Are the Eleven Dead or Missing U.S. Scientists Really Connected?

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the circumstances surrounding the deaths and disappearances of nearly a dozen U.S. scientists, and we cover more media misses.

What Happened to the Eleven Dead or Missing U.S. Scientists?

The narrative first emerged in a Daily Mail story published late last month: “Mystery of five missing scientists sends chill across America. Three are dead. And one troubling link is now under scrutiny in DC.”

The story described a “chilling pattern,” pointing first to two missing-persons cases involving retired General William Neil McCasland, and NASA aerospace engineer Monico Jacinto Reza. McCasland, 68, and Reza, 60, were both “major figures in the Air Force Research Laboratory,” the report explains, with McCasland having overseen Reza’s work designing a “futuristic metal” for rocket engines.

Within eight months of each other, McCasland and Reza both vanished without a trace while hiking in the Southwest.

“McCasland’s reported ties to secret UFO programs at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and Reza’s work with space-age technology used for advanced propulsion, have led many to claim without evidence that the pair are fleeing from parties that wish to silence them because of what they know,” the report explains.

The Daily Mail writer goes on to connect those disappearances to the deaths of three scientists in unrelated fields of research: MIT physicist Nuno Loureiro, who was murdered by a former classmate in Portugal; astrophysicist Carl Grillmair, who was shot to death on his front porch; and Jason Thomas, the assistant director of chemical biology at drugmaker Novartis, whose remains were discovered last month in Massachusetts.

While the Daily Mail reports that “independent researchers and even a member of Congress” fear there is a connection, the congressman who claimed he saw a “clear pattern” in the disappearances is none other than Representative Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.), who has trafficked in unsubstantiated theories about UFOs, JFK’s assassination, and Covid-19’s origins.

Since the story’s publishing, concerns about dead and missing U.S. scientists have only picked up steam, with the count now up to as many as eleven scientists.

The story graduated from dark corners of the internet to outlets with large followings such as the Daily Mail, the New York Post, and Fox News. Joe Rogan recently fanned the flames on his massively popular podcast. All of the media attention has not yet produced any hard evidence of a connection between the disappearances and deaths — but it has drawn the attention of the White House and congressional Republicans.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) appeared on Fox News on Sunday and warned that “something sinister could be happening.” He said that he first saw the situation as “some kind of crazy conspiracy theory” but that learning more about the details behind the cases has changed his mind. On Monday, Comer teamed up with Burchett to send letters to the FBI, the Department of Energy, NASA and the Defense Department to request briefings on “unconfirmed public reporting” surrounding the incidents.

“We know there are many countries around the world that would love to have our knowledge and nuclear capabilities,” the congressmen said. “And these are the people that were at the forefront of it, and they’re either dead or missing.”

Fox News reported that scientists who are “tied to U.S. secrets” have died or vanished, and further described the dead and missing researchers as “mainly tied to the U.S. nuclear and space research programs.”

While there are details in some of the cases that may be enough to give a skeptic pause, several of the eleven scientists actually have no ties to nuclear and space research — or to each other.

Thomas, the Novartis employee, was working on using chemistry and biology to discover and produce new medicines, including potential treatments for cancer. The lone link theorists have made to the other deaths and disappearances is that Novartis has active contracts with the Department of Defense. Thomas disappeared on December 12, 2025; his remains were discovered in Massachusetts on March 17. Local police said that the cause of death still needed to be determined, but “no foul play is suspected.”

The most recent name to be added to the list is Amy Eskridge, an Alabama-based researcher who died by suicide in 2022. Yet as Richard Hanania reports for Unherd, “Nearly everything about Eskridge’s background raises red flags about any narrative that might include her in a list of important scientists.”

She co-founded the Institute for Exotic Science, where she claimed to be working on “gravity-modification research,” which, as Hanania points out, is not a recognized branch of science. Furthermore, Eskridge “apparently believed that she was facing harassment from shadowy forces, who had fired a ‘directed-energy weapon’ at her,” according to the report, which also relayed that Eskridge has apparently never published a peer-reviewed paper.

Yet Fox News has portrayed Eskridge among other esteemed scientists and has treated her “gravity-modification research” as a real topic of study.

The outlet was sure, however, to note that “there is no publicly available evidence linking Eskridge’s death to [other] cases, and authorities have not indicated any connection between her work and the circumstances of her death.”

Also cause for skepticism is the fact that the cases spanned at least four years and several states.

As Hanania notes, there are some 2 million researchers in the U.S. and some of them are “bound to fall victim to unfortunate events.” The researchers also mostly worked in different fields, held different positions, had no obvious connections to each other and lived in different parts of the country.

The most obvious links include those between McCasland and Reza, and several other employees of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

McCasland, the retired Air Force officer, went missing on February 27, when he left home without his phone. An avid hiker, he left home with only a pair of boots and his .38-caliber revolver. He was last seen near Quail Run Court NE in Albuquerque, N.M.

