Here’s What Nobody’s Telling You About The ‘Missing Scientists’ Cases

Beginning in the early 1960s, one after another, former Nazi scientists and engineers were targeted for assassination in an Israeli intelligence operation called “Operation Damocles.” The scientists had taken new jobs developing rockets for Egypt, and it was very clear that Mossad — Israel’s intelligence agency — didn’t want that program to continue. So Mossad agents sent mail bombs, organized drive-by shootings, and in one case, managed to make a prominent arms dealer named Heinz Krug disappear completely. As the New York Times reported at the time, “The expert, Dr. Krug, who once held a top post with a Stuttgart research institute for jet propulsion physics, disappeared in Munich on Tuesday. … He was last seen leaving his Munich office for an appointment.”

Operation Damocles was ultimately a successful program. It terrified Nazi scientists, and it certainly made the idea of working for Egypt much less appealing. It was also good practice for Mossad, which went on to conduct many more assassinations of foreign scientists — most recently in Iran. Just a few years ago, towards the end of Trump’s first term, the Mossad managed to kill Iran’s nuclear scientist using a remote-controlled, AI-enabled machine gun that was hidden in the back of a pickup truck that was parked on the side of the freeway.

Credit: Darron Mark/Corbis via Getty Images

Israeli spies programmed the AI to compensate for the machine gun’s movement in the back of the pickup truck, as well as the input delay from the remote operation of the weapon. So when the scientist drove by, all the Mossad agent had to do was press the button to shoot him. And at the time, Iran had no idea what happened. They assumed that snipers had been hiding near the freeway. Initial media reports suggested that a gun battle had taken place. And for their part, the Mossad contributed to this confusion by blowing up the pickup truck once the target was dead.

We sometimes hear about these kinds of operations when they’re conducted by our own intelligence services, or intelligence agencies that work with the CIA (like the Mossad). And that makes sense — it’s effective propaganda that sounds like you’re reading a spy thriller. And people “on our side” like to brag about successful operations. At the same time, it’s very rare to hear about similar operations that are conducted by foreign governments, within our borders. And there’s only two possible reasons for that: Either foreign governments aren’t conducting any assassination operations on U.S. soil, or they’re conducting those operations without being detected — or at least, without our government telling us about them.

Especially with the war in Iran underway, it’s not hard to wonder whether, indeed, American researchers are being targeted, without the government telling us. And in recent days, as you’ve probably heard, there’s a lot of concern about this possibility. It’s gone mainstream, and now the White House is involved. Watch:

Whenever there’s a confusing and alarming story like this, the worst thing you can do as a media organization is broadcast a superficial, drive-by report. And that’s exactly what NBC just did in that clip. If you’re going to suggest that shadowy assassins are taking out American scientists, or might be, then you can’t spend 60 seconds on the topic and then move on. It’s too important for that kind of treatment.

To be clear: this is obviously a story worth pursuing. But it’s also a story that’s extremely easy for media outlets to mess up. For the most part, they want the number of “dead or missing scientists” to keep increasing, because that creates more drama. And as a result, they’re not doing a deep dive into each one. Instead, they’re making you think that every single case is equally suspicious, which just isn’t true. There’s a lot of distraction going on here, for one reason or another, and it’s drawing attention away from the cases that deserve a second look.

So today we’re going to go, one-by-one, through all of the scientists who have allegedly been killed, or died under suspicious circumstances. We’ll talk about everyone who was just mentioned in that NBC report, and many others. We’ll start with Amy Eskridge, because on the surface, she’s the most disturbing case — although when you dig into it, there are a lot of issues with the narrative that’s going around.

Amy Eskridge died in Huntsville Alabama on June 11, 2022, at the age of 34. The cause of death was a gunshot to the head, which was determined to be a suicide. Shortly before her death, in 2020, Eskridge claimed that she was preparing to present major findings on “antigravity research” — which has relevance to UFOs and their propulsion systems — although she needed approval from NASA. To this end, Eskridge started a now-defunct website called “The Institute for Exotic Science,” which she said would provide a “public-facing persona to disclose anti-gravity technology.” Eskridge was also involved in her father’s company HoloChron Engineering, which was supposedly developing a “triangle antigravity craft” — although they didn’t get very far. Antigravity research, for the record, is not an established branch of science, and Eskridge has no published papers in any peer-reviewed publication. That’s not to say that “peer review” is the most important thing, but it does make it clear that she wasn’t an established, leading U.S. scientist or anything like that.

