Richard C. Niemtzow

Richard C. Niemtzow (April 18, 1942 – February 2, 2025) was a physician whose career was mostly spent in military medicine and acupuncture. His UFO connection is small, but it is documented, and it is worth knowing about because it sits at the point where a respected clinician's work touched the ufological literature.

Medical career

Niemtzow was born in Philadelphia. He received his MD in 1976 from the Université de Montpellier in France and trained in radiation oncology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He joined the US Air Force Medical Service in 1980 and retired in 2010 as a colonel, serving in flight-surgeon and clinical roles along the way. His obituary in Holistic Primary Care records his education and service dates, and his later career is recorded in an obituary in Acupuncture Today.

His best-known contribution is Battlefield Acupuncture, an ear-based (auricular) protocol that he began developing in 2001. It was designed to give fast, non-pharmacological pain relief in combat and mass-casualty settings, and it spread through the Air Force, the Veterans Administration, and other branches. He attended a UCLA medical acupuncture course in 1994 and became a prominent figure in the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture, serving as its president from 2009 to 2011 and as an editor of its journal, Medical Acupuncture. He also spent 13 years on the NIH National Advisory Council for Complementary and Integrative Health. Several sources describe him as a pioneer of medical acupuncture in the United States, and that reputation is the best-documented part of his life.

The UFO-injury paper

Niemtzow's name enters ufology through a 1980 paper he co-wrote with John F. Schuessler, the MUFON figure who later became a prominent field investigator. The paper, "Evaluation of medical injuries resulting from UFO close encounters," appeared in the MUFON Journal in 1980 (vol. 147, p. 5). A 2026 medical review of human injuries from unidentified aerial phenomena cites it in its reference list, although the review's text does not discuss it. Beyond that citation, the paper's data, methods, and conclusions are not independently assessed in the sources available here, so any claims about what it established should be treated as the authors' own.

A second thread concerns the Cash–Landrum case of December 1980 in Texas, in which three witnesses reported injuries after a close encounter with a bright object. Philip Klass, the skeptic who investigated the case, corresponded with Niemtzow in 1981–82 about a possible panel. According to a summary of that correspondence on the G.P. Posner site, the panel was discussed but "no such panel was formed." The page does not say what the panel was meant to evaluate, and the underlying letters are not reproduced there.

Assessment

The gap in the record is the important point. Niemtzow's medical credentials and acupuncture career are well documented in institutional and professional obituaries. His involvement with UFO injury research is documented only by a single co-authored 1980 paper and a short archival note about a panel that never formed. Other claims sometimes attached to his name, including a "Project UFOMD" network of physicians, could not be confirmed in any independent source and are not supported here.

For readers, the useful takeaway is that Niemtzow is a real and credentialed physician whose UFO-related work was limited and never produced a widely accepted body of evidence. He is best understood as a clinician who briefly engaged with the medical side of the Cash–Landrum and close-encounter injury question in the early 1980s, rather than as a central figure in ufology.