Vanishing Minds: UFO & Nuclear Scientists Are Dying or Disappearing

The FBI says it’s looking into suspicious disappearances and deaths of scientists that have occurred over the past few years. The incidences are especially dubious given the scientists’ work on cutting-edge, sensitive UFO and nuclear technologies. Some analysts believe the occurrences are related to the growing coverage of “aliens” and UFOs in recent years. 

“It does appear that there’s a high possibility that something sinister is taking place here,” top House Oversight Committee Republican James Comer recently told Fox News. “It’s very unlikely that this is a coincidence. Congress is very concerned about this.” Comer called the issue a national security threat.

FBI Director Kash Patel told Newsweek that his agency is “working with the Department of Energy, Department of War, and with our state and local law enforcement partners to find answers.” Patel said the FBI started its probe last week, adding that they’re going to look into “whether there are connections to classified access, access to classified information and or foreign actors.”  

President Donald Trump called the incidences “pretty serious stuff.” He told reporters last week that “some of them were very important people, and we’re going to look at it over the next short period.”

The deaths and disappearances number 11, although some of the connections are less apparent than others. Comer said the House Oversight Committee sent notices to the FBI, NASA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense. “Those four agencies were predominantly the agencies that those 11 individuals were affiliated with,” according to Comer.

William McCasland

Among the more high-profile disappearances is that of a retired Air Force major general named William Neil McCasland, who vanished from his Albuquerque, New Mexico, home on February 27. McCasland “oversaw classified space weapons programs and led research at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, during his time in the military,” according to reports. “The base has long been rumored to contain extraterrestrial debris from a UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico.”

McCasland disappeared without his phone and glasses, while his firearm went with him. Local authorities launched a massive search mission that included “drone operations, helicopter support, ground searches with Search and Rescue teams, and K-9 searchers,” according to local reporting. The local sheriff’s office said investigators also “contacted more than 700 homes” and asked for “security video and information.”

The first missing-persons alert hinted that McCasland may have suffered a neurological problem, possibly Alzheimer’s, and walked off in a state of confusion. But his wife dismissed the theory. “He was not confused and disoriented,” Susan McCasland said in a social-media post.

In her post, McCasland’s wife said the retired general “had access to some highly classified programs and information.” However, she doesn’t believe “he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him,” since he retired 13 years ago. She also said her husband “does not have any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash stored at Wright-Patt.”

McCasland’s wife added that her husband worked with former Blink-182 frontman and “alien” disclosure advocate Tom DeLonge as a free consultant. But he dialed back contact with DeLonge after Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails were hacked, she said. Near the end of her message, McCasland’s wife said something odd. “Though at this point with absolutely no sign of him, maybe the best hypothesis is that aliens beamed him up to the mothership,” she said. “However, no sightings of a mothership hovering above the Sandia Mountains have been reported.”

“Up at Night Worrying”

Representative Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told the media that McCasland “had been the key figure in America’s secret research into UFO and extraterrestrial technology before his retirement,” according to reports. “He’s the guy that had a lot of nuclear secrets. I’ve been told by several sources that he was the gatekeeper for the UFO stuff,” according to Burchett.

Burchett has made a series of alarming comments recently. Among them, this one from April 1:  

I’ve been briefed by just about every alphabet agency there is, and I’ll just tell you this, if they would release the things that I’ve seen, you would stay up at — you’d be up at night worrying about or — thinking about this stuff.… I was briefed last week on an issue — or excuse me, two weeks ago — and it would’ve set the Earth on [fire] — this country would’ve come unglued, I think, if they would’ve heard all that I heard. They would demand answers.

Burchett also told media outlets, “For the record, I’m not suicidal.”

Coulthart’s Comments

Longtime UFO reporter Ross Coulthart discussed personal observations and floated some theories worthy of mention. He believes McCasland disappearing without his glasses suggests he didn’t leave voluntarily. The fact that his gun went with him suggests a possible struggle, maybe one in which McCasland was overpowered and his gun taken in the process. 

