The Mystery of Missing and Dead Scientists, Explained
As I write this the week of April 20, 2026, both mainstream media and social media are chockablock full of coverage of the disappearance or death of eleven (and counting) U.S. scientists who worked on UFOs, nuclear weapons, military defense, propulsion systems, or other related fields (a category that keeps growing as new deaths or disappearances are identified not associated with one of the original categories).
House Oversight Chair James Comer, for example, told Fox News “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,” adding “there’s a high possibility that something sinister is taking place here.”
Congressman Eric Burlison (R) told Fox News “This has all the hallmarks of a foreign operation,” and suggested to Elizabeth Vargas at NewsNation that it could be China, Russia, or Iran behind the cabal. Famed physicist Michio Kaku opined “If 10 scientists suddenly die or vanish who all have access to sensitive research, this is cause for national concern.” Even President Trump admitted that this is “pretty serious stuff…some of them were very important people,” but added “I hope it’s random.”
It’s random, Mr. President. Connecting a small cohort of individuals from a wide range of fields to deaths or disappearances is an example of what I call patternicity, or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise. It is also a case study in what cognitive psychologists call base rate neglect, or the tendency to focus on specific, vivid, or anecdotal evidence and ignore statistical generalizations that better explain the phenomenon.
One of the eleven scientists, for example, Amy Eskridge, who was president of the Institute for Exotic Science (an organization she co-founded) and worked on anti-gravity propulsion and electrostatic propulsion systems, died by suicide of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. How unusual is that? According to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Violence Solutions, 27,300 people die each year by gun-inflicted suicide in the U.S. That’s the base rate, and Eskridge’s own non-conspiratorial family accepts the fact that Amy was another lamentable casualty of gun violence and suicidality and not the victim of a vicious UFO cabal. “Scientists die also, just like other people,” explained her father Richard.
Most of the other scientists have similar prosaic (albeit heartbreaking) explanations. Monica Reza, who worked on orbital communication systems, for example, disappeared while hiking in the Angeles National Forest near Mount Waterman in California, which is a remote forested area near where I live in which people go missing every year. Although she was accompanied by two other experienced hikers who reported that she just dropped off the side of the trail, I have done a fair amount of hiking and mountain biking in those mountains and well know that there are countless precipitous cliffs off which one could easily fall off and disappear into thick brush below (which is how I broke my collarbone on a mountain bike ride in 1991).
A similar disappearance is that of retired Major General William Neil McCasland, who was Director of Air Force Research Lab who worked on hypersonics, directive energy systems, and advanced propulsion technology, who went missing during a wilderness hike on February 27, 2026 in New Mexico, apparently taking with him his wallet and a .38 caliber revolver and leather holster (leaving behind his phone and prescription glasses). According to his wife, McCasland had been experiencing short-term memory loss, medical issues, anxiety, and a lack of sleep, adding that she suspected he “planned not to be found” and, in any case, “He retired from the [Air Force] almost 13 years ago and has had only very commonly held clearances since. It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him.”
Before we jump to conspiratorial speculations on these particular vanishings, consider the fact that somewhere between 1,200 and 1,600 people disappear in America’s National Parks annually in the U.S., a stunning number that shrinks by comparison to the over 500,000 people who go missing each year according to the FBI. That’s a base rate one should never neglect and likely is the explanation for the disappearance of 48-year-old government contractor Steven Garcia in August of 2025, also in New Mexico, who worked on nuclear and aerospace research, carrying a handgun and also leaving behind his phone, keys, wallet and car. Anecdotally weird? Sure. Statistically out of the ordinary for missing persons? No.
The rest of the outcomes are equally unsurprising and not out of the ordinary: Michael Hicks “undisclosed cause of death” was in reality, according to the LA County Coroner, caused by arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, for which the CDC and the American Heart Association document over 900,000 Americans die each year due to this and related heart diseases.
Plasma physicist Nuno Loureiro was murdered by a revenge-seeking ex-classmate from the 1990s, who confessed that he’d been planning it for years and that he was envious and resentful of Loureiro’s success. Disturbing, but not mysterious.
