Amy Eskridge: The Scientist Who Predicted Her Own Death

On June 11, 2022, Amy Eskridge was found dead in Huntsville, Alabama. She was 34 years old. Authorities ruled the cause of death a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Neither the Huntsville Police Department nor the Madison County Medical Examiner’s Office has released a public investigative report. No case file has been made available. No press conference was held.

For nearly four years, that silence held. Then, in April 2026, her name surfaced on a list — alongside ten other scientists and researchers connected to U.S. aerospace and nuclear programs who have died or vanished under circumstances that prompted the FBI to open a formal investigation and the House Oversight Committee to demand briefings from the Pentagon, NASA, the Department of Energy, and the FBI itself.

Amy Eskridge is now the eleventh name on that list. To understand why her case matters, you have to understand what she was building, who her father was, and what she said would happen to her before it did.

The Eskridge Name in Huntsville

Huntsville, Alabama, is not an incidental location. It is home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal, and a dense network of defense contractors and aerospace research facilities. It is the city where the Saturn V rocket was built. It is also the city where, beginning in the early 2000s, Richard Eskridge spent his career.

Richard Eskridge was not a fringe figure. He was an aerospace engineer at NASA Marshall, where he worked on pulsed electromagnetic plasma accelerators, magnetic target fusion, and advanced propulsion systems. His name appears on multiple publications archived in the NASA Technical Reports Server, including studies on plasma jet velocities, coaxial plasma thrusters, and the Plasmoid Thruster Experiment. These are peer-reviewed, government-funded research papers published through institutions like the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His work at Marshall centered on the kind of physics that sits at the boundary between propulsion engineering and the theoretical frontiers of energy production — plasma dynamics, fusion ignition, magnetized target compression.

This matters because of what came next.

After retiring from NASA, Richard Eskridge co-founded two companies with his daughter: HoloChron Engineering, a gravity modification research and development firm, and The Institute for Exotic Science, a public benefit corporation headquartered in Huntsville. Richard served as Chief Technology Officer. Amy served as CEO and President.

The Institute That Was Built to Be Seen

The Institute for Exotic Science was not a garage operation with a website. It was a registered public benefit corporation with a declared mission: to conduct antigravity research in the open. Amy Eskridge stated this explicitly and repeatedly. In a December 2018 presentation at HAL5 — the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society, a local space advocacy group — she and her father delivered a talk titled “A Historical Perspective on Anti-Gravity Technology,” covering both historical experiments and what they described as contemporary classified programs allegedly developing triangular antigravity vehicles.

The accompanying presentation materials identify HoloChron as specializing in “quantum computing, gravity modification, metamaterial science and communications.” The Institute’s team included a government affairs director, a senior electrical engineer, and an R&D director. This was an organization with structure, personnel, and a public-facing posture that Amy described as a deliberate survival strategy.

Her reasoning was blunt. In a 2020 podcast interview, she laid it out:

“If you stick your neck out in public, at least someone notices if your head gets chopped off. If you stick your neck out in private… they will bury you, they will burn down your house while you’re sleeping in your bed and it won’t even make the news. That’s why the institute exists.”

She also stated in that same interview that she was planning to present foundational antigravity research but required authorization from NASA before proceeding. She never got that far.

The Huntsville Connection

Amy Eskridge was not working in a vacuum. Huntsville has a documented history with antigravity research that predates her by decades. Dr. Ning Li, a Chinese-born physicist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, published a series of papers in the early 1990s on gravitoelectric coupling via superconductivity that attracted NASA Marshall funding and national media attention, including a feature in Popular Mechanics. In 1999, Li left UAH to found AC Gravity LLC, which received a $448,970 Department of Defense grant in 2001 to continue the research. The grant period ended in 2002 with no public results. Li subsequently obtained a top-secret security clearance and stopped publishing, according to her son, George Men, who spoke to the Huntsville Business Journal in 2023. Li was struck by a car in 2014 on the UAH campus, suffered permanent brain damage, and died in 2021.

