05 Apr 2026 36 min read True Or The Woo

The Pattern Nobody Wants to Talk About

Because when a cluster of scientists working near advanced propulsion, energy systems, and high-end aerospace research begin disappearing within a short window, the question is not proof. The question is incentive. And the incentive, at least on paper, exists.

Scientists working at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

By Matt Stone

This piece is based on Public Reporting. Source Material listed at the end.

The story gets mangled in two opposite ways. One camp dismisses it because nobody has produced a neat little document proving a coordinated operation. The other camp treats every dead scientist and every missing researcher as proof that the whole thing is solved. Both moves are lazy.

What is real seems stranger and narrower than the loudest conspiracy version, but it is still weird enough to deserve a hard look. When this article was first published, the cluster spanned less than two years. It has since grown. Across a four-year window, deaths and disappearances touched Los Alamos, JPL, Caltech, MIT’s fusion world, Aerojet Rocketdyne’s propulsion orbit, and the Air Force Research Laboratory. What do these have in common? They all belong to the same narrow corridor of American high-end science: national security labs, space systems, advanced propulsion, astronomy, and fusion research.That does not prove one cause. It does indicate that this is not just random people who happened to own lab coats.

Jude Height, Army biochemist, Aberdeen Proving Ground; Novichok nerve agent research

Jude Height, 71, was a longtime Army biochemist whose death in September 2022 was ruled accidental. He died after a vehicle allegedly rolled backward down a driveway and trapped him beneath it. Height spent more than four decades at Aberdeen Proving Ground's Edgewood, Maryland facility, focusing on how nerve agents interact with the human body. His work included research on Novichok agents, the class of chemical weapons used in the 2018 poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the UK.

The official account has been disputed on multiple fronts. In 911 audio reviewed by Fox News, the caller appears to say someone "ran him over a couple times," prompting the dispatcher to repeatedly ask who had done it and whether it was intentional. Sworn testimony from Height's girlfriend, the only person present, later differed from the initial police report in key respects, including whether the car had been parked overnight and whether Height ran behind the vehicle or was simply found there. A separate autopsy commissioned by the family found the manner of death could not be determined, describing the findings as "very strongly suspicious of homicidal violence coupled with an attempt to cover this as an accident."

Former colleagues said they do not believe the official account. His daughter has spent years trying to get the case reopened, and family members said Height had at times expressed concern that he was being watched or monitored.

Amy Eskridge, President, Institute for Exotic Science; CEO, HoloChron; advanced propulsion and gravity modification researcher

As the scope has widened in the investigation into missing nuclear and advanced propulsion scientists, an additional puzzle piece presented itself. Amy Catherine Eskridge was a Huntsville, Alabama researcher and entrepreneur who publicly worked in the world of speculative propulsion and anti-gravity ideas.

Public records and her own 2018 presentation identify her as president of the Institute for Exotic Science and CEO of HoloChron, where she described work involving gravity modification, metamaterials, and quantum-related research. Her obituary states that she died on June 11, 2022, at age 34, after earning a double major in chemistry and biology from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and co-founding the Institute for Exotic Science.

Before her death, Eskridge also reportedly told others she feared for her safety and believed her life was in danger. Video that resurfaced in 2026 shows Eskridge in a state of visible distress, claiming her hands had been burned by what she described as a directed energy weapon, and sharing photos (shared below) of injuries she said a colleague with weapons experience identified as caused by an RF k-band emitter powered by car batteries in a nearby SUV.

Former British intelligence officer Franc Milburn, who was in contact with Eskridge before her death, said she feared for her life and believed she was being targeted. Her father, a former NASA engineer, told NewsNation he did not believe her death was suspicious, saying "scientists die also, just like other people."

The family dispute is real and worth noting, but so is the documented pre-death record she left.Versions of it were later parroted in a congressional setting through Michael Shellenberger’s written testimony to the House Oversight Committee, which repeated retired UK intelligence officer Franc Milburn’s allegation that Eskridge had been targeted and killed because of her advanced propulsion work.

While unconfirmed, the messages below were reportedly sent by Amy to her partner prior to her death.

Michael Hicks, Former JPL scientist, comet and asteroid researcher

Michael David Hicks, a former Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist who spent years studying comets and asteroids, died on July 30, 2023, at age 59. Public memorials and university notices confirm his NASA and JPL background, but they do not appear to publicly list a cause of death. That has made Hicks a recent addition to the growing media narrative around dead or missing scientists tied to aerospace, defense, and other sensitive research fields.

What is established is narrower than the speculation: Hicks was real, his career was significant, and his 2023 death is now being folded into a broader pattern story that remains unproven. The silence is the inconsistency here. A 20-year veteran of JPL with over 80 published papers dies suddenly at 59, no cause given, no autopsy on record, and the agency that employed him says nothing.

Frank Maiwald, JPL principal investigator, biosignature and advanced instrumentation

Start with Frank Maiwald, because his case sits at the front of the timeline and still feels oddly quiet. Maiwald was a JPL scientist tied to advanced instrumentation and biosignature work. JPL’s 2023 SURP materials list him as principal investigator on “Unambiguous Detection of Biosignatures by Action Spectroscopy,” and JPL’s poster archive separately identifies him in that role. His obituary says he died in Los Angeles on July 4, 2024, at age 61. What the public record does not appear to provide, is a clear public explanation of the cause of death. Just 13 months before his death, Maiwald was the lead researcher on a breakthrough that could help future NASA missions detect signs of life on other planets.

