For Those of You Scoring at Home, the Count of Missing Scientists With America's Most Sensitive Information is Now Up to SIX
FOX. Getty Images.If it's true what they say about how once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, and three times is a pattern, then five ought to be an X-File:
And that's what we've been living with. Two of America's most impressive scientists have gone missing. Retired Major General Neil McCasland, who spend time at Wright Patterson Air Force Base heading up a $2.2 billion research operation believed to be involved in reverse-engineering tech recovered from downed UFOs wandered away from his home in New Mexico, never to be seen again.
Then we found out that Monica Reza, who had developed a metal alloy vital to our rocket program was lost on a hike when she got separated from the people she was with, also never to be seen again.
Then there have two murders. Nuno Loureiro, the director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT, and astrophysicist Carl Grillmair. Both shot and killed in their own homes, with no apparent motive. Then biologist Jason Thomas was found dead by a lake near his home in Wakefield, MA. He had been working on cancer cures for a company with several Pentagon contracts.:
And if five is an X-File, then six ought to be nothing less than a major reason for widespread panic. And that's what the count is now up to:
Source - Melissa Casias has not been seen since June 26, 2025, when her family said she uncharacteristically decided to work from home, but was last spotted miles from their house walking alone without her wallet, phone or keys.
Casias, 54, was an administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), a facility founded by the famed Manhattan Project during World War II. It has been tied to nuclear weapons research ever since.
Her disappearance takes the number of people from the scientific community potentially holding highly sensitive secrets who have gone missing or died since June 2025 to six.
Of those six, five had ties to nuclear research or missile technology and four of them can now be shown to have some type of connection to each other.
Casias went missing just four days after [Reza].
Both women had worked at facilities with ties to [McCasland]. …
Casias and her husband, Mark Casias, both worked at LANL at the time of her disappearance eight months ago.
According to Mark, a superintendent at the lab, Casias had the security badge needed to enter LANL with her when she dropped him off at work that morning.
However, their daughter, Sierra, told investigators that Casias visited the teen's place of work to drop off a sandwich and then claimed she was returning home after forgetting the badge.
The day went from strange to alarming when Casias's supervisor at the nuclear research lab told Mark she had never reported to work or worked from home that day.
When Casias's family returned home, they found that only her work and personal phones had been left behind and wiped clean after someone performed a factory reset on them.
Think about how hard it is in this day and age to simply disappear. Everything we do can be tracked. From phone data, to how many steps we take, to credit card usage, to the fact that pretty much every square inch of civilization is covered by some security camera. Now think about how unheard of it is for anyone to go anywhere without their wallet, phone or keys. Most people don't walk their dog without all three. But Melissa Casias was walking miles from her home with just the clothes on her back and empty pockets.
And, it should be added, a head filled with whatever secrets they share with administrative assistants at Los Alamos.
Now add to that all stuff about forgetting her security key card to get into work, dropping lunch off to her daughter, then saying she was heading home to get her badge, and eeriest of all, her phones being completely wiped? I'll admit it's possible she did this all herself because she wanted to leave home. There's been talk about her being in tough financial straits. But why all the cloak and dagger with her husband and daughter? Why wouldn't she just leave without all the bouncing around? And how does one even disappear on foot in the desert of the southwestern US? I mean, how far would she expect to get before she ended up like the bleached animal bones in a Georgia O'Keefe painting?
Again, what's more alarming than how McCasland, Reza and Casias vanished is who they were. The sorts of work they were involved in. To varying degrees, highly sensitive and top secret projects. And the fact that their work had loose associations with one another's, as well as the researchers who were killed in their own homes, presumably while minding their own business. If six house painters or six Pilates instructors all met similar fates in a short period of time like this, it would be cause for concern. When it's a half dozen brilliant minds involved in research projects that could change the course of human history, we all deserve to be in full panic mode over this.
Giphy Images.