Conspiracies surrounding the mysterious deaths and disappearances of scientists tied to secret research have been making waves across the internet. The buzz started in the UFO community after the Brown university shooter killed Nuno Loureiro, 47, a MIT professor and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Theories alleged that Loureiro had been killed due to his work with fusion energy. The internet found other cases of scientists who had gone missing or died and the theory took off.
On February 27th, 2026, 68 year old retired Air Force Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland left his home in Albuquerque, NM wearing hiking boots and carrying only his wallet and a .38 caliber pistol, leaving his phone and smart-watch at home. Despite an extensive search and rescue effort involving the FBI and Air Force no trace of McCasland has been found. The UFO community added McCasland to the list of strange disappearances due to his high rank and the classified national security postings he commanded while he was in the Air Force.
The story went unreported by journalists until Fox news picked it up. That brought it to Trump’s attention, and then an FBI probe was opened. Both CNN and the LA Times have reported on the FBI probe this week lending this story an air of credibility that I don’t believe it deserves.
Who Went Missing?
I think the reason this story has gotten so much traction is people read these headlines, for example here’s the LA Times lead: “WASHINGTON — Amid growing national security concerns, the FBI said Tuesday that it has launched a broad investigation into the deaths or disappearances of at least 10 scientists and staff connected to highly sensitive research, including four from the Los Angeles area.”
Wow yes that does sound suspicious. But the rest of the LA times article gives scant accounting of the individuals and the circumstances surrounding their deaths or disappearances. Once you dig in, the story falls apart.
59 Year old Michael Hicks of California
Hicks worked for NASA’s JPL and specialized in comets and asteroids. His daughter told CNN that he’d been struggling with known medical issues. Men’s Journal reported that according to the Los Angeles County Coroner Hicks died of “arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease.”
From Hick’s daughter as reported by CNN: “From what I know of my dad, there’s no train of logic to follow that would implicate him in this potential federal investigation,” she said. “I don’t understand the connection between my dad’s death and the other missing scientists.”
53 Year Old Melissa Casias of New Mexico
Casias was an administrative assistant at Los Alamos and walked out of her home on June 26th, 2025 leaving behind her keys, purse, work and personal cells(which had been factory reset, wiping them of all data). What has gone largely unreported is that her husband and daughter believe that Casias left voluntarily due to “personal and financial struggles” as reported by the Santa Fe New Mexican in September of 2025.
59 Year Old Jason Thomas of Massachusetts
Thomas worked as a chemical biologist for the pharmaceutical giant Novartis studying ways to improve the process of drug discovery. A month before his disappearance Thomas’ mother died in hospice and an hour later on that same day Thomas’ father collapsed in his arms and died of a heart attack. Thomas walked out of his home on December 12th, 2025 and did not return. On the day of his disappearance Thomas walked out of his home, leaving his phone and wallet inside his house and dropped his Apple smart watch in his mailbox.
Thomas vanished without a trace, until March 16th, 2026 when his body was found in lake Quannapowitt. Thomas regularly walked his dogs around lake Quannapowitt due to its proximity to his home. The lake was partially frozen over on the date of his disappearance and subsequently completely froze over, hampering search efforts.
34 Year Old Amy Eskridge of Alabama
Probably the most polarizing figure of the bunch is Amy Eskridge, 34, who claimed to have made breakthroughs in anti-gravity research. She died in 2022. Here’s a video interview she gave before her death. Text messages she sent to her friend before her death. More texts.
She was found at home with what authorities reported as a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The online narrative is that she had made breakthroughs in antigravity research and was subsequently killed to suppress that research.
According to her social media, Eskridge’s work spanned leadership and technical roles—including serving as a CEO, chief technology officer and co‑founder—across multiple research organizations. She also had earlier experience in business development and laboratory positions during her academic training.
Eskridge graduated from the University of Alabama in Huntsville with a double major in chemistry and biology, and she became an interdisciplinarian and a master of electrical engineering, chemistry, physics and genetic engineering. She was also the chair and president of the Institute for Exotic Science in Huntsville, which she co-founded, according to obituaries posted online.
