FBI probing deaths and disappearances of 10 prime scientists linked to UFO investigation
Bureau director Kash Patel says agents are ‘going to look for connections’ and should they uncover ‘nefarious conduct or conspiracy’ they will make arrests
(Image: Getty Images)
The FBI is probing the deaths and disappearances of at least 10 top scientists linked to UFO investigation.
In what sounds like a plot from TV’s The X-Files all had access to sensitive US government research about mystery craft.
Four worked for NASA – three on the same team.
Two were colleagues at the same national laboratory in New Mexico.
Another – a former senior air force research engineer who has not been seen since he left his home two months ago – was involved in UFO research following his retirement.
The nature of their work – which spans nuclear science, astrophysics and aeronautics – has sparked speculation the cases could be connected.
FBI director Kash Patel said: “We’re going to look for connections.
“If there’s any connection that leads to nefarious conduct or conspiracy this FBI will make the appropriate arrest.”
He said agents would be looking at the scientists’ ‘access to classified information’ and ‘foreign actors’.
James Comer, a US Congressman who sits on the House oversight committee, said: “It’s very unlikely that this is a coincidence.”
He said his committee would be making the mystery ‘one of our priorities’.
Last week it sent letters to the departments of energy and defence, NASA and the FBI seeking information about ‘a possible sinister connection between a string of mysterious deaths and disappearances’.
Congressman Tim Burchett said: “Something dark is going on.
“We’ve got to get to the bottom of it.
“It’s just too much, too much is going on right now.
“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.”
The first death under examination was of 59-year-old Michael David Hicks in 2023.
He had worked at NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory for 25 years specialising in comets and asteroids and had served on the agency’s Deep Space 1 mission in 1998.
The cause of his death has not been publicly disclosed. His daughter Julia has admitted she was ‘shaken’ by the speculation around the cases.
A year later one of Michael’s colleagues Frank Maiwald – a 61-year-old German-born scientist – was found dead in his Los Angeles home.
In 2025 another member of the jet propulsion laboratory Monica Reza vanished while hiking in California. Rescue teams who searched for days could find no trace of her.
Some of her work had reportedly been funded by the US Air Force research laboratory where another of the missing individuals – William Neil McCasland – later became commander.
He vanished in February aged 68 after leaving his house with his hiking boots, wallet and a gun in a leather holster. He left behind his prescription glasses and mobile phone.
His wife Susan wrote on Facebook he’d had ‘access to some highly classified programmes and information’.
His workplace, the Air Force Research Laboratory, is at the Wright-Patterson base in Ohio rumoured to house UFO debris retrieved from the infamous 1947 ‘Roswell incident’.
According to his wife Susan after McCasland retired in 2013 he worked as an unpaid consultant on ‘military and technical/scientific matters’ for Tom DeLonge, the Blink-182 frontman with a keen interest in UFOs.
“It is true that Neil had a brief association with the UFO community,” she wrote.
“This connection is not a reason for someone to abduct Neil.
“Neil does not have any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash stored at Wright-Patt.
“Maybe the best hypothesis is that aliens beamed him up to the mothership.”
Other cases under investigation include two employees from the Los Alamos national laboratory – a leading nuclear research facility in New Mexico – who went missing last year.
Melissa Casias vanished on June 26 while Anthony Chavez was last seen leaving his home on May 4.
Amy Eskridge, 34, the founder of an Alabama-based research group specialising in ‘quantum computing’ and ‘gravity modification’, died in 2022 but the cause has not been disclosed.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist and fusion scientist was fatally shot at his home near Boston in December.
A couple of months later an astrophysicist who worked at the California Institute of Technology was killed in his Los Angeles home.
Also under investigation is the disappearance of Steven Garcia, 48, a US Government contractor who vanished from Albuquerque, New Mexico, last August.
He worked as a property custodian at the Kansas City National Security Campus – which is responsible for manufacturing more than 80% of the components used in the US military’s nuclear weapons arsenal.
Garcia was last seen leaving his home on foot carrying only a handgun – similar to retired General McCasland months later in the same city.
Jason Thomas, 48-year-old, a pharmaceutical researcher at Novartis who had been working on cancer treatments, was found face down in a lake in Massachusetts in March.
His official cause of death has not been confirmed though reports say his parents died in quick succession not long before he went missing.
Officials have also questioned the death of Matthew James Sullivan, a former US Air Force intelligence officer who took his own life in 2024 shortly before he was set to appear in a federal whistleblower case about UFOs.
Congressman Eric Burlison said: “He was scheduled to come in for an interview. Within two weeks he had suspiciously committed suicide.”
US Air Force veteran David Grusch, a former member of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office, said threats and intimidation he had received forced him to blow the whistle on UFO black ops.
The intelligence officer, who told Congress the US Government had captured ‘non-human biologics’ from at least 10 aliens at UFO crash sites, alleged officials `killed people’ who tried to expose the secret.
He told American TV he decided to go public with what he knew about the Government’s close encounters `for my own protection’.
