MIT nuclear physicist murdered in his home in Massachusetts. The famous astrophysicist was shot dead in his home in California. Retired Air Force general missing from his home in New Mexico. An aeronautical engineer and NASA materials specialist disappeared while hiking in the vicinity of Los Angeles…
These are some of the dozen murdered or missing American scientists in the last four years who have become the backbone of the Missing scientists conspiracy theory in recent months. And while the “missing scientists” story, like other conspiracy theories, was initially spread on social media, it has recently become an important political and security issue, with the US House Oversight Committee and the FBI announcing investigations. The FBI announced that it is “leading efforts to seek links to missing and deceased scientists” and is “working with the Department of Energy, the Department of War, and state and local law enforcement partners to find answers.” “Congress is very concerned about this. Our committee is now making it one of the priorities because we see it as a threat to national security. There is a strong possibility that something sinister is going on here,” he told Fox News. James Comerchairman of the Supervisory Committee of the House of Representatives.
The American president also reacted Trump. “I hope the disappearances and deaths of the scientists are a coincidence, but we’ll know in the next week and a half,” Trump told reporters last week.
A conspiracy theory about the missing scientists erupted when he left his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in late February William Neil McCasland (68), retired Major General of the Air Force. McCasland went for a walk without his cell phone and the necessary prescription glasses, but with a gun. He never came back. As CNN reported, McCasland was at the center of some of the Pentagon’s most advanced aerospace research during his career and had access to “some top-secret programs and information.” Therefore, claims that he was abducted and that it was connected to the secrets he knew about the Roswell case began to bubble up on social media.
Let’s remind, the so-called the Roswell UFO case is one of the most famous conspiracy theories, and it was created when a farmer found the remains of an unknown flying object 120 kilometers from the city of Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. But McCasland’s wife does not believe her husband, who retired 13 years ago, disappeared because of the “Roswell aliens.” “It is true that Neil had a brief association with the UFO community. That association is no reason for someone to abduct him. It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very outdated secrets from him,” she said in a Facebook post. Susan McCasland Wilkerson. She emphasized that she had some indications that her husband planned his disappearance without anyone finding him. McCasland suffered from anxiety, short-term memory loss and sleep deprivation and said that “if the health of his brain and body continues to deteriorate, he doesn’t want to live like this.”
McCasland’s disappearance drew attention to the case Monica Reza (60), prominent scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasedena. During the 1990s, Monica Reza participated in the discovery of a nickel-based superalloy used in rocket engines. She went missing on June 22 of last year after going hiking in the Angeles National Forest with two friends who were experienced hikers. In a letter to the FBI, the House Oversight Committee cited a report linking her work to missing William McCasland.
Melissa Casias (53) i Anthony Chavez (79) worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico. Let us recall that Los Alamos is the mythical place where the Manhattan Project was developed during the Second World War, which led to the creation of the atomic bomb. Melissa Casias disappeared on June 26, 2025 from the town of Ranchos de Taos near Santa Fe. She drove her husband to work at LANL in the morning and then returned to work from home because she forgot her employee pass.
The departure of the ‘enfant terrible’ of world science
When her daughter returned home that day, her mother’s car was in front of the house, but Melissa was gone. Her phone, purse and wallet were at home. Anthony Chavez went missing in early May 2025, and his best friend called it “extremely unusual” because his wallet, car keys and personal belongings were left in the house. According to CNN, Chavez left LANL in 2017, where he worked as a foreman overseeing construction at construction sites, and retired.
However, it is difficult to find a link between most of the dead or missing scientists, and their family members rejected conspiracy theories.
For example, the case of astrophysicists Carl Grillmair (67) seems quite clear: he was killed in February at his home in Llano, California. A 29-year-old local man was charged with his murder Freddy Snyder who should appear in court these days. “I think my husband would laugh at the conspiracy theories about his murder. It’s absolute nonsense. There are facts and they are known,” she told the BBC. Louise Grillmairthe widow of Carl Grillmair, who has worked at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) since 1997, where he researched exoplanets and dark matter.
The spread of conspiracy theories was certainly stimulated by the death of several famous scientists. In December last year, a distinguished professor was killed Nuno FG Loureiro (47) who led the Center for Plasma and Fusion Science at the prestigious MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). His killer Claudio Manuel Neves Valente he was also found responsible for the mass shooting at Brown University that occurred two days before Loureiro’s murder. Valente and Loureiro studied together between 1995 and 2000 in Portugal. Valente was found dead in a warehouse in New Hampshire on December 19. His motive for murdering Loureiro has never been established, but it is speculated that it may have been jealousy over the professional success of a former colleague.
The death of the antigravity researcher Amy Eskridge (34), from the Institute of Exotic Sciences in Huntsville, Alabama, was ruled a suicide by the coroner in June 2022. But a close friend of hers spread the story on social media that Amy believed she was being targeted because of her work. Amy’s father though Richard Eskridgea former NASA employee, dismissed conspiracy theories about his daughter’s death. “Scientists die too, just like other people,” Eskridge told NewsNation.
And while the FBI is now investigating every single case of missing or murdered scientists and looking for a link between them, he joined the debate Michael ShermerAmerican science writer, historian of science and founder of Skeptic magazine, focused on investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. Shermer has debunked the “missing scientists” story as a conspiracy theory on Skeptica, in podcasts and on social media. He noted that conspiracy theorists began “digging around to find anyone who had died for any reason or disappeared, and then searched their biographies to see if they had anything to do with UFOs, the military, defense, space, aviation, jet propulsion, etc.,” inevitably revealing “patterns in the random noise.”