In any event, according to Eskridge, she was on the verge of a big breakthrough. And someone wanted to stop her. A month before her death, according to a UFO investigator named Franc Milburn, Eskridge reportedly sent a text message to a friend warning that her life was in danger.

The alleged text read, in part: “If you see any report that I killed myself, I most definitely did not. If you see any report that I overdosed myself, I most definitely did not … The dominos are being lined up all over again now.”

Obviously, that’s a very conspicuous thing for someone to write, shortly before they die of a gunshot wound to the head. On the one hand, it could indicate exactly what it says — that this person was being harassed by people who wanted her dead. On the other hand, you need context for a text message like this, because it’s also possible that this woman was simply paranoid and mentally unwell. To make that determination, you need context. David Wilcock, the “paranormal content creator,” also repeatedly said he wasn’t suicidal — and according to police, he just shot himself on April 20 when they responded to a residence where he was located.

So with that in mind, here’s a podcast interview featuring Eskridge, several years before her death, in which she talks about how a suspicious Lexus pulled up near her apartment complex. She describes the apartment complex as low-income, and says that a high-end, blacked-out Lexus is an unusual sight in the parking lot. And supposedly, this Lexus is part of the larger plan to harass her. Listen to this carefully, and assess her credibility. Watch:

NEW: Researcher working on anti-gravity technology, whose death was ruled a su*cide, sent a text just one month before her death saying she would never kill herself, according to the Daily Mail.

Amy Eskridge was found with a gunshot to the head in Huntsville, Alabama.

Eskridge… pic.twitter.com/kUj5vrBPot

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 22, 2026

The problem here is that, really, what she’s saying doesn’t make much sense. There’s no logical reason why someone would do any of this. If she’s a threat to someone because of her research, it doesn’t make much sense for them to send a Lexus and change its license plates in front of her, or moonlight as her Uber driver, or break into her house, or any of that.  She also doesn’t mention any police report, or any surveillance footage, or anything — she’s asking us to take her word for all of this.

You might say, well, the Lexus driver is trying to intimidate her so that she doesn’t publish her research. These people are supposedly sinister enough that they’re capable of murdering her, and yet they held off — for several years — hoping that they could scare her by changing some license plates around. But if that’s the case, you have to ask: Why didn’t she simply publish her groundbreaking research online? Why did she feel a need to wait for NASA or peer-review or anything like that? Why would these shadowy figures allow her to talk about their pressure campaign online, for years, before they took her out?

These are all important questions. And no major news outlets are remotely interested in answering them. One of the things you need to be careful about, as you read stories about these scientists, is that a lot of outlets are extremely sloppy with details. Many of them are probably using AI to generate their stories.

For example, as you can see here, The Daily Mail reported, “Journalist Michael Shellenberger testified before a public hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena that Eskridge was ‘murdered by a private aerospace company in the US because she was involved in the UAP conversation.'”

Credit: The Daily Mail

When I read that quote, I did a double-take. Michael Shellenberger is a serious journalist. We cite his work on the show, all the time. If he did the research, and concluded that Eskridge had been murdered by a private aerospace company, then I’d be very inclined to, at least, take that story seriously.

But if you pull up the actual testimony, Shellenberger didn’t say anything like that. The attribution is completely wrong. He didn’t say anything about Eskridge, or how she was supposedly murdered. In reality, that claim came from a Retired U.K. intelligence officer named Franc Milburn, who got in touch with Eskridge before her death. And he told investigators that, in his view, Eskridge was indeed being harassed. In fact, he claimed that Eskridge had been targeted with a “directed-energy weapon.”

Credit: The Daily Mail

So who is Franc Millburn? He’s also the source for that alleged text message, where Eskridge said she’s not suicidal. As it turns out, he’s a British paratrooper veteran and intel officer who claimed that, in the late 1980s, the British special forces shot down a “non-human craft” in northern England. Milburn doesn’t have first-hand knowledge of this shootdown, but he claims that he spoke to an MI6 officer code-named “John” and the U.K.’s Royal Air Force crew that fired on the UFOs, which were supposedly traveling at hypersonic speeds.

