When Scientists Vanish Without a Trace

I want you to imagine this man. He knows almost every secret the United States government has to offer. He's a retired Air Force general, has a PhD from MIT, and throughout his life one of the most notable achievements was that he used to command the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson. Now does that name sound familiar? This is why it's the one that they say recovered debris from the famous Rosswell UFO crash. On the morning of February twenty seventh, twenty twenty six, not that long ago, the sixty eight year old general was at his home, a typical, quiet, heavily populated neighborhood in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sometime around noon, he simply vanished. Investigators arrived and started poking around, finding out that he had left behind a cell phone, smart watch and its prescription glasses, pretty much anything that could be used to track him. There were some peculiar things that were missing and that we assume he had taken with him his wallet, a red backpack, and a thirty eight caliber revolver. A massive search was launched, and I'm saying helicopters, drones, K nine units, police canvassing seven hundred different homes. But here's a. Detail that will give you chills. Even though this was a modern neighborhood saturated with security cameras, rained doorbells and all that, not a single frame of footage caught him leaving his house. Everything pointed out to him simply evaporating like a ghost. But now let's look at the timing. He disappeared exactly eight days after a presidential announcement when that demanded the release of classified government US full files. So here are we talking about a man who cracked under pressure? Or did the man who knew the United States' darkest secret happened to know a little too much. In today's episode, we're going to get to hear about a much requested topic, one that I kept avoiding, and not due to fear, but because I kept thinking that it was just another government distraction. But let me lay out the facts and. I'll let you decide. I'm about to share with you is chilling, but it's still developing. My name is Edwin, and here is a horror story. Before we can talk about the modern mystery of the vanishing scientists, we have to look back to set our baseline, because trust me, we're gonna need it. Targeting the world's most brilliant minds and killing them is not a conspiracy theory or a made up idea from Hollywood. It happens, and we have a documentation and historical accounts to back it up. Sometimes it is the brutal work of foreign intelligence, but other times the details are so bizarre that they border on the paranormal. So let's begin with the things that there can't be an argument for verified, real, true stuff. If you want to stop the technological progress of a country, you don't have to go and bomb their facilities. You instead get rid of the mines that are building them. Like let's look at this one. The Iranian nuclear scientists assassinations. For example, since twenty ten, multiple Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in these highly coordinated, almost I don't know, cinematic attacks, like things from a spy movie. You have quantum field theorist Masud Ali Mohammadi, who was killed when a remote controlled bomb ripped to a parked motorcycle blew up right outside his home in Tehran in twenty twenty. The head of Iran's nuclear program, Mossen Facrisade, was notoriously assassinated by a hear this remote controlled machine gun. Again, this is an ancient history. During the June twenty twenty five Twelve Day War, Israeli airstrikes wiped out out several more top Iranian nuclear scientists, including Freddy Dunabasi and Mohammed Mehdi Terranchi. So keep that in mind. Countries, nation states, or whatever Israel is absolutely hunt scientists. It's a proven effective tactic. But now that we know that scientists are actively hunted, let's look at a case where the geopolitical explanations just stopped making sense and instead this creeping, paranormal kind of dread begins to set in. So let's go to the UK. Between nineteen eighty two and nineteen ninety twenty five British scientists and defense engineers turned up dead under super mysterious circumstances. These were elite, top of the top minds working for GEC Marconi and the Ministry of Defense on highly classified tech including the sting Rates Torpedo Project and the USA Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative. Authorities rolled a lot of these deaths sas suicides or accidents, but when you hear the details they're going to seriously question that twenty four year old computer control system prodigy Vimal da Jibai felt three hundred and thirty one feet to his death from a suspension bridge in nineteen eighty six. But the missing detail here was that he was found with his pants pulled down to his ankles and an unexplained needle puncture wound in his butt. That same year, satellite detection pioneer Arshad Sharif allegedly committed suicide by tying a rope around his neck, looping it around a tree branch, tying the other end to the back of a car, and driving away, essentially decapitating himself. Nineteen eighty seven, a senior scientist named David Sands packed his car with extra cans of gasoline and drove it really fast into an empty cafe. Then it burst into flames. Maybe the most disturbing one here Ministry of Defense researchers Richard Pew and Mark Wisner. They were found dead months apart, both of them with their feet bound and plastic bags over their heads. And what did the corners say? That these were a sexual misadventure and like this many others, I mean twenty five Defense scientists in total died in these theatrically bizarre ways. Was it the KGB maybe some other unseen force operating in the shadows, because to this day not a single person has been charged. Now, I know these are. Stories from around the Cold War era and far away. So let's get a little bit closer. Meet John P. Wheeler, the Third John knew a lot. It was a West Point graduate and a high level Pentagon consultant. In late December twenty ten, Wheeler's behavior took a dark and turn. He was caught on CCTV footage outside of parking garage looking visibly deserved horrified, as if he knew that he was being hunted. He was wandering around without a coat and one of his shoes was ripped open. He was claiming that his briefcase had been stolen, so when a concerned pharmacist offered to call him a taxi to the train station, John simply ran away. On New Year's Eve, his beat up body was found tumbling out of a garbage truck into the Cherry Island landfill in Wilmington, Delaware. