrapped three times around neck—no fingerprints found. Warned audiences: ‘If I ever commit suicide, I was murdered.’ Wilsonville, Oregon.

Vimal Dajibhai

Age 24. Fell 331 feet from bridge. Unexplained needle puncture mark. Pants around ankles. Marconi torpedo guidance engineer. Bristol, England.

Arshad Sharif

Age 26. Tied rope from neck to tree and drove at speed—decapitated. Marconi satellite programmer, about to be promoted. Bristol, England.

Peter Ferry

Age 60. Electrocuted—stripped wires jammed into his tooth fillings. Retired Army Brigadier and Marconi marketing director. England.

Alistair Beckham

Age 50. Electrocuted with bare mains wires around chest, handkerchief stuffed in mouth. Wife denied depression. Marconi defense engineer. England.

Shani Warren

Age 26. Drowned—gagged, hands bound, noose around neck. Ruled ‘suicide.’ Employer acquired by Marconi weeks later. Buckinghamshire, England.

Ron Rummel

Ex-Air Force intelligence. Gunshot to mouth—no blood on barrel. Gun wiped clean. Suicide note written left-handed; he was right-handed. Portland, Oregon.

Stanley Meyer

Age 57. Last words: ‘They poisoned me.’ Water fuel cell inventor with multiple patents. Collapsed at restaurant. Twin brother Stephen survived. Ohio.

Todd Sees

Age 39. Left home hunting in full gear. Found next day in underwear—emaciated, white, expression of horror. UFO seen over ridge that morning. Pennsylvania.

Mark McCandlish

Age 65. Gunshot to head days before Senate testimony on antigravity craft. Ruled suicide. Disclosure Project witness. Redding, California.

James Forrestal

Age 57. First U.S. Secretary of Defense. Fell from 16th-floor window with bathrobe cord around neck. Navy never ruled it suicide. Bethesda, Maryland.

Frank Olson

Age 43. CIA bioweapons scientist fell from 13th floor. Secretly dosed with LSD nine days prior. Skull fracture inconsistent with fall. New York.

Richard Pugh

Plastic bag on head, feet bound, rope around body. MOD consultant. Ruled ‘sexual misadventure.’ Death method repeated three months later. England.

Mark Wisner

Age 24. Plastic sack and cling film over face—nearly identical to Richard Pugh’s death three months earlier. MOD software engineer. England.

Dorothy Kilgallen

Age 52. Only journalist to interview Jack Ruby privately. Found dead—wrong room, fully dressed, JFK investigation notes vanished. Manhattan, New York.

Eugene Mallove

Age 56. Beaten to death—32 lacerations, crushed trachea. MIT cold fusion whistleblower. Founded Infinite Energy magazine. Norwich, Connecticut.

Roger Hill

Age 49. ‘Suicide’ by shotgun—with four separate wounds. Marconi radar designer working on classified naval systems. Surrey, England.

Tom Ogle

Age ~25. Demonstrated 100+ MPG on live TV. Shot months before death. Told attorney people were drugging his drinks. Ruled overdose. El Paso, Texas.

Peter Peapell

Age 46. Carbon monoxide death, body jammed underneath car in position police called impossible. Classified defense scientist. Oxfordshire, England.

Keith Bowden

Age 46. Car plunged off bridge. Tires swapped with worn ones. First of 25+ Marconi defense scientist deaths in the 1980s. Essex, England.

David Sands

Age 37. Car loaded with extra petrol cans hit wall at speed. Body burned beyond recognition. Marconi satellite projects manager. Surrey, England.

Wilhelm Reich

Age 60. Six tons of his books burned by U.S. government order—only federal book burning in history. Died in prison one day before parole.

Amy Eskridge

Age 34. Ruled suicide. Intelligence officer told Congress she was ‘murdered with directed energy weapons by an aerospace company.’ Antigravity researcher. Huntsville, Alabama.

Zigmund Adamski

Age 56. Missing five days, only one day’s beard growth. Unexplained burns, unidentified ointment on skin, shirt gone. Coal miner buying potatoes. Yorkshire, England.

William Cooper

Age 58. Author of Behold a Pale Horse. Predicted 9/11-style attack on radio three months before it happened. Shot by deputies at his Arizona home.

Max Spiers

Age 39. Father of two. Texted mother: ‘If anything happens to me, investigate.’ Vomited two liters of black fluid before dying. Warsaw, Poland.

Jonathan Walsh

Age 29. Fell from hotel window in Ivory Coast. Had told colleagues he feared for his life before traveling. GEC defense communications expert.