Per The Daily Mail Milburn said, “John said they were tasked to secure and retrieve the craft in the north of England. They were flown in by helicopter. They established a cordon, a perimeter, and they approached the craft. ‘He didn’t describe the craft, he just said it was obvious it was non-human, and it was obvious that there were occupants who had fled the scene on foot – or whatever you call it. ‘He said then it became a task of tracking down these beings to try to bring them into custody. ‘Part of the unit was left protecting the craft. They would have left maybe six to eight blokes to cordon the craft, and the others would have been on foot, quad bikes, or 4x4s trying to track down these entities that escaped from it, with helicopters supporting. ‘He said after that it was totally passed over. He said, “scientists and technicians came in and it was completely out of our hands. We were flown away by helicopter, and we knew nothing more after that.”‘

So we don’t get a description of the UFO. We’re only told that the aliens ran away, and that there was a hot pursuit of some kind, involving quad bikes, like something out of a movie. And then, the whole thing was just dropped. The government didn’t kill John to keep him quiet, or anything like that. So he just told all his friends.

Put simply, Franc Milburn has a history of making unverifiable, outlandish claims. And now he’s making another one — he’s saying this woman was hit with a mysterious energy beam, harassed, and targeted for assassination. It’s simply not much to go on.

On the other hand, there are disappearances that are obviously worth a deeper investigation. Consider the case of 29-year-old Joshua Leblanc, a NASA scientist who worked on rockets and nuclear propulsion. Last summer, he died in a car accident. Here’s how local news reported on his death at the time. Watch:

A NASA nuclear scientist was found deceased in his Tesla after colliding with a guardrail, leaving his body so burned that he was completely unrecognizable, according to a new report from Fox News.

29-year-old Joshua LeBlanc, who worked on nuclear propulsion projects, died in a… https://t.co/C793en0aeU pic.twitter.com/8YIhgG7fE3

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 22, 2026

By itself, does any of this reporting prove — or even suggest — that Leblanc was targeted by an intelligence agency? No, it doesn’t. Nor does it make much sense for someone to use a Tesla to kill him, since Teslas have cameras that are constantly recording. And while the family has their concerns, it’s also possible that they’re mistaken. But given the circumstances, you’d think the authorities would have investigated and come up with some kind of explanation for what Leblanc was doing, and why he would’ve left his phone behind. Normally it’s not hard to figure out these kinds of basic details. But in this case, none of those details have been forthcoming. Maybe now that it’s getting more attention, that will change.

Then there’s another case NBC mentioned — the disappearance of 68-year-old US Air Force Major General. William Neil McCasland. And this is where the cases are worth paying a lot of attention to.

William Neil McCasland

Unlike Eskridge, McCasland had an established scientific career. According to the New York Post, he “served in senior Pentagon roles involving nuclear science, space research and defense initiatives. He also commanded the Air Force Research Laboratory at New Mexico’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — where wreckage from the 1947 Roswell crash was purportedly shipped.” (Although the Air Force has denied that.) During his career, McCasland also oversaw research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, which was famous for its work developing the first atomic bomb.

Congressman Eric Burlison of Missouri says he had contacted McCasland concerning his research into UFOs. And according to the Post, “McCasland also appears in the Wikileaks dump of Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails. Former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge was in frequent contact with Podesta regarding UFOs and identified McCasland as his insider source on alien intel. Leaked calendar notifications showed a meeting scheduled between Podesta, DeLonge and McCasland on Jan. 24, 2016.”

On February 27 of this year, McCasland — an experienced hiker — left his home in Albuquerque without his phone or prescription glasses. All he took with him, apparently, was his wallet, hiking boots, and a .38-caliber revolver. Before leaving, at 10 a.m., he spoke to repairman at his home. His wife left for a doctor’s appointment at 11:10 a.m., and by the time she returned an hour later, he was missing. A couple hours later, his wife called 911. Listen:

So he has both mental and physical issues. He’s retired. He’s given indications that he might not want to continue on with his life, and his wife believes he doesn’t want to be found. And he left with a gun. The police dispatched a helicopter with an infrared scanner to try to find him, but they said it was too hot outside for the scanner to be useful.

“The mountain was just lit up like a candle,” a sheriff said. “We couldn’t differentiate from heat signatures and the heat from the rocks.”

So again, the simplest explanation is clear. You can easily make the case that, in all likelihood, this elderly man with mental health problems may have committed suicide, or become incapacitated while he was on a hike, or attacked by an animal, or any number of possibilities. There aren’t any indications that he was actively involved in any high-level research, or was on the verge of any kind of breakthrough.

What makes his case interesting is that, in a relatively short period of time, several other people with connections to national laboratories basically went missing the same way. Within around 10 months, they all disappeared without taking their cellphones with them. And some of them had weapons. So let’s go through those cases, starting with 78-year-old Anthony Chavez, a research and development engineer who also worked at Los Alamos. He spent most of his career working on a “Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test” facility, which is involved in nuclear weapons research.

