The Scientists Are DISAPPEARING. Here's What They All Had In Common

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New episodes drop every Wednesday. Into the Dark, where true crime meets the eerie unknown. Every town has a dark side. When something happens once, you can dismiss it as random chance. When it happens twice, you might start to wonder, "When it happens three times," we're talking in the same circumstances, same outcome, same result. That's no longer coincidence, that's a deliberate pattern, and something is being done intentionally. And today, we have six people, all of whom have gone missing without a trace or have wound up dead under mysterious circumstances. And this all happened within the last nine months, and the thing that connects them all is that each and every one of these individuals were working at facilities guarding America's most sensitive information. Hey guys, it's Andrew, and welcome to another episode of Every Town, Where Today. We have a situation unfolding that most certainly deserves a deep dive in. It looks like a good old-fashioned cleaning up of loose ends of sorts. My questions for us then are, "What exactly was in need of such a cleansing and who is behind it all?" Let's get into it. This is Dead or Missing, what's really happening to the scientists who know too much. William McCastlin is not a name you're likely to recognize, but inside the world of American aerospace and defense research, he was a top official. He graduated from the Air Force Academy in '79 with a degree in Astronautical Engineering, then went to MIT for a master's and then came back for a doctorate. This PhD supervisor, the one who sat across from him and guided his most serious academic work, had personally designed the guidance computer for the Apollo program. And so, from the very beginning of his career, McCastlin wasn't just adjacent to America's most serious science, he was right inside it. Now, what followed was a career of more than three decades, spent climbing through increasingly classified corners of the Air Force, director-level positions at the Pentagon and work alongside the National Reconnaissance Office, which is the agency responsible for operating America's spy satellites. It's an organization so secretive that its existence wasn't even publicly acknowledged until 1992. He commanded the Phillips Research Site at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, a facility associated with directed energy weapons and advanced space technologies that most Americans have never heard of and never will. And then in 2011, while he received his final posting, he took command of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base over in Dayton, Ohio. Wright Patterson, as you might know, isn't just any base. In the world of UFO research, it occupies a position something like the Vatican, a place of reverence, a rumor, and of mystery that has persisted for nearly eight decades and shows no sign of fading. It was the home of Project Blue Book, the Air Force's official investigation into reported UFO sightings that ran from the early '50s through 1969. In over the life of that program, investigators logged nearly 13,000 reported sightings, and most of them they could explain away, but 700 and one of them were officially classified as unidentified, and it remains so to this day. And the base has long been rumored to be where physical materials recovered from the 1947 laws well incident were eventually transported and then studied. The Air Force, of course, has always denied this, but the rumors have never gone away. And that's really because researchers, former military personnel, and even people who worked inside it, every once in a while opened their mouths about stuff they had seen or things they've heard. The Macastlin ran the research lab at that base for two years, and to put it into perspective how real of a deal this was, he oversaw combined annual budget of $4.4 billion with a B and a workforce of nearly 11,000 people. When he retired in October of 2013, the general who replaced him said publicly that Macastlin had developed capabilities the country would be relying on for decades, though he said nothing about what those capabilities actually were. After retiring, while he moved into the private sector, director of technology and the defense company in Albuquerque. But somewhere in that post-retirement period, quietly and never on the record, he became involved in Tom DeLong's disclosure project. A source described Macastlin to the New York Post as a gatekeeper and participant in the UFO community, someone who sat at the intersection of what was classified and what the outside world was trying to piece together from fragments. DeLong's "To the Stars" Academy, the organization, those conversations helped shape, later played a direct role in pushing the Pentagon to release authentic Navy footage with unidentified aerial phenomenon 2017. In three videos, in fact, three encounters between Navy pilots and objects that moved in ways no known aircraft could explain. The release of that footage triggered the current wave of congressional UAP hearings and set off a chain of events that reshaped the entire conversation and culminated in 2023, with a former Pentagon official testifying under oath before Congress, the United States government had been operating a secret program to recover and reverse engineer what he described as "non-human craft". And whether you believe that testimony or not, something has genuinely shifted in the last several years, and UFO disclosures move from sketchy internet forms and into formal senate hearings and sworn congressional testimony. And William Macastlin, one of those figures hanging quietly in the background of it all when that shift began. And now comes the first part that is difficult to explain away with coincidence. On February 1st of 2026, six days before he vanished, President Trump publicly announced he was directing the Pentagon and federal agencies to begin releasing government records related to extraterrestrial life in