The FBI Just Found a D̲i̲s̲t̲u̲r̲b̲i̲n̲g Pattern Behind These Missing Scientists

At 11.10 one morning, a woman in Albuquerque left her husband at home. At 12.04, she walked back in. His phone was there. So were his prescription glasses and the devices he wore. But he wasn't. And something else was missing too. He'd once run the Air Force's research laboratory. He wasn't the first person tied to America's secret programs to disappear. And the FBI is now spearheading the effort to look for connections. At 3.07 that afternoon she called 911 and she told the dispatcher she had some indication that he must have planned not to be found. His name was William Neal McCasland. He was 68 and a silver alert went out for him. Deputies went through the house and found what else was gone. His wallet, a pair of hiking boots, and a .38 revolver with its leather holster. His wife had already told the dispatcher about the gun. He'd switched his phone off and left it behind, which the sheriff's lieutenant would call abnormal behavior, but he'd taken his gun, and she said he doesn't generally carry one. Within days, the FBI's Albuquerque office and the airbase at Kirtland were helping with the search, at the same base where McCasland had once led the Air Force Lab's space vehicles work. They worked the foothills with drones, with horses, and with a helicopter. About a week in, someone found a gray U.S. Air Force sweatshirt about a mile and a quarter east of the house, roughly a 25-minute walk from his front door. There was no blood on it, and his family hadn't confirmed it was his. Deputies knocked on more than 700 doors. Nobody could confirm seeing him leave, and there was no confirmed video of it either. The helicopter carried an infrared camera, the kind that picks a warm body out of a cold hillside at night. But that winter ran unusually warm, and the rocks were holding the heat. the mountain is just lit up like a candle the sheriff's office said at a press conference the one tool built to find him couldn't tell him from the rocks 74 tips came into the sheriff Moore went straight to the FBI and none of them found him the foothills gave them nothing some of his things turned up 200 miles away at his second home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado 3 or 4 hours drive north Investigators found his green shirt there, and his hiking boots. The sheriff pointed out that he probably had more than one pair of hiking boots. But the rest of the list was still gone. The wallet, the 38 in its holster, and now a red backpack too. An FBI special agent stood at the podium with the sheriff, and the sheriff's lieutenant said the likelihood of surviving out there that long would be very low. If he took them, a wallet, a gun, and a backpack are what a man takes when he isn't planning to come back, or when he thinks somebody might be coming for him. His wife didn't wait for the internet to decide which. A week after he vanished, she posted that he'd held only very commonly held clearances, and that anyone taking him to extract very dated secrets was quite unlikely. She even joked, no sightings of a mothership hovering above the Sandia Mountains have been reported The trouble is an email from 10 years earlier. When Wikileaks published a batch of private emails, one of them came from Tom DeLonge. In it, DeLonge wrote that McCasland was in charge of that exact laboratory where the Roswell crash was shipped and that he'd helped assemble my advisory team. Ten years later, his name was on a list in Congress anyway. He was on our list to talk to, Representative Eric Burleson said, and he disappeared. Another congressman called McCasland the gatekeeper for the UFO stuff. He wasn't the only name on that kind of list with a strange ending. A 39-year-old Air Force man was due to sit down with lawmakers about UAPs. Weeks before the interview, he was dead. The medical examiner reportedly ruled it an accidental overdose, and Burleson calls it a suicide. Either way, lawmakers never got to hear what he had to say. By early April, Burleson said he'd asked the FBI to get involved, and McCasland's file wasn't the oldest on his desk. The summer before the general vanished, a 60-year-old woman named Monica Jacinto Reza went hiking near Mount Waterman in the Angeles National Forest with a friend. She ran materials processing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and she'd helped invent a metal for rocket engines. They set off near the Angeles Crest Highway. Around 9.10 that morning, according to police, she was about 30 feet behind him, roughly three car lengths. Her companion says she waved to show she was fine. He looked ahead again, and when he turned back a moment later, she was gone. At that distance, you'd hear her footsteps behind you. For a week, searchers rappelled on ropes around waterfalls at 