Transcription
Three weeks ago, a retired Air Force general walked out of his home and disappeared. He left behind his phone, his wearable devices, even his glasses. And he is not the only one.
In the months before that, multiple people from the United States connected to nuclear and space research also disappeared. In several cases, they left behind their families. They walked away from their homes and their cars, and they left behind wallets and phones. Now, depending on how you count, there are 10 or maybe 11 scientists in the United States who are dead or missing. For a while, this has been written off as just conspiracy theory. But at this point, there are enough cases that this deserves a closer look. Donald Trump has said he is now being briefed about this and that the United States is looking into it.
What I want to do today is actually walk through the facts, what we actually know about these cases. I'm going to go case by case who these people are, what happened, where are the gaps, where do they not fit in or do fit in? And then at the end, we're going to step back and look at the bigger picture, what is standing out, what isn't, because we can't at this point ignore the fact that 10 or 11 scientists are missing and what they're tied to, but we don't yet know if they're actually connected. You have to look at the facts and decide what they actually show.
Now, not everyone, as I said, is talking about the same number of scientists. For this video, I'm going to use the 11 names that are most consistently included. Almost all of them have ties to nuclear or space related work. Space is a pretty broad category. I'll get more specific as we go for each person. I'm going to start with the most recent disappearance, the one that pushed this into the mainstream conversation. And interestingly, he may turn out to be one of the ones least likely to be connected to the others.
To make sense of all of it, I broke the cases down the way you would analyze any set of facts, timeline, area of expertise, how each person disappeared or died, where they were, what makes this stand out, what makes this a little different from the others. So, my goal is to let you be able to line up the facts and then hopefully we can start to see patterns and differences. So, if you would please hit the like button and subscribe and we will dive in.
Person number one, at 10:00 a.m. on February 27th, 2026, retired General William Neil McCasslin was at home meeting with a repair man. By noon, when McCasslin's wife came home, he was gone. Now, initially she figured he went hiking. His hiking boots were missing. His wallet was missing and so was a 38 caliber revolver, but there were other things that were left behind like his phone and his devices that he wore and his prescription glasses. In fact, when his wife called 911, what she said was, "I have some indication he must have planned not to be found." Authorities searched the canyons near his home. They even used a helicopter. But three weeks later, he is still missing. He's not just anyone either. He previously oversaw the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. And his name has surfaced before when a Wikileaks email linked him to claims about an extraterrestrial crash that supposedly happened near Roswell, New Mexico. Here's what the email said. When Roswell crashed, they shipped it to the laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. General McCasslin was in charge of that exact laboratory up to a couple years ago.
Now, to add fuel to the fire, McCasslin's disappearance came one week after Donald Trump said on Truth Social that the government would begin releasing files related to UFOs and extraterrestrial life. But it's not clear that McCasslin's disappearance had anything to do with his job. He retired in 2013, and his wife pointed out that any access he once had to sensitive information would be pretty dated by now. In the weeks before he disappeared, he also withdrew from several groups and complained of what he described as a mental fog that he was feeling. Now, when he first went missing, the sheriff issued a silver alert for him. That would typically be issued in a case where an older adult, usually a senior, is missing and is possibly having cognitive decline. But that doesn't really line up either because later authorities said there was no indication that McCasslin was disoriented or confused. They said he was highly capable. In fact, that he was sharp. And of course, his wife had told 911 that she thought he might have planned not to be found. So you have two really different pictures here. One suggesting possible personal or medical issues and another that raises entirely different questions. So I marked the alternate explanation box here as red, but I'll just say there are major gaps in what we know about this particular missing person.
So the second person I want to talk about is Carl Gillemare. 11 days before General McCasslin went missing and about an 11-hour drive away, Carl Gillemare was shot and killed on his own front porch. Gillemare was 67. He had worked at Caltech for 30 years. He was widely considered a preeminent astronomer and astrophysicist. His work focused on exoplanets, galactic structure, black matter. According to a fellow scientist who talked about it, he was irreplaceable. And the reason was his ingenuity, his creativity. So far, absolutely nothing about his death seems to make sense. A man has been arrested and charged with the murder, but the arrest didn't really answer a lot of the questions around why this had happened. The man who was arrested lived just two miles away from Gillemare. Although authorities don't think they even knew each other. Despite the fact that they had never met, this was not the first incident between them. On December 20th, Gillemare called to say the man was trespassing on his property while carrying a rifle. And then eight days later, the same man allegedly broke into Gillemare's neighbor's house. On the day that Gillemare was shot, police arrested the same man for carjacking and then in the course of that arrest, they decided this was actually the person who had shot Gillemare. So now he has also been arrested for that. This case could be radically different from the others because it was a murder. But for now, there are still a number of open questions. For purposes of location, by the way, I'm considering anything that happened in the extreme southwest corner of the US to be connected in terms of location, but it is true that Albuquerque and LA County are about a 10 to 11 hour drive apart. So, they are definitely not right next door to each other, but they are significantly closer than where this next incident happened.
