At least 11 U.S. scientists linked to U.S. nuclear and space research programs have died or vanished in recent years, prompting a federal investigation into a situation President Donald Trump called “pretty serious stuff.”
On April 20, the House Oversight Committee announced that it would look into the deaths and disappearances after committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) warned that “something sinister could be happening” on Fox & Friends. Comer said that at first he thought it was “some kind of crazy conspiracy theory,” but now believes it could be a national security concern.
CNN reported that the FBI is leading efforts to find connections between the missing and deceased scientists and is working with the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, and state and local law enforcement. NASA posted on X that the agency is “coordinating and cooperating with the relevant agencies in relation to the missing scientists,” but currently sees no national security threat.
Trump has slashed funding for science research in his second term, providing an opening for other countries to poach leading scientists. Could the missing researchers be part of a brain drain? Some GOP lawmakers seem to think so. Congressman Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) posted on X, “We are in competition with China, Russia, and Iran on nuclear technology, advanced weapons, and space. Meanwhile, our top scientists keep vanishing.”
Who are the scientists who have died or disappeared?
Questions about a possible sinister connection between the 11 deaths and disappearances began to emerge after William Neil McCasland, a 68-year-old former U.S. Air Force major general, was reported missing from his Albuquerque home by his wife on Feb. 27, 2026. McCasland left his prescription glasses, phone, and electronics behind; he is thought to have taken his .38 caliber revolver with him. Two months later, officials still can’t say where he went.
McCasland was the onetime commander of the Wright-Patterson base, central to the Roswell incident; his connection to UFO lore and classified space weapons programs fanned the flames of speculation sparked by a YouTuber named Daniel Liszt when he posted a video theorizing that a Portuguese physicist was assassinated because of his work in advanced fusion research. Nuno Gomes Loureiro, a renowned nuclear science professor, was shot and killed at his Massachusetts home in December 2025. He had recently been named director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
Liszt, who goes by the handle Dark Journalist, theorized that Loureiro’s work was “potentially so transformative, that if you get a real leg up in the research… then you become a sort of database that needs to be erased potentially.” He tied Loureiro’s murder to the deaths of other scientists who had worked in the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative program.
Right-wing influencer Jessica Reed Kraus wrote a Substack article in February that drew parallels between Loureiro’s death and that of astrophysicist Carl Grillmair, who was shot and killed outside his rural California home. In another post, she deemed McCasland’s disappearance a “Conspiracy Alert!” The Daily Mail kicked the story into high gear in March, reporting that the “mystery of five missing scientists sends [a] chill across America.”
What ties the scientists together?
Comer and other lawmakers say that the string of mysterious deaths and disappearances began in July 2023 with the death of Michael David Hicks, a 59-year-old scientist who specialized in comet and asteroid research at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. There has also been speculation surrounding the 2022 suicide of an anti-gravity scientist named Amy Eskridge, after the Daily Mail linked her death to the others. Eskridge, an Alabama-based researcher, revealed in a rambling 2020 interview that she had plans to disclose information about UFOs and extraterrestrials, and was receiving threats as a result.
The cases vary extensively in circumstance and span several years. JPL space researcher Frank Maiwald died in July 2024; his cause of death was not publicly disclosed. Anthony Chavez, a retired engineer who had worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in nuclear weapons research, disappeared from his New Mexico home in May 2025. An administrative assistant from the Los Alamos lab named Melissa Casillas went missing in June 2025; she was last seen walking along a highway a few miles from her home. Monica Jacinto Reza was employed as Director of Materials Processing at JPL when she vanished while hiking with a friend in the Angeles National Forest last June. Steven Garcia, a property custodian with high-level clearance at a national nuclear security administration facility in Albuquerque, disappeared last August. Pharmaceutical scientist Jason Thomas went missing last December; he was found dead on March 17, 2026.
What are the conspiracy theories?
The common thread between the 11 dead and missing seems to be that all of them had access to sensitive nuclear and aerospace research. The press release announcing the investigation by the House Oversight Committee says “these deaths and disappearances may represent a grave threat to U.S. national security and to U.S. personnel with access to scientific secrets.” Online sleuths say the cases are linked because they were working on projects tied to the development of clean energy, while Rep. Eric Burlison told Fox News, “This has all the hallmarks of a foreign operation.”
Critics say it’s simply a conspiracy theory. Retired FBI agent Jennifer Coffindaffer told Newsweek that the claims “fall apart when examined under basic investigative principles.” Erin Ryan, co-host of the political commentary podcast Hysteria, called it a symptom of MAGA’s anti-science rhetoric: “I think that it’s a way for people on the far right to try to wash their hands of their culpability in creating an environment that’s actually dangerous to scientists.” The Atlantic‘s Daniel Engber wrote, “To call it a conspiracy theory would be far too kind, because no comprehensive theory has been floated to explain the pattern of events.” All in all, Engber said, the story is “unbelievably dumb.”
