Dr. Walter J. Kilner (1847–1920) was a working medical electrician at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, in charge of the hospital's electrotherapy department for over a decade. In 1911 he published The Human Atmosphere, describing experiments with glass screens tinted with dicyanin — a coal-tar dye used at the time to extend the sensitivity of photographic plates. Kilner reported that observers looking through dicyanin-tinted "Kilner goggles" could perceive a faint coloured envelope around the human body, which he termed the aura, and proposed it might have diagnostic medical value.
That much is genuine, documented history: a real physician, a real 1911 publication, a real chemical dye with a real (if unrelated) use in early photography.
What happened when other researchers checked
The scientific response was swift and, on the evidence, decisive. A 1912 review in the British Medical Journal attempted to replicate Kilner's experiments and reported negative results, concluding that Kilner had failed to demonstrate his aura was "more real than Macbeth's visionary dagger." Later researchers in the field of light and perception concluded that what Kilner's subjects were seeing was most likely an ordinary visual artifact — the kind of afterimage effect produced by staring through any strongly coloured filter — rather than any biological emanation. Dicyanin itself has no property in physics or chemistry that would make an electromagnetic biofield visible.
Where the "Vietnam" and "banned" claims actually come from
Here the story shifts from documented history into unverified modern marketing. A popular claim, repeated widely online and stamped across novelty eyewear currently sold as "Dicyanin Aura Glasses," holds that the U.S. military used dicyanin goggles in the Vietnam War to detect camouflaged enemy combatants via their bioenergy field, and that the technology was subsequently classified or banned. It's a good story. It is not, however, a story supported by any primary historical source, military record, or credible citation this research could locate — Kilner's own work predates Vietnam by over five decades, and the trail for the "Vietnam" claim leads consistently back to contemporary product listings and marketing copy rather than archival evidence.
This is worth naming directly: it appears to be an urban legend, likely originating in or amplified by novelty-eyewear marketing, rather than documented history. The genuinely interesting story — a Victorian-era physician's real, real-y-tested, and ultimately unsupported diagnostic claim — doesn't need an invented military conspiracy to be worth knowing about.