Sometimes a long percolating news story comes to a head, and when viewed in context and in the light of day it just seems like science fiction. Which in this case, perhaps it is.
Here is the one-liner: 11 US scientists working in critical areas that affect US national security have either gone missing or died over the last few years. Some under very mysterious circumstances.
It would not be hyperbole to call this delicious nutrient for the conspiracy-minded.
To wit:
A retired Air Force general walks out of his Albuquerque home and vanishes. An aerospace engineer disappears while hiking in a California forest, thirty steps ahead of another hiker who finds her simply gone. A nuclear physicist is shot on his porch in Massachusetts. Two NASA scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory die within a year of each other, with no public cause of death given for either. A pharmaceutical researcher goes missing in December and his body is recovered, weeks later, from a lake that spent the winter frozen.
Eleven people in total — some dead, some missing, several still unaccounted for — all connected in various ways to America’s most sensitive scientific infrastructure: nuclear weapons design, planetary defence, fusion energy, aerospace engineering, and cancer pharmacology. The story broke slowly, incubated for months on social media and fringe websites, until it was too loud to ignore.
A few weeks ago, the matter reached the hallowed halls of US political power. When a reporter raised it at the White House briefing room on April 15, press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the administration was “actively working with all relevant agencies and the FBI to holistically review all of the cases together and identify any potential commonalities.” She added: “No stone will be unturned.”
On April 16 Trump himself referred to the matter as “pretty serious stuff,” and said he hoped it was all a coincidence, but acknowledged that “we’re going to know in the next week and a half.” He had apparently just come from a meeting on the subject.
Congress was equally agitated. House Oversight Chair James Comer declared on Fox News last Sunday that it was “very unlikely that this is a coincidence.” NASA issued a carefully worded statement saying it was “coordinating with relevant agencies” but saw nothing indicating a national security threat.
Who were these people? Let’s back up and thread the needle through the individual cases.
The oldest case on the list involves Michael David Hicks, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who worked on the DART Project — the mission that deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid to test planetary defence — and on the Deep Space 1 mission. He died on 30 July 2023, aged 59. No cause of death has been publicly released.
A year later, Frank Maiwald, a principal researcher and systems engineer also at JPL, specialising in spaceflight instrumentation and remote sensing, the kind of technology used to detect chemical signatures including water and organic molecules on other worlds, died in Los Angeles on 4 July 2024, aged 61. He received no autopsy. No cause of death was disclosed.
Then the disappearances began. Anthony Chavez, 78, a retired Los Alamos National Laboratory employee who had worked at the New Mexico nuclear facility for decades before retiring in 2017, was last seen at his home in Los Alamos in early May 2025. His wallet, keys and car were all found left behind. No signs of forced entry, no struggle, no confirmed footage of him after he left the house.
Monica Reza, 60, Director of the Materials Processing Group at JPL and an aerospace engineer with deep ties to Air Force-funded rocket technology, disappeared on 22 June 2025 while hiking near Mount Waterman in the Angeles National Forest. Witnesses reported that she was walking just thirty steps behind another hiker when she vanished. She has not been found.
Four days later, Melissa Casias, 53, an administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory who held a security clearance, disappeared in Taos County, New Mexico. Her car, purse, keys and — notably — both her personal and work-issue phones were found at home, the latter factory-reset. She was last seen buying a Subway sandwich and dropping it off for her daughter at a coffee shop.
Steven Garcia, 47, a government contractor at the Kansas City National Security Campus, a facility that manufactures non-nuclear components for nuclear weapons, disappeared from his Albuquerque home on 28 August 2025.
In December 2025, Jason Thomas, 45, an associate director of chemical biology at Novartis working on cancer treatments, left his Wakefield, Massachusetts, home after midnight, leaving behind his phone and wallet. Surveillance cameras caught him near train tracks. A body believed to be his was recovered from Lake Quannapowitt in March 2026, when the ice thawed.
In February 2026, Carl Johann Grillmair, a celebrated Caltech astrophysicist who had worked on NASA’s NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor missions, was fatally shot at his home near Los Angeles.
The most politically-charged case may be that of William “Neil” McCasland, a 68-year-old retired US Air Force major general last seen at his Albuquerque residence on 27 February 2026. He took his wallet and a .38-calibre revolver, but left his phone and prescription glasses. His wife called 911, and the released audio suggested she believed immediately that he had chosen to run. No trace has been found.
This is the point at which the story splits in two. One version says: look at the pattern. Space, nuclear science, advanced materials, Los Alamos, JPL, fusion, UFO rumours, dead men, vanished women, phones left behind, weapons missing, causes undisclosed. Surely this cannot all be chance. In that telling, the United States is in the middle of a clandestine assault on its scientific priesthood.
The other version says: slow down. The pattern is being assembled after the fact. This, given the average US citizen’s predilection for conspiracies, is a much more boring conclusion.
AP quoted University of Maryland professor Jen Golbeck warning that with large populations of people working at national labs, universities and government research centres, some will die, disappear or take their own lives in any given year. One can always gather a list and make it look sinister. A Wikipedia article describes this as “mystery-mongering data mining”: start with dead or missing people, then scrape their biographies for anything involving NASA, defence, UFOs, nuclear work or classified programmes.
The sceptics go further. Some of the scientists weren’t scientists at all; one was an administrative assistant. One was a construction worker. One of the scientists who is lumped with this bunch was extremely ill, his family very roll-eyed about the whole matter. And autopsies (reported as having been suspiciously missing) are only performed under special circumstances. A lack of autopsy means nothing on its own.
But here is the nub. When a series of possibly (or probably) unrelated events are corralled into a narrative that makes for flights of fancy, it is one thing. When the president and staff and members of Congress start getting a bit breathless about it, it is entirely another.
I mean, jeez, it could even lead to things like nearly half of US citizens believing that the 2020 election was rigged.
[Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-concrete-building-with-flags-on-top-7017138/]
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