Two JPL scientists dead within a year of each other, both with no public cause of death, no autopsy on record, and institutional silence from the agency. That is not proof of anything. It is a fact.

Matthew James Sullivan, Air Force Veteran, Whistleblower

Matthew James Sullivan, 39, died on May 12, 2024, at his home in Falls Church, Virginia, from a lethal combination of alcohol, alprazolam, cyclobenzaprine, and imipramine, according to the medical examiner, who ruled it an accidental overdose. Sullivan had worked in highly sensitive roles with the Air Force Intelligence Agency, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, and the National Security Agency.

He died only weeks after committing to appear at congressional hearings scheduled for November 2024, where sources say he planned to reveal firsthand knowledge of the U.S. government's long-running crash retrieval and reverse-engineering programs involving non-human craft. At Sullivan's funeral, retired Major General David Abba, who ran some of the Pentagon's most secretive offices, spoke of "the burden that a select few in this nation have of truly understanding what's going on."

Rep. Eric Burlison referred Sullivan's death to the FBI, writing to Director Kash Patel that the "sudden and suspicious circumstances surrounding his death raise significant concerns about potential foul play and the safety of other individuals involved in this matter." Breitbart However, the medical examiner's ruling was accidental overdose, directly contradicting Burlison's earlier public claim on Fox News that Sullivan had "suspiciously committed suicide." Patriot News Alerts

Anthony Chavez, R&D engineer, Los Alamos National Laboratory (DARHT)

Then comes Anthony Chavez. This is where the list stops feeling like internet slop and starts looking like something people are justified in staring at. Los Alamos National Laboratory profiled Chavez in 2025 as an R&D engineer in Engineering, Operations, and Physics who had worked at the lab more than 25 years, including at DARHT. Los Alamos authorities then publicly announced an active search for him after he went missing in early May 2025. The city’s notice says the search remained active as of May 19, 2025.

Public reporting around the case has described him as having effectively vanished from Los Alamos, New Mexico, after May 4. A detective told CNN exhaustive searches have yielded no signs of activity or any indication he was planning to leave. A longtime Los Alamos engineer disappearing from a national-security lab town is not proof of anything by itself. It is also not nothing. His friend Carl Buckland, who raised the alarm publicly, told CNN he was glad authorities were finally looking into it: "It's about time."

Monica Reza, Aerojet Rocketdyne, advanced propulsion materials

Monica Jacinto Reza is where the map starts to feel both stronger and murkier at the same time. The disappearance is well established. She was last seen hiking near Mount Waterman in the Angeles National Forest on June 22, 2025, around 9 a.m. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department treated her as an at-risk missing person. She was about 30 feet behind the person she was hiking with, smiling and waving. When he turned back around, she was gone.

Reza and her male companion had oddly begun running on terrain that is steep and uneven, which is uncommon. An extensive week-long search found only a beanie 600 feet below the trail.Searchers noted the beanie's location was inconsistent with her trajectory. FLIR infrared searches came up empty. Scent dogs hit a dead end at the beanie and went no further. Hundreds of volunteers searched for months. No body, no trace.

But what is really strange, is that four days after she disappeared, and three days before the official search was even suspended, someone created a memorial page for her on Find a Grave, listing her death date as June 22, 2025, and her burial as a "green burial," which requires a body. The memorial was created by a contributor whose profile is no longer publicly accessible. Public reporting has placed her in the Aerojet Rocketdyne world and connected her to Mondaloy-type high-performance alloys used in next-generation propulsion.

Separate reporting later tied her professionally to retired Air Force Research Laboratory commander William Neil McCasland. What we know for sure is this: Reza undeniably vanished on June 22, 2025, and the technical world she worked in overlaps with AFRL-backed propulsion materials. The McCasland connection does not prove causation. It does create a documented overlap.

William Neil McCasland, Retired U.S. Air Force general, former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory

Then there is William Neil McCasland, who is the closest thing this story has to a structural hub. Bernalillo County’s sheriff says McCasland, a retired U.S. Air Force general, was last known to be at or near his residence in Albuquerque on the morning of February 27, 2026, and remained missing as of the March 12 press release. His Air Force biography explains why his name carries so much weight in this conversation. McCasland was commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, responsible for the Air Force’s multibillion-dollar science and technology program, and his assignments included space acquisition and special programs. In plain English, he sat in the kind of institutional position where advanced materials, propulsion, space systems, and classified research all start touching each other. That does not prove he linked all the others. It does explain why his disappearance turned this from an odd list into something people could no longer ignore.

Melissa Casias, Los Alamos National Laboratory-linked researcher

Melissa Casias tightened the pattern. NamUs lists Melissa Shirley Casias as missing from Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, with her disappearance dated June 26, 2025. The NamUs entry says she and her husband went to work that morning, that she later left after dropping off lunch for her daughter, and that she was reported missing that evening. This one has the most documented strangeness of all the disappearances.

By that afternoon, she had vanished, leaving behind her wallet, her keys, and both of her personal phones wiped to factory settings. A factory reset is not an accident. You open settings. You navigate to reset. You confirm, twice. It takes two hands and a conscious decision. New Mexico State Police confirmed the phones were wiped to NBC News.

Surveillance footage shows her walking eastbound on NM 518 roughly an hour after she dropped off lunch to her daughter. A family acquaintance reported seeing a blue Dodge truck following her around that time. Police located a matching vehicle but concluded she did not get inside. Public reporting has described her as connected to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Within less than two months of Anthony Chavez’s disappearance, another person publicly linked to the Los Alamos environment vanished in New Mexico. Again, that is not a solution. It is an overlap. And pretending it does not register is just dishonest.