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide by a non penetrating blunt force trauma. But here's the even weirder part. He hadn't been robbed. His expensive class ring and watch were still on his corpse. And days before this, John had emailed a friend, Richard Radius, explicitly warning him that the US is not ready for imminent cyber warfare threats. So to John Cee, something of the digital matrix of the US defense that got him and his secrets killed and thrown out with the trash. So there it is our baseline where scientists can get assassinated by rival government defense contractors, suffer impossibly bizarre strings of so called suicides, and Pentagon insiders get beaten to death and thrown in landfills. So hold on to that for now as we fast forward to today, because right now the FBI is actively reviewing a pattern involving Levin or more now brilliant American minds who have recently vanished into thin air or met violent ends, And let me tell you, the details are about to get much much stranger. The world of top secret research can be a dangerous and deadly play. So here we are twenty twenty six. An unsettling list has clawed its way out of the Internet forums and landed right here on the desk of the highest offices in the United States. Eleven American scientists, researchers, and government adjacent workers who have vanished or died under mysterious circumstances, all of them between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty six. The government appears to be. Treating this as a potential threat. In April twenty twenty six, the FBI publicly confirmed it was investigating to see if there are any connections between these cases. The House Oversight Committee you launched a review where they said that there was a high possibility that something sinister was taking place. They even asked a president who said that the situation was pretty serious stuff, adding that he hopes it's random. It was confirmed by the White House Press Secretary. They're reviewing the cases together to see if there are any connections between them. But okay, here's where we can go straight into the rabbit hole and lose ourselves. So let's pause and to look at this with the cold, hard logic brain, because conspiracy is the trick of the brain. After all, Right, we seem to find connections that aren't there, and suddenly, I don't know, the Earth is flat. Medical sociologists Robert Bartholomew and Michael Schrmer, the editor in chief of Skeptic magazine, argue that this effect apothemia, is the psychological tendency for humans to find meaningful links and totally unrelated random events. And that's what's going on here, supposedly. But let's actually look at numbers. They can't lie. Science writer Mick West pointed out that there are over seven hundred thousand people working in top secret, cleared positions right here in the US aerospace nuclear sectors and all that. So when you have that many people working on it over a four year period, hundreds of them might die in accidents, heart disease, even suicide, right, And okay, for the skeptics of us out there, this is a strong point. Now, a lot of these. Cases seemed a little bit forced together, like Michael Hicks, who was a fifty nine year old former planetary scientist who worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Conspiracy theorists point to his undisclosed cause of death, but La Corner says that he sadly died over tyroschlerotic cardiovascular disease aka heart disease. Even his own daughter laughed at the conspiracy, noting that he had a known medical condition already. Then we have Jason Thomas, forty five years old, an assistant director of chemical biology at Novardes. He was reported missing in December twenty twenty five, and his body was found in a Massachusetts lake right there. Months later, the. Medical examiner ruled that he drowned with no foul play, and his wife confirmed that he had been suffering from severe depression after both of his parents passed away. Now there are also cases from Los Alamo's National Laboratory that have been looped into this UFO Scientists narrative. Anthony Chavez was a seventy eight year old retired construction foreman. Melisa Casillas was a fifty three year old administrative assistant dealing with severe financial stress, and police say that she likely walked away from her own problems. Now, these aren't elite aerospace physicists hiding alien technology, just regular people working support roles who faced personal tragedies. And that's true. I mean, for this part of the list at least, here's a problem. What happens when you remove the noise, the depression, heart attacks, and ignore unrelated accidents, because the remaining cases absolutely do not make any sense. Yet, cases where elite scientists vanished off the face of the earth a government panic that can can't be explained by saying that it's only a coincidence. Even if only two of these cases are connected, we're looking at one of the greatest national security breaches in modern history. So let's look at this again. They say that half of the cases are tragic but normal occurrences. Okay, what about the other ones, right, So let's look at the two most mysterious ones. One of them I already told you about in the beginning. These two people had lives that orbited the most highly classified aerospace and defense projects in the United States, and their vanishings feel like something out of a science fiction nightmare. So here's a case of doctor Monica jacinto Resa. She was sixty years old and an aerospace engineer and metallurgist, a materials kind of engineer who studies and develops metals and alloys. You see, for decades, the. US military had to rely on Russian r D one eighty rocket engines for sensitive national security space launches because US scientists couldn't find a metal strong enough to survive the extreme pressure of an oxygen rich combustion engine without burning up. But doctor Rezza and her