Up to 12 scientists have now died or vanished under mysterious circumstances: As fears of dark plot grow, TOM LEONARD’s forensic analysis of all the evidence raises sinister questions

Avid hiker Monica Reza was out with two friends walking in California’s Angeles National Forest ten months ago when she vanished into thin air.

It had been a normal June day and, according to one of her companions, she’d been just 30 feet behind him, smiling and waving. When he next turned around, she was gone.

Rescue teams spent days searching for Reza but nothing has been seen or heard of the 60-year-old aerospace engineer since.

Given that she was involved in highly sensitive work – as director of the Materials Processing Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she had developed a ‘super-alloy’ metal used in rockets – her very sudden disappearance might have been viewed as intrinsically suspicious.

However, she is not the only scientist linked with that particular laboratory or with NASA to have gone missing or died in odd circumstances.

Over the past weeks the Daily Mail has reported 11 scientists with links to America’s space and nuclear programs who have disappeared or died under unusual or unexplained circumstances in recent years. In fact there may be a twelfth connected case, but more of that later.

So, is it a sad coincidence – or is there something else going on? Some politicians in Washington and former law enforcement chiefs are among those who believe it’s the latter.

Last Wednesday, the Trump Administration indicated that it was also, albeit belatedly, paying attention. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that she would speak to the relevant agencies.

‘If true, of course, that’s definitely something this government and administration would deem worth looking into,’ she said. ‘So let me do that for you.’ 

Those involved are linked by a web of workplaces and fields of research in common. But in some cases, they have been direct colleagues.

Reza’s ground-breaking research work developing the rocket alloy was financed and overseen by the Air Force Research Laboratory, which, at the time, was commanded by former US Air Force Major-General William Neil McCasland.

And now, he has gone missing, too – vanishing without trace after leaving his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in late February this year.

His disappearance has sparked particularly intense interest online because, after his 2013 retirement from the military, McCasland was involved in the investigation of UFOs.

McCasland, 68, was last seen by his wife, Susan, on February 27 just after 11am. She returned from a medical appointment, that took her out for less than an hour, to find him gone, according to local police.

A keen hiker like Reza, he appeared to have gone out to run around local trails, wearing hiking boots and taking with him only a backpack, his wallet and a .38 caliber revolver and holster. Curiously, he left behind his mobile phone, prescription glasses and Smart watch.

A grey US Air Force sweatshirt was discovered just over a mile away from McCasland’s home around ten days later, although his family was unable to confirm whether it belonged to him.

As with Monica Reza, the disappearance prompted a major manhunt which has yet, after weeks of searching that included a door-to-door check of 700 surrounding homes and a search of areas where he liked to hike, to turn up any trace of him.

The general’s last military posting was to command the Air Force Research Laboratory, which is based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.

In this role, he oversaw highly classified space weapons programs. Marik Von Rennenkampf, a former national security analyst in the Obama Administration, recently described the base as ‘where all the super-secret research happens.’

The base is rumored – despite air force denials – to be the home of supposed alien remains and debris from extraterrestrial craft allegedly recovered from the famous crash site near Roswell, New Mexico.

McCasland had also commanded a research department at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico – a sparsely populated desert state long connected with UFO claims – and led a department of NASA’s Space Vehicle Directorate as well as working at the Pentagon. Plenty there for the more conspiracy-minded to get their teeth into.

After he retired, he became briefly involved in the search for UFOs through an organization set up by Tom DeLonge, the former singer in rock band Blink-182 and a keen UFologist.

The ET world was further excited by the fact that McCasland disappeared only six days after President Trump promised to release eagerly awaited government files on extraterrestrial life and spacecraft. 

Ross Coulthart, an Australian journalist who has investigated UFO claims, described the timing as ‘screechingly relevant’ and called McCasland ‘a man with some of the most sensitive US military intelligence secrets in his head.’ He claims his vanishing presents a ‘grave national security crisis.’

Meanwhile, McCasland’s wife, Susan, went on Facebook to counter what she described as ‘misinformation’ about him. She said he didn’t have dementia and, although she acknowledged he once had ‘access to some highly classified programmes and information’, she found it ‘quite unlikely’ that he was ‘taken to extract very dated secrets from him.’