UAPs. And six days later, Macastlin, the man who most certainly could have helped releasing all that information, he walked out of his albacurky home on foot and was never seen again. Now, I hope you're not too desensitized at this point to really let that sink in, because what I just described is not a movie or a conspiracy, it's all factual information that you can look up, and it's only the tip of the iceberg. In terms of what we know about his disappearance, it's this. That morning, a repairman was at his home around 10 a.m., and he spoke briefly with him and left. At 1110, his wife left for a medical appointment. When she returned to 1204, her husband was gone, and she reported a missing at 307 p.m. His wearable device is like smartwatch that had tracking capabilities. What may have gone with him was a red backpack, a 38 caliber revolver, and its leather holster. He also left without his wallet, essentially gone with no way to contact anyone, no way to be tracked, and no way to buy anything. It was a huge search. for this man. They pulled out all the stops and the FBI field office in the area even got involved. But as of the making of this, there have been zero confirmed sightings of William McCastlin since the morning of February 27th. Eight months before McCastlin disappeared on June 22nd, 2025, a woman named Monica Reza went hiking in the Angeles National Forest in the mountains above Los Angeles. The last scene hiking in the Los Angeles Forest with the companion. By all accounts, everything seemed normal that day. She was about 38 feet behind that person. She was hiking with smiling and waving. He turned around. Next thing you know, she was just completely gone. They searched immediately and rescue teams arrived. Helicopters, canine units, and drones. Dozens of agencies combed that mountain for days, and then weeks, and they found nothing. It was not a piece of clothing, not a single footprint, not a physical trace of her anywhere on that terrain. In the case, it was transferred to the LA County Sheriff's Homicide Bureau Missing Person Unit. Monica Reza remains listed as a missing person today. Now, here's who she was. Under her professional name, Monica Jacinto, she spent decades as a technical fellow at AeroJet Rocket Dying, the highest technical rank that the company offers. She co-invented something called Mondaloid, a family of nickel-based super-alloys engineered to withstand the extreme heat and oxygen rich conditions inside rocket engines. The stated purpose of Mondaloid in the Air Force Press release was specific and strategic to eliminate America's dependence on foreign rocket propulsion technology, which really meant to stop relying on Russian-made engines for national security launches, so America could do what it wanted without any other country knowing. When AeroJet Rocket Dying was sold for $4.7 billion to defense contractor L3 Harris in 2023, a Reza moved quietly to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Lakhonada, Flint Ridge, California. And now, here's the question worth sitting with. Who had overseen the government side of the Mondaloid Research Program? Well, it was the Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicle Directorate, commanded during a key period of that work by William McCastland. The scientists who invented the alloy and the general who ran the program that funded it, they both vanished in the American West eight months apart, leaving no physical trace behind. And now this is where things start to ramp up. Just four days after Monica disappeared from that mountain trail, another woman vanished. Her name was Melissa Cassius, and the date was June 26, 2025. As she was an administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, in that place, if you don't know, is one of the most secure and sensitive scientific facilities in the entire United States. It's the birthplace of the atomic bomb. And today, it's where classified research into energy, material science, and national security happens at the highest levels. During World War II, the U.S. government essentially built an entire secret city in the New Mexico Mountains, and population classified, location classified, and purpose classified. And this is Los Alamos. The facility covers nearly 40 square miles. Access is controlled down to the room level. Employees are compartmentalized, meaning most people only know what they need to know for their specific role and nothing more. And Melissa, she worked there. Her role gave her access to sensitive, nuclear research data, and much more. Cassius was the last seen near Tulpa, just southeast of Ranchos de Tals. Her family says all of her belongings, like her wallet, keys, and valuables, were all left inside of her home. Her work and personal phone were also found inside of the home, but reset to manufacturer settings. So not lost or broken, but deliberately wiped clean. Every contact, every message, every piece of data she had stored on those devices was gone. A race before she walked out the door and disappeared. But right now, Melissa Cassius is still missing. So, three people, three disappearances, all of them gone within eight months of each other, all of them connected in one way or another, to the most protected corners of American science and defense. And this next story definitely made the news, but that doesn't mean the answers are all there. In fact, it's quite the opposite. And because of how fast the news cycle is, well, this story is faded into the background and that's likely been done on purpose. On the evening of December 15, 2025, a man named Nuno Lerero was shot in the entry wave as a apartment building in Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. It was transported to a nearby hospital and died early the following morning. Lerero was 47 years old. And born in central Portugal, he had earned a doctorate in physics from Imperial College London. Lerero was a professor of nuclear science, engineering, and physics and also director of MIT's Plasma Science Infusion Center. He was a husband and father of three colleagues