7,000 and 8,000 feet and pushed through a plant called Poodle Dog Bush on the steep slopes. Teams came in from as far as San Diego and Tulare County, and on Day 6, they were still going. The Sheriff's Department said, it appears she left the trail for some unknown reason. When the search was called off, her case went to the Homicide Bureau's Missing Persons Unit. She has never been found. This spring, two congressmen put their names on letters to the FBI and three other agencies, and in those letters they cited a reported close professional connection between Reza and McCasland through a materials program the Air Force had funded. Those letters also say McCasland left home with a .38 caliber revolver. A woman who vanished on a California trail and a general who vanished in New Mexico ended up in the same file in Congress. The letters counted two people from Los Alamos as well. The first walked out of his house into bad weather that spring, seven weeks before Reza's hike. Anthony Chavez, 78, had been a construction foreman at the Los Alamos lab. A friend said the weather that day was very inclement. Chavez's car was still locked in the driveway. His wallet and his keys were in the house. He didn't take a phone because he does not carry a cell phone. He just walked out into it. It was four days before anyone reported him missing. Police said there was no sign he'd planned to leave. He hasn't been found either. And four days after Reza vanished, the second one came home one morning with a story that didn't add up. At 6.15 that morning, Melissa Casillas, a 53-year-old administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, dropped her husband off at the lab. Back home, she told her daughter she'd forgotten her badge. Her husband had watched her swipe in. Just before 1, she brought her daughter Sierra a subway lunch in Taos Plaza, took Sierra's paycheck to deposit it for her, said, love you, and left. Around 2.15, a security camera caught her walking east along Highway 518 with a backpack. The clip runs 34 seconds. Police said it was difficult to tell if she appears distressed. Sierra texted her. The text never delivered. Sierra left work at 3.30, and when she got home, the door was locked and the car was there. Her mother's keys and work phone were on the kitchen table. Her mother's personal phone, purse, and wallet were in the office, And police said both phones had been factory reset. Sierra's paycheck was still in the house, sitting beside some loose dollar bills. Somebody took the time to wipe both phones before leaving them behind, either so nothing on them could be found, or so she couldn't be. At 9.47 that evening, a witness reported seeing her, with a blue Dodge truck following her. Police were told it wasn't her, because her shirt was the wrong color, and that truck isn't in the 34 seconds of footage. A relative later wrote that the mix-up cost us the first four critical days. By that weekend, about 125 volunteers were out with a hunting app, and search dogs came next, then 100 acres, then 283 acres of the Carson National Forest. Archers drove in from El Paso and from Colorado to help. They found nothing. If this were about secrets, Casius would be the hardest file to explain. Before she vanished, she'd already lost her Q clearance. A coworker put that down to tax debt. A Democrat on the House Oversight Committee made the same kind of point about the whole list. The country has thousands of nuclear scientists, he said, and it isn't the kind of nuclear program that a foreign adversary could significantly impact by targeting 10 individuals. The committee's chairman saw it the other way. It's very unlikely that this is a coincidence, he said on Sunday television. We view this as a national security threat. Two of the families had a simpler answer, that they left on their own. McCaslin's wife told the dispatcher he'd been struggling with anxiety and short-term memory loss, and that he'd said if his brain and body kept deteriorating, he didn't want to live like that. Cassius's daughter and husband believed she may have walked away because of stress. Eleven months after Cassius vanished, a hiker found her. Her remains were on the Gaffey Ridge in the Carson National Forest, about six miles from home, the kind of distance most people could walk on a Sunday. Her family says it was an area that had already been searched. State police said a handgun was located alongside the remains. She was identified two days later, and her family said they fully intend to continue to pursue answers for justice. That summer, the autopsy came back. Cause of death, a gunshot wound to the head. Manner of death. Undetermined. Because of how long she'd been out there and how little anyone knew. The bullet went in at the base of the right side of her skull and traveled from right to left and upward. No