Carl Grillmair

Age 67. Shot by a man whose charges were dismissed eleven days earlier. Caltech astrophysicist, infrared detection specialist. Llano, California.

Uyrange Hollanda

Brazilian Air Force captain. Led UFO investigation producing 500 photos. Broke 20-year silence in interview—found hanged three months later. Brazil.

James McDonald

Age 51. Most credentialed UFO scientist of the 1960s. Career and marriage systematically destroyed. First attempt left him blind. Found dead in Arizona desert.

Thomas Mantell

Age 25. First pilot to die chasing a UFO. P-51 crashed pursuing bright circular object over Kentucky. Air Force blamed Venus, later retracted. WWII hero.

Felix Moncla

Age 27. Fighter scrambled to intercept radar target over Lake Superior. His blip merged with the unknown object—no wreckage ever found. Had a newborn daughter.

Frederick Valentich

Age 20. Radioed: ‘It is not an aircraft.’ Described metallic craft with green light above his plane. Transmission ended in scraping sounds. Never found. Australia.

Monica Jacinto Reza

Age 60. Mondaloy superalloy co-inventor for military rockets. Vanished hiking—declared dead four days later while search teams were still looking. Angeles National Forest, California.

William McCasland

Retired Major General. Commanded $4.4 billion Air Force Research Lab. Vanished from Albuquerque home, February 2026. Left phone, glasses, all devices behind. FBI searching.

Viktor Schauberger

Age 73. Vortex energy inventor. Forced to sign away all rights in America. Said: ‘They took everything from me.’ Died five days later. Austria.

Lester Hendershot

Fuelless motor inventor—Lindbergh witnessed demo. Carbon monoxide, ruled suicide. His son died the exact same way ten years later. Cypress, California.

Fred Bell

Age 68. Nuclear physicist. Died 48 hours after filming interview about classified directed energy weapons with Jesse Ventura. Sudden heart failure.

Dean Warwick

Age 62. Collapsed on stage mid-sentence, about to reveal who killed RFK. Told organizers he felt a ‘beam’ on the side of his head. Blackpool, England.

Morris Jessup

Age 59. UFO researcher—Navy reprinted his annotated book at classified facility. Ruled suicide. Friends said he was in ‘high spirits’ the night before. Florida.

Karl Wolfe

Age 74. USAF veteran who testified about artificial structures on the Moon at the National Press Club. Struck by tractor trailer while cycling. New York.

Karla Turner

Age 48. Ph.D. researcher documenting the dark side of alien abductions. Publicly threatened. Fast-acting cancer, no family history. Same month as Schneider. Texas.

Nikola Tesla

Age 86. 300+ patents. FBI seized ~80 trunks of papers within hours of death. Hoover classified it top secret. Twenty trunks never returned. New York.

Mae Brussell

Age 66. Radio host—851 broadcasts over 17 years. Investigating military base child abuse scandal. Death threats in March. Dead of fast-acting cancer by October. California.

Jim Keith

Age 49. Conspiracy author. Fell at Burning Man, needed knee surgery. Told friends he feared he wouldn’t survive the hospital. Died during surgery. Reno, Nevada.

John Mack

Age 74. Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard psychiatrist. Most credentialed academic to take alien abductions seriously. Struck and killed by drunk driver walking home. London.

Rudolf Diesel

Age 55. His engine could run on vegetable oil. Vanished from ship en route to meet British Navy about submarine engines. Body found in English Channel.

Nuno Loureiro

Age 47. MIT fusion center director. Shot by former classmate who attacked Brown University two days prior—then killed himself. Father of young children. Massachusetts.

Jacob Prichard

Age 34. AFRL scientist at Wright-Patterson. Killed wife and colleague then himself—no motive ever established. Three young children left behind. West Milton, Ohio.

Jaime Gustitus

Age 25. Air Force Academy grad, Top Secret clearance. Shot 5–7 times by colleague Jacob Prichard—no motive found. Wright-Patterson AFB cluster. Ohio.

Jaymee Prichard

Age 33. Mother of three young children. Strangled by husband—an AFRL scientist—who then killed a colleague and himself. No motive established. Ohio.

Paul Brown

Nuclear battery inventor. Home robbed three times, vandalized four times. Mother’s car pipe-bombed. Then died in a car accident. Boise, Idaho.

Thomas Henry Moray

Radiant energy device producing 50 kilowatts. Shot at multiple times. Lab ransacked. His own assistant destroyed the device with an ax. Salt Lake City.

Gianni Dotto

Anti-aging device inventor. FDA ordered his machines destroyed at Sloan-Kettering. Reportedly run over by a vehicle multiple times. Former WWII fighter pilot.