In 2020, Eskridge said she intended to present new foundational research on antigravity but required authorization from NASA before doing so, the report said. -Newsweek
Eskridge’s credentials sound impressive, and I think that’s what largely fuels her story. But they don’t hold up to scrutiny. She holds a double bachelors in chemistry and biology from the University of Alabama with no additional formal education. From Eskridge’s obituary: “After her graduation from UAH with a double major in chemistry and biology, she became an interdisciplinarian and a master of electrical engineering, chemistry, physics, and genetic engineering.”
Eskridge’s work roles are all self-reported and pulled via her social media. She made claims that she conducted research for NASA but there’s no evidence that she’s ever worked for NASA or any credible advanced research institution. She co-founded the Institute of Exotic Science with her father, a retired NASA scientist. I’ve found no evidence that the company ever published any research, worked with NASA, or had any government contracts.
Eskridge’s father denies that her death is suspicious and said, “Scientists die also, just like other people.”
In my opinion the texts messages she sent and the interviews she gave sheds light into her state of mind, and I’ll just leave it at that.
47 Year Old Nuno Loureiro of Massachusetts
Nuno Loureiro was a MIT professor and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. He was shot at his home in Brookline, MA on Dec. 15th, 2025. Investigators subsequently linked the killing to Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national and former Brown University graduate student who had studied alongside Loureiro in the same physics program at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon between 1995 and 2000.
“Claudio was obviously one of the best, but in class he had a great need to stand out and show that he was better than the rest,” Moura wrote in Portuguese in a Facebook post.
“Claudio’s attitude was unpleasant,” he continued, often arguing with “colleagues he didn’t consider as brilliant as him (and who probably weren’t),” he wrote. “They were totally unnecessary quarrels, which did not help the class at all.” -CNN
Valente was rejected from MIT where he wanted to attend graduate school and instead attended Brown where he dropped out in 2000. ABC reported that a “lengthy grudge” was the motivation behind the shootings. Valente left a video recorded confession and admitted that he had been planning the shootings for a long time. He killed himself before authorities zeroed in on his location.
67 Year Old Carl Grillmair of California
Carl Grillmair, a Caltech astrophysicist known for research on galaxy collisions and the search for water on exoplanets was fatally shot on the porch of his home in Llano, California, on February 16, 2026. Freddy Snyder, 29, of Llano, was arrested and charged with Grillmair’s murder, burglary, and carjacking. Investigators do not believe the two knew each other, and no motive has been disclosed. Snyder had been arrested in December after trespassing on Grillmair’s property while carrying a rifle.
61 Year Old Frank Maiwald of California
Frank Maiwald was a JPL researcher and died on July 4, 2024, in Los Angeles with no public cause of death reported in his obituary. There is literally no other information you can find on Maiwald’s death yet he is included in the list.
60 Year Old Monica Reza of California
Reza, 60, disappeared on June 22, while hiking near Mount Waterman in the Angeles National Forest. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said she was last seen around 9:10 a.m. along Angeles Crest Highway. According to NewsNation, her hiking companion told investigators she waved and indicated she was doing fine, and was gone when he turned back moments later. At the time of her disappearance, Reza was Director of Materials Processing at JPL. She co-invented Mondaloy, a nickel-based superalloy used in rocket engines, while working at Rocketdyne in the mid-1990s.
It sounds mysterious. But people disappear without a trace in the wilderness all the time. Between 2004 and 2014, over 46,000 people required rescue from state parks, resulting in more than 1,500 fatalities. By 2014, 3,409 individuals were rescued, and in 2017, that number rose to 3,453. Inchworm got disoriented on the Appalachian Trail when she stepped off trail to pee, and died only two miles from the trail. Her body, lying inside her tent, went undiscovered for two years.
David Paullides wrote a whole series of books titled Missing 411 reporting on the mysterious disappearances of people in the woods. His story was compelling, with many cases just like Reza’s: a hiker turns a corner and then they’re never seen again. However his work has been largely discredited because when people looked into the cases that he reported on they found he cherrypicked information in order to make the cases fit his narrative.