fragments were recovered, and nobody could tell from how far away it was fired. The report describes her remains as leaned back against stone, with the bones of her left leg below the knee, a shoe and a sock about 20 feet away. Near her was a backpack and a bottle of alcohol and a relative wrote that there were pieces of paper that could potentially be notes. Her mother's side of the family says the scene was staged and they've hired lawyers. Either the search walked straight past her or she came to be there after the searchers had gone. She left on her own, doesn't close her file because even the medical examiner couldn't say whether she fired that shot herself. Before the summer Casillas walked out was It happened again, this time in Albuquerque. Stephen Garcia, 48, looked after government property for the Kansas City National Security Campus, which makes the non-nuclear parts of America's nuclear weapons. One day, he walked out of his home in southwest Albuquerque on foot, and police say he left with a handgun. He's still missing, and it took a British tabloid seven months later to start counting cases like his. Its headline in March was about five missing scientists. By the middle of April, a reporter put the question to the White House. Was anyone checking whether the cases were connected? I haven't spoken to our relevant agencies about it, the press secretary said. I will certainly do that, and we'll get you an answer. The next day, the president said he'd just left a meeting on that subject. I hope it's random, he said, but we're going to know in the next week and a half. Some of them, he said, were very important people. Within a day, the White House said it was working with all relevant agencies and the FBI to holistically review all of the cases together. And on the afternoon the president spoke, staff on the House Oversight Committee emailed the Pentagon at 1.21. The answer came back at 4.02. There were no active national security investigations of any missing person who'd held a Department of War clearance and worked in special access programs. Under three hours, and the answer was no. The committee wrote that the reply leaves the committee with many unanswered questions. That afternoon, a source told reporters the FBI wasn't treating the cases as a pattern, and an FBI spokesman would only call the situation developing. That Sunday, on television, FBI Director Kash Patel said what his agency would do. We're going to look for connections, he said, to classified access, access to classified information, and/or foreign actors. And if any connections led to nefarious conduct or conspiracy, he said, this FBI will make the appropriate arrest. The next day, the letters that put Reza and McCasland in one file went out, to the FBI, the Department of Energy, the Department of War, and NASA. The committee wanted a briefing no later than the 27th of April. NASA answered in public that same day. Nothing related to NASA indicates a national security threat. A day after that, the FBI put out the line from the start of this story. It is spearheading the effort to look for connections, working with Energy, the Department of War, and state and local police. Burleson kept counting. When a NASA engineer's name surfaced, he posted, a new name for the list. This is not normal. By the end of the month, he said, the count is up to 13. Asked what the FBI was telling him, he said, they would not confirm or deny. The 27th came and went. As far as anyone reported, only the Pentagon had given Congress a real answer, and no briefing was ever reported. While Congress waited, the other side already had its number. Four days before that deadline was even set, a well-known debunker of claims like this had run it. Roughly 700,000 people hold top-secret clearances in American aerospace and nuclear work, he wrote. Over 22 months, ordinary life alone would see about 4,000 of them die, around 70 by homicide and 180 by suicide. The deaths are real, he wrote. The family's grief is real. The pattern is not. Some of the families say the same and angrier. One widow called the theory absolute nonsense. The brother of a JPL scientist who died of heart disease said he'd now be remembered for some baloney, Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot conspiracy theory. His number counts deaths, and two of these files are the kind it counts. One December evening, at about 8.30, in Brookline, Massachusetts, the upstairs neighbor of Nuno Loureiro was lighting a menorah candle and heard shots. Loureiro, who ran MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, had been shot in the entrance of his building, and he died the next morning. He was 47. The man who shot him had opened fire at Brown University two days earlier, and he was later found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire. Investigators