A month before she was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head in Huntsville, Alabama, 34-year-old scientist Amy Eskridge sent a text message to a former British intelligence officer with a stark warning: "If you see any report that I killed myself, I most definitely did not."
Her death on June 11, 2022, was ruled a suicide. But the messages she left behind, and the pattern of alleged harassment she described in the weeks before she died, have now drawn the attention of Congress and prompted lawmakers to seek a formal FBI investigation into what they describe as multiple deaths and disappearances among America's scientific community.
The case sits at the intersection of government secrecy, advanced weapons research, and the growing push for transparency around Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. And the questions it raises are not going away.
Franc Milburn, a retired British paratrooper and intelligence officer, told the Daily Mail that he had been in regular contact with Eskridge before her death. He said he spoke with her just four hours before she died. In that final conversation, he recalled, she gave no indication of distress.
"She said, 'Everything's fine, Franc, I'm feeling okay.' She sent me, and others, emails and LinkedIn messages saying, 'If anything happens to me, suicide or an accident, it wasn't, it's suspicious, treat it as such.'"
The messages Milburn shared paint a picture of a woman who believed she was under sustained, organized surveillance and intimidation. A May 13, 2022, text attributed to Eskridge read:
"If you see any report that I killed myself, I most definitely did not. If you see any report that I overdosed, I most definitely did not. If you see any report that I killed anyone else, I most definitely did not."
That message was sent less than a month before her death. Six days later, on May 19, Milburn said Eskridge messaged him about a lab member with advanced weapons experience who believed a directed energy weapon had caused burns on her hands. She quoted the team member's assessment: the device was "most likely an RF k-band emitter run by five car batteries strung together from inside an SUV."
Eskridge had also described, in a May 11 text, a pattern of confrontations in public. Groups of two to six people, she said, would enter a location about 30 minutes after she sat down.
"Then the whole group will take turns one at a time rotating through the empty seat next to me, repeatedly asking me the same questions over and over again. I deflect one, then the next one sits down. They even all use the same opening line between them all, as if they all read the same briefing materials."
She alleged her apartment had been broken into on at least three occasions. And she told Milburn the harassment had been escalating for four or five years, growing "more aggressive, more invasive" over the previous 12 months, including, she said, "digging through my underwear drawer and sexual threats."
Eskridge was no fringe figure. She co-founded The Institute for Exotic Science with her father, Richard Eskridge, a former NASA scientist who worked on fusion propulsion. The institute's stated mission, as Amy Eskridge described it in a 2020 podcast, was to create a "public-facing persona to disclose anti-gravity technology."
In that same interview, she laid out her reasoning for going public in terms that now read as a grim forecast. She explained why she believed visibility was a form of protection:
"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."
Eskridge's death is now one of eleven cases involving the deaths or disappearances of top scientists that have drawn scrutiny from lawmakers. She also believed the 2021 death of illustrator and ufologist Mark McCandlish, also officially ruled a suicide, was suspicious.
Milburn said he had put Eskridge in touch with the FBI before her death, specifically regarding the alleged incidents and the possible use of a directed energy weapon on U.S. soil. He said the agency later dropped the case. No official explanation for that decision has been reported.
After Eskridge died, Milburn launched his own investigation. He said co-workers and friends of Eskridge came forward anonymously with their own accounts of harassment.
"After she died, her co-workers and her friends, people she'd worked with, they came forward anonymously and said to me, 'yeah, look, we were attacked, we were roofied, my house was broken into, my car tires were slashed.'"
Milburn added: "So this wasn't just random events, this was happening to her and people around her, and she was introducing me to the people that it was happening to."
His findings were brought before a congressional hearing in 2023 that examined Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Journalist Michael Shellenberger presented the material to the committee in writing, alongside other incidents of alleged government retaliation against UAP whistleblowers, including Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch.
Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri confirmed that Shellenberger had briefed House members on the case. Burlison said lawmakers are now seeking an FBI investigation into the broader pattern of deaths and disappearances among American scientists. NASA has since joined a multi-agency probe into these cases.
Eskridge's father, Richard, has pushed back against the notion that his daughter's death was anything other than what authorities concluded. In an interview with NewsNation, he said simply: "Scientists die also, just like other people."
The family issued a statement to CNN describing Amy as a "marvelously intelligent person" who suffered from "chronic pain." They urged restraint: "People should realize that scientists die also and not make too much of this."
Milburn, for his part, was not persuaded. He said his investigation concluded that Eskridge had been targeted by a private aerospace company in the United States because of her involvement in the UAP conversation. He also disclosed that after her death, he received what he described as threats of his own.
"A s*** load of anonymous messages. Offering advice on how to kill myself. Phrased as these crazy, creepy rhymes, like: 'Take your pills and overdose and this will go away, take your pills and overdose and it will be OK.'"
Milburn also issued his own preemptive statement, echoing the same language Eskridge had used: "I am not suicidal or contemplating suicide and if anything happens to me, like an accident or other suspicious event, then it should be fully investigated as suspicious."
One detail Milburn flagged repeatedly was the timeline immediately following Eskridge's death. She died on a Saturday. An autopsy was performed the same day. By Sunday, she had been cremated.
"Why was she cremated so quickly? She phoned me four hours before she died, then she dies, then a few hours later, on the Saturday when she died, she has an autopsy, and then on the Sunday, she's cremated."
That sequence raises its own set of questions. Rapid cremation effectively forecloses any future independent forensic examination. Whether the speed was routine or unusual for Huntsville remains unclear from available reporting. No medical or law enforcement officials in Huntsville have been quoted addressing Milburn's concerns about the timeline.
The broader push for transparency around UAP-related government programs has gained significant momentum in recent years, with both the White House and senior members of Congress demanding answers.
The official record on Amy Eskridge's death remains thin. No public accounting has been offered for why the FBI reportedly dropped its inquiry into the incidents she described. No agency has publicly addressed the claims about directed energy weapons. And the identity of whoever, or whatever entity, may have been behind the alleged surveillance and harassment has never been established through official channels.
Milburn urged people to weigh Eskridge's credibility on the merits. "I would give a lot of credence to her," he said. "There's gonna be people saying she's delusional, she's this or that, just follow the facts."
Congressional interest in the case is not fading. Lawmakers have pressed the Pentagon on classified UAP materials, with deadlines set for the release of dozens of classified videos. Members of both chambers have signaled that the pattern of scientist deaths warrants a serious federal inquiry, not a quiet filing and a closed case.
Huntsville, Alabama, is no stranger to tragedy connected to its scientific community. In 2010, Amy Bishop opened fire at the University of Alabama's Huntsville campus, killing three people, Gopi Podila, Maria Ragland Davis, and Adriel Johnson. Bishop pleaded guilty in 2012 and is serving a life sentence after her appeal was denied. That case, at least, had a clear perpetrator and a public trial.
The Eskridge case has neither. What it has are messages, sent weeks before a young scientist's death, that read less like the words of someone planning to end her life and more like someone trying to leave a trail in case someone else did.
Milburn's claims remain single-source and unverified by any official body. Eskridge's family maintains the death was a personal tragedy, not a conspiracy. But the text messages exist. The congressional interest is real. And the FBI's reported decision to walk away from the case before Eskridge died deserves an explanation that, four years on, no one in government has provided.
When a 34-year-old scientist writes "if anything happens to me, treat it as suspicious" and then turns up dead a month later, the bare minimum a serious country owes her is a serious investigation. So far, she hasn't gotten one.