Mount Waterman is near the PCT and only ten miles west of Mount Baden Powell. I’ve hiked that area. It’s a rugged area with steep terrain. The Mt. Waterman trail sits between 6,000 and 8,000ft. To assert that Reza disappeared due to a nefarious actor and not the myriad of mundane reasons that people disappear in the woods would require further evidence, of which there is none.
78 Year Old Anthony Chavez of New Mexico
Chavez was also last seen leaving his home near Los Alamos on foot and was reported missing on May 8, 2025. Chavez also left behind his wallet, keys, and cigarettes with his car parked in the driveway. Police said there were no signs of foul play or forced entry into his home and he remains missing, despite an extensive search by Los Alamos police, including the use of cadaver dogs.
Chavez had retired from Los Alamos where he worked at the Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test (DARHT) facility — a critical site for nuclear weapons research.
48 Year Old Steven Garcia of New Mexico
Garcia was last seen on Aug. 28 leaving his Albuquerque home around 9 a.m. carrying only a handgun, leaving behind his wallet, phone, keys, and car. Garcia worked as a property custodian at the Kansas City National Security Campus’s Albuquerque facility, which manufactures over 80% of non-nuclear components for US nuclear weapons and builds nuclear parts for AFRL. Not a scientist, but allegedly he would have security clearance so he made it onto the list the same as Melissa Casais the Los Alamos administrative assistant.
68 Year Old Maj. Gen. McCasland of New Mexico
The most interesting disappearance of the lot is Maj. General McCasland. Per CNN, McCasland held some of the most sensitive positions in the US military. He was an astronautical engineer with degrees from the US Air Force Academy, MIT and the JFK School of Government at Harvard University.
He served as chief engineer on the Department of Defense’s GPS program, system program director of the Space Based Laser Project Office and director of special programs at the Pentagon. Importantly, McCasland commanded the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
In July 1947, the US military announced it had recovered the wreckage of a UFO from a nearby ranch [at Roswell, NM] before quickly retracting the claim, saying the debris was from a weather balloon.
The episode helped ignite decades of speculation that something far stranger had fallen from the sky — and that whatever was recovered, including rumors of bodies that didn’t belong to human beings, was quietly transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a sprawling military installation in Ohio long speculated to house secret government research into unidentified flying objects.
Renewed attention is falling on the base after the disappearance of retired Air Force Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland, a former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson whose career placed him at the center of some of the Pentagon’s most advanced aerospace research.
The base is also home to the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, which analyzes foreign aerospace systems and emerging threats.
“The lore is that people are inclined to believe that there was a crash at Roswell, and there’s been a lot of reporting over the years of witnesses and deathbed confessions, but allegedly, (the intelligence center) is where those retrieved materials were ultimately taken for research and study,” Von Rennenkampff said.
“It’s really a hub for all things in Air Force intelligence, military intelligence, but also has those very, very interesting links, both to UFOs and McCasland himself.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/15/us/wright-patterson-air-force-base
Gen. McCasland would have actually had access to top-secret military programs and quite possibly UFO/UAP programs. I don’t want to get into the whole UAP subject with this article but the topic has moved beyond fringe conspiracy with DOD released videos of UAPs and congressional testimony about crash-retrieval and reverse engineering programs, including the retrieval of bodies as reported by NPR.
A Facebook post from Susan McCasland, Neil’s wife confirmed that Gen McCasland had worked with Tom Delonge’s organization To The Stars which is the Blink-182 singer’s project to bring about UFO disclosure. I know that sentence sounds absurd, but that’s the UFO world. Tom Delonge’s efforts helped get this 2017 NYT article published: Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program.
Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.
In the interview, Mr. Elizondo said he and his government colleagues had determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country. “That fact is not something any government or institution should classify in order to keep secret from the people,” he said.
I also found it very interesting how she worded the paragraph about Roswell. “Neil does not have any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash stored at Wright-Patt.” What a matter of fact way to say that, as if there’s no question whether there was a crash at Roswell, and whether debris and bodies were retrieved.
Susan McCasland is also highly credentialed with a PhD from the University of Arizona. She was selected as a finalist to be an astronaut at NASA, and was the Director of Advanced Studies, Headquarters Space Division, Defense Dissemination Program in El Segundo, California, a secretive defense intelligence operation.
