Conspiracy theory over UFOs and missing scientists spreads from web to White House | UFOs

A.Are the disappearances or deaths of at least 11 US scientists, each allegedly linked in some way to space, defense and nuclear research, really linked to a nefarious conspiracy: one involving the Chinese or other enemies of the state, or possibly linked to UFOs?

A conspiracy theory suggesting exactly this has resonated among segments of the US population in recent weeks, spreading rapidly across the internet to right-wing media and thus the mainstream press, prompting an investigation by Congress and questions from Donald Trump.

Could there be any truth to such a strange theory? Or are lawmakers, the FBI, the White House, countless substackers and podcasters, as well as US media outlets, pandering to the latest clickbait conspiracy theory in an age full of them?

Like all good conspiracy theories, the mysterious case of a sudden influx of missing or dead US scientists is difficult to dissect. And the answers to the puzzle likely lie not in the conspiracy theory itself, but in what it represents in the age of artificial intelligence breakdown and disinformation on social media. Especially when each morsel of plot connection creates more appetite for another that can never be sated.

However, there are a few known elements.

On February 27, retired U.S. air force major general William “Neil” McCasland, 68, left his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, between 10 and 11 a.m. His phone and glasses were left behind, he grabbed his .38 pistol and is believed to have walked away. His wife noticed he was missing around noon. That afternoon, the Bernalillo sheriff’s office issued a silver alert; A bulletin about an elderly person missing.

Nothing has been seen or heard from McCasland since. But the disappearance of a former commander of Kirtland Air Force Base’s Phillips research site and laboratory, which focuses on spacecraft and directed energy technologies, raised eyebrows, including in the UFO community.

Lt. Kyle Woods of the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office told reporters nothing has been ruled out, “so we’re investigating every possible connection.”

Woods added: “I appreciate that there is a community that wants to go down the UFO rabbit hole. I don’t have a way to follow that up and so those theories need to be put aside unless we find something that indicates that. So we can only go off the facts.”

But the facts were few and far between. And soon other information poured into this void, regarding missing or dead scientists, often with real or imagined connections to national security or space studies.

Reports eventually emerged of at least 10 missing or dead scientists. Among them was Michael David Hicks, a scientist who worked in NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory from 1998 to 2022 and studied near-Earth asteroids and comets. He died of unknown causes in 2023 at the age of 59.

Another scientist, Monica Reza, disappeared in June last year. He served as manager of the NASA laboratory’s materials processing group. He had gone hiking in the Angeles national forest with a friend. Reza, 60, was about 30 feet behind his friend when he disappeared, according to a police report. His body was never found.

Others added to the list include astrophysicist Carl Grillmair, who was shot to death on his porch; MIT physicist Nuno Loureiro was murdered by a former classmate; and Jason Thomas, a chemical biologist at drugmaker Novartis who disappeared in December. His remains were discovered in Massachusetts in March.

Another name is Amy Eskridge, an Alabama-based researcher who claims to be working on “gravity modification research.” Eskridge died by suicide in 2022. But last week Franc Milburn, who claimed to be a former British intelligence officer, said: NewsNation He said Eskridge told him not to believe any reports that if he died, he died by suicide.

“If you see any reports that I killed myself, I definitely didn’t. If you see any reports that I overdosed on myself, I definitely didn’t. If you see any reports that I killed anyone else, I definitely didn’t,” Eskridge said, according to Milburn.

The accounts were breathlessly published by right-wing press accounts as well as social media. Trump was asked about the story and promised to look into it. Republican lawmakers soon joined the fray, writing in a letter demanding that the FBI, Department of Energy, NASA and other agencies investigate the “possible malicious connection” to the disappearances.

“These reports allege that at least 10 individuals ‘with ties to U.S. nuclear secrets or rocket technology have died or mysteriously disappeared in recent years,'” Republicans James Comer of Kentucky and Eric Burlison of Missouri wrote in a letter to multiple law enforcement agencies last week demanding action.

“If the reports are accurate, these deaths and disappearances could pose a serious threat to U.S. national security and U.S. personnel with access to scientific secrets,” they added, referring to two more workers affiliated with Los Alamos National Laboratory who died or went missing.

In a letter to defense department secretary Pete Hegseth, they wrote that Reza and McCasland may have had a “close professional bond.”

Then last week, 53-year-old UFO researcher David Wilcock used a gun to kill himself outside his home in Boulder County, Colorado. Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett responded to a social media post announcing Wilcock’s death: “Not nice.” Burchett told the Daily Mail: “I don’t think there’s any chance of this being a coincidence.”

But is there more than coincidence that 11 of the more than 2 million scientific researchers in the United States, or an estimated 700,000 people with top-secret aviation and nuclear clearances, have variously gone for a walk and disappeared? Or perhaps they chose to end their lives, especially if they had mental illness or paranoid delusions? Or will you fall victim to murder?

Experts say that it is we, the audience, who choose to connect when in reality there is no connection.

Greg Eghigian, professor of history and bioethics at Penn State and author of After the Flying Saucers Came, says the recent surge in alien/nuclear mystery fears is different from the drone scare in New Jersey in late 2024.

“This is one of those things that is compounded by other kinds of concerns and conspiracy theories about science and medicine that have been around since Covid,” Eghigian said. “This neatly ties together decades of thought that UFOs have been spotted around nuclear facilities and that some of these facilities may be masking UFO-related projects.”

All of this seems like a convergence, he adds, “so when people want to connect those dots it falls easily into a niche for UFO knowledge because you have all the elements that have always been there: the military, state secrets, nuclear facilities and technologies, and the fear of the missing figure. What is it? Are they being kidnapped? Are they being assassinated because they know too much? The seeds of that were planted decades ago.”

The mystery – or lack thereof – arises at a moment of heightened national security concern, accompanied by increasing reports of UFO sightings or alien abductions, often by individuals or institutions interested in promoting richly imaginative theories that can neither be proven nor disproved.

Podcaster Joe Rogan, one of the most powerful figures in US media, recently suggested – unhelpfully – that the disappearances might be related to “plasma technology, whatever the hell it is”.

McCasland’s wife, Susan McCasland Wilkerson, stands as the best debunker of any mystery surrounding her husband’s work, explaining that he once had access to classified information but retired about 13 years ago.

With a sarcastic tone of voice that used humor to defuse the conspiracy theories that were sprouting around him, he playfully took aim at those who wanted to believe something bad was going on.

“It seems unlikely that he was taken to extract ancient secrets from himself,” he said. wrote In March before the theory spread too widely. She said her past relationship with Tom DeLonge, the former Blink-182 singer and a figure involved in UFO/UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) disclosure efforts, “is not a reason for someone to kidnap her.”

She also said that her husband “does not have any specific information about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash.”

She said there was no sign of her husband, so “perhaps the best hypothesis is that aliens beamed him to the mothership. However, there have been no reported sightings of a mothership flying over the Sandia Mountains.”