Coulhart also finds it interesting that, as far as he knows, none of the security cameras in the neighborhood picked up McCasland. “If it is true that he walked out of his house, as has been reported by so many in the media, then why is there no imagery of that? Or why has that not been released?” Coulhart asked. He believes McCasland might have been kidnapped. “What if the general was abducted against his will and put in the back of a car and driven off by malign forces of the state or private military contractors?”

Coulhart also noted that one of the other missing scientists is an aerospace rocket scientist who worked at the same laboratory as McCasland when he was the commander there. Monica Jacinto Reza went missing June 22, 2025, in the Angeles National Forest. Reports say she suddenly vanished while hiking with friends. Like with McCasland, authorities launched a search mission that proved fruitless. “Police report Reza was about 30 feet behind the person she was with, smiling and waving. When the person turned back around, she was gone,” NewsNation reported.

Other Scientists

There are others. A gunman shot astrophysicist Carl Grillmair on February 16 while Grillmair was on his front porch. Grillmair worked on NASA’s infrared telescope projects “that track asteroids but use the same physics as military systems for tracking satellites and missiles,” according to reports. Nuclear fusion researcher Nuno Loureiro was assassinated at his home in the Boston suburb of Brookline on December 15, 2025. NASA scientists Michael David Hicks and Frank Maiwald, who worked at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California, mysteriously died. Hicks died in 2023 and Maiwald in 2024. Hicks was connected to a NASA project that sought “to see if humans could deflect dangerous asteroids away from Earth.” Maiwald led research designed to detect signs of life on other planets.

There’s also Steve Garcia, a government contractor with ties to nuclear weapons production. He went missing. So did Melissa Casias and Anthony Chavez, both of whom had ties to the Los Alamos National Lab, which hosts nuclear research. They all disappeared in 2025, between May and August.

As for pharmaceutical researcher Jason Thomas, he disappeared in December of 2025, and his body was pulled out of lake a few months later.

Amy Eskridge

Lastly, there’s Dr. Amy Eskridge, a scientist who said she had discovered anti-gravity technology. She said she had been the sixth person to independently develop the technology. She supposedly shot herself in June 2022. Oddly enough, there is video of Eskridge talking at length about the enduring harassment and death threats she received before she died. She said she created her research company, The Institute for Exotic Science, as an avenue for revealing anti-gravity technology.

During a three-hour video conversation that has since been posted on YouTube, Eskridge goes into great detail about the many instances of threats and intimidation she believed were attempts to shut her up. She said people had broken into her apartment and ransacked her underwear drawer. Other times, the disturbances were more subtle. In one instance she described, from the perspective of those who’d threatened her, “Didn’t we tell this b*tch three years ago that we kill people for this? Is she not listening? What is she doing? She’s still doing it? We told her we’re going to kill her three years ago?”

Eskridge went on to say that some people were encouraging her to disclose anti-gravity, and others told her not to do it because she would be killed. “I have multiple of these whispers in my ears. I can’t even describe it. It’s crazy,” she said. Eskridge said she eventually moved in with her parents because of the threats.

Not a Coincidence

Something is happening here. It’s nearly a statistical impossibility that a bulk of these instances are not connected. There is a great deal of speculation as to why these people are disappearing and dying. Representative Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) echoed Patel’s suggestion that these incidences may be the result of a “foreign operation.” Another theory suggests the missing scientists were swooped into a witness-protection program because they were assets in major federal investigations into “criminal organizations” related to UFO/UAP programs. There’s also the old-fashioned theory that private contractors got rid of these people to keep breakthrough technology out of the public eye for fear that it would erode the power of the elites.

And then there’s the theory that these people had to be removed because they would splash cold water on whatever version of disclosure the powers-that-be have planned for the public. A popular Substack account that goes by the name of Wise Wolf posited:

Maybe these were the minds that understood the physics behind whatever is being disclosed. The ones capable of building countermeasures. The ones who could have looked at the data and said: this is not what they are telling you it is.