Because on December 15th of 2025, Nuno Loureiro was shot in the foyer of his apartment building in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was taken to the hospital but died the next day. He was 47, an MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering and physics. He directed the plasma science and fusion center at MIT. He was married with three daughters. Now, who would want to kill this father and professor? According to authorities, the chain of events started earlier when someone shot 11 people at Brown University, killing two people and injuring nine others. Police believe the person who did the shooting was Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, the Brown shooter. He fled to Massachusetts and killed Loureiro. Valente and Loureiro actually knew each other. They were both from Portugal. They had gone to school together. Valente, the alleged shooter, actually graduated first in the class ahead of Loureiro. Many online commentators suggested maybe Valente was jealous. We haven't really seen public information though or evidence that would explain what the motive was. We may never get that answer in fact because Valente was found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire. Authorities say the wound for him was self-inflicted. So, I marked both of the last two boxes here in red because Loureiro was killed on the other side of the country and there may have been alternative reasons.
Next, Steven Garcia. Last summer on August 28th, 2025, Steven Garcia left his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was wearing a green camouflage shirt and shorts. He was on foot. He left his phone, his keys, his car behind. He did take a bottle of water and a gun. Garcia worked in the nuclear components industry as a contractor making the components, the non-nuclear parts that are used to make nuclear weapons. He's widely reported to be property custodian for the National Nuclear Security Administration. That's a pretty broad title and means he physically controls and tracks government property. So MSM reported a source told them he had a very high level overseeing position that would cover tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment, some of which would be classified. We frankly know very little about Garcia's disappearance. Not enough for me to offer you any alternative reasons for why he might have disappeared.
Now Melissa Cassius, age 53, we know a good deal more about what happened here. She disappeared on June 26th of 2025. There were no warning signs. According to her family, she had plans coming up. She was excited about a late trip scheduled the very next day. She was taking time off work to help her mother recover from knee surgery. Melissa and her husband Mark both worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory where she was an administrative assistant. Los Alamos manages nuclear weapons, does scientific research. That morning, Melissa and Mark drove to work together, but Melissa said she forgot her badge, so she returned home. She was supposed to meet her husband back at work at 11:00 a.m., but she never showed up. However, we do know that Melissa was alive later that day. At 12:50 p.m., she brought lunch to her daughter, Sierra, and they spoke briefly, and Sierra said nothing really seemed out of the ordinary, except maybe her mom was a little quiet. So Sierra, the daughter, gave her mom, Melissa, a check to deposit at the bank. About an hour and a half later, at 2:18 p.m., a friend saw Melissa walking along a highway about three miles from her home, and some surveillance footage shows her in the same area carrying a backpack. When her family returned home, Melissa's car was still there, and her work phone and her keys were on a table. She had left behind her purse, her personal phone, her wallet, and the check she was supposed to deposit. Both of her phones had been wiped. Her family later said that when they looked through paperwork there at the house, they were able to see that Melissa had been under a great deal of stress they hadn't even known about. That's pretty vague, but I put that as also in the red category for alternative reasons. And I also want to point out one other difference. Now, Melissa was not a scientist or is not a scientist. She worked at Los Alamos, but in an administrative role.
Monica Jento-Reese may be the most disturbing disappearance on this entire list. On June 22nd, 2025, the 60-year-old aerospace engineer was hiking with a friend in the Angeles National Forest just north of Los Angeles. She was small, about 4'11" and 100 pounds. The friend told police he was about 30 feet ahead of her and he turned around to check on her and she smiled and waved. Moments later, he turned around again and she was gone. He called out to her, but she didn't respond. Search teams combed the area, but Monica had vanished without a trace. She had just been named the director of the materials processing group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She worked on advanced rocket materials. In fact, she had patented a super alloy called Mandeloy that is lightweight, burn-resistant, and high strength, and it's used in rocket engines. There's one additional point that stands out. She had previously been stationed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base at the same time as General McCasslin.
The next person, Anthony Chavez, was aged 78 and a retired employee of Los Alamos National Lab. He vanished from his home on May 25th. Now, like several others on this list, it appears he simply walked away. He left his car, his wallet, his keys, even his cigarettes. Beyond that, very little has been made public. Friends say he was active and mentally sharp, that he was regularly in contact with family and with friends. He liked to hike, but there was no indication he left prepared to go on a hike, and the weather was bad that day. So, at this point, we have very few clear answers.
