Something peculiar has been happening in the United States. Over the past three years, a quiet but growing list of scientists, researchers, and military figures tied to America’s most sensitive programs has been accumulating. Some are gone without a trace. Others turned up dead. The circumstances range from baffling to heartbreaking. And while no official authority has yet drawn a firm connecting line between the cases, the sheer weight of the accumulating names has now pulled the matter from social media forums all the way to the Oval Office.
The story did not begin as a national news event. It grew slowly, case by case, each one reported locally or in fragments, until a critical mass of names formed a pattern that was impossible to ignore. Some of those named had worked on spacecraft. Others had spent careers studying nuclear reactions, rocket propulsion, and the cutting edge of aerospace defense. A handful had ties, however brief, to research into unidentified aerial phenomena. That last detail has proven electrically provocative in a country with a long, complicated relationship with the question of what governments do and don’t know about what is flying in their skies.
What began as fringe speculation became front-page news. And then, almost without warning, it became a matter for the President of the United States.
From Fringe to Federal Investigation
In 2026, a conspiracy theory emerged alleging that the deaths or disappearances of several people – some described online as scientists tied to classified or sensitive research – were connected to secret knowledge about UFOs, advanced energy projects, and materials science. The speculation started spreading through social media following the February 2026 disappearance of former U.S. Air Force major general William Neil McCasland.
In an April 15 press briefing, Fox News reporter Peter Doocy questioned press secretary Karoline Leavitt about reports of scientists tied to sensitive U.S. research who had gone missing or died, and whether the cases were connected. Doocy put it plainly: “There are now 10 American scientists who have either gone missing or died since mid-2024. They all reportedly had access to classified nuclear or aerospace material.” Leavitt told Doocy she would look into it. The next day, Doocy asked President Donald Trump about it in person, and Trump said he had “just left a meeting” on the subject. On April 17, Leavitt announced that the White House would launch an investigation. On April 20, the House Oversight Committee announced that it was planning an investigation of its own.
“The White House is actively working with all relevant agencies and the FBI to holistically review all of the cases together and identify any potential commonalities that may exist,” Leavitt posted on X. “No stone will be unturned in this effort, and the White House will provide updates when we have them.”
President Trump vowed to investigate the mysterious disappearances and deaths, telling reporters, “I hope it’s random, but we’re going to know in the next week and a half.”
CNN reported that the FBI is leading efforts to find connections between the missing and deceased scientists and is working with the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and state and local law enforcement.
The Cases: A Detailed Timeline
Cases cited by proponents of a connected pattern span several years and involve widely unrelated circumstances, including natural death, homicide, suicide, and missing-person reports. What follows is a detailed account of each individual at the center of this story.
Amy Eskridge, 34 – Died 2022 (Huntsville, Alabama)
The list, as it is now widely compiled, begins before most people were paying attention. Amy Eskridge, 34, was involved in extensive research into anti-gravity technology, UFOs, and extraterrestrial life. She died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at her Huntsville, Alabama home in 2022. Her death was ruled a suicide and no public information was released. Prior to her death, Eskridge had launched a research company, the Institute for Exotic Science, in order to create, in her own words, a “public-facing persona to disclose anti-gravity technology.”
Eskridge co-founded the Institute for Exotic Science and described her work as focused on experimental propulsion concepts, including what she referred to as “antigravity” research. “We discovered antigravity, and our lives went to [expletive] and people started sabotaging us,” she said in a 2020 interview. There is no publicly available evidence linking Eskridge’s death to the other cases on this list, and authorities have not indicated any ties between her work and the circumstances of her death.
Michael David Hicks, 59 – Died July 30, 2023 (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
The string of deaths and disappearances that lawmakers now cite formally began in 2023 with the death of Michael David Hicks, a scientist who worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for nearly 25 years. Hicks, 59, died July 30, 2023. During his career at JPL, he specialized in comets and asteroids. His cause of death was not disclosed.
His daughter, Julia Hicks, told CNN her father had been struggling with known medical issues and that the recent speculation has her “shaken up.” “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.
Frank Maiwald, 61 – Died July 4, 2024 (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
Frank Maiwald, 61, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, died July 4, 2024. He designed a critical instrument for a NASA mission to map the “living color” of the Earth in far greater detail than can be observed by the human eye. Just over a year before he died, he was working on a program to help astronauts on space missions identify signs of life on other planets, including Jupiter’s moon Europa, Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and the dwarf planet Ceres.
JPL space researcher Frank Maiwald died in July 2024; his cause of death was not publicly disclosed. He was the second JPL-affiliated researcher to die within approximately a year.
