"They Kill People"
Amy Eskridge and the business of keeping breakthroughs secret
The story of Amy Catherine Eskridge is part of what drew my attention to Alabama in late 2022. Huntsville, the Rocket City, home to Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), Redstone Arsenal, and a dense cluster of private and military aerospace firms, had appeared in my reading around Amy’s death (ruled a suicide by authorities) and around the earlier retreat from public view of another Huntsville-linked physicist, Ning Li1. Both had been associated with exotic-propulsion research. The combination of exotic research, government contracts (a world I knew well as a career civil servant), and advanced scientific concepts (an applied scientist by trade), was too interesting to leave alone. Excited to tell someone, I mentioned it to a family member who had worked at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). The response was not what I expected:
“If you care about anyone in this family, you will stop looking into this.”
I set the subject down and did not return to it for some time. Amy’s death has resurfaced recently, placed alongside a string of deaths and disappearances involving scientists associated with classified or exotic research programs2. Whether any of these cases are connected remains an open question. Having spent time in Huntsville and worked on government contracts, my interest was less in the manner of Amy’s death than in whether something about her work could plausibly have put her at odds with serious institutional interests. The hypothesis worth examining is this: that “anti-gravity” research, or its adjacent fields, is being suppressed because elements of the black budget aerospace and defense world have either achieved such capabilities internally, or intend to remain their sole custodians, and will act to silence those who try to bring the field into the open.
What the public record shows
A fact worth stating first: there are no peer-reviewed journal articles published under Amy Eskridge’s name. This is almost certainly a function of how private research in Huntsville is organized rather than anything sinister. Unlike academia, where “publish or perish” pushes scientists to disclose, the private ecosystem in Huntsville operates more like an innovation pipeline. In other words, investment is tied to proof-of-concept milestones and proprietary trade secrets. There is, however, a formal paper trail that links her family’s work to NASA: NASA Technical Memorandum 20205010911.
The Technical Memorandum, A Study of the Pope-Osborne Angular Momentum Synthesis Theory (POAMS) Including a Mathematical Reformulation and Validation Experiment, was authored by R.H. Eskridge (Amy’s father, a retired NASA engineer), M.A. Nelson, and M.P. Schoenfeld. The work was performed at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center under a Space Act Agreement (SAA8-1519855) between MSFC and Quantum Machines, LLC, signed July 1, 2015. For readers unfamiliar with government contracting: a “Reimbursable” SAA is an arrangement in which the private party pays NASA to use its facilities and personnel to test a theory. Unlike traditional defense contractors, Quantum Machines (QM) does not appear in publicly available records to hold large IDIQ (Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity) contracts with the Department of Defense (DOD). It functions more like a small research boutique built around a specific theory (in this case, POAMS).
In short: the Technical Memorandum documents her father’s work and his colleagues’ work, not Amy’s directly.
Three entities, one ecosystem
To understand Amy’s role, one has to look at the relationship among three entities: Quantum Machines LLC, The Institute for Exotic Science (IES), and HoloChron LLC.
Quantum Machines was the contract manager and the registered legal entity that could sign a Space Act Agreement. Individuals cannot sign SAAs, so a commercial entity is required; QM held the proprietary “trade secrets” and handled the financial transactions needed to lease NASA’s labs and staff.
HoloChron was a commercial incubator aimed at turning experimental data into proprietary, marketable technology and at attracting private investment.
IES functioned as the think tank and public-facing research advocacy arm for speculative physics.
The slide deck many readers are familiar with was delivered on behalf of HoloChron. In that presentation, A Historical Perspective on Anti-Gravity Technology, given to the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5) on December 6, 20183, Amy and her father surveyed the history of anti-gravity research, from early electrogravitics and Tesla’s “space drive” to modern work on superconductors and “black budget” programs. Its central argument: the field needs independently funded private research with testable hypotheses so that any genuine breakthroughs remain in the public domain rather than vanishing into classified programs.