Anthony Chavez

Chavez had long retired. He hasn’t been working since 2017. And like McCasland, Chavez was last seen leaving his home on foot, with his car parked in the driveway — only, unlike McCasland, Chavez left behind his wallet. He was reported missing in May of 2025, and he still hasn’t been located, despite an extensive search.

Then, three months after Chavez disappeared, 48-year-old contractor Steven Garcia also went missing.

Steven Garcia

And he disappeared in pretty much the same way. He was last seen on August 28 leaving his home in Albuquerque at 9 a.m., carrying only his gun, and leaving his wallet and keys behind. Police said they had some reason to believe he may have been a danger to himself. Watch:

????10th missing person case in UFO mystery – Steven Garcia disappearance

Another government contractor with links to UFO information has become the latest person to go missing in the past year. Los Angeles Magazine contributor Lauren Conlin joins “Jesse Weber Live” to discuss the… pic.twitter.com/Scfmzh4yM9

— Skywatch Signal (@UAPWatchers) April 15, 2026

The Albuquerque facility of the “Kansas City National Security Campus” manufactures most of the non-nuclear components that are used in nuclear weapons. At the same time, a property custodian isn’t the most essential employee in that facility. So it’s not clear, to anyone, why he’d be a potential target for any reason. But, again, the similarity of these disappearances is striking.

And then there’s another disappearance to add to the list: the case of 53-year-old Melissa Casias, who also worked at Los Alamos.

Melissa Casias

Melissa Casias was not a UFO researcher or a nuclear weapons expert. She was an administrative assistant. There’s no indication, one way or the other, that she had access to sensitive information or research. She was last seen in June of 2025, entering her car in the afternoon after shopping downtown. She reportedly dropped lunch off for her daughter, before saying she was going to work from home.

Investigators have since recovered a pair of shoes that match the ones she was wearing. They’ve also discovered that her phone has been factory-reset.

Based on this information, if we’re being honest, there are about ten million explanations for why she might be missing. The most likely explanation, of course, is that she was attacked by a criminal who had no idea where she worked. And when that happens, contrary to what you might see on television, it’s not easy for police to figure out who did it. Think about the Nancy Guthrie case, which is still unsolved. If the FBI can’t find out what happened to Nancy Guthrie, then the odds are low that anyone’s going to be able to track down a random administrative assistant. People are much, much less safe than we might like to think. That’s one of the reasons we have the Second Amendment.

But the fact that we have so many people, all of them affiliated with national laboratories at one point or another, all disappearing, is obviously worth further investigation. That said, we do have to acknowledge that sometimes people die in strange ways. Sometimes they kill themselves. Sometimes they trip and fall while they’re hiking. And sometimes these people tend to live near each other, and work in the same kinds of places. Los Alamos alone employs well over 10,000 staffers. It’s not unreasonable to think that two or three of them, over the course of more than a year, might become suicidal, independent of one another. Recall that, after January 6, several Capitol police officers committed suicide. In fact, within months of January 6, four officers killed themselves. The media tried to link that to January 6 itself, claiming that these all counted towards that day’s death toll — a death toll that was actually just one, Ashley Babbitt. In that case, the attempt to draw a connection was absurd. Is this another example of that sort of thing? We don’t know yet.

But let’s keep going, because there are more names to get through. And again, some of them are worth a closer look. Fox reported that, “NASA materials engineer Monica Reza, who served as director of the Materials Processing Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also remains missing after disappearing during a hike in California in June 2025.”

Monica Reza

Reza is one of four cases that are linked to Los Angeles County, including Caltech’s Carl Grillmair and two other Jet Propulsion Lab experts, Frank Maiwald and Michael David Hicks. So let’s take these in turn, starting with Reza — who, incidentally or not, worked on projects that were overseen by McCasland at one point.

The local Fox affiliate reported that, “Reza disappeared while hiking with a friend near Mount Waterman in the Angeles National Forest. According to her companion, they were roughly 30 feet apart when they made eye contact; she smiled and waved to indicate she was fine. Moments later, when the friend turned around again, she had vanished.”

She disappeared in June of 2025, and her body still hasn’t been found, despite an extensive search and recovery effort. Right away, we should be able to point out the obvious, which is that it’s extremely unlikely that a CIA assassin snatched her during this hike. If you’re going to run an operation like that, it’s probably a good idea to do it when the target is alone, not right next to their friend. So again, the default assumption here should be that she fell off a ravine, or something like that.

But the other missing scientists from Los Angeles County are a little harder to explain away.

