A hiker found Melissa Casias in the McGaffey Ridge area of the Carson National Forest in New Mexico last week. Casias had been missing for almost a year. She was last seen walking alone along Highway 518 in June 2025. A gun was reportedly found at the scene of her remains.
Casias reportedly wiped her devices before leaving her New Mexico residence and left her keys behind. Only 53, her family was divided over what happened to her. Even clear evidence often fails to satisfy the hopes of survivors after a tragedy. Their turmoil helped feed rumors and speculation that Casias had been ‘disappeared’ by someone because she knew too much about flying saucers.
In fact, Casias worked at the nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory, but she was an administrative employee with a security clearance, not a scientist. If confirmed, a suicide by handgun would not be unusual or hard to believe. It happens every 19 seconds in America.
The disappearance of Casias coincided with the disappearance of Anthony Chavez, a US nuclear weapons scientist. He was last seen in May 2025 when he left his Los Alamos-area home on foot without his wallet or keys.
Chavez was 78 years old and retired. His last work was with the Scorpius Project, which uses nuclear accelerators to make x-ray pictures of plutonium components in order to find flaws. Chavez never worked in space propulsion or any area with an obvious connection to space travel.
Chavez and Casias are two of the 14 people supposedly connected to extraterrestrial research who have died or disappeared under somewhat mysterious circumstances since 2021. As I recently explained for premium subscribers, this ‘list’ is absolute bollocks.
If Casias’s death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound, then 9 of the 14 cases are completely solved as suicides, murders, accidents, or natural causes, and not a bit mysterious at all.
The remaining five cases are either unexplained because someone has disappeared and not been found yet, or because the family has withheld the cause of death from an obituary. That is also not unusual, in fact it is is completely normal, especially when substance abuse is involved or the deceased is very old.
This whole story is apophenia, a false pattern that people are seeing, sometimes on purpose. Melissa Casias and Anthony Chavez were not involved in research related to UAPs, UFOs, or antigravity propulsion. Just three of the 14 ostensible victims of this supposed conspiracy even have any obvious connections to the science of space flight.
Death is not unusual. Death is universal and mortality is not a mystery. With 248,000 federal research and development personnel, however, there will always be enough missing or dead people tangentially connected to breakthrough technology research that this putative pattern can fool people forever.