Update–June 1, 2026

Melissa Casias' body has been found. On May 28, a hiker discovered human remains in the McGaffey Ridge area of Carson National Forest, approximately six miles from her home. New Mexico State Police confirmed the remains as hers. A handgun was found alongside her body. The cause and manner of death have not yet been determined, the remains are undergoing further anthropological examination.

Casias was an avid hunter with a hunting guide license. The presence of a handgun is not automatically suspicious in that context. What is harder to explain is this: her family confirmed she was found in an area that had already been searched. Both of her personal phones had been wiped before she disappeared. She left behind her purse, her keys, her wallet, and her identification. And she was found nearly a year later in ground searchers had already covered.

Her family's statement said they "fully intend to continue to pursue answers for justice." That word--justice--is worth sitting with. Families who believe their loved one walked into the woods and died do not typically use that word.

The cause and manner of death will be determined by the Office of the Medical Investigator. This article will be updated when that ruling is made.

Ingrid Coleen Lane, Neuroscientist and Bioengineer

She vanished October 15, 2023, in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico. She was a bioengineer and neuroscientist with the Mind Research Network at the University of New Mexico, with documented ties to both Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, her name appears in an official 2023 NNSA Strategic Outlook Initiative report as a Sandia contributor. When she disappeared she was publicly described only as a bipolar musician struggling with her mental health.

Her car was found three days later at 9,100 feet elevation on a remote forest road. Inside: three laptops and an unactivated burner phone. The rear hatch window had been shattered by what investigators described as a large boulder, in an area they described as "just trees," with no footprints, no tire tracks, and no sign of any other human presence. Search dogs found no scent trail. The Sandoval County Sheriff's Office declared no foul play within 24 hours without processing the car forensically. Her mother told the Santa Fe New Mexican they "didn't even do forensics on the car." Interestingly, especially considering Amy Eskridge's case, Lane's husband works for a DoD contractor at Kirtland Air Force Base building directed energy weapons software. She has never been found.

Nuno Loureiro, MIT professor, director of Plasma Science and Fusion Center

Nuno Loureiro was not missing. He was murdered. MIT says Loureiro was a professor of physics and nuclear science and engineering and director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center. MIT President Sally Kornbluth wrote that he died early on December 16, 2025, from gunshot wounds sustained a few hours earlier. PBS, citing the AP, reported that the shooting happened at his Brookline home on December 15. His field was not marginal science. It was plasma physics, magnetic reconnection, and fusion research. That matters because his death sits inside the same broader corridor of high-end, strategically valuable science, even if his case looks different from the other vanishings.

Jason Thomas, Novartis chemical biology team leader

Jason Thomas is the weakest fit in the cluster, but he is still part of the timeline people are reacting to. People reported that Thomas, 45, was a Novartis scientist in Wakefield, Massachusetts who was reported missing on December 13, 2025, after leaving home on foot, and that his phone and wallet were left behind. In March 2026, authorities said a body recovered from Lake Quannapowitt was believed to be his, and reporting said investigators did not suspect foul play.

Public reporting also described him as struggling under enormous grief after both of his parents died within an hour of each other. That makes his case tragic, but it also makes it different. He belongs on the edge of the pattern, not at the center of the strongest version of it.

Steven Garcia, Property custodian (TS Clearance) at the Kansas City National Security Campus's New Mexico facility.

Steven Abel Garcia, 48, was last seen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on August 28, 2025, according to the New Mexico Department of Public Safety, which lists him as a missing person and says he was last seen wearing a green camo shirt and glasses. Garcia was last seen leaving his home in Albuquerque on foot, captured on surveillance footage carrying a handgun. He left behind his phone, wallet, keys, and car.

He worked at a facility reported to manufacture over 80 percent of all non-nuclear components for US nuclear weapons, and reportedly held a top secret security clearance. No confirmed sightings since. reporting that ties Garcia to sensitive nuclear-related work appears to rely heavily on anonymous sourcing and has not been publicly confirmed by New Mexico authorities in the materials I found. So the strongest version is this: Garcia is a real missing person with an officially documented case, and recent media coverage has pulled his disappearance into a broader narrative about vanished officials and scientists tied to national-security work, even though the more explosive claims about his exact role remain less firmly established in public records.

Carl Grillmair, Caltech/IPAC astronomer, exoplanets and stellar streams

Carl Grillmair is one of the cases that keeps this whole story from being waved away. Caltech says Grillmair was an astronomer at IPAC, its science and data center for astronomy and planetary science, and that his work spanned exoplanets and stellar streams. Grillmair lived in a rural area where he could have a clearer view of the universe he devoted his life to studying. Caltech says he died on February 16, 2026, at age 67. ABC7 and the Los Angeles Times reported that he was shot and killed at his home in Llano, California, and that a 29-year-old man, Freddy Snyder, was later charged.

But what really makes people stop is what happened before the killing. The Los Angeles Times reported that Snyder had already faced firearm charges after a December confrontation at Grillmair’s property, and ABC7 reported that he had previously been arrested for trespassing on Grillmair’s property while carrying a rifle before those charges were dismissed. Armed trespass on the property, release, then a return and an alleged murder. That sequence is not internet myth. This is recorded fact.