Amy’s role
Amy was co-founder, chair, and president of the Institute for Exotic Science, a Public Benefit Corporation. Her primary role was not pure scientist or engineer but entrepreneur (a description drawn directly from her obituary). Unlike her father, she was not performing the technical legwork at NASA. Instead, she recruited scientists, released white papers, and built the institutional framework that gave the research academic legitimacy.
This is not meant to discount her technical or applied chops. By accounts from friends and colleagues she was deep in the experimental weeds. But her principal contribution and, in her own account, what she believed had made her a target, was opening doors and building a framework that would let exotic research happen in a democratized setting. If breakthroughs in gravitic propulsion were made under the IES framework, her stated aspiration was to open-source the foundational knowledge.
Open-sourcing does not preclude profit. Red Hat built a significant business atop open-source Linux. But in classified aerospace, where value derives from secrecy and exclusivity, open-sourcing any genuine breakthrough would directly undercut an existing business model.
The business model she threatened
The POAMS experiments at Marshall produced what the Technical Memorandum itself called “rudimentary and preliminary” data suggestive of a spin-coupled force consistent with the theory, but unreproduced at scale, and flagged by the authors themselves as requiring substantially more careful methodology before anything could be concluded (Eskridge et al., 2017, 24). Suggestive, heading, perhaps, in the right direction, but results not yet demonstrated. And that is precisely the point.
The most rigorous logical link here is not a technical claim but a strategic one: disruptive competition. Amy was not simply a scientist; she was something closer to a technical CEO attempting to build a public-benefit framework for exotic science. In doing so, she arguably positioned herself at the seam between established classified contractors, who benefit from keeping such research outside the civilian eye, and her own vision of a democratized alternative. Whether this actually endangered her is a separate question, and one the public record cannot settle.
Is suppression a real pattern?
The prior question worth asking: is there evidence that black budget contractors have, historically, acted to suppress competition or silence outsiders? Returning to the business-model framing, suppression protects proprietary monopoly and budgetary authority. Several historical cases are frequently cited:
The Cabazon–Wackenhut affair (early 1980s). Wackenhut Corporation, whose successor entities eventually became part of G4S and the GEO Group, entered a joint venture with the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians. Court filings and later cold-case investigations alleged the partnership extended beyond routine security into experimental weapons work, though the tribe has denied this, and key allegations come from disputed sources (notably Michael Riconosciuto’s affidavit). Tribal vice chairman Fred Alvarez, who had raised concerns about financial irregularities at the tribe’s casino, was murdered in 1981 along with two companions. An arrest was made nearly three decades later, but prosecutors dropped the case in 2010, citing lost confidence in the evidence. No one has been convicted. The motive, casino skimming, a weapons deal, or something else, remains contested.
The Inslaw / PROMIS affair. Inslaw Inc. alleged that the Department of Justice stole and misappropriated its case-management software, PROMIS, for use in a global intelligence-tracking network. Journalist Danny Casolaro, investigating what he called “The Octopus”, an alleged interlocking web connecting Inslaw, Iran-Contra, and other scandals, was found dead in a West Virginia hotel in 1991. His death was ruled a suicide; his family and associates have long disputed the ruling. The Netflix documentary series American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders covers the case.
Iran-Contra. The affair demonstrated that a network of private corporations, cut-outs, and informal “Enterprise”-style structures4 can sustain clandestine defense operations outside the ordinary frame of congressional oversight. This is a matter of public record.
None of these on its own proves that Amy Eskridge was targeted. Taken together, they establish only that the structures and incentives for suppression have existed, and have periodically produced violence and legal opacity around them.
A note on the Mansfield Amendment
One claim that travels with this narrative deserves correction. It is sometimes said that black-world contractors rely on the Mansfield Amendment on military-funded research to keep research out of the civilian eye. This reads the amendment backwards. The Mansfield Amendment (1969, tightened in 1973) required DoD-funded basic research to have a direct or apparent relationship to a specific military function. Its effect was to push general basic research out of the DoD and toward civilian agencies like NSF, not to pull it into classified programs. Whatever legal machinery sustains secrecy in exotic aerospace research, ITAR5 export controls, original classification authorities, invention-secrecy orders under the Invention Secrecy Act, Non-Disclosure Agreements, and Special Access Program-level compartmentation, Mansfield is not the mechanism. The argument for suppression has to be built on the correct legal scaffolding, not on a misread statute.
