The mystery of the missing scientists began with the Financial Alert. In late February, a retired Air Force general named Neil McCasland left his home in New Mexico for a walk and never returned. Rumors spread on social media that the old aeronautical engineer had been kidnapped or killed. Forget Nancy Guthrie, they said. Here was a young man who once ran away “Connected to a UFO” laboratory. Here was a young man with the knowledge of “America’s deepest and darkest secrets.” So where was this guy?
McCasland’s wife went to great lengths with a Facebook post to address what she called “the misinformation being circulated about Neil and his disappearance,” but the misconceptions only grew. The dots were added, then connected: Another scientist—an advanced materials researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) named Monica Reza—had disappeared while hiking near Los Angeles in June 2025. A physicist at MIT had been killed in December. “What is going on looks like an enemy move,” Walter Kirnnovelist and podcaster, he said last month.
Things only got worse from there: Eight more names were added to the growing list of scientists who recently either died or went missing. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer expressed concern about the 11 missing scientists and said that “something bad could happen.” Another member of the committee suggested that China, Russia, or Iran could be involved. And last week, on the White House lawn, President Trump he told it reporter from Fox News that he was just at a meeting to discuss the matter. (Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the administration would address “legitimate questions about these troubling cases” and said that “no stone will be left unturned.”)
Which is to say that another piece of pure nonsense has risen to the highest levels of American politics and the media. Calling it a conspiracy theory would be too good, because no comprehensive theory has been proposed to explain the pattern of events. But then, even the words pattern of events is incorrect, because there is no structure here at all. Considering all the people who could have been included in this narrative but weren’t, any hope of finding meaning is lost. Barring any surprising new revelations, the mystery of the missing scientists has the dubious honor of being bogus in every way at once.
Conspiracy theorists can’t even put their finger on the American research field that has been threatened. Our top scientists are being targeted by alien powers—but which ones, exactly? Well, are they people who study space technologies, or maybe people who study asteroids and comets, or maybe people who work on plasma physics? Fox News reporter Peter Doocy tried to sum it up: The scientists who are dead or missing are the ones “who can find classified stuff—nuclear material, space.” Kirn’s test was somewhat less coordinated: The missing experts, he said, are working “in the most advanced areas of rocketry and, you know, Space Force-NASA-type efforts.”
If these attempts at explanation seem silly, it’s because the people on the list of lost scientists don’t have a common area of expertise. Indeed, many happen to be physicists or engineers; some are or were related to government laboratories. But what about Jason Thomas? His tragic death last winter made the list even though he was a chemical biologist working for Novartis on ways to improve the drug discovery process.
And what about Melissa Casias, the Los Alamos National Laboratory employee who went missing last year? He was not a scientist at all, but an administrative assistant. (Maybe he could find some “classified stuff”; who knows?) Another person on that list is Amy Eskridge, who was a “scientist” only in the way that a subway preacher is a “theologian.” Whatever fame he had gained came from claiming that his father, a former NASA engineer, had discovered the secret of antigravity and that he would soon go public with this world-changing scientific breakthrough. He also frequently referred to his friend, a “katana-soldier, time traveler” named Dan.
Maybe Casias had a chance to open some insensitive file while doing his job, and he had to be kidnapped. Maybe Eskridge was into new technology. The biggest problem with the story is this: The deaths and their disappearances are unexplainable. Reza disappeared while hiking, a fate that probably befalls hundreds or thousands of people every year. Two more people on the list, a pair of JPL-affiliated astronomers, each in their 60s, may have died of natural causes, as happens to about 35,000 other Americans their age each year. An MIT physicist was killed by a former classmate who also shot and killed two undergraduates at Brown University. Several people on the list seemed to be suffering from personal distress: Thomas, a chemical biologist, was upset about recently. losing both his parents; Casias was very important personal problemsaccording to his daughter, and may have tried to run away from them; McCasland suffered from brain fog and physical deterioration, according to his wife, and he told her more than once that “he did not want to live like that.”
And then there’s Eskridge, an antigravity theorist and friend of the expedition. In what appears to be the end of it media appearancesas of 2020, he is (by his own account) drunk and excessive, and seems to be in the grip of delusion. During the interview, she claims someone snuck into her home while she was outside and locked her bedroom window and that, in another incident, someone broke in and pulled out the charger for her boyfriend’s wireless headphones. Eskridge also said that he was being followed by a car with a license plate that kept changing, that he had been run over numerous times, and that strangers at his local bar had been taunting him by using “words” important to his life. “I’m scared,” he said near the end of the interview. “I’m tired. I’m so tired.” Eskridge died in June 2022.
Read: An act of global sabotage
Remember the date: June 2022. Any good conspiracy theory starts with a specific event. (The causative bacteria Lyme disease They were first discovered on an island just 10 miles from the site of a former military research laboratory…) But again, this is not a good conspiracy theory. While on the White House lawn Doocy asked for comments on the missing scientists, describing them as “all missing or dead in the last few months.” If that were true, we might be looking at a “chain” of events. In fact, the reported cases of dead or missing persons span a period of nearly four years, from Eskridge’s death by suicide to McCasland’s disappearance two months ago.
Add in the variety of individuals and circumstances—remember that we are talking about a group of people who were scientists or non-scientists, and who died of natural causes or were murdered or disappeared—and it is clear that there is no such thing as bad luck. The loss of life is real, and families are grieving, but nothing bad is going on. “Secret” is just that p-hacked fear and waste everyone’s time.
Surprisingly, America doesn’t seem to need much help when it comes to missing scientists. About 1,000 employees have been laid off from NASA JPL in the past few years. One senior scientist who is still there told my colleague Ross Andersen last October that he had never seen the place empty and lifeless. At the same time, the Trump administration has repeatedly proposed to cut NASA’s scientific research funding in half, a plan that would undoubtedly lead to further loss of workers at JPL, not to mention the abandonment of the probes that have been sent to our solar system.
And while the FBI is looking into foreign involvement in the deaths of professors at MIT and Caltech, the Trump administration says it intends to cut in half the budget of the National Science Foundation, which in recent years has provided the two schools with hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. Already, more than 40 percent of NSF’s scientific staff has left or been fired.
This is only a small part of the damage that has been done to the US research business since the start of 2025. In response, some leading scientists have been rising and walking out the door. Their absence cannot be blamed on China, Russia, or Iran. Maybe the White House should look into that.