concluded he'd acted alone, and the FBI called his victims symbolic. Just before Christmas, Karl Grillmayer, a 67-year-old Caltech astronomer with a small observatory beside his desert home in Llano, California, reported a trespasser. Deputies found a man there with a loaded rifle, who told them he was walking to the post office. The post office was the other way. He was arrested and released three days later, and in early February the charges were dropped. Two weeks before the killing, Grillmayer's widow says, the man came back with a baseball bat. Then, Grillmayer was shot dead on his own porch, and police say the man threatened his own mother, took her car, and was arrested for carjacking. We believe he came for revenge, the widow said, thinking Karl was the one that called 911. He's pleaded not guilty. This time, he's being held on more than $3 million bail. Both of those files end with a suspect, one the FBI says acted alone, and one charged with murder. The next one doesn't. On a December night in Wakefield, Massachusetts, three nights before Loreto was shot, Jason Thomas' wife heard the mailbox close. She looked out and saw him outside. He worked as a chemical biologist at the drug company Novartis, and he was 45. Later, his phone and his wallet turned up on the bathroom counter, and his Apple Watch was inside the mailbox, the one his wife had just heard close. A camera caught him near the train tracks on North Avenue, and that was the last anyone saw. He was reported missing the next day. Three months later, in March, a detective searching Lake Quannapowitt, which had been frozen over, spotted a body. A drone confirmed it, and he was identified at first by his clothes. Investigators said no foul play is suspected, and by late April the medical examiner still hadn't ruled on how he died. In the last file, it was the car that kept the record. Early one July morning in Huntsville, Alabama, at 4:32, the family of Joshua LeBlanc, 29, a NASA engineer who led a team on nuclear propulsion, reported him missing. His phone and his wallet were at home. The car's own camera system showed his Tesla had sat at the Huntsville airport for four hours, a whole morning in an airport parking lot. Then, at about 2.45 that afternoon, the car hit a guardrail and trees and burst into flames. The car and the man inside were burned beyond recognition. It took three days to confirm it was him, and his family had feared he'd been taken. Four hours in a parked car is long enough to be waiting for someone. No official cause of that crash has been published. In the same city, years before, a physicist who said she'd built an anti-gravity device had been struck by a vehicle on her campus, and a request for the results of her Pentagon grant was denied. LeBlanc was the name Burleson added to the list with, this is not normal. Now lay the files side by side, the way the FBI said it would look for connections. McCaslin left his phone, his glasses, and the devices he wore. Chavez never carried a phone, and he left his wallet and his keys. Casillas left two phones, and both had been wiped. LeBlanc's phone and wallet stayed at home. Thomas's were on the bathroom counter, with his watch out in the mailbox. And in three of these files, there's a handgun. One is missing from McCaslin's house, Garcia walked out with one, and one was lying beside Casillas on that ridge. Five of them left without a phone. Of the ones who were found, one turned up where her family says people had already searched, one came up out of a lake that had been frozen over, and one was burned past recognizing in a car that had waited four hours. The FBI didn't just find these files in April. In Garcia's case, her niece said the summer she vanished that the FBI and DHS are now involved. The FBI's Albuquerque office was in McCaslin's search within days, and in Garcia's case, police say the FBI has reached out and is able to assist. The agency that announced in April it was looking for links had been inside Casillas' case for nine months. At the end of April, Patel said, They're all state cases, but we're looking to see if there's any connections, and we're going to have a final report here in short order. His agency wouldn't say how much of it the public would see. A full set of FBI findings did come out the next day on one of these files, the Llorero shooting, with 112 pieces of evidence, more than 490 leads, and more than 11,000 surveillance files, all for one man who acted alone. The president followed a day later. So far, we're finding that there's not much of a connection. And then we're going to be doing a full report. When Patel made that promise, McCaslin had been missing for two months. Now it's eight. There's no report. General McCasland is still missing, and whatever the FBI saw when it put those files together, it hasn't said.