Journalist Ross Coulthart stated in a February 2023 podcast that people “involved in high-level physics” who worked in Huntsville had disappeared, and that sources described both an active antigravity program and “an extraordinarily aggressive and nasty Chinese counterintelligence operation” targeting researchers in the area. These claims remain unverified, but they place Amy Eskridge’s work — and her fears — within a specific geographic and institutional context that extends well beyond her own case.

What She Said Would Happen

In the months before her death, Amy Eskridge contacted Franc Milburn, a retired British intelligence officer and former paratrooper, through social media. According to Milburn, who has spoken to NewsNation, the Daily Mail, and other outlets, Eskridge described an escalating pattern of harassment and physical attacks she believed were designed to stop her research.

On May 13, 2022 — less than a month before her death — Eskridge sent a text message that has since been shared publicly by Milburn:

“If you see any report that I killed myself, I most definitely did not. If you see any report that I overdosed myself, I most definitely did not. If you see any report that I killed anyone else, I most definitely did not.”

She also described being struck by what she believed was a directed energy weapon, sharing photographs of burns on her hands, feet, neck, and back. In a text message dated May 19, 2022, she wrote that a colleague with weapons expertise — whom she described as a former CIA operative on her team — identified the device as “an RF k-band emitter run by five car batteries strung together from inside an SUV.” Milburn claims he spoke with Eskridge approximately four hours before her death and detected nothing unusual.

These are extraordinary claims. They require extraordinary evidence, and no independent forensic analysis of the alleged burns or weapon has entered the public record. No pathologist has publicly confirmed microwave-consistent tissue damage. Milburn’s own conclusions — that Eskridge was murdered — are his assessment, not a verified finding. The family’s position is unambiguous: Richard Eskridge told NewsNation that he does not believe his daughter’s death was suspicious. “Scientists die also, just like other people,” he said.

The Congressional Record

Whatever one makes of Milburn’s claims, they did not stay on social media. In November 2024, journalist Michael Shellenberger submitted written testimony to the House Oversight Committee during its hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena — the same hearing series in which David Grusch testified under oath about non-human craft in U.S. possession. Shellenberger’s 214-page submission included Milburn’s allegation that Eskridge was “murdered by a ‘private aerospace company’ in the US because she was involved in the UAP conversation.” That allegation — submitted alongside Shellenberger’s reporting on the Immaculate Constellation program — is now part of the congressional record.

Congressman Eric Burlison has stated publicly that there is “significant evidence Amy Eskridge was targeted by a directed energy weapon.” In April 2026, the House Oversight Committee sent formal letters to FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, stating that the deaths and disappearances of eleven scientists “may represent a grave threat to U.S. national security.” The FBI confirmed it is “spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists.” President Trump called the situation “pretty serious stuff.”

Amy Eskridge’s case sits at the center of this investigation — not because it is the most recent, but because she left a trail of statements, texts, and public appearances that either document a genuine threat or document something else entirely. Both possibilities demand scrutiny.

What Is Known and What Is Not

The verifiable record is narrow and specific. Richard Eskridge’s career at NASA Marshall is documented in government archives. Amy Eskridge’s companies were registered entities with public records. The HAL5 presentation exists as a downloadable PDF. Her obituary was published in the Arab Tribune and on Legacy.com. She was born September 19, 1987, graduated from UAH with a double major in chemistry and biology, and is survived by her parents and two brothers.

What is not verified: the directed energy weapon claims, the identity of the former CIA colleague she referenced, the specific nature of the burns she photographed, and — critically — whether the official cause of death is accurate. The absence of a public investigative report from Huntsville authorities is not evidence of a coverup. It is, at minimum, an absence that invites questions in a case where the deceased left behind explicit, timestamped statements predicting the circumstances of her own death.

As former FBI special agent-in-charge Andrew Black told NewsNation: “The fact that her parents may feel that she did commit suicide doesn’t mean the other things she reported weren’t true.”

The Institute for Exotic Science’s website went offline after Amy Eskridge’s death. HoloChron Engineering was formally dissolved on December 29, 2022. The research she intended to publish has not appeared. The questions she was asking have not been answered.

She built a company to be visible. She put her name on presentations, registered public benefit corporations, and went on the record about her work and her fears. She designed the institute, in her own words, so that someone would notice if something happened.

Something happened.