colleague cracked the code. They invented a super alloy called Mondaloi, which solved that problem. One of the hardest ones in modern American rocketry. Her work that the US built its own engines and stopped relying on a geopolitical rival well. On the morning of June twenty second, twenty twenty five, doctor Rezza went for a hike with friends near Mount Watermen in the Los Angeles National Forest. Her friend walked just a few steps ahead of her, turned around, and she was gone. They started a massive search, scarring the area for eight days by land and by air, helicopters drones, and they theorized that she could have been taken by a mountain lion, but no remains or dens were found. Also, the billion searchers noted that the terrain, even though it was steep, it wasn't steep enough for a fatal fall that would completely hide a body. The only trace of doctor Reza ever found was her visor and her beanie, who were discovered about four hundred yards off the trail. Eerily, though photographs that were taken earlier that same morning showed her beanie securely tucked into her hip belt. To this day, the woman who built the skin of our most advanced rockets remains missing. Now, losing an elite scientist on a mountain is strange enough, but it's when you look at her next case that the true terrifying part of this mystery comes into focus. And it's the man we talked about in the beginning of this episode, retired Air Force Major General William Neil mccaslan. He was sixty eight years old, MITP Astronautical Engineering formal Director of Special Programs at the Pentagon. This guy knew a lot in that role. He oversaw acquisition Special Access programs, the absolute highest, most classified tier of black projects in the Department of Defense. A strange coincidence here at that same laboratory, the Air Force Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, was the same organization that helped fund doctor Reza's Mondaloit project. But anyway, at eleven ten am, his wife, Susan left for a medical appointment and came back less than an hour later, and that's when she couldn't find them. Now, I hinted at the UFO connection here, so I'll give you the rest. In twenty sixteen, the Wiki Leaks dumped the hacked emails of political operative John Podesta, and in there it was an email from Tom Delaune, the musician that co founded the To the Stars Academy to push for UFO disclosure, and that email, Tom explicitly names General McCasland, saying that the General knew all about the roswell debris that were shipped to Wright Patterson and he had been secretly advising his disclosure team for months. That's when the President demanded that the UFO files start being released, not the Epstein files everyone has been asking for. This is why I was hesitating and to talk about this, because it does seem a little bit like, come on, we're releasing all this other stuff, but not what we're asking for anyway. Still, that's when the man who was rumored to know exactly what was happening suddenly vanished without a trace. Now are these tragic, isolated strings of coincidences, or are we looking at a shadow war to silence the few minds on Earth who actually know what is hiding in the dark. So we have those two individuals who disappeared while their work was at their absolute core of the American defense establishment. But now we have to push past that edge of reality and step into the territory of directed energy weapons, censored telescopes, and cosmic cover ups. We'll begin with Amy Eskridge, thirty four year old researcher based in Huntsville, Alabama and the co founder of the Institute of for Exotic Science. Her work was focused on advanced repulsion, zero point energy, and anti gravity technology. On Juni eleven, twenty two, she was found dead. Authority said that her death was a suicide by a self inflicted gunshot wound, and her family asked the public not to look into it as she had suffered from chronic pain, saying that scientists also. Die, just like other people. But the Internet had other ideas and they have some reasoning behind it too. You see. Toward the end of her life, Amy became extremely paranoid, and she was documenting this all for like TikTok and Instagram and stuff. She was believing that she was being stocked, she was being surveilled because of her anti gravity work, and about a month before her death, she recorded a video showing burns on her hands, explicitly claiming that she had been attacked by directed energy weapons. A friend reported that she left a chilling message before her death, saying, if you see any report that I killed myself, I most definitely did not. But was this the tragic mental health crisis made worse by chronic pain? Or did that anti gravity researcher get silenced by the weaponry that she was warning people about. It was really sad. Amy story was about what was happening here on Earth, But our next case is about what is happening in the skies above us. Enter Carl Grillmer. He was a. Brilliant sixty seven year old Caltech astronomer and asked stro physicist who dedicated his life to mapping the structure of the Milky Way, was tracking dark matter and studying exoplanets. On February sixteenth, twenty twenty six, Carl was shot to death on the front porch of his rural home in Yano, California, a secluded area in the Antelope Valley where he built his own personal observatory. Suspect was arrested right away. He was a twenty nine year old neighbor named Freddie Snyder, who already had a long rap sheet, But the backstory is unsettling. Two months before the murder, Carl called the police because Freddy was trespassing on his property and he was carrying a loaded, unregistered rifle. Freddy said that he was just walking to the post office, even though it was later found out that the post office was in the opposite direction. Still, Freddy was released and asked to take a gun safety course, and two months later he returned and killed Carl. But Carl's widow told everyone want to stop spreading these absolute nonsense conspiracy theories, saying that he would laugh at them if he were alive. But okay, let's look at what he. Was working on before his death. The Vera Reuben Observatory. Now, this is the most powerful sky surveillance instrument ever built, taking over one thousand images at night, covering the entire