Carl Grillmair

Here’s Carl Grillmair, the Caltech scientist. He was 67-years-old, and he specialized in astrophysics at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center on campus. (That Center also partners with NASA). Grillmair was a renowned scientist who was famous for his work on “dark matter and galactic structures,” as well as for discovering the existence of water on a “distant exoplanet.” A few months ago, he was shot to death on his front porch in Antelope Valley. Watch:

The suspect who allegedly shot the scientist, before apparently carjacking someone, has been identified as 29-year-old Freddy Snyder. Good luck finding a picture of him — for some reason, the authorities haven’t released one. I certainly couldn’t find it, if they did. According to local reports, Snyder had been arrested several months earlier for “trespassing on Grillmair’s property while armed with a rifle.” There’s still no official motive.

But hearing these facts, it’s hard not to think of the murder of MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro in front of his home in a Boston suburb.

Nuno Loureiro

As you probably remember, a gunman shot the professor after killing two students at Brown University. In that case, it was pretty clear that the killer was upset that his career was a failure, and he blamed Brown (while also harboring jealousy for the professor’s success). At the same time, the Brown shooter did kill himself, so we don’t have a definitive understanding of his motive, either.

Some of these lists mention Michael David Hicks, who died in July of 2023. I’ve seen his name come up at NewsNation, the New York Post, Newsweek, and other outlets. He was a veteran researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for more than two decades. But there’s no indication of how he died, exactly, so there’s not much to go on. No cause of death has been released. For all we know, he might have been hit by a car, or died of a heart attack. But a lot of outlets are adding his name and picture to other lists of missing or dead scientists, which tells you something — a lot of them are trying to “pad” the statistics a bit. They’re trying to sell a narrative that may not be entirely true.

The magazine “Unheard” ran its own deep dive recently into several of these missing scientists. And while they’re more skeptical about the narrative than I am, they did include this paragraph on the origins of this story, which is pretty interesting. It’s always important to try to figure out, when everyone’s talking about a particular topic, where it began, exactly. Here’s what they came up with.

Where did this narrative even come from? The earliest article on this topic is dated March 22, and was published in the Daily Mail. It notes five missing scientists. … Two days later, a website called The Liberty Line added another name, expanding the list to six. According to its X account, the website specializes in ‘Philadelphia sports and whatever else comes to mind.’ Right-wing media and influencers kept adding names until we reached Eskridge, with old cases treated as breaking news. Finally, the story made its way to Fox News and the White House briefing room.

What’s frustrating about this is that, indeed, there are several disappearances and deaths that are worth further investigation. No reasonable person can deny that. We simply don’t have many details about deaths that are obviously suspicious, and that involve very high-level scientists (including retired scientists). But by the same token, no reasonable person can deny that the tabloids (and even some major media outlets) are mainly interested in turning this whole story into a circus. They’re adding names to the list that obviously don’t belong, just so they can create paranoia and drive clicks. And in the process, they’re distracting from some actual investigations that need to happen — particularly investigations into LeBlanc, McCasland, Chavez, Garcia, and Casias. And show us the picture of the man who killed the Caltech scientist. Otherwise, as usual, a legitimate story is at risk of being derailed — whether deliberately or not, it doesn’t matter.

Yesterday, we talked at some length about the “false flag” operation that took place in Charlottesville at the “Unite the Right” rally, during Trump’s first term. It was well-funded, well-organized, and highly effective. The whole thing was engineered to give Democrats a pretext to suspend civil liberties. We might choose to believe that these kinds of operations don’t take place on American soil, but they do — all the time. And by the same token, you’d have to be willfully blind to think that intelligence agencies — including potentially our own intelligence agencies — wouldn’t want to make certain people “disappear.” Or at the very least, they might lie about what happened to those people. Just the other day, for example, we were told that two CIA officers died in a tragic, and very strange, “car crash” in Mexico. Watch:

This is like the line from Mission Impossible, about how the U.S. government will “disavow all knowledge” if you’re caught or killed. Everyone knows these CIA agents didn’t die in a car crash. But that’s the cover story that the U.S. government is going with. Again, it happens all the time. And for that reason, we simply cannot be satisfied with the information we have so far, about these missing or dead scientists. We need an independent investigation — one that’s not conducted exclusively by the government — into each of those deaths I mentioned. Put all the facts out there, and let us debate the merits of every single case. Without transparency, the bodies are going to keep piling up. The theories will multiply. The tabloid articles will spiral completely out of control. Most of them will be way off-the-mark. And in that environment, when an intelligence agency *does* take out one of its targets, no one — even the most discerning observer — will have any way of knowing.