The same, she added, applied to his association with the UFO community. ‘This connection is not a reason for someone to abduct Neil,’ she said.

Her husband had no ‘special knowledge’ about any alien or UFO remains at the Wright-Patterson base, she insisted. His involvement with Tom DeLonge involved offering unpaid advice on military, technical and scientific matters related to DeLonge’s UFO projects, she said.

She added, clearly flippantly: ‘Though at this point, with absolutely no sign of him, maybe the best hypothesis is that aliens beamed him up to the mothership. However, no sightings of a mothership hovering above the [nearby] Sandia Mountains have been reported.’

According to the local county sheriff, John Allen, William McCasland had not reported any health problems apart from suffering a ‘mental fog’ in the months before he went missing. However, his wife and police insist there was no indication that he had been ‘disoriented or confused’ at the time of his disappearance.

‘Arguably, he would still be the most intelligent person in the room that any of would be in,’ said Lt Kyle Woods of Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office. ‘Highly intelligent, highly capable.’

Sheriff Allen said they had received a lot of tips and promised they would go through every one, even though he admitted they included ‘some outlandish theories.’

And those theories are only gathering steam.

Four days after the disappearance of Monica Reza last June, Melissa Casias – an administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the top-secret nuclear research facility in New Mexico which developed the atomic bomb in the 1940s – also went missing.

Although there’s no direct connection between Casias, 53, and McCasland or Reza, her laboratory reportedly works closely on national security projects with nearby Kirtland Air Force Base, whose research facility General McCasland once commanded.

Kirtland is the largest installation in the Air Force’s Global Strike Command, which conducts any US nuclear missile and bomber attack.

Casias, a keen archer and hunter, had reportedly told her husband she would work from home on the day she went missing in the New Mexican town of Ranchos de Taos and was later seen walking along a highway three miles away.

Her family, who said she had financial and personal problems, later discovered she’d left her work and private phones at home – along with her car, keys and purse – with their contents erased.

‘Her job links her to missing retired Air Force Gen. William McCasland, amid a pattern of disappearances and deaths of high-clearance individuals since June 2025,’ according to Manifested Search Team, a charity that tries to track down missing people.

Chris Swecker, a former FBI Assistant Director, told the Daily Mail he is concerned that Casias’s vanishing may be part of a pattern along with those of Reza and Gen McCasland, although he also acknowledges it could yet turn out to be coincidence.

‘You can say these are all suspicious and these are scientists who have worked in critical technology,’ he said.

Calling on the FBI to take over the investigation, he said it was plausible for hostile powers to use kidnapping or assassination to extract information from Americans involved in such militarily valuable research.

And the mystery doesn’t stop with this trio. Only weeks before the Casias disappearance, 78-year-old Anthony Chavez, who had also worked at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory until his retirement, vanished in May 2025 in very similar circumstances.

He also reportedly had left his home in Los Alamos for a walk one morning, leaving behind his wallet and phone. His family told police his disappearance was ‘out of character’ but didn’t initially consider him to be in danger. Like Casias, he hasn’t been seen since.

The same applies to 48-year-old Steven Garcia, who – like McCasland – disappeared from his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on foot and only carrying a handgun, on August 28 last year.

Garcia was a security guard at a New Mexico facility of the Kansas City National Security Complex, another highly sensitive federal government installation, this time devoted to manufacturing most of the non-nuclear components of America’s nuclear weapon arsenal. Officials have said Garcia may have posed a danger to himself, but have not provided further details, or the nature of his work.

There are still other disappearances that some believe must be considered.

Some point to Nuno Loureiro, an acclaimed Portuguese nuclear scientist and plasma physicist who was shot dead at his home in a Boston suburb in December last year. Loureiro, 47, did his PhD at Imperial College London and had previously worked at the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Culham Centre for Fusion Energy before becoming a professor at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Authorities say the gunman was a former classmate at Brown University who later killed himself. Although some speculate that it might have been professional jealousy, the killer’s motive has yet to be confirmed.