Monica Reza, 60 – Missing Since June 22, 2025 (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
Monica Reza, a 60-year-old aerospace engineer, disappeared while hiking in a Los Angeles forest in June 2025. She served as the director of the NASA Lab’s Materials Processing Group, the House Oversight Committee said.
Reza was last seen hiking in the Los Angeles forest with a companion in June 2025. Police said she was about 30 feet behind the person she was with, smiling and waving. When the person turned back around, she was gone. Rescue teams searched for days, but her body was never recovered.
Reza, 60, was director of JPL’s materials processing group and had patented a nickel super-alloy used in both space travel and weaponry when she vanished during a hike on Angeles Crest Highway in June 2025. She patented a nickel super-alloy for rocket manufacturing, research that went into reusable rocket programs like New Glenn and Starship. Her patented nickel-based “super-alloy,” called Mondaloy, brought her into the professional orbit of McCasland, who oversaw the Air Force group that funded research in the early 2000s into advanced materials for reusable space vehicles and weapons.
Anthony Chavez, 79 – Missing Since May 8, 2025 (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Anthony Chavez, a retired engineer who had worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in nuclear weapons research, disappeared from his New Mexico home in May 2025. He left behind his car, phone, wallet, and keys, and his whereabouts remain unknown.
That four separate individuals connected to sites in New Mexico – Los Alamos and Kirtland Air Force Base – have gone missing from the same region in a similar timeframe is one of the features of this story that investigators and lawmakers have found most striking.
Melissa Casias, 53 – Missing Since June 26, 2025 (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Melissa Casias and Anthony Chavez both worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a leading nuclear research facility in New Mexico. Casias, 53, was last seen walking on a highway near Talpa, New Mexico, in June 2025, according to New Mexico State Police, leaving her belongings at home and a phone that had been factory-reset, NBC News reported. The New Mexico Department of Public Safety told CNN there is an open missing person investigation into Casias’ disappearance but added no foul play is suspected.
Both Casias and Chavez were connected to Los Alamos, one of the primary facilities in the United States for nuclear weapons research and development.
Steven Garcia, 48 – Missing Since August 28, 2025 (Kansas City National Security Campus)
Steven Garcia, a property custodian with high-level clearance at a national nuclear security administration facility in Albuquerque, disappeared last August. Authorities said he disappeared after leaving all his belongings beside a gun at his New Mexico home before going outside and walking away.
Garcia worked at the Kansas City National Security Campus, a facility that develops most of the non-nuclear components for nuclear weapons in the U.S. His disappearance, like those of Chavez and Casias, followed the unusual pattern of leaving behind personal effects and simply vanishing on foot.
Nuno Loureiro, 47 – Died December 16, 2025 (MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center)
The 47-year-old physicist and fusion scientist had led MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, where he aimed to advance clean energy technology and other research. Nuno Loureiro was a professor of nuclear science and engineering and of physics at MIT.
Online theorists tried to link what appears to have already been a solved case – the killing of the MIT physics professor. Loureiro was gunned down in December by Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who two days earlier had opened fire at Brown University’s campus, officials have said. Neves Valente died by suicide.
In January 2025, President Biden had presented Loureiro with the Presidential Early Career Award, the highest U.S. government honor for young scientists. His murder, while subsequently solved, drew enormous public attention – not least because it occurred within days of the Brown University campus shooting and involved a world-class fusion scientist who had been directing America’s most advanced plasma research laboratory.
On April 29, 2026, the FBI and the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts announced that they had conclusively determined that Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente was solely responsible for the murder of Nuno Loureiro, that Loureiro’s murder had “no nexus to terrorism,” and that Valente’s actions were probably due to personal dissatisfaction with his social and professional life.
Jason Thomas, 46 – Body Recovered March 17, 2026 (Novartis, Massachusetts)
Jason R. Thomas, a 46-year-old pharmaceutical researcher at Novartis working on cancer treatments, was reported missing from his Massachusetts home in December 2025. According to his obituary, Thomas “passed away unexpectedly after having been missing since December 12, 2025.” His body was found dead on March 17, 2026.
Thomas’s career pinnacle came when he joined the Novartis Institute of Biomedical Research in 2010, where he eventually became Associate Director of Chemical Biology. He had earned undergraduate degrees in physics and biology from Temple University, a doctorate in biophysics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and completed postdoctoral work at the Scripps Research Institute.
