A haphazard grouping of recent cases emerged from what one paranormal investigator describes as “mystery-mongering data mining.” It also made for ideal fodder for the president and our leading media personalities alike.
For an extraterrestrial enthusiast of a certain stripe, the mystery has landed like a modern-day Roswell. McCasland had overseen classified aerospace research at a laboratory that UFO lore identifies as the secret site of debris from the 1947 crash.
After he retired in 2013, he worked as a consultant on media projects for Tom DeLonge as the Blink-182 frontman’s longtime obsession with alien-related conspiracy theories was bursting into broader view—a 2016 WikiLeaks dump revealed that DeLonge had emailed Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta about McCasland. In online UFO communities, the astronautical engineer’s life had long been pointing to revelations just beyond reach, and his unexplained vanishing was proof that they must be onto something.
McCasland is the most high-profile of 11 scientists whose deaths or disappearances over the last four years have formed the basis for a conspiracy theory that has recently crossed over into mainstream visibility. There are various spins on the line of inquiry, and the specifics are hard to pin down, but it revolves around the idea that these occurrences are connected and point to some manner of government cover-up .
The missing-scientist theory has traversed the Daily Mail and New York Post, a leading Substack newsletter published by MAGA-MAHA personality Jessica Reed Kraus, and the airwaves of prominent podcasters—Joe Rogan recently exemplified the typical tenor and precision of the coverage when he proposed that the disappearances could have something to do with “plasma technology, whatever the fuck that is. ” Last week the conspiracy reached its apex in the White House after a Fox News correspondent asked press secretary Karoline Leavitt at a briefing whether anybody was “investigating this to see if these things are connected.
” Leavitt assured him that, if it were true, “that’s definitely something I think this government and administration would deem worth looking into. ” “I hope it’s random,” Donald Trump soon told reporters.
“Pretty serious stuff…hopefully, I don’t know, coincidence, whatever you want to call it. But some of them were very important people, and we’re gonna look at it over the next short period.
” The House Oversight Committee chairman announced on Monday that the group was beginning to investigate, proposing that “these deaths and disappearances may represent a grave threat to US national security and to US personnel with access to scientific secrets,” and the FBI added in a statement on Tuesday that it is “spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists. ” At a Turning Point USA event on Friday, the president doubled down on his appeal to interested onlookers among the right and alien-curious.
“I recently directed the secretary of war…to begin releasing government files relating to UFOs and unexplained aerial phenomena,” he told the audience, adding, “I thought I’d save it for this crowd, because you’re a little bit out-there. ” “At this point with absolutely no sign of him,” she wrote, “maybe the best hypothesis is that aliens beamed him up to the mothership.
However, no sightings of a mothership hovering above the Sandia Mountains have been reported. ” For conspiracy theory experts, the missing-scientists saga similarly falls apart on any closer inspection.
“It’s one of those things where once you start looking into the details,” paranormal investigator Benjamin Radford tells me, “the mystery sort of vanishes. ” The scientists in question worked across specialties ranging from materials processing to the development of cancer drugs, only in some cases dealing with aerospace or nuclear matters.
One died of natural causes, according to the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office, and two faculty members at MIT and Caltech were the victims of widely covered homicides. Authorities have not yet officially disproven, for instance, some link between these three deaths, but any conceivable connection or sense of a coordinated series of assassinations quickly exceeds imaginative powers.
The 48-year-old killer of the MIT physicist, who in a video confession expressed vague grievances dating back to his early adulthood, also shot 11 people at Brown University, killing two, before dying by suicide. The alleged shooter of the Caltech astronomer had been arrested for trespassing on the victim’s property with a rifle two months before the shooting and also carjacked his own relative on the day he allegedly killed the astrophysicist, whose work had nothing to do with classified programs. As far as Men in Black–style operations go, this would have been a sloppy one, and it would have required the complicity of the LA County coroner too.
Proponents of some variant of the conspiracy, Radford adds, are working backward.
“They’re finding people who are already dead or missing and then trying to find some connection, however tenuous,” he says, “to the defense industry, the Pentagon, UFOs, UAP, NASA. ” In a comprehensive rejoinder to the theory, UFO investigator and pseudoscience debunker Mick West pointed out that the US top-secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce includes about 700,000 people.
Ordinary mortality rates over the time span of some of the purportedly linked deaths and disappearances would predict, he said, around 4,000 deaths, 70 homicides, and 180 suicides in this community—as of this week, Rogan, Kraus, et al. are working with 11 cases.
“People just kind of go looking for names,” West tells me, “and if you go looking for names, you’re gonna find them. ” In Radford’s view, the trope runs deeper still: think the Bermuda Triangle, the conspiracy surrounding King Tut’s tomb , or even a child’s notion that death comes in threes.
“It’s really a psychological thing where people want to see patterns in the world around them for various cognitive reasons,” he says, adding that the missing-scientists conspiracy “is only the latest in a long, long line of what you might call mystery-mongering data mining. ” There is no singular Jones or Thompson in this instance, according to experts who have monitored the evolution of the missing-scientists list, but a few sleuths can lay claim to stoking the flames after McCasland’s disappearance.
Australian NewsNation investigative correspondent Ross Coulthart has described the engineer’s disappearance as a “grave national security crisis,” and former State Department analyst Marik von Rennenkampff told the network that “we might have passed that threshold” where the list can no longer be attributed to coincidence. Republican watchdogs in Congress, including representatives Tim Burchett, Eric Burlison, and Anna Paulina Luna, have appeared on the Rogan-adjacent podcasting circuit to air their claims about a government scheme to conceal the truth regarding unidentified aerial phenomena.
It helps, no doubt, that these voices have a ready audience in the Oval Office, with the Obama birther conspiracy serving as a foundational element of Trump’s political rise before he became the chosen candidate of QAnon.
“If the government can do this,” West says, parroting the conspiracists’ thinking, “like cover up alien bodies, then what else could they do? What else could the deep state be doing? ” “It makes it easy for people like Trump,” he adds, “to point fingers and claim the elections are rigged and things like that.
” Conspiracy theory expert Mike Rothschild—no relation to the European banking family, itself the subject of so many antisemitic conspiracy theories—submitted written testimony to the January 6 committee on the role of QAnon in the Capitol riot and has observed a familiar pattern in the current curiosity around the dead or missing scientists.
“A lot of the people pushing this are very big conspiracy-content creators, and they constantly need to be coming up with new stuff to keep their audiences from going somewhere else,” he tells me. It was predictable that Leavitt and Trump would entertain the theory, Rothschild thought, but dismaying.
“Of course what you’re losing here is that these are actual people who have disappeared or died,” Rothschild says, “and every one of these is a family trauma that’s essentially being monetized for clicks. ”
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