What I can and cannot say
Amy’s death has become part of a larger story. It now circulates alongside a list of roughly eleven scientists and officials—among them MIT physicist Nuno Loureiro, retired Air Force Major General William Neil McCasland6, NASA researchers and engineers, employees linked to Los Alamos, a pharmaceutical scientist—whose deaths or disappearances since mid-2024 have drawn attention from online commentators, journalists, and more recently the White House and the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. What it means is not yet established. The pattern-recognition is being done by the public, not yet by any investigating authority with findings to share. I note this not to dismiss it but to be precise about the kind of claim it currently is. Whether Amy belongs in that cluster is something I cannot answer, and as of this writing, neither can anyone else.
Amy herself believed she was being targeted. In a 2020 interview she described escalating harassment, surveillance, and what she characterized as directed-energy attacks. She is not the only person to have described experiences of this kind. Something under that umbrella is what the U.S. government has been investigating as “Havana Syndrome” since 2016, and 60 Minutes reporting has kept it in public view. The underlying technological lineage is documented. The Active Denial System (a 94 GHz millimeter-wave non-lethal platform developed and tested in part at AFRL) has been public for more than two decades. THOR (Tactical High Power Operational Responder) is an acknowledged high-power microwave counter-drone system. In January 2026, after Operation Absolute Resolve in Caracas, the president referred publicly to a system he called “the Discombobulator” and the Pentagon’s chief technology officer followed with his own confirmation that the department has directed-energy weapons and is scaling them. Reporting suggests the “Discombobulator” is less a single device than a fielded combination of high-power microwave, electronic warfare, cyber capabilities and that some components may overlap with the technology long speculated to underlie Havana Syndrome7.
I knew someone who worked on Active Denial at AFRL. The technology does what it is advertised to do. It is also the kind of capability that, once demonstrated, tends to acquire quieter downstream applications, and the gap between publicly acknowledged systems and whatever sits in the classified fielded inventory is, by design, opaque. That establishes a technological possibility. It does not establish a fact about Amy. Whether any such weapon was ever directed at her is, on the public record, unknowable. I cannot say it was. I will not say it wasn’t. Both would overreach the evidence I actually have.
I want to be explicit about what I am not doing. Some of the text threads and accounts that have circulated in the wake of her death contain patterns that a layperson might read as signs of psychological distress. I am not a clinician, and even if I were, I would not be her clinician. I will not retroactively diagnose a dead woman for the convenience of my argument. I’d also push back on the binary the framing tends to impose: prolonged harassment and surveillance produce hypervigilance, insomnia, and patterns of thought that look from outside like paranoia whether or not the underlying threat is real. A person can be both genuinely targeted and genuinely suffering. Picking one reading to the exclusion of the other is itself an interpretation the evidence does not support.
So here is where I actually stand. A young scientist with a public-benefit mission to democratize exotic-propulsion research died of a gunshot wound in her home in Huntsville in June 2022. The police and medical examiner have not released an investigative report. She had stated on record that she believed she was being targeted. Her peers8 and a retired British intelligence9 officer have contested the suicide ruling. The broader cluster of scientist deaths now drawing official attention may or may not include her case. The technology she feared exists in some form. Whether it was ever used against her is not something the public record can settle.
Ning Li’s “disappearance” is largely an internet myth. Her son George Men clarified in a 2023 Huntsville Business Journal interview that she retreated from public view after obtaining a top-secret clearance in the early 2000s, was struck by a vehicle on the UAH campus in 2014, suffered brain damage and Alzheimer’s, and died in July 2021, a year before Amy’s death, not “about the same time.”