in Portugal remembering Lerero as friendly. In January of 2025, just months before he was killed, President Biden personally presented him with the Presidential Early Career Award, the highest honor the US government gives to young scientists. His work was in plasma physics and nuclear fusion, the science of super-heated ionized gas, and how to harness it as a clean, unlimited energy source. Now, fusion is ever cracked at scale. The world's dependence on oil, gas, and coal ends just like that. Lerero was, by the assessment of his colleagues and MIT itself, one of the people most likely to help make that happen. Gunman Claudio Nevis Valente attended the same university in Portugal as Lerero did at the same time in the late 90s. Lerero graduated from the physics program in 2000. That same year, Nevis Valente was let go from his post as a teaching assistant. It was also identified as the suspect in a shooting at Brown University two days earlier, where it injured people before making his way to Brookline. So, was it a personal grudge between old classmates? Perhaps. A man gone crazy, one could be. But also, her crazy man with a possible grudge to get on a plane in Portugal, stake out Lerero's neighborhood on the day they're shooting, well, that takes a certain level of capability, and they would need to be one heck of a grudge. Or what the motive really was, well, that's never been formally established and most likely never well. Claudio died in a storage facility center that night, taking any secrets along with him. Fast forward just eight weeks to February 16th, 2026. At a house in Lano, California, along a remote stretch of desert that sits about 70 miles north east of Los Angeles, just after six in the morning, a 67-year-old man named Karl Grilmer was found on his own porch with a gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead at the scene. And Grilmer was an astrophysicist at Caltech's Infrared Science and Data Center. His colleagues described him as "ingenious" and not as a courtesy, but as a precise description of how his mind worked. His research had contributed to the discovery of water in the atmosphere of a distant planet, affining their pointed toward conditions potentially hospitable to life, less than 160 light years from Earth. He had identified stellar streams in the Milky Way, and vast rivers of stars left behind by the disruption of ancient galaxy clusters, and worked that fundamentally reshaped how astronomers understand the large-scale structures of the cosmos. He led research programs using both the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, and had received a NASA exceptional scientific achievement medal. He is, and I say in the present tense, Karl is irreplaceable because the ingenuity he injected into into his research in astronomy. And where he lived in Lano, this was the kind of place people choose specifically because it's far from everything. Authorities arrested a 29-year-old man, and Freddy Snyder nearby on a car-jacking charge and later charged him with Grilmer's murder. But no motive was ever publicly released, and no explanation of whether Snyder knew Grilmer. There's no confirmation of whether this was a random crime of opportunity or something deliberate, pointing at this specific scientist at this specific house on this specific morning. And that question has never been answered. And now, here's the final case, at least as of right now. The 45-year-old Jason Thomas disappeared back in mid-December. He was lasting in the area of Murray and Chestnut Streets in town. Searchers and leads for the Novartis scientists have come up empty. A Novartis is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the entire world with active research contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense. Thomas' work focused on developing new medicines, including potential treatments for cancer. He was missing for three months, and on March 17th of 2026, his remains were recovered from late Kwanapohit, not far from where he'd last been seen. Authorities did not announce evidence of foul play, and working assumption at least publicly appeared to be that his death was not suspicious. And maybe it wasn't, I mean people go missing. These happen that of no sinister explanation and no connection to anything larger. But the timeline sits uncomfortably alongside everything else in this story. A defense connected pharmaceutical researcher goes missing in December, as remains surface in March, no mode of his offered, no explanation of what happened in those three months. No public accounting are the circumstances that led a 45-year-old man from his life to the bottom of the lake. So quick recap just to lay this all out in sequence for clarity. June 2025, a NASA rocket scientist who co-invented strategic defense materials and worked directly under a program connected to Macastlin vanishes off a hiking trail in daylight, 30 feet from her companions and leaves no trace. Also in June, an administrative assistant, a Los Alamos National Lab, with access to sensitive nuclear research data, vanishes without a trace, and her phones, their white clean. On December 2025, the director of MIT's nuclear fusion laboratory is shot and killed in his home, the motive never established. February 2026, a pioneering astrophysicist is shot dead on his front porch at dawn, no motive released. Also in February, the most prominent figure in the intersection of the U.S. military and the UFO disclosure world vanishes from his home in New Mexico, and is simply never seen again. March 2026, the chemical biologist body surfaces in a Massachusetts lake, no explanation given. Six people, dead or missing, all of them working at the edges of aerospace research, advanced energy, defense technology, and at least one case, definitely the world of UFO disclose closure. Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett has said publicly that he sees a pattern, that the numbers in these specific fields feel unusually high, and that people in Washington need to be paying attention. He also added that he doesn't think the government should be trusted to investigate itself on this. Former assistant FBI director Chris Swecker said his gut goes directly to a foreign intelligence service. Countries like Russia, China, and others have been running programs for decades, specifically designed to acquire American scientific knowledge at the level these people possessed. Things like advanced materials, plasma physics, astrophysical data, propulsion technology, and Swecker noted that in the world of intelligence targeting scientists is not a new strategy. It goes back to the Second World War. In both sides, we're actively hunting each other's physicists and engineers. That's important to remember in this case, because why these people have been killed or disappeared in odd ways probably isn't all tied to UFOs, alien secrets, and Roswell. That's the sensationalized version of events, the ones that grab headlines and your attention. That kind of wording also diminishes the truth and even the lives of all these people lost. UAPs, alien probes, all that stuff. These words alone carry a weight of cultural mockery that makes it genuinely difficult to take this situation seriously, and it's understandable to be skeptical, but it also might be the intention of it all. The question of whether any of this is connected to extraterrestrial phenomena is actually separate from the question that matters most right now. The question that matters most is, would powerful institutions take extreme measures to protect certain kinds of knowledge and silence the people who hold it? Would they actually harm individuals to preserve state secrets, whatever those secrets might be? The last question has a documented answer with a deep history, and the answer is a resounding yes, absolutely. Beyond individuals, targeted killings, and there are many documented examples of those, what's most unsettling isn't the idea that powerful institutions would eliminate a specific person in new too much. It's that they've demonstrated a willingness to harm completely random people. People with no strategic value, no secrets, no leverage, just ordinary civilians going about their lives. If you're willing to do that to strangers, to people who don't matter to you in any way, then removing someone who represents a genuine threat to state secrets is an elite that's almost the easier call. For instance, Operation Lack from the 1950s at the US Army secretly spraying zinc cadmium sulfide over large areas of the American Midwest, including the city of St. Louis, just to test dispersal patterns. Cadmium is a known carcinogen, so what it did to humans and animals down there, well, who knows for sure, but it certainly didn't help them. The government also conducted hundreds of radiation experiments on unsuspecting civilians, including hospital patients, prisoners, and military personnel during the Cold War, because, well, they needed to understand it better. This is a fact, formally acknowledged by President Clinton back in '94. In the 1950s and '60s, the Army released swarms of mosquitoes in residential areas of Georgia and Florida, and they did fleas to test whether insects could be used as biological weapon delivery systems, and nobody in the public truly knows what the results were of that. And speaking of insects, what about Lyme disease? At that first showed up in 1975, an old Lyme Connecticut, which just so happens to be located less than 12 miles from Plum Island. The main attraction there is the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, where they can safely experiment on and research animal diseases. A Lyme came out of nowhere, and what started as a small cluster 50 years ago now has about half a million people per year getting infected, and that number is growing exponentially. And there was this other disease that spread recently, actually all over the world starting in 2020. I can't remember the name, but it may have come from a bat or some animal, or it may have been developed in a lab, it's tough to know for sure. But if the lab leak is true, then it may have been released by accident, but also maybe on purpose. Well, who knows, but I hear there's good money in pharmaceuticals. MK Ultra does people without their consent. For 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service told 400 black men in rural Alabama that they were receiving free treatment for bad blood. And they were actually being observed as their untreated syphilis progressed, and when penicillin became available as a treatment in the 1940s, it was deliberately withheld so the study could continue. Many of them died from a curable disease. Now we could go on and on, but now we're starting to sound silly, so let's bring it back. The point is not. Not that every unexplained death or disappearance is a government operation, it isn't, and most of them aren't. The point is that the instinct to say they would never do that. That instinct has been wrong before and documented confirmed historical ways. And so when six people carry highly sensitive knowledge and aerospace, energy, and defense research, turn up dead or missing inside a year, the question of whether something delivered is happening is not paranoid or fringe conspiracy, it's the exact right question to ask. You're not weird to wonder what's going on. Well, what's going on is strange, and if you don't question the narrative, or lack thereof, well, then you need to pay more attention. So, that's going to do it for this week's episode of Every Town, I appreciate you tuning in. If you're tired of all the ads, well, then go watch our episodes over on Spotify. If you're subscribed to Spotify Premium, you won't get any Spotify ads on my videos, so have at it. Remember to come on back next week for another episode of Every Town filled with scary, strange, mysterious stories, because you never know, maybe your town will be next. Meet new groupy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all-day comfy grip, no tightness, no stickiness, no residue. Try new groupy setting mist from Mabelie, New York.