Stefan Marinov

Age 66. Physicist challenging Einstein’s relativity. Fell from university staircase in Graz, Austria. A Russian colleague publicly stated: ‘He was thrown.’

Andrija Puharich

Age 76. Held water-splitting patent. Home burned by arson. CIA/MKULTRA connections. 50+ patents. Died of heart attack after falling down stairs. North Carolina.

Ning Li

Anti-gravity physicist, DOD grant, top secret clearance. Emailed ‘successful experiments’ then went silent. Car accident destroyed her brain. Husband died witnessing it. Alabama.

Melissa Casias

Age 53. LANL employee on DOE advisory board. Factory-reset both personal and government phones before vanishing—four days after Monica Reza disappeared. Talpa, New Mexico.

Paul Bennewitz

Age 75. Intercepted classified signals near Kirtland AFB. Air Force deliberately drove him insane with disinformation—documented in official AFOSI files. Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Rory Johnson

Invented 525 HP motor needing no fuel. Greyhound signed a contract. DOE placed a gag order. Reportedly #1 on an alleged OPEC hit list. California.

Philip Haney

Age 66. DHS founding member and counterterrorism whistleblower. Found shot in his car while writing a follow-up book. Was engaged to be married. Amador County, California.

John Bedini

Age 67. Electromagnetic energy device inventor. Died suddenly—four hours after his brother Gary also died unexpectedly. Survived by wife Ronda.

Ann Livingston

MUFON investigator. Published on electronic harassment and alien abductions. Attacked by five ‘faceless’ men in parking lot. Died of sudden ovarian cancer. Chicago.

David Greenhalgh

Age 46. Fell 40 feet from railway bridge. Survived briefly but could never explain what happened. Died the same day as another defense scientist. England.

Victor Moore

Age 46. Marconi engineer on infrared satellite systems. Drug overdose. MI5 investigated his death as part of the defense scientist cluster. England.

Trevor Knight

Age 52. Carbon monoxide, car in garage. The eighth Marconi defense scientist to die in eighteen months. Computer engineer on classified systems. Berkshire, England.

Andrew Hall

Age 33. Carbon monoxide, hosepipe from exhaust. No suicide note. The last recorded death in the Marconi scientist cluster. British Aerospace engineer. England.

Michael Baker

Age 22. Car crashed through barrier. Plessey digital communications expert and part-time SAS Signals Corps member. Part of Marconi defense cluster. Dorset, England.

David Skeels

Age 43. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Marconi avionics engineer. One of 25+ British defense scientists to die under questionable circumstances in the 1980s. England.

Stuart Gooding

Age 23. Head-on collision with lorry. Classified defense researcher at Royal College of Military Science. Died the exact same day as David Greenhalgh. Cyprus.

Russell Smith

Age 23. Fell from cliff at Boscastle, Cornwall. Nuclear lab technician at Harwell. No motive for suicide ever established. England.

Jason Thomas

Age 45. Novartis chemical biology director. Left without phone or wallet. Found in frozen lake three months later. Both parents died weeks before. Massachusetts.

John Brittan

Age 52. Carbon monoxide, car in garage. Top-secret MOD work. Recently returned from the United States. No documented history of depression. England.

George Kountis

Defense analyst. Car went into River Mersey. Sister demanded fresh inquest: ‘Things didn’t add up.’ Died same day as Shani Warren. Liverpool, England.

Floyd Sweet

Age 83. Device produced 500 watts from 33 microwatts input. Man showed surveillance photo of his apartment: ‘Unfortunate things happen.’ Research confiscated after death.

Arie DeGeus

Age 67. Zero-point energy battery inventor with multiple patents. Found dead in airport parking lot en route to meet European investors. Charlotte, North Carolina.

Frank Jennings

Age 60. Heart attack. Plessey electronic weapons engineer on SDI programs. No inquest held. His colleague Michael Baker died the month before. England.

Philip Corso

Eisenhower’s NSC member. Said he gave Roswell artifacts to defense contractors—seeding fiber optics, lasers, Kevlar. Heart attack one year after publishing. Filed sworn affidavit.

Brian Lynch

Young psychic recruited by intelligence-linked firm for ‘psychic warfare’ experiments. Found dead of overdose. Note referenced ‘$5 million from Pentagon for Project Scanate.’

Wilbert Smith

Age 52. Canadian government engineer who ran official UFO program. Classified memo confirmed U.S. programs. Cancer. Told wife to hide all files. Three nations sought them.

80 profiles from 290+ documented cases