[1][2] He is part of the Human Potential Movement.

[1] He is also the founder of the Firewalking Institute of Research and Education.

[4] In the 1980s, he started working with large corporations and began training instructors.

[5] Burkan's disappearance from Asbury Park, New Jersey and his subsequent reappearance two months later, after a memorial service, was the subject of national news in 1967.

[6][7] Although he would explain in his book Dying to Live and in news stories years later [8] that he had run away from home for two months, the incident would continue to be cited in pseudoscience books as "still unexplained" and evidence of alien abduction [9] or teleportation [10]