Alternate Perceptions Magazine, September 2026
UFO Eyeburn
By: Brent Raynes
UFO witnesses periodically over the years have described what’s simply been called “eyeburn” related to their sightings of UFOs. Noted journalist John A. Keel reported on a number of cases he connected to this effect. In his book The Mothman Prophecies he claimed he knew upon meeting one witness that the person was truthful as “her eyes were reddened, watery, and almost swollen shut.”
“I had seen these symptoms many times in my treks around the country investigating UFO reports,” he wrote. “Witnesses who were unlucky enough to have a close encounter with an unidentified flying object, usually a dazzlingly brilliant aerial light, are exposed to actinic rays…ultraviolet rays…which can cause ‘eyeburn,’ medically known as klieg conjunctivitis. These are the same kind of rays that tan your hide at the beach. If you lay in the bright sun without protecting your eyes you can get conjunctivitis. Whatever they are, UFOs radiate intense actinic rays.”
He also described an instance where a young amorous couple in the backseat of a car, the night they alleged “a big ball of bluish fire” appeared in the sky nearby, how the next morning both were “sunburned from head to foot” and he noticed how the young man’s eyes were swollen.
In Kansas, a Mrs. Frederick Boxberger and her aunt Kathryn Black were riding together when a funnel shaped UFO flew low over their car. In fact, they feared it was going to collide with them. Afterwards, they too claimed “our eyes hurt and were blurry all day.” [Russell Daily News, Kansas, July 7, 1975] In the famous January 6, 1976, close range UFO encounter of three women near Stanford, Kentucky, it was reported how they had suffered tearing and irritated eyes afterwards. For one of them, a Mona Stafford, it was so severe she sought medical attention.
Early on in my UFOlogical career, if you will, I came across similar instances. For example, my father had worked years earlier at a job where he came to know a gentleman named Franklin Sweatt of Richmond, Maine, who had one such story. It happened around 11:45 p.m., sometime in the fall of 1949. He had just parked his car in his garage, was closing the door, when suddenly the whole area lit up like daytime! Looking upward he saw a brilliant bluish green object moving from the southwest to the northeast, producing a hissing sound. He estimated that he had observed it for 40-50 seconds.
“It really scared me,” he admitted. For a short time, he was temporarily blinded. For 2-3 hours he said he had dots in front of his eyes and how his eyes bothered him for 2-3 days afterwards. He reported his sighting to The Daily Kennebec Journal in Augusta but found that no one else had reported anything unusual in the sky that night. A woman in North Scituate, Rhode Island, named Jessie Williams, had written me of something she’d seen back in October of 1973. “I woke up at about 2:30, or somewhere near that time, to find my bedroom flooded with light. Every crack and corner was lighted.’
“There was this huge golden colored thing outside sort of over the meadow that was what flooded the room with light,” she added. She got out of bed with the intent of bringing this matter to the attention of a friend in another room nearby. “When I stopped looking, I was as blind as a bat. I fell on my knees and had to feel for the bed and got into it.” Back in bed she worried wondering if her eyes were permanently damaged. Eventually she fell back asleep, and though she could see the next morning she said her vision was “not the best.”
“My eyes itched so it was awful,” she explained. “I washed them with clear cold water, but they still itched.” A neighbor took her to a local doctor. Months later I visited her and spoke with neighbors, some who had also seen strange things in the sky and I got in touch with a journalist who had written about a wave of sightings that had gone on in the area.