Thomas was struggling with the recent deaths of his parents when he disappeared, his wife told Dateline. Local authorities stated that no foul play was suspected, though the disappearance itself – Thomas walked away from his home in Wakefield on the night of December 12 and was not seen for more than three months – generated significant media attention once his name was added to the broader list of researchers who had died or gone missing.
Carl Grillmair, 67 – Died February 16, 2026 (Caltech / NASA)
Caltech astrophysicist Carl Grillmair was killed on his porch in a rural area north of Los Angeles in 2026, eight weeks after Loureiro’s killing. Local law enforcement arrested a suspect and charged him with the killing and a separate carjacking and burglary. Grillmair was a highly decorated astronomer and astrophysicist, working with NASA on investigations of exoplanets light-years away from our own solar system.
The suspect in Grillmair’s shooting was a neighbor with a history of erratic behavior who had previously trespassed on Grillmair’s property. He was shot and killed at his home on February 16, 2026.
William Neil McCasland, 68 – Missing Since February 27, 2026 (Air Force Research Laboratory, ret.)
McCasland, a 68-year-old former U.S. Air Force major general and seventh Commander of Air Force Research Laboratory, was reported missing by his wife on February 27, 2026.
McCasland’s last known location was at or near his home in the Quail Run Court NE area of Albuquerque, New Mexico on February 27, 2026. While his phone, prescription glasses and wearable devices were found at his residence, his hiking boots, wallet and a .38-caliber revolver could not be found.
He had been briefly involved with To The Stars Inc., which, according to Scientific American, is “a celebrity-led organization that promotes theories about aliens.” According to CNN, he “played a central role in the US military’s real investigations into mysterious objects in the sky – from Cold War-era research programs to efforts to study UAPs.”
McCasland’s wife stated that he “had only very commonly held [security] clearances” since his retirement more than a decade before, and suffered from a chronic health issue at the time of his disappearance. According to the sheriff of Bernalillo County, New Mexico, there was “no evidence indicating foul play” in his disappearance.
James “Tony” Moffatt, 60 – Died April 17, 2026 (NASA / U.S. Army, ret.)
The most recent – and most jarring – case involves not one death but four. Moffatt, 60, a decorated veteran pilot, aerospace engineer, and defense researcher, was killed in a plane crash while flying with his wife Leasa, 61, and sons Andrew, 30, and William, 28. The family from Huntsville, Alabama, was traveling from the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina to Huntsville and had stopped in Union County to refuel.
Following his 21-year military career, Moffatt worked as a payload and flight crew support specialist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center Astronaut Office, where he participated in 14 Space Shuttle ISS construction missions. After retiring from the Army, Moffatt founded Moffatt Systems Inc., a defense and aerospace consulting firm based in Huntsville, and went on to serve as a Principal Research Engineer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Research Center, where he directed the Digital Engineering Transformation Lab until 2024.
The National Transportation Safety Board and FAA are investigating the cause of the crash. Investigators have not formally linked the crash to the broader cluster of deaths.
Expert Views: Espionage, Pattern Recognition, or Random Noise?
The question of whether these cases are connected has drawn sharply different answers from different quarters. Former FBI assistant director Chris Swecker said he did not believe the missing experts were abducted by aliens. “I think there’s a rational explanation for this,” he told NewsNation. “If it’s not just random acts, it’s modern-day espionage.”
Dr. Steven Greer, a ufologist and retired physician, offered a different frame to Fox News Digital: “The disappearances of some of these people may be because there are some confidential investigations going on at a very significant level federally, where there are certain people that may be either taken because they know too much or have made themselves disappear.” He added that in “certain significant quarters federally, it has been concluded that the programs – some euphemistically call them legacy programs – have been attached to UFO, UAP research and development, and have been involved as a criminal organization.”
Skeptics, however, have been equally vocal. Writing on social media, Michael Shermer, the editor-in-chief of Skeptic, explained that conspiracy theorists began “digging around to find anyone who died for any reason, or has disappeared, then scrapping through their bio to see if they have any connection whatsoever to UFOs, military, defense, space, aerospace, propulsion,” inevitably discovering “patterns in random noise.” That view was echoed by writer Benjamin Radford, who characterized the theory as “mystery-mongering data mining.”
Medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew described the belief as an example of apophenia – the tendency to perceive meaningful links in unrelated events. He said that social media postings plant the idea that there has been a coordinated attack on American scientists, priming some to reinterpret random deaths and disappearances as suspicious and sinister.