David Wilcock, UFO researcher, author, Ancient Aliens personality; found dead in apparent suicide outside his home

David Wilcock died on April 20, 2026, at age 53, in Boulder County, Colorado. Authorities responded to a 911 call near Nederland at approximately 10:44 a.m., made contact with him, and he died by suicide shortly thereafter. No other individuals were present. A subsequent statement released through Boulder County included remarks from his family describing a prolonged struggle with depression and severe financial strain.

He was born March 8, 1973, in Schenectady, New York, and later built a career at the intersection of alternative science, spirituality, and UFO disclosure culture. Through his platform Divine Cosmos, Wilcock positioned himself as a researcher exploring consciousness, ancient civilizations, and what he described as emerging scientific paradigms involving energy and matter.

His reach was not niche. He was a New York Times bestselling author, with titles including The Source Field Investigations, The Synchronicity Key, The Ascension Mysteries, and Awakening in the Dream. He also became widely recognizable through repeated appearances on Ancient Aliens, where he contributed to narratives around extraterrestrial influence, lost knowledge systems, and hidden histories.

His core worldview combined spiritual metaphysics with speculative physics: ideas about solar-system-wide transformation (“Ascension”), advanced non-human intelligences, and hidden scientific frameworks operating beneath mainstream understanding. His audience, numbering in the hundreds of thousands across YouTube and social platforms, followed him not just as a commentator but as a guide to an alternative model of reality.

Two days before his death, he posted a message referencing “intense stuff going on,” ending with a familiar theme in his work: that consciousness and the “Creator” exist within, and that the universe is ultimately benevolent.

On May 8, 2026, a public records request for the bodycam footage was filed with the Boulder County Sheriff's Office under Colorado's Law Enforcement Integrity Act. Colorado's Law Enforcement Integrity Act, enacted in 2020, requires that all unedited video and audio recordings of incidents involving a complaint of peace officer misconduct must be released to the public no later than 21 days after a request is made.

Claims have circulated that the Boulder County Sheriff's Office has cited the Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act to justify withholding the footage, the same argument a Colorado Court of Appeals ruling from just weeks before Wilcock's death explicitly rejected, finding that the CCJRA fee provision does not apply to Integrity Act requests, and that the Integrity Act's mandatory disclosure requirements cannot be conditioned on fees or withheld under the older statute. Those claims have not been independently confirmed. On May 8, 2026, a public records request was filed under the Law Enforcement Integrity Act to find out. They have 21 days to respond. Wilcock was not a scientist. He was a public commentator on UAP and the disappearing researchers. He belongs on the edge of the pattern. But the bodycam situation is a legitimate transparency issue regardless of where you stand on anything else.

Joshua LeBlanc, NASA aerospace technologies electrical engineer, team lead for Space Nuclear Propulsion Instrumentation and Control, Marshall Space Flight Center

Joshua Kyle LeBlanc died on July 22, 2025, at age 29, in a fiery single-vehicle crash in Walker County, Alabama, near Empire. According to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, his 2021 Tesla Model 3 left the roadway around 2:45 p.m., struck a guardrail and trees, and caught fire. His identity was later confirmed through forensic analysis, and the crash remained under investigation.

His family feared he had been abducted because he left his phone and wallet at home. Tesla Sentry Mode data showed his vehicle had been parked at Huntsville International Airport for four hours that morning – a stop his family said was not part of his plans for the day. His car then drove westward through rural roads before the crash.

Both the vehicle and his body were burned beyond recognition. His identity was confirmed days later by the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences. No cause of death beyond the crash itself has been publicly detailed. He worked on nuclear propulsion projects and was team lead for Space Nuclear Propulsion Instrumentation and Control maturation – including work connected to the DRACO project aimed at crewed Mars missions.

He died in Huntsville, Alabama. Amy Eskridge died in Huntsville, Alabama three years earlier. Authorities have found no direct connection between them. The geographic overlap is documented fact.

LeBlanc was an electrical engineer working in aerospace technologies, with roughly five and a half years at NASA. Public professional profiles described him as a team lead involved in Space Nuclear Propulsion instrumentation and control systems, including work connected to DRACO (Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations)—a joint NASA–DARPA effort to test nuclear thermal propulsion in space.

Nuclear propulsion is one of the few technologies capable of significantly reducing transit time for deep-space missions, including Mars. It sits at the intersection of civilian space exploration and strategic capability. LeBlanc was not a public figure, but he was working inside a technically sensitive and forward-looking domain.

What complicates the narrative are the pre-crash circumstances reported by family and media. His family said he was reported missing around 4:32 a.m. the same day after failing to report to work. They also stated he left behind his phone and wallet, which they described as out of character. Data associated with the vehicle reportedly indicated it spent several hours at Huntsville International Airport earlier that morning—again, something family members said did not align with his known plans.

Those details are not official conclusions. They are reported observations and family concerns. No public investigation has established foul play.

The story resurfaced in April 2026 when members of the U.S. House Oversight Committee requested briefings from federal agencies regarding “unconfirmed public reporting” of multiple deaths or disappearances involving individuals connected to nuclear or aerospace work. LeBlanc’s case was included in that broader context of concern, but officials explicitly stated that no confirmed link between cases had been established.

The online reaction to his death fractured immediately. Some treated it as a tragic but personal outcome tied to the pressures described by his family. Others attempted to fold it into broader narratives involving suppressed knowledge or targeted individuals. There is no verified evidence supporting those claims. The official record remains clear and limited: a death ruled suicide, with family citing mental health and financial distress.

The Star Wars Cluster

This is not the first time people have stared at a list like this. In the 1980s, during the height of the Strategic Defense Initiative, a series of deaths among British defense scientists quietly triggered similar unease. These were not fringe researchers. Many were connected to firms working on missile defense, radar, guidance systems, and advanced electronics tied to what was popularly called “Star Wars.”