Why is there a federal probe?
The tale of the missing and dead scientists snowballed when GOP officials claimed it was serious news. On April 15, Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt about the scientists; two days later, Leavitt announced that the White House would launch an investigation. Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fl.) posted, “If you are feeling uneasy about the amount of scientists that have gone missing, died, and recent suicides ref those scientists and others you are correct in your intuition.” Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va), who serves on the Oversight Committee with Comer and Burlison, struck a measured tone about the investigation, telling CNN, “The United States has thousands of nuclear scientists and nuclear experts. It’s not the kind of nuclear program that potentially a foreign adversary could significantly impact by targeting 10 individuals.”
President Trump said this week that the investigation has yet to turn up evidence of a connection in the deaths and disappearances. “Some of them that we looked at are very sad cases, in some cases, some were sick. Some left this earth self-inflicted. Some had other things,” Trump told reporters. “We’re going to be doing a full report. And it’s very serious.”
What do the families of the scientists say?
Family members of the dead and missing are frustrated by the swirl of conspiracy theories. Michael David Hicks’ daughter said that speculation about her father’s death has shaken her. “From what I know of my dad, there’s no train of logic to follow that would implicate him in this potential federal investigation,” Julia Hicks told CNN. “I don’t understand the connection between my dad’s death and the other missing scientists. I can’t help but laugh about it, but at the same time, it’s getting serious.”
Amy Eskridge’s father, Richard Eskridge, a former NASA scientist, denied that his daughter’s suicide was suspicious, saying, “Scientists die also, just like other people.” William McCasland’s wife wrote on Facebook that, when McCasland was in the Air Force, he had access to “some highly classified programs and information,” but that he had been retired for more than a decade. “It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him.”
Despite the federal investigation, Monica Jacinto Reza’s family says that no one from the White House or the FBI has contacted anyone in the family regarding her disappearance. They reject any suggestion that Reza was working on something that could have endangered her life. Speaking to LA Mag, one of Reza’s relatives said, “She was just a regular person who had a family.”
Whether or not they’re credible, the conspiracy theories keep coming. Mercury News reported that Rep. Burlison presented two more names that he says warrant scrutiny — Matthew James Sullivan, a former Air Force intelligence officer who died from a drug overdose in 2024, and Ning Li, an anti-gravity physicist who died in 2021 at the age of 79 after being struck by a car. There’s also the case of Joshua LeBlanc, a NASA nuclear scientist who died in a car crash in Alabama last year.
On April 30, Burlison posted on X: “The count is up to 13. Thirteen American scientists tied to nuclear and space research, missing or dead. Every adversary on the planet celebrates each one we lose. We are weaker as a nation today because of these losses, and I’m working to get answers.”
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Fans cheer in the streets of Port-au-Prince on Nov. 18, 2025 as Haiti celebrates qualifying for the World Cup.
We’ve Been Thinking About Animal Sexuality All Wrong
I want to take you back to the year 2008, when New York City’s Museum of Sex launched an exhibit on the sex lives of animals. The exhibit ran for a full decade, and I had the chance to check it out about a year or so before it closed in 2018. The Sex Lives of Animals exhibit is, in fact, where I learned that ducks possess massive, corkscrew-like penises. But duck genitalia aside, the Museum of Sex’s intention, nearly 20 years ago, was to reveal the “astonishing array” of sexual behaviors animals routinely engage in, from kissing to hugging to, well, everything else. And definitely not always male-on-female.
As many props as I give the Museum of Sex for teaching me so much about what goes in broad daylight among the literal birds and bees, I also have to acknowledge what a bummer it is that such an exhibit would probably not be permitted in a place where they don’t sell vibrators and lube in the gift shop. And how disappointing it is that the truth about cats and dogs, if you will, has not become more widely accepted.
When it comes to the gender and sexuality of animals, the truth is not only out there — it’s actually been staring us in the face for years. The problem is, mainstream science and society have been slow to move away from the narrative that all animals copulate only for reproduction, any same-sex activity is purely anomalous (and unnatural), and every species is male-dominated. Now, a new documentary called Second Nature: Gender & Sexuality in the Animal World is working to dispel those myths — and, ideally, popularize them to a greater extent.
Narrated by Elliot Page, Second Nature more than does its homework by interviewing a handful of in-the-know scientists who have built lengthy careers studying the diversity of sex and gender behaviors of a range of species, from primates and birds to fish and reptiles. And there certainly is a lot to unpack. In addition to the facts themselves, Second Nature asks a few important questions: Why isn’t this information taught in basic biology classes or included in zoo books? Why do humans insist on projecting their own binary narrative of gender and sexuality — that males are aggressors, females are coy, and sex is only for procreation — onto our animals neighbors?