The next scientist, Jason Thomas, on December 12th of 2025, Jason Thomas was a 45-year-old scientist working at the NORDI Institute of Biomedical Research, and he left his Massachusetts home late at night. As his wife Kristen was going to bed, she heard their mailbox close, so she looked out and saw her husband there. They locked eyes, and at least at the time, she said she thought that was very comforting. It was the last time she saw him. The next morning, he was gone. His phone and wallet were left behind on the bathroom counter. Later, his Apple Watch was found in the mailbox. Kristen said Jason had been struggling emotionally. He had just lost both of his parents a month before. His mother died in hospice care and just an hour later, his father collapsed into his arms and died of a heart attack. Three months after Jason disappeared, authorities found his body in a nearby lake. He had often hiked in that area, the lake had been partially frozen at the time he disappeared and had completely frozen over shortly after that. Investigators had to wait until the ice thaw. Jason did have a doctorate in biophysics, but he stands out from the rest of this list in a few ways. First of all, his work was not tied directly to space or to nuclear research. Secondly, he was located pretty far away from the southwest corridor where most of the other cases occurred. And there were some alternative reasons that could explain what had happened. None of that answers every question, but this case does at least look somewhat different from the others.
Next, Frank Maywald was 61 when he died on July 4, 2024 in Los Angeles. He worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and contributed to the Juno mission to Jupiter, including research into subsurface oceans on its moons. But beyond that, very little has been publicly explained about how or why he died. According to the Daily Mail, officials have confirmed there was no autopsy.
Now, according to reporting by the Daily Mail, Frank Maywald and the next person on the list, Michael David Hicks, were longtime colleagues. Hicks worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab for 24 years. He was involved in the DART project, which was testing whether we could deflect dangerous asteroids headed toward collision with Earth. He died at age 59. Now, as with Maywald, there's really very little publicly available information about how or why Hicks died. Reports have indicated there was not an autopsy. So, at this point, we just don't have clear answers about either of these two. I also want to mention both of the deaths occurred roughly a year and a half or more before the first eight cases on the list. So that's a pretty significant separation in terms of time.
Now the last person on the list, Amy Escridge. Initially, most of the list of dead and missing scientists began with Maywald, but this earlier death is now added to most lists. Amy Escridge was 34 and living in Huntsville, Alabama when she died on June 11th of 2022. So in other words, well before any of the others on this list. According to reports, her death was ruled a suicide. Escridge has been included on some lists because of her connection to advanced space research. She co-founded the Institute for Exotic Science with her father, Richard Escridge, a retired NASA engineer who specialized in plasma physics and fusion. In a 2018 presentation, Escridge and her father talked about some unconventional areas of research they were involved in, including gravity modifications and trying to develop anti-gravity craft. Escridge said she was facing threats. In a 2020 interview, she said she had a plan for publicly disclosing UFOs, extraterrestrials, but the threats to her had become more aggressive. Escridge reached out to a retired British intelligence officer, Frank Milbourn, and asked him to help her investigate these threats. She claimed someone had fired a directed energy weapon at her. Milbourn has publicly questioned whether her death was ruled correctly, but her father says just the opposite, that there is nothing suspicious about her death.
So, now that we've looked at all 11, I want to step back for just a minute and look at a few key points. Now, some of these scientists seem harder to connect to the rest of the group. Jason Thomas was in a different field, had significant personal pressures. His body has been found in a lake. Amy Escridge, the death was ruled a suicide. It occurred years before the others. But there are also some facts and connections that are harder to ignore.
Between May and August of 2025, four people, Steven Garcia, Monica Jento-Reese, Anthony Chavez, and Melissa Cassius, disappeared from the same general region in the southwest. They were all connected to high-level scientific work. One worked inside Los Alamos, and in each case, they appeared to have simply vanished, leaving everything behind, phones, cars, families, belongings. A few months later, General McCasslin can be added to that list. That is a lot of high-level strategically important people who just suddenly decide to walk away from everything.
Now, three points. First, it is entirely possible all of this is coincidence, but it's also too important to just ignore it. Trump said it's being investigated and good, it needs to be. A brain drain in the space and nuclear areas could obviously be catastrophic for the US. Losing even just a small number of really experienced scientists in these highly specialized fields could have very long-term consequences. It could be consequences in research, in national security, even for the next generation in terms of training.
Now the second point, this issue absolutely demands transparency. As long as we are missing facts, people will fill in the rest of the story with theories about what could have happened. We will have a much better public discussion, a much higher level public discussion if we base it on what has really happened and not just guesses about what is going on.
Third, the government needs to be very clear when there are questions that cannot be answered. I think people can accept and will accept that not every blank can be filled in if they are convinced that the government is trying to answer every question it possibly can. I'll continue to follow this and update you as more information becomes available. So, please don't forget to like the video and subscribe for more coverage.