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President Donald Trump has been briefed on an unsettling trend involving a series of missing and deceased scientists, with the tally now reaching ten. Upon his arrival at the White House on Thursday, Trump addressed the situation with reporters, responding to questions from FOX News about whether these incidents were random or potentially linked. “Well, I hope it is random, but we are going to know in the next week and a half,” Trump remarked. “I just left a meeting on that subject, so pretty serious stuff. Hopefully, coincidence… but some of them were very important people, and we are going to look at it.” The scientists in question, associated with NASA, nuclear research, and aerospace programs, have been a cause for concern since 2023.
The individuals, including experts from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, had access to sensitive information spanning space missions, nuclear technology, and advanced defense systems. This has fueled speculation about potential connections between the cases. The president’s comments came after a briefing at the White House on Wednesday, where Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was queried about the enigmatic deaths and disappearances of ten individuals linked to space or nuclear secrets. “I haven’t spoken to our relevant agencies about it. I will certainly do that and will get you an answer,” Leavitt stated.
Leavitt further commented, “If true, of course, that’s definitely something I think this government and administration would deem worth looking into. So let me do that for you.” The troubling pattern emerged when retired Air Force General William Neil McCasland disappeared on February 27. He was last seen leaving his New Mexico home without his phone, wearable devices, or glasses, carrying only a pistol. His wife reported to 911 that he seemed to be trying “not to be found.” The peculiar circumstances of McCasland’s disappearance mirror four other cases of missing persons reported between May and August 2025 in the Southwest. Alarmingly, all four cases are linked to McCasland through his role overseeing the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which has long been rumored to study extraterrestrial technology since the infamous 1947 Roswell UFO incident.
While at Wright-Patterson, McCasland oversaw and reportedly approved the funding for scientist Monica Jacinto Reza’s work on a space-age metal for rocket engines called Mondaloy. Reza (pictured), 60, disappeared while hiking with friends in California on June 22, 2025. She had just become the director of the Materials Processing Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The three other disappearances all involved workers at some of America’s most important nuclear facilities, and all three were last seen walking out of their homes without their phones or keys, just like McCasland. Steven Garcia, 48, vanished without a trace on August 28, 2025. He was last seen leaving his Albuquerque, New Mexico home on foot, carrying only a handgun. An anonymous source told the Daily Mail that Garcia was a government contractor working for the Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC), a major facility in Albuquerque that manufactures more than 80 percent of all the non-nuclear components that go into building the military’s nuclear weapons.
Anthony Chavez (pictured) and Melissa Casias both worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), one of the nation’s most important nuclear research sites. Chavez, 79, worked at the lab until his retirement in 2017, although his role there has not been made clear. Casias, 54, was an active administrative assistant at the facility and is believed to have had top security clearance. All three were last seen leaving their homes in New Mexico on foot, leaving behind their cars, keys, wallets and phones before disappearing without a trace. Police have not had any updates in the cases since last year. In addition to the string of disappearances, five scientists in key areas of research have died over the last three years, including two who were murdered in their own homes. Nuclear physicist Nuno Loureiro and Astrophysicist Carl Grillmair were both shot to death in their homes in recent months.
Independent investigators have noted that Loureiro’s (pictured) revolutionary work in nuclear fusion may have made him a target of a greater conspiracy against US scientists, as his work may one day upend the energy industry. Grillmair’s work with NASA’s NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor has also been linked to the Air Force, as the telescopes used the same systems the military relies on to track satellites and missiles. Meanwhile, NASA scientists Michael David Hicks and Frank Maiwald, who also worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab, died from unknown circumstances at an early age. Maiwald, 61, was the lead researcher on a breakthrough that could help future space missions detect clear signs of life on other worlds just 13 months before he died in 2024.
Hicks, who passed away just a year after leaving JPL at age 59, had been involved with the DART Project, NASA’s test to see if humans could deflect dangerous asteroids away from Earth. NASA’s JPL has not commented on the deaths of Maiwald or Hicks, and did not reply to the Daily Mail’s inquiries into the nature of the scientists’ work before their deaths. In another mysterious incident, Jason Thomas (pictured), a pharmaceutical researcher testing cancer treatments at Novartis, was found dead in a Massachusetts lake on March 17, 2026, after disappearing without a trace in December 2025. Local police have claimed there was no foul play suspected.
