Documents / Official release
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 11 March 2010, was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications program. It reviews reported injuries to people exposed at close range to anomalous aerospace vehicles and attributes them mainly to electromagnetic radiation field effects, including burns, neurological and auditory effects. It argues that clinical diagnoses can help infer the characteristics of advanced systems. The appendices hold a case catalog and ICD code tables.
From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/11/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD surveys reported acute and subacute injuries allegedly associated with close exposure to anomalous field effects, attempting to draw tentative parallels between these claimed symptoms and the known physiological effects of intense radiofrequency .and microwave exposure on human tissue. By reviewing medical and biophysical literature on heating, burns, neurological effects, and sensory disturbances, the report speculates on theoretical mechanisms by which intense electromagnetic fields might account for some of the reported injury patterns, though it does not establish a direct causal link between the reported injuries and any specific source. It hypothesizes that clinical symptoms and reported exposure circumstances might allow for highly constrained, limited inferences regarding the characteristics of an unknown emitter or propulsion system. Notably, the document’s findings rely heavily on case comparisons lacking physical examinations, untestable exposure conditions, and a mix of established science and more controversial literature. These comparisons are then extended to anomalous-craft scenarios, attempting to map known electromagnetic injury mechanisms onto anomalous encounter claims that lack independent scientific validation in the report.
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the "hotspot" range which lies between 400 MHz and 2 GHz. The heating is highly
nonuniform with typica l ratios between spatial peaks and whole body average specific
absorption rates of the order of 150: 1 to 200: 1.' {above and Figure One adapted from
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Figure One
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Subresonance Resonance range , Hot spot Surface
absorption
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range Whole body : Partial : range
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30 300 400 2000 f(MHz)
Variation ofnormalistd specific absorption ratt wirhfrrqumcy and rtlattd absorption
characrerisrics in living organisms: reproduced wirh rht pe,,ni.ssion qf WHO from :
Electromagnetic fidds (300 Hz w 300 Ghz) 1993:76. (Emnronmental H talrh
Criuria 137.)
A. THE EFFECTS THAT BURN
From the perspective of aerospace applications, the millimeter wave length of emitters
has been of greatest interest for human effects, and there have been extensive reviews
documenting effects at both low and high levels of incident energy [20,21]. For our
purposes, the most basic biophysical information that pertains is clear: with dry
clothing, 90-95 % of the energy is efficiently absorbed with or without an air gap acting
as an impedance transformer. These millimeter waves (30-300 GHz) penetrate the skin
to a depth of several millimeters. The ANSI (American National Standards Institute)
safety guideline of 5 mW/cm2 for RF /NIEMR equates to a SAR of 65-357 W/kg.
The depth of penetration involves the area of cutaneous receptors, and at and above
these levels will be perceived first, as prickling sensation, then pain and finally
erythema and even second degree burns if exposures last on the order of minutes:
burning can occur in a non-linear dose-effect range above these SAR levels, as
described elsewhere in th is paper.
The threshold of heat perception is near 0.7 mW/cm 2, with power densities of about 9.0
mW/cm 2 causing sensations of pain with in one second of exposure. It is notable, that
the non-liner effects apply; e.g. for 3 GHz {decimeter, not millimeter wave lengths},
the thresholds are on the order of 30 times less. Indeed, especially in the Former Soviet
Union, there is substantial literature on these wavelengths at SARs below 10s of W/kg
(as with Diathermy Machines in the US in the '50s) being exploited for a wide range of
external and internal (gastrointestina l) therapies .
Of interest here, in the context of incident RF that can produce heating injury, are a
series of very early experiments done at Brooks Air Force Base and the Oak Ridge
National Laboratories during the Cold War era intended to study potential weapons and
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9 Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 38 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.