Veterans deserve the truth about UAP
By Kevin Wright
The cancer started in his bladder, eventually creeping into his kidneys and, later, his liver, lungs, and bones. In March 2018, my father’s body succumbed to his more than two-decades-long battle against cancer.
Two years after he died, the Veterans Administration (VA) sent my mother a letter. The letter confirmed something my father had long suspected. While serving in Vietnam, he was exposed to Agent Orange, an herbicide designed to defoliate trees and destroy crops. One of the diseases associated with exposure to Agent Orange is a particular type of bladder cancer, which my father had and died from.
While it was good to finally learn the truth, more than 50 years after his tour of duty in Vietnam, it would have been more welcome and meaningful had the VA admitted as much while my dad was still alive.
In December 1980, former Airman First Class John Burroughs encountered a UAP in Rendlesham Forest while on duty at RAF Bentwaters/Woodbridge in the United Kingdom. The Rendlesham incident is one of the most famous cases in UFO lore. The encounter caused Burroughs to suffer heart and vision damage. As reported here by the Roswell Daily Record, 35 years after the incident, “the U.S. government made an unprecedented move by acknowledging” Burroughs’ health issues resulted from his “encounter with a UAP,” and the VA granted him “total medical disability.” More specifically, Burroughs’ heart and vision injuries were the result of “broad-band non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation … linked to cardiac and neurological injuries.” The government’s decision “not only recognizes the reality of the phenomenon, but also highlights the potential health consequences of such encounters.”
Our veterans always deserve the truth from our government, especially when their service to our nation leads to adverse physiological and psychological impacts. They deserve that truth, when possible, while they are still with us, and so do their families. Luckily, Burroughs received some answers, or at least medical relief, while still alive. But others have not been so fortunate, and if the truth can’t be told while they live, then the families should at least learn the truth when their loved one is gone.
Recently, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) made available to the public a 2010 Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD) titled “Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human Biological Tissues.” The DIRD examined cases of “unintended injury to human observers,” including radiation burns, paralysis, and brain damage, from “exposures to anomalous vehicles,” or UAP. The DIRD also found that the “primary mechanisms of injury are related to electromagnetic radiation,” which resembles what Burroughs experienced.
Addressing the DIRD in an April 2022 interview, Lou Elizondo, the former director of a previously classified program investigating UAP, said, “in some cases” military personnel, fighter pilots, and others who got too close to a UAP “sustained significant…medical trauma.”
Dr. Garry Nolan, a Professor of Pathology at Stanford University and founder of the Sol Foundation, got his start in the UAP field when officials from the Central Intelligence Agency approached him because of his expertise and world-class instrumentations for blood analysis.
Pilots, ground personnel, intelligence agents, and presumably others “had been damaged” after getting “close to supposed UAPs and the fields generated by them.” Some of those who were exposed had “horribly, horribly damaged” brains.
In an August 2022 interview, Dr. Nolan said he knew the government was “deadly serious” about people being injured by UAP “because they had basically” told Nolan that “people have died,” including “military personnel” and “intelligence agents.”
Out of the “100 or so patients” Nolan examined, of which were mostly comprised of “defense or governmental personnel,” approximately a “quarter of them died from their injuries.”
In July of last year, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby admitted UAP are impacting “military training” and “military readiness.” How so? Are military pilots in jeopardy of a near-miss collision? Are the pilots or other military members getting too close to UAP? If so, how many of them are experiencing adverse physiological and psychological health problems? How and where else is this type of UAP activity occurring?
Like anything else UAP-related, the government doesn’t want to talk about any anomalous health incidents connected to UAP. Yet, here and there, you can find evidence in the public domain that the government is aware of adverse health implications for some people who have encountered UAP, particularly those serving in our military and intelligence agencies.
In December 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law. Sec. 1683 of the act established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to investigate UAP, review historical intelligence involving UAP dating back to 1945, and uncover UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs. Importantly, AARO was also instructed to develop procedures and “standardize the collection, reporting, and analysis of incidents, including adverse physiological effects, regarding” UAP and required the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense to ensure military, intelligence, and civilian government employees “have access to procedures by which the personnel shall report incidents or information, including adverse physiological effects, involving or associated” with UAP to AARO.
It’s clear that UAP are serious business for our military and our veterans. We know the government has studied adverse health effects from encounters with UAP, and we know there are men and women in uniform who have endured physiological and psychological injuries. What we don’t know are the number of veterans injured, the extent of their injuries, and how many have lost their lives as a result. Our nation’s veterans deserve answers, and so do we.
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Kevin Wright has 25 years of experience in Washington, D.C., in public relations, communications, and issue advocacy. He founded Solve Advocacy, an issue advocacy and communications consulting firm dedicated to UAP and edge science issues. He advises the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies’ (SCU) Board of Directors on public affairs and public relations and is a consultant to Daniel Sheehan’s New Paradigm Institute. The views expressed in this column are those of the author.