Missing and dead scientists: The conspiracy theory being investigated by the FBI and Congress
The alleged connections between the cases of a dozen people linked to the US government and military have led to two official investigations promoted by Trump
When Susan Wilkerson returned from running errands on February 27, she couldn’t find her husband, the astronautical engineer and retired Army General William McCasland, at their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His prescription glasses and phone were still there. His wallet, his .38 caliber revolver and his hiking boots were missing. Fifty-eight days have passed, and there is still no trace of him.
Aerospace engineer Monica Jacinto Reza, director of Materials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, went for a hike on June 22, 2025, in a forest near Los Angeles. The friend she was hiking with that morning got a few feet ahead. When he turned around to check that he hadn’t lost her, she waved and smiled. When he looked back again, she had vanished. The friend immediately called the police, who are still searching for her.
McCasland and Reza are two of about a dozen scientists linked to the U.S. government and military or dedicated to research tasks sensitive to national security who have disappeared or died in the last four years.
For months, the growing number of these incidents and the possible connections between them have fueled the imagination of the corners of the internet most prone to conspiracy theories. Last week, the matter entered a new phase with the opening of separate investigations by the FBI and Congress to determine whether these incidents are related. It was only a matter of time, after a Fox News reporter asked U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on April 16 about the “10 missing scientists with access to classified stuff, nuclear material, and aerospace technology.” “Well, I hope it’s random, but we’re going to know in the next week and a half,” the president replied.
The deadline set by Trump (who has certainly been reluctant to meet deadlines lately) has not yet passed, but so far, no convincing evidence has emerged to prove that, for example, an enemy power is behind these deaths and disappearances, as feared by those who suspect something strange is happening in the United States. Meanwhile, suspicion is growing among those who subscribe to the phrase that hangs in the Washington office of Trump ideologue Steve Bannon: “There are no conspiracies, but there are no coincidences.”
For James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, the body that launched the investigation from Capitol Hill, “this doesn’t pass the smell test.” “Congress is very concerned about this. Our committee is making this one of our priorities now because we view this as a national security threat,” the Republican congressman told Fox News last Sunday. The FBI said last week in a statement that it will coordinate with the Departments of Energy and Defense in its investigation.
The House committee traces its suspicions back to the 2023 death of Michael David Hicks, who, like Reza, also worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory between 1998 and 2022, during which time he developed his career in the field of comets and asteroids, according to the obituary published by the American Astronomical Society. The cause of his death has not been released, but his daughter expressed her surprise to CNN last week at seeing her father on that list. “I can’t help but laugh about it, but at the same time, it’s getting serious,” she said.
The congressional tally is completed by four missing scientists and three dead ones. They are Frank Maiwald and Carl Grillmair, who also worked for NASA; Melissa Casias and Anthony Chavez, professionals associated with Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is part of the Department of Energy and focuses on the design and maintenance of nuclear weapons; Nuno Loureiro, a renowned physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Jason Thomas, an executive at the pharmaceutical company Novartis; and Steven Garcia, a government contractor at a plant that manufactures components for atomic weapons. The map of connections places four of the incidents in New Mexico, the same number as in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, and two in Massachusetts.
Among these latter cases, Loureiro’s is the one that attracted the most attention at the time. This Portuguese man directed an institute called the Plasma Science and Fusion, and died in December, murdered by Claudio Neves Valente at his home in Brookline, a city adjacent to Boston that is home to Harvard University and MIT.
A couple of days earlier, Neves Valente had killed two students and wounded nine others at a university in Providence, Rhode Island. After committing his last crime, he took his own life. Loureiro’s murder fueled conspiracy theories. Almost six months later, the investigation into the perpetrator’s motive remains open, but all indications point to a personal matter: the two met while studying in Lisbon, and the strongest hypothesis is that Neves Valente, an unsuccessful scientist, resented his compatriot’s success.
Another case that leaves little room for doubt is the other murder on the list. Grillmair, an astrophysicist specializing in exoplanets, was shot to death one morning last February in front of his home in Llano, California. Police arrested a suspect that same day, who is also accused of assault and armed carjacking.
Fascination with conspiracy theories
“It’s typical of these kinds of lists: there are a lot of supposedly mysterious deaths, but when you examine them closely, you discover that there are only two truly enigmatic cases, and the rest are included without much sense,” explains Jesse Walker, author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, about the history of this country’s fascination with conspiracy theories, in a phone interview. “It’s part of the success of this kind of thing: adding names until the number seems overwhelming.”
In his book, Walker divides conspiracy theories into five categories. He places the scientists’ conspiracy theory in the section that plays on the “external enemy” trope. “Underlying it is the idea that Iran or China may be responsible,” explains Walker, who cites precedents such as the list of political rivals the Clintons supposedly eliminated or the people who “died mysteriously after JFK’s assassination.”
When asked if there are precedents of the FBI or Congress investigating similar cases, or if, on the contrary, these investigations are a product of the climate created by the administration, led by the inventor of the concept of “alternative facts,” Walker responds: “I’m sure that any FBI, not just Trump’s, would investigate the mysterious disappearance of a nuclear scientist. However, its officials wouldn’t have made public statements based on sensationalist reports and then linked the case to other alleged events that don’t seem to be related.”
Despite these warnings (and articles like the one published by The Atlantic with the headline “The ‘Missing Scientist’ Story Is Unbelievably Dumb”), the opening of official investigations has revived interest in the death at age 34 of Amy Eskridge, co-founder of the Institute for Exotic Science in Huntsville, Alabama, home to a major NASA facility. She took her own life in 2022, and a month before that, she recorded herself talking about burns on her hands, which in the video she attributed to an attack by a “guided energy weapon.”
A newly created website dedicated to tracking the deaths or disappearances of “people potentially linked to sensitive investigations and government programs” focuses on the entire world (with particular attention to China) and has included Eskridge’s case on a list that continues to grow (now totaling 35 stories, according to Saturday’s count). The latest is the suicide last Monday of ufologist David Wilcock, a key figure in the so-called Disclosure Movement, which suspects that the United States government has information about extraterrestrial life and that a major announcement is imminent.
Given that the tragedy of losing a loved one has been compounded in recent days by the shock of finding themselves in the eye of a media storm, the family of Eskridge, the young scientist from Alabama, issued a statement last week. It reads: “People should realize that scientists die also and not make too much of this.”
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