Astronomer Carl Grillmair, a 67-year-old Caltech professor who worked on exoplanets, stellar streams, and near-earth objects, was shot to death in February 2026 on the front porch of his rural home in Antelope Valley, CA (about a hundred miles from Caltech out in the desert outside Los Angeles), by 29-year-old Freddy Snyder, a known criminal with a long rap sheet that included carjacking and burglary, including on Grillmair’s property months before, which the astronomer responded to by calling the police on him (as one would rationally do). Again, troubling and tragic, but not inexplicable or grand conspiratorial.
And so on.
The Internet, especially X, is rapidly filling up with additional confusions over these alleged cabals. One Dr. John Brandenburg, a self-identified “plasma physicist” who works on “fusion energy and advanced space propulsion,” with “Phd” in his X username, told his 22.2k followers (see screenshot below) that the death of an “antigravity researcher” named Dr. Ning Li, who was stuck by a vehicle and sustained brain damage that would take her life many years later, was actually the victim of a murderous conspiracy:
Dear Friends, Like Dr. Ning Li, antigravity researcher, professor John Mack of Harvard, Pulitzer Prize winner, and a Psychiatrist researching UFO abductees, was also run over by a car. This happened in London in 2004. This must end, and whoever is responsible brought to justice.
In fact, Dr. Li died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2021 at the age of 78, following a long health decline after a 2014 automobile accident where she was struck by a vehicle while crossing a street at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and sustained permanent brain damage. As I explained to Dr. Brandenberg in my response to his post on X:
In the US ~7,500 pedestrians are killed in traffic crashes annually. Globally, WHO reports ~ 1.19 million deaths/year. Before you concoct wild conspiracy theories about UFO people being run over, stop neglecting the base rate.
The tireless UFO disclosure activist and one-time government insider Lue Elizondo went on Chris Cuomo’s popular podcast to explain that UFO disclosure activists and former (and present) government insiders are being murdered, which as I also pointed out on X (see screen shot below) is just what one would do if you didn’t actually believe that you could be murdered yourself.
And in this mode, I also pointed out on X all the proponents of UFO and UAP disclosure who have not been murdered or disappeared, which again as a counterfactual would seem to negate what is on the table with this so-called mystery, namely that such people are being murdered by some nefarious “they” purportedly operating in the name of some government agency or private corporation.
More generally, this phenomenon is also emblematic of what I call the fallacy of excluded exceptions, an illustration for which can be seen in a 2x2 matrix of four cells (see figure below). Cell 1 represents our mystery, namely UFO and nuclear/military scientists who go missing or are found dead before old age. What about all the UFO and nuclear/military scientists who do not go missing or are not found dead before old age (Cell 2)? Or the non-UFO and non-nuclear/military scientists who go missing or are found dead before old age (Cell 3)? Or the non-UFO and non-nuclear/military scientists who do not go missing or are not found dead before old age (Cell 4)? Suddenly our mystery disappears. There’s nothing unusual to explain in the broader context of everything else that could happen but are ignored in our focus on just the combination we’re interested in exploring.
Keep this matrix of possibilities in mind as we hear about additional Cell 1 examples in the coming days and weeks, such as the one posted by Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R) on April 21, 2026 (see screenshot below), about “the tragic passing of David Wilcock,” citing the biblical passage of John 8:32, which reads “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
What truth is that? David Wilcock was an American paranormal writer and YouTube influencer (over 500,000 followers) deeply involved in the UFO “disclosure movement”, who suggested that he might be the reincarnation of the famed early 20th century psychic Edgar Cayce, that he is in telepathic contact with space aliens, and that reptilian aliens inhabit parts of Antarctica where they are preparing for an invasion to take over the world’s governments and banks.
Sadly, Wilcock died by suicide the morning of April 20, 2026. Although Luna suggests otherwise, according to the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, “The emergency communications specialist who took the call suspected the caller was experiencing a mental health crisis.” Additional details noted that “officers reportedly reached around 11:02am and tried to make contact with the male who was outside his residence holding a weapon.”
Again, regretfully but necessarily, we must consider the base rate for this issue: according to the CDC nearly 50,000 Americans every year die by suicide, around half of which are struggling with mental health issues. As such, and woefully but realistically, I think most of us can agree that if you think you are telepathically communicating with alien beings and you think they may be trying to take over the world, you may not be fully sound of mind.
No doubt more deaths and disappearances will be announced in the coming weeks as believers go digging around for more examples of Cell 1, but keep the other cells in mind, along with these other principles of critical thinking, before jumping to unwarranted conspiratorial conclusions.