Gen McCasland left his home on the 27th of Feb. with only his wallet, hiking boots, and his .38 caliber revolver. His wife reported him missing three hours after he left the house, and despite a massive search and rescue effort involving drones, helicopters, K-9s, the FBI, and the Air Force, not a trace of McCasland has been found. He didn’t appear on any of the numerous surveillance cameras surrounding his neighborhood. He left his phone and smart-watch at home, denying searchers any electronic clues.
Out of all of the missing scientists Gen McCasland is the most likely to have been disappeared for his knowledge of highly classified programs. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the logical conclusion is that he went out for a hike and either got lost, had an accident, or had a medical emergency. Or, he went out to the woods never intending for his body to be found.
It is strange how many of these cases left home without their phone or wallet. I can’t find statistics on how common or uncommon this is, but searching the term pulls up many pages of news articles of missing people who left their phones and wallets at home before disappearing.
April 22nd, 2026- two USF doctoral students are missing and left their home without their keys or wallets.
September 24th, 2021- Brian Laundrie, the killer of Gabby Petito left home without his phone or wallet. He would be found later having shot himself.
June 7, 1992- The “Springfield Three.” Three women who disappeared from Springfield, Missouri leaving their personal belongings including cars and purses behind.
July 9, 2023- 27 year old Tyler Keplin was last seen walking away from a jobsite on Mingo Mountain Rd just outside Kettle Falls. Tyler is from Spokane and doesn’t have ties to the area. He has no phone or wallet with him.
Just yesterday I saw a post on the Pacific Crest Trail subreddit of a missing person who left home without their phone or wallet.
On the 22nd of April, 80 year old Georgia Democratic Rep. David Scott died. Scott is the fifth sitting House member to die this Congress and the fourth Democrat to die. Five sitting congressmen out of 435 have died since January 3rd, 2025. Did you know that Georgia’s 13th district which was represented by Rep. David Scott is home to Dobbins Air Reserve base which houses a fleet of C-130J aircraft and is adjacent to the Lockheed Martin Aeronautics facility? Did you know that Lockheed Martin produces the C-130J at this Marietta, GA facility? Did you know that two C-130J aircraft were lost in the rescue operation of the downed F-15 crewmember in Iran? Those are just quick facts I dug up with one search, they have absolutely nothing to do with Rep. Scott’s death, but you can see how easily a conspiracy like this gets started when you selectively pick out information.
It’s an intriguing mystery but there is simply not enough evidence to support this broader conspiracy that scientists are being disappeared by a foreign adversary or by the deep state to hide anti-gravity secrets. The net is so broad that you can only call them missing scientists, not nuclear scientists, physicists, or engineers. Included in the list is an administrative assistant, a property custodian, and a pharmaceutical researcher. Of the remaining 8 scientists their fields of study vary from fusion to asteroids to water on exoplanets. They’re only related if you’re painting with an extremely broad brush.
The Government Accountability Office found that there were 295 cases of involuntary absences across the military from 2015 to 2024. Of those 93% (274) resulted in a service member’s death. In most cases, troops had suffered an accident, while about 10% were eventually found to have died by suicide. Is there some foreign government killing US military members because of their highly sensitive work? Only if you don’t look into it at all!
You need more evidence than “they worked in highly classified fields.” There isn’t any evidence that connects any of these disappearance or deaths to each other. They worked in different fields, for different organizations and companies, on wildly different projects.
15,000 people work at Los Alamos. 16,000 people work at Sandia National Labs. 5,500 people work for NASA’s JPL. People die, especially as they get older.
This investigation was largely a waste of time, but it did bring to mind an unfinished subject I had begun in the weeks before the Iran war started. It’s a fascinating story involving the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and Epstein’s desire to access to the scientists from those labs. Zorro ranch wasn’t purchased just for its seclusion. That will be the next deep-dive I cover.
Perfect read! lol, I just started rewatching the X-files.
Ok, I need to ask a serious question here. How do we trust an agency connected to corruption, "run" by a cross eyed drunk.