Roger Leir

Roger Krevin Leir was an American podiatric surgeon and ufologist, born in the San Francisco Bay area on 20 March 1935 and died of a heart attack on 14 March 2014. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1961, qualified as a podiatrist in 1964 and practised in southern California. After joining a local chapter of the Mutual UFO Network he removed small metallic objects from patients who believed they had been abducted, and came to claim that they were alien implants and proof of non-terrestrial experimentation on people. A laboratory at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology found the objects were made of commonly found elements such as iron or aluminum, and the skeptical investigator Joe Nickell argued they were ordinary debris, such as glass or metal fragments, lodged in the skin by accidents. Leir wrote The Aliens and the Scalpel in 1999, Casebook: Alien Implants in 2000 and a 2005 book on an alleged crash in Varginha, Brazil, and he appeared on radio and television. His place in the record of medicine is as a disputed claim, not an accepted finding.