On February 16, astrophysicist Carl Grillmair was shot dead on the front porch of his isolated home in Llano, a rural community in Los Angeles County, California.

The 67-year-old scientist worked at the California Institute of Technology but he, like Reza, had also done important research that was financed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In his case, it involved the discovery of water – and possibly also life – on a distant planet.

Grillmair had also worked on developing infrared space telescopes to track asteroids, although critics claim the technology has been quietly used in advanced missile design.

A local man has been charged with killing the astrophysicist among other offences including carjacking and burglary, but a motive has yet to be disclosed by investigators.

Last October, Lieutenant Jaime Gustitus, a 25-year-old female officer working as an operations analysis officer at the Air Force Research Laboratory once led by Gen McCasland at Ohio’s highly sensitive Wright-Patterson Air Force base was killed in an apparent double-murder suicide.

Her killer, Jacob Prichard – who also worked on the base – also murdered his wife Jaymee Pritchard before killing himself. If linked she would bring the tally of cases cited as suspicious to 12.

Online sleuths have delved further back in time claiming to find more evidence of a trend.

In June 2022, Amy Eskridge, a 34-year-old scientist experimenting with anti-gravity technology died from an allegedly self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in Huntsville, Alabama. UFO conspiracy theorists believe aliens use such tech to travel at astonishing speed and that the US government may have been trying to develop it.

Eskridge claimed in 2020 she needed NASA approval to develop her research but warned that her life was in danger because of her ground-breaking work.

Journalist Michael Shellenberger testified before a public hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (the new name for UFOs) that Eskridge was ‘murdered by a ‘private aerospace company’ in the US because she was involved in the UAP conversation.’

In July 2023, Michael Hicks, a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) died aged 59 – but the cause of death was never made public, and no record exists of an autopsy ever being conducted.

Hicks had worked on the so-called DART Project, NASA’s research into whether dangerous asteroids could be deflected away from the Earth. He’d also been involved in Deep Space 1, a ground-breaking Nasa mission in the late 1990s to test various ‘high-risk’ new technologies in space.

The following year, a prominent JPL colleague of Hicks named Frank Maiwald also passed away in undisclosed circumstances – again relatively young at 61 and again with very little public acknowledgement.

The German-born scientist, who died in Los Angeles, was described in an online obituary as an ‘illustrious’ and multi-award-winning expert who had chiefly worked on developing a spectrometer capable of peering deep into outer space.

Clearly, some of these sudden or unexplained deaths and disappearances are rather more mysterious than others.

The documented murders, for instance, appear to involve killers who have no connection with the sort of forces – human or extra-terrestrial – who might have targeted the victims because of their sensitive scientific work.

The absence of details over some of the other deaths could simply be down to a desire for privacy. Given NASA and its contractors, such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, together employ nearly 60,000 people, sometimes odd things will happen to a few of them, say skeptics.

But the disappearances are surely unusual, particularly when they’ve occurred so close together and shared so many similarities.

It’s also undeniable that foreign powers – particularly China but also North Korea and Iran – have a long history of targeting the US technology sector and American scientists, especially those involved in rocket development.

As speculation has increased online and more names are added to the list of supposedly suspicious deaths, some stretch credulity that they could be part of any conspiracy.

Jason Thomas, for instance, was a pharmaceutical researcher for drug giant Novartis. His body was discovered in a lake in Massachusetts in March after he disappeared in December 2025. His wife said he’d been struggling to cope with the death of his parents.

Prior to recent publicity, some politicians in Washington had already called on the federal government to investigate the spate of disappearances and deaths. ‘The disappearance of multiple scientists and military personnel with ties to advanced research is deeply concerning,’ said Representative Eric Burlison. ‘I’ve already requested FBI involvement, and we will keep pressing for answers.’

Congressman Tim Burchett told the Daily Mail last month that he saw a clear pattern in these seemingly unrelated deaths and disappearances, saying that the work several of them were doing has been linked to theories about extraterrestrial spacecraft. ‘I think we ought to be paying attention to it,’ he said.

Little green men or not, time may tell whether this is just a bizarre coincidence or something far more sinister.