Part One
Some mysteries begin with a body. Some mysteries begin at a crime scene. And then there are mysteries that begin when someone walks out the door—and never comes home.
In February of this year, a retired U.S. Air Force major general named William “Neil” McCasland walked out of his Albuquerque home. As of today, he is still missing. McCasland left behind his phone, prescription glasses, and wearable devices. However, he took a .38-caliber revolver, backpack, and hiking boots with him.
His disappearance brought renewed attention to a list of scientists, engineers, researchers, and people connected to advanced technology to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which in April 2026 asked the FBI, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and NASA to investigate possible connections among these cases.
The investigation shows that individuals died by homicide or suicide, while others died in accidents or under suspicious circumstances. Yet others, like McCasland, vanished without explanation. Resembling McCasland, these were scientists associated with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT, Caltech, and other government, military, and private research organizations.
The people highlighted in this mystery include Melissa Casias, an administrative secretary, who walked out of her home, and hunters found her skeleton a year later in a remote forest. Michael David Hicks, a JPL planetary scientist who died in 2023; Frank Maiwald, a longtime JPL scientist who died in 2024; Monica Reza, a JPL materials scientist who disappeared while hiking in California in 2025; Anthony Chavez, a former Los Alamos worker who disappeared in New Mexico; and Steven Garcia, a contractor associated with the Kansas City National Security Campus who also disappeared.
Also, there is Joshua LeBlanc, a young NASA engineer who died in a fiery automobile crash. Amy Eskridge, whose death was ruled a suicide, informed a reporter the day before her death that she was not suicidal. Nuno Loureiro, the murdered MIT plasma physicist; Caltech astronomer Carl Grillmair, also murdered. Then there’s Jason Thomas, a pharmaceutical researcher, whose body floated in a Massachusetts lake following his disappearance.
What is more interesting is that Wright-Patterson Air Force Base has long been associated with America’s investigations of unidentified flying objects, including the famous Project Blue Book era.
Despite McCasland’s wife, Susan Wilkerson, pushing back against the UFO speculation surrounding her husband’s disappearance, another piece of information came to light. McCasland, in fact, had a relationship with the UFO/UAP world after his retirement. Years before his disappearance, McCasland became involved with musician and UFO researcher Tom DeLonge, who was assembling a group of scientists, military personnel, and intelligence figures around a project devoted to investigating and bringing public attention to UFO/UAP phenomena. Proof came by DeLonge’s 2016 correspondence with John Podesta, which described McCasland as an important part of that effort. McCasland’s wife then acknowledged that her husband had a “brief association with the UFO community,” but said he did not possess privileged knowledge about aliens and had not been sitting on a cache of current extraterrestrial secrets. She also pointed out that he had retired more than a decade ago. “Don’t turn my husband’s disappearance into a UFO story,” she said. And yet the documented history shows that his relationship with the UFO/UAP community was real. But McCasland is not the only case that warrants a closer look. Join us next month for part two of “The Scientist Who Vanished,” and we will discuss the circumstances of the death of scientist Amy Eskridge, who studied anti-gravity technology, and the undocumented rumor that Amy and her father created the first oval-shaped spacecraft
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