Between roughly 1982 and 1990, more than two dozen scientists and engineers linked to defense contractors died in ways that drew attention. Some were found in cars with hoses running from exhaust pipes. Some fell from buildings. Some were reported as suicides under circumstances that observers described as unusual. Others died in accidents that, taken individually, would not have raised alarms. But taken together, within a narrow technical community, over a relatively short period, the pattern became hard to ignore.

Authorities ruled most of the deaths suicides or misadventure. No single explanation unified them. Parliamentary questions were raised, journalists compiled lists, and speculation filled the gaps where certainty was absent. What remains decades later is not proof of foul play, but a historical precedent. A cluster of scientists working in strategically sensitive fields died within a compressed timeline, and the public noticed.

The official explanations never fully resolved the discomfort. The lesson is not that something sinister must have happened. The lesson is that when high-value research, national security, and human tragedy overlap, patterns emerge that sit uneasily between coincidence and suspicion.

The Iranian Nuclear Cluster

Unlike the 1980s cluster, the Iranian cases are not ambiguous. Beginning in the late 2000s, a series of Iranian nuclear scientists were targeted in killings widely attributed to state-level covert operations. Ardeshir Hosseinpour died in 2007 under disputed circumstances. In January 2010, Masoud Ali-Mohammadi was killed by a bomb placed on a motorcycle outside his home in Tehran. Later that same year, Majid Shahriari was assassinated in a coordinated attack using explosive devices attached to vehicles. In 2011, Darioush Rezaeinejad was shot outside his home. In 2012, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was killed by a magnetic bomb placed on his car during morning traffic. The most prominent case came in 2020, when Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, widely described as the architect of Iran’s nuclear program, was killed in a sophisticated ambush involving remote-operated weaponry.

These were not random events. They were widely understood as efforts to slow or disrupt a strategic scientific program by targeting key personnel. The pattern was clear: specialized researchers, connected to sensitive technological development, eliminated one by one.

The Iranian cases demonstrate something uncomfortable but undeniable. When science intersects directly with national power, scientists themselves can become strategic nodes. Removing them becomes, in the cold logic of statecraft, another method of influence. That history does not explain modern cases. It does not imply the same forces are at work. But it does establish precedent. Scientists working in consequential fields have been targeted before, and not in theory, but in documented reality.

Chinese scientists

While the U.S. is now publicly questioning deaths and disappearances among people tied to nuclear, space, and advanced weapons work, China appears to have its own cluster of premature deaths among scientists in militarily significant fields. Some are explained as accidents or illness. Some remain vague. The pattern is not proof of a covert campaign, but it is enough to raise the harder question: why are so many people near the edge of military technology dying young, dying suddenly, or disappearing into thin institutional fog?

Newsweek reported at least nine scientists in strategically sensitive fields have died in recent years, with cases involving military AI, hypersonics, microelectronics, drones, space technology, chemistry, biomedical chemistry, and advanced weapons research. NDTV’s pickup of the same reporting emphasizes the key restraint: there is currently no evidence that any foreign power is carrying out a coordinated campaign against scientists.

The most striking case is Feng Yanghe, a 38-year-old professor at China’s National University of Defense Technology, who died in a Beijing car crash in July 2023. He reportedly worked on simulation models involving possible Taiwan scenarios. State-linked reporting said he had been returning from a meeting around 2:35 a.m. when the accident occurred. A government-affiliated science platform described him as having been “sacrificed while performing official duties,” language normally associated with military or state service, and he was later buried at Babaoshan cemetery, a site associated with senior Communist Party and state-recognized figures.

The broader Chinese list reported includes: Chen Shuming, 57, microelectronics specialist, died in a similar incident in 2018; Feng Yanghe, military AI expert, died in a July 2023 car crash; Zhou Guangyuan, chemist, died in December 2023 of unspecified cause; Liu Donghao, data scientist, died after an unspecified accident in March 2024; Zhang Xiaoxin, 62, space expert, died in a December 2024 car accident; Zhang Daibing, 47, drone expert, died in January 2025 with no disclosed cause; Li Minyong, biomedical chemist, died after sudden illness in November 2025; Fang Daining, hypersonics expert, died after a medical episode abroad in February 2026; and Yan Hong, hypersonics researcher, reportedly died after illness in March 2026.

Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370

Everything above involves one person at a time. MH370 is what happens when you lose them in bulk. A little reported fact from when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, was that twenty employees of Freescale Semiconductor were on board, traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Freescale was a major semiconductor company working on microcontrollers, RF systems, and advanced electronics used in automotive, communications, and defense-adjacent technologies. The employees were primarily engineers and technical specialists, many based in Malaysia and China, reportedly traveling for company business. Their presence stood out because it represented a significant concentration of personnel from a single high-tech firm on one flight, and the disappearance meant that an entire group of experienced semiconductor professionals vanished at once.

The Targeting of Academia

The targeting of scientists is not purely a modern phenomenon. In the late 19th and throughout the 20th century, governments increasingly recognized that technical expertise translated directly into military and industrial power. During both World Wars, physicists, chemists, and engineers became strategic assets, working on explosives, radar, cryptography, and nuclear weapons. Some were recruited aggressively, others were murdered, detained, surveilled, or pressured to prevent their knowledge from reaching rival states. The Cold War intensified this logic.

