The DIA's UFO Injury Study, Read Properly

What Is the DIA UFO Injury Study?

The DIA UFO injury study is a 2010 research paper written for AAWSAP, the Defense Intelligence Agency's Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. It argues that people have been hurt by close exposure to "anomalous aerospace vehicles", that the injuries look like radio-frequency and microwave injuries, and that doctors could use them to work out how such craft are powered.

It is one of 38 papers the programme commissioned, and one of the 37 published in the Department of War's sixth release of UFO files on 18 September 2026. Our guide to the AAWSAP programme rates all 37. Most are dry literature reviews about metals, lasers and fusion. Only two mention unidentified craft at all, and this is the one that is about them from start to finish. Its stated aim is blunt:

What follows is the whole thing, in the order the paper makes its case. If you want to know where it sits in the wider collection, the UAP research hub explains how we work with primary sources, and our news story on the sixth UFO file release covers the rest of the batch.

What Does the Pentagon UFO Injury Report Claim?

The report claims that historical cases show people injured near unknown craft, that the injuries are caused by electromagnetic field effects, and that enough cases have been reliably recorded to suggest "some advanced systems are already deployed". It says the biology of the injuries is well understood even though the propulsion behind them is not.

Its summary page sets this out in a list of bullet points. The two that matter most:

The injuries it lists fall into three groups: heating and burns, nervous-system effects (from confusion and numbness to anxiety and seizures), and effects on hearing, including sounds "heard" inside the head. It works within a range of tens of metres and exposures of under ten minutes, and it says its most important frequencies run from about 300 kHz to 300 GHz, the band in which radio waves deposit energy in the body.

The Department of War's own catalogue entry is far more careful. It describes the paper as an attempt "to draw tentative parallels" between claimed symptoms and known radio-frequency injuries, and says it "does not establish a direct causal link between the reported injuries and any specific source". That is the official framing.

Who Were the Three Antenna Engineers? A Real 1997 Radio Accident

The three antenna engineers were victims of an industrial accident, not UFO witnesses. They are the subject of a 1997 case report in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, which the paper cites as its very first reference (it spells the author "Shilling"). They were accidentally exposed, at a range of metres, to broadband radio-frequency radiation centred at about 785 MHz.

The paper opens with their story but does not call it an industrial accident at first. It says three "previous fit and active individuals experienced an anomalous... aerospace-related event", and only further down reveals that they were "antennae engineers subjected to an anomalous 'accident'", with the word accident in quotation marks.

Their injuries, as the paper lists them, came on within 72 hours: redness and heat over exposed skin, fever, pain, headaches, numbness and tingling, diarrhoea, hair loss, skin eruptions, palpitations, and sleep problems and anxiety that became long-term. Two had painful, bloodshot eyes and light sensitivity. One developed a blood disorder and "signs of radiation illness", and over several years "signs of malignant transformations".

The paper adds that a wider search turned up 42 "less dramatic" cases in the peer-reviewed medical literature and 300 more that are unpublished, mostly involving exposures of 1 to 10 GHz at high power. The unpublished 300 are not shown anywhere in the document.

How Does the Injury Study Compare Them With Cash-Landrum?

The paper says the engineers and the Cash-Landrum witnesses are medically indistinguishable. That is its central move: a real accident with a known source, set beside a famous 1980 UFO case, to argue that the UFO case must also have involved intense radio-frequency energy.

It goes further. Citing a laboratory study in which skin cells exposed to 849 MHz radiation for an hour showed no damage, it argues that radio-frequency heating explains the burns in Cash-Landrum but not the blood disorder and later illness: "one assumes the cells DNA damage was secondary to ionizing radiation". So the craft, on this reading, gave off a mix of radio-frequency and ionising radiation.

There are two problems. First, the paper never sets out the Cash-Landrum medical records. It cites John Schuessler's 1981 article in the MUFON UFO Journal and its author's own unpublished files, described as protected by US medical privacy law, so a reader cannot check the comparison. Second, a match in symptoms tells you two groups of people suffered similar harm. It does not tell you what caused it, and the paper offers no measured field, no known emitter and no physical trace for the UFO side.

What Is the INSCOM "Delusional" Witness Story in the Report?

The INSCOM story is an anecdote the paper uses to defend witnesses whose accounts sound unbelievable. It concerns a man, named only as XXXX, who believed the US government was attacking him with energy weapons, threatened a Secret Service agent, and was judged psychotic by both the government's psychiatrist and a psychologist he chose himself.

At a competency hearing he produced a pair of shoes whose heels, he said, had been vaporised by an electromagnetic weapon in 2001. The court thought "the heel of the shoe had simply worn out due to ordinary use". But the document he had obtained turned out to be real: a 1998 Army INSCOM (Intelligence and Security Command) report on the bioeffects of non-lethal weapons, classified SECRET/NOFORN until 2006, describing the kinds of field effects he claimed.