Southern Hemisphere, and is perfectly positioned to detect interstellar objects or anomalies going across our solar system. But here's a verified factual detail that makes it so scary. Every single image captured by the Vera Reuben Observatory must be approved by the Pentagon before astronomers are allowed. To see it. Now, when the telescope takes a picture, the file is encrypted and sent to a secure facility in California. There an automated system filters out small sized pictures that might have fix classified US spy satellites or secret military assets. There are many other surveys that get censored, like massive censorship by the Air Force. So what happens if an astronomer like carl One that is trained to spot the faintest anomalies in the stars see something slip the cracks? So what has been happening here? The first theory is that there is a foreign enemy like China, Russia or Iran that are killing our scientists. And then there's a deep state clean up theory where they say that a shadowy part of the US intelligence is quietly killing off whistleblowers. And then there's a third theory, the one that I like the most, even though it takes some work for us to actually believe it. Now, there's a famous Chinese science fiction novel called The Three Body Problem. In the book, humanity is facing an impending invasion from extraterrestrials. Now the aliens know humanities. Tech advances too rapidly, so in order to conquer Earth. They admit that they have to stop or under standing of physics, and how do they do it? They monitor, sabotage, or kill our brightest scientists. They say that during the Bush administration, key players in the federal government were asked to read that book. There's even a widely circulated story about President Obama and Pearl DRAMs singer Eddie Vedder where they are sitting around a campfire and Eddie pressed Obama on the true nature of reality, wanting to know how the world really works at the highest level. The alleged answer read the three body problem. Why is it that the UFO phenomenon always seem to cluster around the technologies that define our strategic power? Are these vanishing scientists actually vanishing or are we just looking around to satisfy our need for conspiracy theories? Why would the ones leading the way seemingly vanish into thin air? So next time you look up at the stars yourself, who else is out there looking back? What do they do to the people who see too much? Or why would people living here on earth with us be trying to hide it? One thing I kept thinking throughout the whole research process for this episode was how I don't know if I've ever talked to you about this in a previous episode, but how aliens might be among us already, like they might be just disguised as regular people. Also the idea of the men in black that seem to show up whenever we have people who learn about UFOs and learn a little too much to theories about aliens living underground in the ocean and volcanoes, all these things. And there's a lot of theories out there. I mean, I've found some pretty like out there ones, some that say that aliens do make contact with administrations of nations, like governments, they make deals, they give you know, knowledge of certain things, and that they're trying to stop whenever there's we're close to a war that can end everybody's life on the planet, they seem to intervene. How true is that, I don't know. I found it particularly intriguing thinking of all that, of all that stuff, But I'm curious to know your thoughts on what's happening here. Also considering that, you know, looking at the actual numbers, seven hundred thousand people working in these top secret things and only what eleven of them going through these mysterious debts. Then we suddenly come up with this list. At first, when I found out about missing scientists, I thought that they were like in recent times, like you know, within I don't know, a few months, all these sciences are suddenly going missing. But then I found out they were actually summing them up like that. And I don't know, but you know, there was a recent one that came out and other death and I was all these other people started talking about it, and I was listening on it. I was watching all the reports on it, and it is pretty bizarre. But I don't know if we're reaching for it or if it's actually time to be concerned about this stuff. It is really eerie, though, and it's an interesting story. Again, I'm still very very careful that this isn't some type of distraction from something else that's going on, because suddenly everything seems to go wrong. They try to throw a virus at us to see if, like suddenly we panic the economy is going nuts, as in really bad, and we have all these other things to talk about, and I feel like they're trying to distract us from something. But yeah, I found this very very cool to learn about and I'm going to keep track of everything that's going on just to see if anything changes, So keep you stay open to any more development with with with these stories. If you have any ideas for upcoming stories, upcoming episodes, please let me know. We have a couple of good ones coming up and very interested in finding out what you're interested in so we can move them forward past pass them along. Heard about an idea today about the Salt Lake City, Utah and its history and it's haunted history actually, so we might be looking into that. Bet you hadn't heard about that, like if you're outside of Utah. But anyway, this episode of Horror Story was written and produced by me Edwin Kovar Rubiez and a huge shout out to our scary plus members over at scaryplus dot com who helped make this episode possible, actually all this podcast possible, so thank you so much for that. If you want to support the show, go to scaryplus dot com. You can sign up there. You get ad free episodes. You also get early released episodes when they're available, additional commentary on some episodes. Actually, and if you can't or you don't want to sign up for another subscription. You can also just either drop a review somewhere five stars, leave a comment, interact with the podcast somehow, and that really really helps, so I appreciate that. But anyway, that's all I got for you. Thank you so much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.