Programs like Operation Paperclip moved German rocket scientists into U.S. custody, while Soviet intelligence sought Western nuclear expertise and restricted the movement of its own scientists. In this environment, scientists were no longer just academics. They were pawns on a geopolitical chessboard, valued not only for what they discovered, but for who controlled them.

If This Technology Exists, Why Would Anyone Sit On It?

Forget aliens for a moment. The real explanation is more uncomfortable. And more human.

If a propulsion or energy breakthrough made fossil fuels unnecessary, it would not just change transportation. It would destabilize the entire global order. Our entire way of life would flip upside down.

Oil is not just fuel. It is power, currency, and leverage. Entire governments and countries exist because oil revenue keeps them alive. Markets are built around it. Wars have been fought over it. Alliances depend on it.

Remove oil overnight, and you do not just get cleaner skies. You get economic shockwaves. You get waves of chaos cascading around the globe.

Trillions of dollars in reserves become stranded assets. Millions of jobs lost. Sovereign wealth funds wobble. Oil-dependent states face collapse. Energy markets panic. Pension funds tied to energy companies take hits. Shipping, aviation, and heavy industry all scramble at once.

That is not a smooth transition. That is an uncontrolled demolition. A global socioeconomic kamikaze.

Now add national security. Advanced propulsion is never just transportation. It is also missiles, maneuverability, space dominance, and rapid deployment. The same breakthrough that lets you cross the planet cheaply also lets you cross it fast, quietly, and with payload.

That changes military balance overnight.

If one country had that first, it would not rush to publish it. It would study it. Harden it. Control it. Decide how and when the world learns about it.

Then there is infrastructure. The entire modern world runs on hydrocarbons. Planes, ships, trucks, generators, plastics, fertilizer, power grids. Even if a miracle technology appeared tomorrow, you could not flip a switch and replace everything. Rolling it out too fast could create the elimination of jobs with no immediate replacements, shortages in every sector, global financial and social instability, and other unintended consequences.

So even without conspiracy, there is a simple institutional instinct: slow it down, control it, phase it. That is what governments do with anything that could destabilize the world. Which brings the unease back.

That does not prove anything sinister happened. But it does explain why people start looking for patterns in the first place. And why scientists disappearing or being killed in quick succession like this raises so many eyebrows.

When I first wrote this, the number was 8 dead or missing scientists. Now, 15 scientists and researchers are gone. There are undoubtedly countless others that we have not put the pieces together on yet. But the pattern is becoming more obvious, and more alarming.

Dead:

June 11, 2022: Amy Catherine Eskridge, 34, president of the Institute for Exotic Science and CEO of HoloChron, died in Huntsville, Alabama. Before her death she reportedly told others she feared for her safety and claimed injuries from a directed energy weapon. Former British intelligence officer Franc Milburn confirmed he had been in contact with her before her death.
September 2022: Jude Height, 71, Army biochemist at Aberdeen Proving Ground, died in what was ruled an accidental death after being trapped beneath a vehicle in his driveway. Height spent more than four decades researching how nerve agents including Novichok interact with the human body. A separate family-commissioned autopsy found the manner of death could not be determined and described findings as "very strongly suspicious of homicidal violence."
July 30, 2023: Michael David Hicks, 59, former JPL scientist whose career focused on comet and asteroid research, died with no public cause of death listed.
May 12, 2024: Matthew James Sullivan, 39, Air Force Intelligence and NSA veteran, died of a ruled accidental overdose weeks before planned congressional testimony about crash retrieval and reverse-engineering programs. Rep. Eric Burlison referred his death to the FBI.
July 4, 2024: Frank Maiwald, 61, JPL principal investigator on biosignature detection and advanced instrumentation, died in Los Angeles. No public cause of death has been listed.
July 22, 2025: Joshua Kyle LeBlanc, 29, NASA electrical engineer and team lead for Space Nuclear Propulsion Instrumentation and Control on the DRACO project, died in a fiery single vehicle crash in Walker County, Alabama. Tesla Sentry Mode data showed his vehicle had been parked at Huntsville International Airport for four hours that morning, a stop his family said was not part of his plans.
December 13, 2025: Jason Thomas, 45, Novartis chemical biology team leader in Wakefield, Massachusetts, was reported missing after leaving home on foot, leaving behind his phone and wallet. A body recovered from Lake Quannapowitt in March 2026 was believed to be his. Investigators did not suspect foul play.
December 15-16, 2025: Nuno Loureiro, MIT professor of physics and nuclear science and director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, was shot at his Brookline home on December 15 and died on December 16.
February 16, 2026: Carl Grillmair, 67, Caltech/IPAC astronomer whose work spanned exoplanets and stellar streams, was shot and killed at his home in Llano, California. A 29-year-old man, Freddy Snyder, was charged. Snyder had previously been arrested for armed trespass on Grillmair's property before those charges were dismissed.
April 20, 2026: David Wilcock, 53, UAP researcher and Ancient Aliens personality, died by suicide near Nederland, Colorado. Boulder County has withheld bodycam footage despite a recent Court of Appeals ruling that directly undermines their legal justification for doing so.
June 26, 2025: Melissa Casias disappeared after what began as a normal workday, later seen on surveillance footage walking eastbound on NM 518. She left behind her wallet, keys, and both personal phones wiped to factory settings. Public reporting connected her to the Los Alamos National Laboratory environment. On 5/28/2026, Melissa's remains were found in a wooded area that had already been searched, with a handgun nearby.

