On February 27, retired Air Force Research Laboratory commander William Neil McCasland, who once worked at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, an Ohio base steeped in UFO lore, mysteriously went missing after leaving his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
By March, the FBI had joined the search for the general, sending conspiracy theorists into a tailspin, with some arguing that the agency’s involvement was “evidence of foul play.”
Now the story is getting even stranger. McCasland is just one out of at least ten scientists and engineers with government ties who either died or disappeared within the last four years in incidents that the FBI is now actively investigating, Scientific American reports.
In a statement, the FBI said it’s “spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists.”
In a separate Monday press release, the House Oversight Committee announced it was “seeking information from the Department of Energy, Department of War, FBI, and NASA about the scientists and other personnel connected to US nuclear secrets or rocket technology who have died or mysteriously vanished in recent years.”
The committee pointed to reporting alleging that “at least ten individuals who ‘had a connection to US nuclear secrets or rocket technology’ have ‘died or mysteriously vanished in recent years.’”
Lawmakers suggested there could be a “possible sinister connection between a string of mysterious deaths and disappearances,” which could “represent a grave threat to US national security and to US personnel with access to scientific secrets.”
Among these scientists is NASA Jet Propulsion Lab scientist Michael David Hicks, who died in July 2023 of a still-unknown cause. He studied comets and asteroids.
His daughter, Julia Hicks, told CNN that she didn’t “understand the connection between my dad’s death and the other missing scientists.”
“I can’t help but laugh about it, but at the same time, it’s getting serious,” she added.
Another JPL-affiliated space research specialist, Frank Maiwald, died in 2024, while an aerospace engineer, Monica Reza, disappeared while hiking in Los Angeles in 2025. Maiwald has authored papers on mass spectrometry and remote sensing instruments, while Reza was a metallurgist and materials engineer at JPL.
In December, lauded theoretical physicist and director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center Nuno Loureiro was murdered in his Brookline, Massachusetts, home. Then in February, a renowned Caltech astronomer who studied distant exoplanets named Carl Grillmair was shot and killed outside his home near LA.
Of course, it’s possible that investigators and lawmakers could be falling for sensationalist tabloid reporting. After all, the president of the United States has frequently furthered unhinged conspiracy theories himself.
Still, the pattern is striking. For now, the scientists’ surviving loved ones continue to be baffled by all the interest and widespread press coverage. Earlier this year, following McCasland’s disappearance, his wife, Susan McCasland Wilkerson, took to Facebook with some eyebrow-raising remarks.
“It is true that Neil had a brief association with the UFO community,” she wrote at the time. “This connection is not a reason for someone to abduct Neil.”
“Neil does not have any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash stored at Wright-Patt,” she added, referring to the 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico, which became the basis for countless UFO conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists are vowing to “keep digging.” Just last week, British tabloid the Daily Mail announced it had identified the death of an “eleventh” and “UFO-linked scientist.” The tabloid claims that 34-year-old Amy Eskridge, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2022, had been investigating “anti-gravity technology.”
More on the disappearances: Retired Air Force Major General With UFO Connections Disappears in New Mexico
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