The FBI is looking for any connections among the recent deaths and disappearances of at least 10 scientists who had ties to government science projects or other sensitive information.
The announcement comes after the cases were highlighted by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers; growing online speculation hinted at a link between the incidents, although there is no known evidence of any connections among the individual researchers other than the nature of their respective jobs and the fact that none of the incidents occurred before 2022.
The most recent case involves retired Air Force Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland, who disappeared, along with a gun and his wallet, from his Albuquerque, N.M., home in February, according to local law enforcement. Responding to speculation about her husband’s disappearance, McCasland’s wife wrote in a social media post that it was “quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him.” McCasland retired about 13 years ago, she said.
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Some of the online rumor mill appears to have been fueled by McCasland’s links to To the Stars, a celebrity-led organization that promotes theories about aliens and unidentified flying objects. In the same social media post, his wife dismissed the idea that his disappearance was linked to that work.
In the past, McCasland also reportedly worked with a former NASA scientist who went missing in 2025 and whose case is among those now being investigated for potential links.
The FBI said on Monday that it would coordinate its investigation with the Department of Energy, the Pentagon, and state and local law enforcement. The House Oversight Committee is also conducting an investigation and has asked for briefings from the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, NASA and the FBI on the “disappearance and death of individuals with access to sensitive U.S. scientific information,” according to a press release.
NASA said in a social media post that “at this time, nothing related to NASA indicates a national security threat” and that the agency is cooperating with the investigation and committed to transparency. The Pentagon referred Scientific American to the FBI.
The DOE referred Scientific American to a Fox News interview conducted with Secretary of Energy Chris Wright on Sunday. In it, he said, “There’s a coordinated investigation across various branches of the government, but, yeah, a lot of the nuclear security, nuclear scientists are in DOE, so, yes, of course we are looking into this.”