Missing:

Oct 15, 2023: Ingrid Lane vanished October 15, 2023, on State Route 144, a narrow dirt road that runs through the Jemez Mountains. She had begun a weeklong retreat at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center the day before, but left the next morning, telling the director she had to go to Albuquerque and Los Alamos and would be hiking, too, but would be back later. Her black 2019 Subaru Impreza hatchback was found on 144 October 18, 2023, about 11 miles north of NM-126, near San Antonio Mountain and the Valles Caldera National Preserve, at 9,100 feet elevation and out of cellular range.
May 4, 2025: Anthony "Tony" Chavez was last seen leaving his Los Alamos home on foot. An R&D engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory with more than 25 years of experience including work at the DARHT facility, he left behind his wallet and car keys. Exhaustive searches have yielded no signs of activity or any indication he was planning to leave.
June 22, 2025: Monica Reza vanished while hiking near Mount Waterman in the Angeles National Forest, approximately 30 feet behind her hiking companion. An extensive search found only a beanie 600 feet below the trail. A memorial page listing her death date was created on Find a Grave four days after her disappearance, before the official search was suspended. Public reporting connected her to Aerojet Rocketdyne and advanced propulsion materials.
August 28, 2025: Steven Abel Garcia, 48, was last seen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, leaving his home on foot carrying a handgun, captured on surveillance footage. He left behind his phone, wallet, keys, and car. Garcia worked at a facility reported to manufacture over 80 percent of all non-nuclear components for US nuclear weapons and reportedly held a top secret security clearance. He remains listed in the state missing persons system.
February 27, 2026: William Neil McCasland, retired U.S. Air Force general and former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, was last seen at his Albuquerque residence and remained missing as of the March 12, 2026 sheriff's press release.

That is a bizarre run of events across only a few years, with 7 of the scientists disappearing or being killed in a 9-month window. A compressed timeline is not proof of common causation, but it is exactly the kind of pattern that makes normal people start asking hard questions. And makes other people light up online forums.

The overlap is not that all worked on the same thing. They did not. The overlap is institutional and thematic.

At the tightest core sit Chavez, Casias, Reza, and McCasland. Chavez and Casias both exist in the Los Alamos sphere, vanishing within two months of each other from the same institutional world in New Mexico.

Reza sits, at minimum, in a reported propulsion-materials orbit that overlaps with AFRL's own published work on Mondaloy. McCasland sat at the top of AFRL itself, responsible for the Air Force's multibillion-dollar science and technology program, with assignments spanning space acquisition and special programs. He is the structural hub. His disappearance is what connects the others into something that can no longer be called coincidence without explaining why.

Garcia sits just outside that core but close enough to feel it. He worked at a facility reported to manufacture over 80 percent of all non-nuclear components for US nuclear weapons, held a top secret clearance, and vanished from Albuquerque three months after Chavez disappeared from the same state. Two missing men, both connected to nuclear work, both in New Mexico, within a single calendar year.

Maiwald and Hicks sit in the elite NASA-adjacent space science world. Both were JPL. Both died within a year of each other. Neither has a public cause of death on record. The agency that employed both of them said nothing. LeBlanc extends that thread into nuclear propulsion specifically, working on DRACO, the joint NASA-DARPA effort to test nuclear thermal propulsion in space, dying in a fiery crash at 29 with unexplained airport data and a body burned beyond recognition. Eskridge connects to that same Huntsville geography where LeBlanc died, three years earlier, with documented pre-death fears and alleged directed energy weapon injuries.

Loureiro sits in fusion and plasma physics, which is adjacent to the propulsion and energy spine without being identical to it. His murder looks different from the disappearances in form, a charged suspect, a specific crime scene, but his field belongs to the same corridor of strategically valuable science that runs through every other name on this list. Grillmair sits in elite space science at Caltech, and his case also has a charged suspect, but the sequence matters: armed trespass, dismissed charges, return, alleged murder. That sequence is a recorded fact.

Height sits in chemical weapons defense research, Novichok specifically, which places him in a different corner of the national security science world but still inside it. His case has the most contested official account of any death on this list. A family-commissioned autopsy called it suspicious of homicidal violence. Former colleagues do not believe the official story. His daughter has spent years trying to get the case reopened.

Sullivan was not a scientist. He was an intelligence officer who knew things and was weeks away from saying them to Congress when he died of a drug overdose. That is not peripheral. That is the mechanism. Someone who sits inside the world these scientists worked in, who had firsthand knowledge of crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs, who committed to testify, and who died before he could. Interestingly, at his funeral a retired Major General spoke of the burden of truly understanding what is going on.

Wilcock was not a scientist either. He was a public commentator who spent years documenting this exact story, naming these exact corridors of research, and building an audience of hundreds of thousands around the argument that something was being hidden. Two days before he died he posted that intense stuff was going on. Boulder County is currently withholding bodycam footage using a legal argument that a Colorado Court of Appeals ruling from weeks before his death explicitly rejected. That is not conspiracy. That is a public records dispute. And it belongs here because a man who was loudly telling this story is now dead and the footage of his final moments is being withheld illegally.

Thomas sits the farthest outside the defense-space-energy spine, which is exactly why his case should be handled with more caution than the tighter core. His disappearance appears connected to grief and personal crisis rather than institutional overlap. He belongs on the edge of this pattern, not at the center of it.

What connects all fifteen is not a single employer, a single research area, or a single cause of death. What connects them is that they all touched something the United States government considers strategically irreplaceable, and that within a four year window, they are all either dead or gone. Some of those deaths have charged suspects and clear explanations. Some have no explanation at all. Some have official explanations that their own families do not believe.