From this the paper draws a general rule, and it is the line that does the most work in the whole document:

As a general point, that holds up. But the story shows that a real document existed, not that anyone was attacked with what it described, and the paper itself admits "there is no evidence that the systems described in the document have been fielded". One line later it says "there is no doubt that they would work". The paper is often like this: a careful hedge, then a confident claim that steps over it.

Pentagon UFO Report "Radiation Burns" and "Unaccounted-for Pregnancy": What the Appendix Lists

Appendix A reproduces the frequency table from John Schuessler's 1996 MUFON catalogue, UFO-Related Human Physiological Effects, which lists 356 selected cases from 1873 to 1994. It is a tally of what witnesses reported, not a set of medical diagnoses, and it is where the headlines about pregnancies and burns came from.

Further down come telepathy (9), levitation (5) and "sexual encounters" (5), then about twenty effects listed once each, including "unaccounted-for pregnancy", "fillings crumbled" and "hair precipitously turned white". The paper calls the catalogue "a useful data base from which it is anticipated that certain physical source causes may be inferred". It does not explain how a field strength could be inferred from a report of telepathy.

Appendix B lists more than 80 dated case locations from 1952 onwards, many of them in France in autumn 1954, and Appendix C is a draft chart matching them to medical diagnosis codes. Both are presented as work in progress for a companion study.

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Can Microwaves Cause These Injuries? What Mainstream Medicine Supports

Yes, some of them, at high power. Intense radio-frequency and microwave energy heats tissue, and the paper's account of how that happens is mainstream science, well referenced to the FCC, the IEEE and the World Health Organization. This is the solid half of the document.

It explains that water-rich tissue such as blood, muscle and brain absorbs far more energy than fat or bone, and that the 400 MHz to 2 GHz range is a "hotspot" band where heating is very uneven (the engineers' 785 MHz falls inside it). It quotes the FCC's limits: 0.4 W/kg averaged over the whole body for people exposed at work and 0.08 W/kg for the public, with separate limits for any single gram of tissue. Its own one-sentence summary is that early burning is unlikely below about 1 W/kg over minutes. It also covers microwave hearing, the well-documented effect in which pulsed microwaves are heard as clicks or buzzing, first reported in 1956.

Notably, it cites several studies that found nothing: ultra-wideband pulses that produced no detectable effect on behaviour, phone-mast signals that caused no cognitive symptoms in a double-blind trial, and skin cells unharmed after high exposures. The companion paper in the same release, DIRD D121 on high-power microwave sources, covers the engineering side of the same physics in sober terms and never mentions UFOs.

Where Does the UFO Injury Study Go Beyond the Evidence?

The paper goes beyond the evidence at the point where it moves from "these injuries look like radio-frequency injuries" to "therefore an advanced craft caused them". None of its UFO cases has a measured field, a known source or an independent medical record a reader can check.

The sourcing is uneven too. Alongside proper journal papers, the reference list includes Google Scholar search results, a Wikipedia page, a website about the "Philadelphia Experiment", and one link that points to 127.0.0.1, an address on the author's own computer. A footnote claims "over 240,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers" on radio-frequency hearing without giving a source. And the paper's argument that ordinary people could not imagine symptoms that fit "thermal injury patterns" so neatly overlooks the simplest explanation of a match with a real accident: a real accident with a mundane source.

The author's own conclusion is more careful than the paper's tone:

Who Wrote the AAWSAP UFO Injury Study?

Officially, nobody we can name: the author is redacted to "AAP Person 81". The text drops clues, though. It cites unpublished personal files as "Green, C." and "Green & Schuessler", and a footnote says the author "once ran the INSCOM effort" behind the 1998 report, as Assistant National Intelligence Officer for Science and Technology, and recently chaired a National Research Council study published as "The military application of neuroscience research".

People have put a name to that description. The release does not, so neither do we. What can be said is that the paper's author self-cites as Green, C., and that much of its key evidence is that author's own unpublished data. Like every AAWSAP paper, it also carries the Department of War's standard note that DIRDs are "reference and synthesis products rather than original research" and should not be read as validating the ideas in them.

How to Read the UFO Injury Study Yourself

The paper is public domain. Open it in our PURSUE files browser under D128, which links to a download from our own mirror. Our guide to the six US PURSUE releases explains the designations, and the full UAP document archive lists every collection we have catalogued. For the money behind the paper, see the AAWSAP contract file, line by line.

Seen a Strange Light? Check the Sky First

The best answer to both hype and dismissal is a quick look at the sky. Most bright moving lights turn out to be the International Space Station, a satellite train or a planet, and you can see ISS passes tonight or what you can see in the sky tonight in seconds. Our UK night sky this week lists the bright planets, and if you want to know the sky well enough to spot the odd one out, start with stargazing for beginners. The same release has a fine example of how hard it is to settle a sighting from paperwork: the Air Force's file on the 1952 Tremonton film.

Related Reading

Header image: an illustration generated with Google Gemini, not a photograph of any site in the paper. Document pages: DOW-UAP-D128, US Department of War, public domain.