What's Really Going On With All These 'UFO Experts' Who Keep Disappearing?
TL;DR: it's not about aliens and they are not UFO experts
Have you heard about all the scientists involved in flying saucer research who keep disappearing? It’s true, according to the internet, which is completely wrong. A cursory examination of the facts reveals that this is a nonsense narrative. Humans are simply adept at seeing false patterns, a tendency called apophenia. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — and the evidence here is just ordinary human messiness.
Consider the example of Dr. Ning Li, who died in 2021 at the age of 79. Li was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease after suffering brain damage from being struck by a vehicle seven years earlier. She has been described as an “anti-gravity researcher”, and in fact she did work with high temperature superconductors during her career.
However, Dr. Li was not a “fusion energy and advanced space propulsion” scientist as aerospace contractor Dr. John Brandenburg has claimed. Indeed, Brandenburg maintains that her death is suspicious because Dr. John Mack of Harvard University, who found alleged victims of alien abduction credible, also died of a vehicular collision in 2004.
Raymond Czechowski, the driver who struck Dr. Mack, was convicted of driving under the influence. But never mind the public record, or the prevalence of DUI deaths. Two pedestrian accidents ten years apart are supposed to be evidence of a nefarious, sinister global conspiracy to hide the truth.
The ‘list’ just gets more ridiculous from here. Dr. Li’s son would like everyone to stop making up stories about his mother. No doubt these families would all prefer the conspiracy theories surrounding their losses stopped circulating. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen for reasons explained below the paywall.
Amy Eskridge was president and co-founder of the Institute for Exotic Science. She worked on anti-gravity propulsion and electrostatic propulsion systems until her death in 2022. Eskridge died of suicide using a gun, a tragedy which happens every 19 seconds in America. “Scientists die also, just like other people”, her father Richard told Newsweek. Like Dr. Li, Eskridge lived in Huntsville, Alabama, one of the most highly-educated cities in America.
Michael David Hicks, an astrophysicist with NASA’s famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory, died in July 2023 — of arteriosclerosis, according to the LA County Coroner. Approximately 900,000 Americans will die of the same cause this year. Nevertheless, this death has been deemed suspicious by the internet, for some reason. The noise is so loud that even President Trump wonders what is going on, but no one can ever quite explain why a heart attack is unusual.
Frank Maiwald, another NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory research engineer, died in Los Angeles in 2024 at the age of 61. No cause of death has been released, which is hardly unusual — in fact, most obituaries do not, especially when age or substance use is involved. Nevertheless, the lack of an explanation for his death has been perfect fodder for conspiracy theories.
Anthony Chavez, a US nuclear weapons scientist, was last seen in May 2025 when he left his Los Alamos-area home on foot without his wallet or keys. He 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.
Monica Jacinto Reza was a materials scientist working in aerospace engineering. She made rocket propulsion alloys for Aerojet Rocketdyne until she disappeared in June of 2025 during a hike in Angeles National Forest, California. Because she vanished just a few yards away from her friends, Reza’s disappearance has been easy to frame as mysterious. However, anyone familiar with coastal trails in California will appreciate how steep the hillsides can be. “I have done a fair amount of hiking and mountain biking in those mountains”, Michael Shermer writes at Skeptic, “and well know that there are countless precipitous cliffs off which one could easily fall off and disappear into thick brush below (which is how I broke my collarbone on a mountain bike ride in 1991).”
Melissa Casias, who worked at the same lab as Chavez, was last seen walking alone along Highway 518 in June 2025. She was an administrative employee with a security clearance, however, and not a scientist. Casias reportedly wiped her devices before leaving her New Mexico residence and left her keys behind. Only 53, her family is divided over what happened to her. Only about one percent of those reported missing are never found. However, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) database says that tens of thousands of Americans are currently missing.
Joshua LeBlanc was a 29-year-old aerospace engineer who died when his Tesla vehicle left the road, striking a guardrail and trees. His body was burned beyond recognition in the ensuing fire. Because he worked in Huntsville, his death has been added to the list of supposedly mysterious deaths, even though there is nothing mysterious about fatal car accidents. More than 40,000 deaths occur in vehicular accidents during an average year.
Steven Garcia was a Los Alamos contractor who worked on nuclear weapon components. He left his Albuquerque, New Mexico home in August 2025 with a handgun and a bottle of water, leaving his phone and wallet behind. Garcia has been described by anonymous sources as a “very stable person”, but police considered him to be a possible danger to himself. As noted above, suicide by handgun is sadly normal in the United States, with rates among men being even higher than women like Amy Eskridge.
Nuno Loureiro was a 47-year-old MIT physicist and the head of their Plasma Science and Fusion Center doing nuclear fusion research. His death is not a mystery at all. He was shot and killed at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts in December 15, 2025. The killer, Claudio Neves Valente, was arrested and reportedly confessed to planning the murder for years out of jealousy at Loureiro’s career success.
William ‘Neil’ McCasland was a retired Major General in the US Air Force. He walked away from his Albuquerque home in February of 2026 without his phone, eyeglasses, or hearing aids. A helicopter search for him was frustrated by unseasonable weather that made the ground too warm to spot him against a colder background. Aged 68, he had recently reported “mental fog” and stepped down from all the advanced research groups he had worked with. During his long career, McCasland was a base commander at a facility that has been subject to rumors about crashed spaceship storage for decades. He had briefly worked for Tom DeLonge, UAP enthusiast and co-founder of To The Stars Academy, as a scientific advisor on DeLonge’s fiction. Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri has claimed that McCasland was privy to “a lot of information” about UFOs. However, his wife insists that McCasland had no special knowledge about extraterrestrials.
Carl Grillmair, 67, was an astrophysicist involved in exoplanet research at the California Institute of Technology. He was shot and killed while sitting on his front porch in Antelope Valley, California in February 2026. His alleged killer, 29-year-old Freddy Snyder, was arraigned this week. Snyder’s criminal record is extensive and includes violent carjacking. Grillmair had called the police on Snyder before, so there is zero mystery about this death at all.
Jason Thomas, a biochemistry researcher at Novartis, went missing in December 2025 and his body was recovered from a nearby lake on 17 March. Aged 45, he was reportedly depressed from the deaths of his parents an hour apart. Thomas left his phone and wallet in the house and put his Apple watch in the mailbox before disappearing. It is unclear why this death is even being included in conspiracy theories about missing scientists, as he never worked on anything related to outer space.
David Wilcock took his own life on the morning of 20 April 2026. Wilcock “was an American paranormal writer and YouTube influencer (over 500,000 followers) deeply involved in the UFO ‘disclosure movement’, who suggested that he might be the reincarnation of the famed early 20th century psychic Edgar Cayce, that he is in telepathic contact with space aliens, and that reptilian aliens inhabit parts of Antarctica where they are preparing for an invasion to take over the world’s governments and banks”, Michael Shermer observes. According to the Boulder County, Colorado Sheriff’s Department, Wilcock called 911 in an evident mental health crisis, having been seen outside his home with a handgun. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida has tried to cast suspicion on this death, claiming that “something is up” without presenting any evidence at all.
Of the fourteen cases we have listed here, eight are completely solved as suicides, murders, accidents, or natural causes, and not a bit mysterious at all. The rest are either unexplained because someone has disappeared and not been found yet, or because the family has withheld the cause of death from the obituary, which is completely normal. Without the purported links to UFOs, most of which seem quite specious and tendentious, none of these names would be a national discussion. So what is really going on here?