That is the web. I did not build it. I just refused to look away from it.

Rep. Tim Burchett: The Congressman who wasn't Suicidal

This is also where Rep. Tim Burchett enters the story, and I want to be precise about what he has and has not said, because people keep reaching too fast in both directions.

Burchett is a sitting Republican congressman from Tennessee and a member of the House Oversight Committee. In recent interviews he said that if the public knew what he had been briefed on regarding extraterrestrial matters, people would be up at night and the country would come unglued. He has also received death threats. And he said, for the record, I'm not suicidal.

That is not a throwaway line from a man looking for attention. A sitting member of Congress who has received death threats does not volunteer that he is not suicidal casually. He said it because Sullivan is on this list, and Wilcock is on this list, and the people paying attention to this story know exactly what that sentence implies. He said it because he wanted it on record before anything happened to him.

Burchett has also raised the disappearances and deaths of researchers and officials in this orbit directly, including McCasland and Reza, and suggested publicly that they were not coincidental. That matters. Not because a congressman saying something makes it true, but because a congressman saying something means it has crossed a threshold. This is no longer a Reddit thread. This is an elected official with access to classified briefings, who has received death threats, telling the public that the pattern bothers him too.

But here is what Burchett has not done. He has not produced evidence tying these cases together in a provable operational chain. He has not named a program, an agency, or a mechanism. He has said the pattern concerns him and that he knows things he cannot say publicly. That is meaningful. It is not a solution.

His role in this story is not as a source who cracked the case. His role is as a data point. A sitting member of Congress, with a security clearance, who has been briefed on matters he says would unglue the country, who has received death threats, and who felt it necessary to publicly state he is not suicidal, is uncomfortable with this list of names. That tells you something. There are actors that can threaten to kill sitting politicians without repercussions, and you likely only heard it here.

The people who treat Burchett's comments as confirmation have made the same mistake as the people who dismiss the pattern entirely. Both are done thinking before the thinking gets hard.

What the public record shows right now is this: fifteen people connected to national security science, advanced propulsion, nuclear research, space systems, and the public documentation of all of the above are dead or missing within a four year window. A sitting congressman who has received death threats has said the pattern is not coincidental. The government has not explained it. The institutions involved have been largely silent.

That is where the record ends. Everything beyond it is speculation. I am comfortable sitting with that discomfort. You should be too.

It does show a striking cluster that touches national-security science, advanced propulsion, space instrumentation, astrophysics, and fusion research. It shows multiple unresolved disappearances. It shows two homicides in elite science. It shows one homicide preceded by an armed trespass arrest on the victim’s own property. It shows a retired AFRL commander disappearing into thin air. None of that needs embellishment.

The misinformation in this day and age is too easy to weaponize. One bad claim, and the entire pattern gets written off. So I am setting aside the usual sarcasm and wit I normally deploy. This requires factual precision and logical consistency, especially when topics like this have historically been buried under noise, ridicule, and contradictions.

The honest version is both harder and cleaner than either extreme. No, the public has not been shown proof that all fifteen cases are linked or that our government had any involvement. But this is not just meaningless noise.

Every scientist on this list was involved with matters of deep national security. Each one died or disappeared under circumstances that remain unresolved. This is not the first time we have seen a cluster like this. It is the first time we recognized the pattern this quickly.

The story is weird enough on the facts alone. You do not need to lie to make it sound strange. Strange is the new normal. Keep asking questions. I know I will.

Sources

2024–2026 Cluster

Los Alamos County. “Search Continues for Missing Person, Anthony Chavez.” May 2025.
NamUs. “Melissa Shirley Casias-Missing Person Case.” June 26, 2025.
Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office. “Missing Person: William Neil McCasland.” March 2026.
MIT News. Statement on the death of Nuno Loureiro. December 2025.
Associated Press / PBS. “MIT professor shot at Brookline home.” December 2025.
Caltech / IPAC. Carl Grillmair obituary and institutional biography. February 2026.
Los Angeles Times. Coverage of Carl Grillmair killing and prior trespass incident.
ABC7 Los Angeles. Reporting on suspect previously arrested on Grillmair property with rifle.
People Magazine. “Rocket scientist Monica Reza missing after hike.” June 2025.
CBS Los Angeles. Coverage of Monica Reza disappearance. June 2025.
JPL SURP Program Materials (2023) identifying Frank Maiwald as PI.
Frank Maiwald obituary, Los Angeles, July 4, 2024.

Historical Precedent-Strategic Defense Initiative / “Star Wars” deaths

UK House of Commons records discussing defense scientist deaths (1980s)
British press coverage of Marconi / SDI scientist deaths (1982–1990)
Historical reporting on GEC-Marconi scientist deaths

Iranian Nuclear Scientist Assassinations

BBC News. Masoud Ali-Mohammadi assassination (2010)
BBC News. Majid Shahriari coordinated attack (2010)
Reuters. Darioush Rezaeinejad shooting (2011)
Reuters. Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan bombing (2012)
New York Times. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh assassination (2020)
International reporting on Ardeshir Hosseinpour death (2007)

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370

Reuters. “Freescale says 20 employees on missing Malaysia Airlines plane.” March 2014
BBC News. “Malaysia Airlines MH370: Freescale staff on board.”
CNN. Reporting on Freescale Semiconductor engineers traveling to Beijing
The Guardian. “Twenty Freescale Semiconductor staff aboard MH370”
Malaysia Airlines passenger manifest (2014)

Public Commentary