John Edward Heymer is a British former police officer and author who has written extensively on spontaneous human combustion (SHC).
Heymer was born in Bow, East London, in 1934 and went to South Wales at the age of 16 to become a coal miner.
Heymer describes himself as an autodidact, with a lifelong passion for knowledge, and has written that he is not afraid to pursue this into areas where other people might fear ridicule or contempt.
[4][5] He has published articles about SHC in New Scientist[6] and Fortean Times, and has appeared on the BBC television programmes Newsnight and QED ("The Burning Question").
In 1996, he published a book entitled The Entrancing Flame, which was about his personal experience of dealing with the results of SHC and attempted to analyse the phenomenon.