The FBI said Monday that it would lead an effort to hunt for any possible connections between the seemingly unrelated deaths or disappearances of at least 10 scientists and government workers over the past few years.
The decision comes after online speculation and internet theories linking the deaths caught the attention of President Donald Trump, who said late last week that he’d just left a meeting where the fate of these scientists and workers had been discussed.
“I hope it’s random, but we’re going to know in the next week and a half,” Trump told reporters Thursday. “Pretty serious stuff … hopefully a coincidence, or whatever you want to call it.”
The FBI said Monday it would work with “the Department of Energy, Department of War, and with our state and local law enforcement partners to find answers.”
Also Monday, the House Oversight Committee said it would conduct its own investigation, formally asking for a briefing from the Defense Department, Energy, FBI and NASA on the “disappearance and death of individuals with access to sensitive U.S. scientific information.”
Since 2022, at least 10 scientists with ties to sensitive government projects — including the nation’s nuclear programs, NASA or other sensitive topics — have died or disappeared. While there has been no link between the cases, it has led to growing speculation online that some may have been targeted somehow, either by America’s enemies or in an effort to hide what the government knows about unidentified aerial phenomena.
These discussions, coupled with calls for government action, have been accelerating on Reddit and other social media sites since February, when 68-year-old retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Neil McCasland disappeared from his home in New Mexico.
NASA said in a post on X that it was cooperating with the investigation, but "at this time, nothing related to NASA indicates a national security threat. The agency is committed to transparency and will provide more information as able."
Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said in the days after McCasland went missing that U.S. intelligence agencies had stymied his attempts to find out what happened to the retired Air Force major general and several other prominent scientists and researchers in the U.S. who disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
“The numbers seem very high in these certain areas of research. I think we’d better be paying attention, and I don’t think we should trust our government,” he told the Daily Mail.
McCasland, according to the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office, had donned hiking boots and appeared to have taken his wallet and a .38-caliber revolver with a leather holster before he took off. He left behind his phone and glasses.
It wasn’t long before investigators began hearing speculation that McCasland’s disappearance might have somehow been tied to his former job.
McCasland’s wife, Susan McCasland Wilkerson, addressed that speculation directly in a Facebook post.
“He retired from the [Air Force] almost 13 years ago and has had only very commonly held clearances since,” she wrote. “It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him.”
Wilkerson, and the sheriff’s office, also batted down speculation fanned by conspiracy theorists that McCasland’s disappearance had something to do with UFOs.
McCasland had once volunteered to work with To the Stars, an outfit led by Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge that has published books and released music and a docuseries related to aliens and unidentified flying objects.
Wilkerson said McCasland has no special UFO knowledge. “This connection is not a reason for someone to abduct Neil,” she wrote.
Another case that fueled speculation was the disappearance of Monica Reza, a 60-year-old former NASA scientist and rocket materials expert who was reported missing June 22, 2025, while hiking in the Angeles National Forest. That missing persons case is being investigated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and remains unsolved.
Reza worked with McCasland, but more than a decade ago.
The same agency also investigated the death of renowned California Institute of Technology scientist Carl Johann Grillmair, who was fatally shot Feb. 16. A suspect — who in a previous case was charged with intentional discharge of a rifle — has been arrested, but no motive has been released, which only added tinder to the theories. The 29-year-old suspect is being held pending an arraignment that was postponed until the end of April.
The oldest case that has churned up questions appears to be that of Alabama-based anti-gravity researcher Amy Catherine Eskridge, whose death at age 34 in 2022 was ruled a suicide.
Online theorists also tried to link a case that appears to have already been solved, the killing of 47-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor Nuno Loureiro.
Loureiro was gunned down in December by Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who two days earlier had opened fire at Brown University, officials have said. Neves Valente died by suicide.
The Justice Department has not divulged a motive for why Neves Valente would have targeted Brown, where he had been a graduate student, or Loureiro. Both Loureiro and Neves Valente were from Portugal.