The answer is pretty simple: in order to understand the world around us, the easiest and simplest thing to do is to apply our societal framework. Historically speaking, those who research and study animals are prone to projecting their ciscentric, patriarchal ideas into animals, despite lots of evidence to the contrary.
Anyway, now that I’ve watched Second Nature, I can rattle off some very cool facts: Dolphins have homosexual sex — a lot — as do penguins and black swans. Also regarding penguins, those seabirds frequently form pair bonds of the same sex to parent little penguin chicks. Bonobo females frequently use sex to resolve conflicts via “genital rubbing,” and males can have sex with each other via “penis fencing.” Bonobos also operate in a matriarchal society. About half of the sex capuchin monkeys have is homosexual.
Speaking of those crazy-dicked ducks, get this: Female ducks possess vaginas with two to three pouches that may lead nowhere; beyond the pouches lies a labyrinthian spiral. When ducks mate, it’s the female who decides which male she’ll allow to deposit sperm in the spiral, but that’s only if she decides to relax her muscles enough. If and when a male duck tries to force himself on a female — and that definitely happens — her vaginal pouches actually prevent the sperm from getting anywhere.
What else? Well, female golden lion tamarins have harems of unrelated males, all of whom she mates with. And I think we all are pretty familiar with the tale of the seahorse, where males become pregnant and give birth.
A lot of this information initially found an audience in Dr. Joan Roughgarden’s 2004 book Evolution’s Rainbow, which looked at evidence from birds, fish, and mammals to push back against the Darwinian sexual selection theory, which proposed that male-male competition, or intrasexual selection, was a method for successful mating. (Basically, the strongest and most aggressive male gets to mate and pass on their genes.) Charles Darwin also proposed that intersexual selection involved females evaluating and choosing males with whom to mate based on specific traits, such as a colorful peacock plumage.
When Roughgarden, a Stanford evolutionary biologist who is prominently featured in Second Nature, argued against these long-accepted Darwinian theories, she was met with some horrific pushback. The reviews were “nasty,” she recalls in the documentary. Other reviews said that there was a “gay agenda” at work. (Dr. Roughgarden is a trans woman.)
We tend to forget that in Victorian England, when Darwin first proposed the theory of evolution, religious leaders weren’t having it. Generally speaking, religious leaders in the 1800s resisted Darwinism because they felt it contradicted the Genesis creation story (though some were comfortable with the idea of Christian Darwinism, which proposes that God utilized biological evolution to create all life). Catholic leadership felt Darwinism could explain physical biology but threatened the existence of unique human souls. Ultimately, leaders in Christianity felt Darwinism reduced human life to something purely mechanical and soulless, and therefore Godless.
It wouldn’t be until the 1870s — nearly two decades after Darwin published On The Origin of Species — that the scientific community and other educated groups widely accepted evolution as fact.
In Second Nature, scientists theorize that Darwin couldn’t help but impose his own heterosexual ideations on animal reproduction, mainly that animals only copulate for the purposes of reproduction, with males being the aggressors and females fluttering their eyelids behind lace fans, or something.
In more recent years, as the scientific community became more diverse, there came a fresh wave of observations about animal behavior and the evolutionary reasons behind them. For instance, social animals like bonobos and chimpanzees use sex as a means of reconciliation, which allows for a peaceful, cooperative existence. (If sex were primarily achieved through aggression, that would probably result in more volatility, injuries, and death, which doesn’t sound ideal for any community’s survival — animal, human, or otherwise.)
“Humans project ourselves onto nature all the time, and have been doing it forever — just look at any myth,” Second Nature director Drew Denny tells Rolling Stone. “We love creating colorful explanations for natural phenomena, but often do so at the peril of totally innocent people. Remember when all left-handed people were controlled by Satan? I bet you know several lefties who are not, in fact, Satanists.”
Denny thinks it would benefit all of us to take a bird’s eye view (pun intended) of history and remember the myriad stories we’ve told each other over the years in an attempt to explain the unexplainable. If humans and our inventions are inherently fallible, then it’s reasonable to figure that our stories are too. “Our little projections — even our longest standing myths — are nothing compared to the billions of years of evolution that have led us to this moment,” Denny says.
Of course, animals don’t really need us to understand the full spectrum of their gender and sexual experiences — they’re all doing just fine living their lives, fencing penises, same-sex pair bonding, and changing sexes in order to preserve their existence. Really, by peddling outdated narratives about the way animals relate to each other will only hurt one species: our own.