Burchett, for his part, has said McCasland’s disappearance is a “major national security issue,” arguing that the scientist is in possession of some of the U.S.’s nuclear secrets. Burchett also claims that McCasland previously worked with recovered UFO technology housed in Ohio, having previously led the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson, which is rumored to hold extraterrestrial debris from the 1947 Roswell UFO crash.

Still, McCasland’s wife has said that “foul play” was not suspected in her husband’s disappearance.

Reza, meanwhile, went missing last summer. She was serving as the Director of the Materials Processing Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory when she disappeared during a hike in the Los Angeles forest with a friend. Reza was some 30 feet behind her friend, but at one point when the friend turned back, she was gone. Rescue teams searched for days, but Reza was never found.

In the case of Frank Maiwald, a 61-year-old engineer with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who died July 4, 2024, no cause of death has been publicly given.

Michael David Hicks, also a physicist with JPL specializing in comets and asteroids, died on July 30, 2023, at the age of 59. His cause of death has also not been made public.

Others on the list include Melissa Casias, an administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who disappeared from her home on June 26, 2025, and was last seen walking alongside a highway without her phone, wallet or keys.

Anthony Chavez, another former Los Alamos employee, disappeared on May 4, 2025, and was last seen leaving his home on foot. It was not clear what role Chavez held at the lab.

Loureiro, the physicist who was fatally shot in December by his former classmate Claudio Neves Valente, was the director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was “on the brink of revolutionizing the energy sector as we know it” using plasma physics.

Because the pair knew each other, some people have speculated that a personal dispute or professional jealousy could have been the motive behind the crime, though the shooter killed himself, leaving authorities unable to know for sure.

Daniel Liszt, an independent investigator who identifies as a “dark journalist” and an “enemy of the deep state” and who regularly discusses conspiracies around UFOs and government secrets, claims Loureiro’s plasma research has been tied to speculation about the advanced propulsion of secret UFO tech, according to the Daily Mail’s initial reporting on the scientists’ deaths and disappearances.

Grillmair, the astrophysicist who was fatally shot on his front porch in February, had contributed to the discovery of water on a distant planet. While no motive has been publicly released in the case, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department named Freddy Snyder, 29, as a person of interest in Grillmair’s homicide case and later charged the man with murder, carjacking, and burglary.

Steven Garcia was a property custodian at the Kansas City National Security Campus, which manufactures nonnuclear components for nuclear weapons. He had a top security clearance at the facility. He disappeared on August 28, 2025, after leaving his home in Albuquerque on foot with a handgun. Police warned he may have been a danger to himself.

The overwhelming media attention to the loosely tied theory has prompted the Trump administration to take action.

“I hope it’s random, but we’re going to know in the next week and a half,” President Trump told reporters Thursday. “I just left a meeting on that subject.”

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) also told Fox News it is looking into the cases. “NNSA is aware of reports related to employees of our labs, plants, and sites and is looking into the matter.”

Headline Fail of the Week

Iran is winning at least one war, according to The Economist, which recently declared: “In the AI propaganda war, Iran is winning.”

Tehran might not be winning the actual war against the U.S. and Israel, but it has something even better: memes.

“Its memes are just so dank that, apparently, you have to hand it to the brutal Islamist theocrats in Tehran,” NR’s Noah Rothman writes in response to the British mag.

The “murderous dictatorship appears to be winning the propaganda battle against the land of the free and the home of Hollywood,” The Economist claims, because Iran and its allies are “out-trolling” the president on social media.

AI-generated videos making the rounds online are “witty and show fluency in their enemy’s culture,” The Economist wrote. They take aim at an “unpopular war” waged by an “unpopular president.”

While the magazine notes there are antisemitic themes and conspiracy theories running wild in many of the videos, it argues “all these nasties flit past your eyes so fast they are easy to miss.”

Media Misses

• 60 Minutes found three progressive American cardinals who were eager to slam President Trump over his immigration crackdown and the war in Iran. The segment featured commentary from Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington, D.C., and Cardinal Joseph Tobin, archbishop of Newark, New Jersey. Catholic author Robert Royal noted that none of the three hold offices in the U.S. bishops’ conference, and they have never been elected. He likened the trio to the progressive “Squad” in U.S. politics, calling them “a very definite and pretty left-wing group of just three.”

• New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently appeared on CNN and claimed that while he wans to see Iran “defeated militarily because this regime is a terrible regime for its people and the region….The problem is I really don’t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war because they are two awful human beings.”

“They are both engaged in anti-democratic projects in their own countries. They’re both alleged crooks. They are terrible, terrible people doing terrible things to America’s standing in the world and Israel’s standing in the world.”