The House Oversight Committee announced it would look into the deaths and disappearances after committee chairman James Comer warned that “something sinister could be happening.” Comer said that at first he thought it was “some kind of crazy conspiracy theory,” but now believes it could be a national security concern.
For those following this story from within the UFO research community, the concern runs deeper. Republican Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee told outlets that the slew of disappearances in recent years has had “a real chilling effect. People don’t want to talk about this issue of Unidentified Flying Objects anymore, and it’s kind of difficult to get to people because they are afraid.”
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The Skeptical Case: What the Data Actually Shows
On April 30, Doocy asked Trump about possible connections among the scientists again, and Trump replied, “Well, so far, I mean, they’re individual. We have a lot of scientists.” He added that “so far, we’re finding that there’s not much of a connection,” but went on to assure Doocy, “We’re going to be doing a full report, and it’s very serious.”
Four cases are in California, four in New Mexico, and two in Massachusetts. Michael Hicks, Frank Maiwald, and Monica Reza were all scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. There is no indication that they worked on the same projects. As CNN reported in April 2026, the story’s rapid amplification owed as much to social media dynamics and political attention as it did to confirmed evidence of a pattern.
Representative James Walkinshaw, a Democrat who also serves on the Oversight Committee, agrees an investigation is warranted, but said he is not convinced there is a coordinated motive. “The United States has thousands of nuclear scientists and nuclear experts,” Walkinshaw told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “It’s not the kind of nuclear program that potentially a foreign adversary could significantly impact by targeting 10 individuals.”
According to science writer Mick West, more than 700,000 people work in top-secret-cleared positions in the U.S. aerospace and nuclear sectors. When viewed against existing mortality rates and causes, this would suggest around 250 persons in the industry would normally succumb to homicides and suicides over the time period during which the 10 or 11 alleged “missing scientists” had died or disappeared, with thousands more dying of natural causes.
Even if the questions about the cases had a potboiler premise – brilliant minds filled with the nation’s most vital secrets, vanishing one by one – the available answers looked much less compelling. Not all of the names on the list were actually scientists, and CNN’s reporting on the federal probes found that a majority of the deaths or disappearances were regarded by investigators or family members as having unmysterious explanations, or as lacking any link to sensitive secrets.
McCasland’s wife wrote on Facebook in March 2026 that since his retirement 13 years prior, McCasland “has had only very commonly held clearances” and that “it seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him,” also noting he had only “a brief association with the UFO community” when he worked as a consultant for a fiction book.
Key Takeaways
What this story ultimately reveals depends heavily on which evidence you weigh. At its factual core, a cluster of scientists and researchers with ties to U.S. aerospace, nuclear, and defense programs have died or disappeared between 2022 and 2026 – and the coincidence of their professional backgrounds has, rightly or wrongly, drawn institutional attention.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration said the agency is paying attention to fears the cases may be linked. “NNSA is aware of reports related to employees of our labs, plants, and sites and is looking into the matter,” a spokesperson for NNSA told CBS News. That the NNSA, the FBI, the White House, and the House Oversight Committee are all now formally engaged with these cases is itself a significant development, regardless of what the investigations ultimately conclude.
Cases cited by proponents span several years and involve unrelated circumstances, including natural death, homicide, suicide, and missing-person reports. Colleagues of those named, as well as experts and journalists, have rejected claims of a coordinated pattern. The circumstances vary enormously – from solved homicides with identified perpetrators to unexplained disappearances from hiking trails, to a fatal plane crash, to a body recovered from a frozen lake.
What We Know – and What We Don’t
The questions being asked by lawmakers and investigators are legitimate ones. The answers, as of May 2026, remain unknown. As one expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted, “The deaths and missing persons cases are scattered across several years at different and only loosely affiliated organizations. If all of the scientists were working on one project or weapons system, then I’d be more suspicious.”
What the evidence does not yet support is a definitive finding of coordinated foul play. No confirmed connections or causes have been identified among the cases despite investigations involving various locations and roles. The men and women at the center of this story were real people with real careers – people who spent their lives working on some of the most consequential science in the world. They deserve both rigorous investigation and the presumption that the truth, whatever it turns out to be, matters.
If you’re following this story, the most honest takeaway is this: stay skeptical of the narrative, stay open to the evidence, and watch what the investigations actually conclude rather than what any theory claims they will. The FBI has said it will report its findings. Until it does, the most responsible position is to hold the questions open – and resist the very human pull to connect dots that may not belong on the same map.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.
Images Disclaimer: Images used in this article are for representational purposes only and do not depict actual events, locations, individuals, or specific situations referenced in the content.
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