Why America’s Top Scientists Are Going Missing [They Knew Too Much…]

This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. Star Wars, The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney+. What are you waiting for? Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney+. This is the way. Our only chance is to work together. I like this kid. Always wear your seatbelt. Star Wars, The Mandalorian and Grogu, now streaming on Disney+. Read PG-13. What do you call it when a retired Air Force general, one who once ran the most notorious lab in UFO history, vanishes from his house in broad daylight? The general was involved with the Pentagon's most advanced aerospace research. When the NASA material scientist behind a breakthrough rocket engine alloy disappears 30 feet from her friend on a hike. She was right behind them, 30 feet behind them, and then she disappeared. When one of MIT's top plasma physicists is gunned down outside his own front door. This many top scientists getting killed or going missing in just under a year looks like a major red flag. Who were the first people the Israelis killed in Iran when they went in? The first thing you do is kill your scientists. It's the kind of thing that sounds like the Chinese science fiction book, The Three-Body Problem. A world where scientists don't just make discoveries, but become the front line of a war they don't even know they're in. A world where the future rests on some of the most important minds on Earth. And those minds start disappearing. Except here, the names and the people behind them are real. "Gacias went missing after taking lunch to her teenage daughter at a cafe in Taos Plaza." "Some of them were very important people, and we're going to look at it over the next couple of weeks." What we're looking at might not just be geopolitics in the dark or pressure coming from nation states, but from an unseen force shaping our timeline from somewhere above it, and a hidden struggle over who gets to control humanity's next leap. Or maybe none of these cases are connected. "It's really sensitive stuff, and I'm not a big believer in coincidences." So tonight, we're following the trail through missing scientists, murdered physicists, defense-world gatekeepers, in this strange shadowland that forms wherever advanced knowledge becomes too dangerous to leave walking around. There's a state that researchers call hypnagogia. That threshold between waking and sleep where the brain is doing something genuinely unusual. We'll talk about that in a moment, but before we do, let's take a look at some of the most interesting stories we've had on this show. Since moving to Austin, sleep is something I've thought about a lot more, mostly because I'm not really doing it. That is, until recently. I used to sleep on whatever mattress I'd had for years, and it was clearly not helping me get the sleep I need. Then I did a comprehensive search, and I learned that most mattresses are kind of lame, and a total insomniac fraud. My insomniac friend of mine told me that he tried Helix, and it fixed all of his issues. Helix is the mattress of the future. They have a sleep quiz that matches you to the right mattress based on your sleep position, your body type, and whether you sleep hot or cold. I got matched with the Helix Midnight. It has a cooling cover, which I know is going to matter a lot in these extremely hot Austin summer days. When I started using it, the change hit immediately. I'm waking up feeling like I actually recovered overnight. For someone who does 4- and 5-hour interviews, sleep is maybe the most important thing for me to dial in. Ask any health or biohacking expert, and it's the number one thing that impacts the rest of your life. Helix has 20+ mattresses, free shipping, a 120-night trial, and a lifetime warranty. And Helix's Midnight Luxe was ranked best overall mattress by both Forbes and Wired. Thank you so much to Helix Sleep for sponsoring today's episode. Visit HelixSleep.com for more information. I'll see you next time. HelixSleep.com/JessieMichaels to take advantage of their Spring Savings Event and get 20% off site-wide. And 20% is a lot when it comes to mattresses. Again, that's HelixSleep.com/JessieMichaels, Michael's with no A. The Trail begins in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the shadow of Sandia Mountains. It's February 27th, 2026, a late Friday morning on Quail Run Court. Neal McCasland, a 68-year-old retired Air Force general, is at home in a quiet neighborhood at the edge of the Cibola National Forest. A repairman sees him at the house around 10:00 a.m. Then, about an hour later, around 11:10 a.m. his wife leaves for a medical appointment. At 12:04, barely an hour after that, she's back home. But her husband is gone. Left behind are his prescription glasses, his phone which had been switched off, and his smartwatch, all the things that would make him trackable in the 21st century. But what's missing is a red backpack, his wallet, and a.38 caliber revolver with its holster. Not the best combination. At 3:07, his wife Susan reports him missing and the official police investigation begins. In a newly released 911 call, she tells the dispatcher he's been gone for about three hours. "I have some indication that he must have planned not to be found." She said he changed his clothes and appears to be on foot since none of their cars or bikes were missing. She also tells dispatch that he's been dealing with some medical issues and that both of them were seeing a doctor for anxiety, lack of sleep, and short-term memory problems. In fact, it was the same doctor she had seen earlier that day. But Susan chalked the health issues up to garden-variety things that you face in old age. She never thought that Neal would actually act in a way to harm himself. "If his brain and body keeps deteriorating, he didn't want to live like that, but it seemed to me that was just a man-I-hate-how-this-is-good-to-me situation." "No, it's not." A comment like that would naturally raise concerns about self-harm, but whether that was a real risk or just a throwaway comment on an off day, we don't actually know. When the police asked about the weapons, she said that her husband had a gun safe with multiple pistols and rifles, but at that moment couldn't tell whether anything was actually missing, although now we know that one of his.38 calibers was in fact gone. The next day, a silver alert goes out. This is the kind of state-wide alert issued when authorities think a missing person might be disoriented or cognitively impaired. New Mexico's state statute doesn't require any kind of formal diagnosis. Given what Susan had already told the police, that was enough to trigger it. But even with those reported issues, McCasland still doesn't fit the profile of a man who just wandered into a canyon. "Investigators say he's still highly intelligent and capable." "He's still highly intelligent and capable." The week before he disappeared, McCasland cycled 60 miles. He hiked those very foothills. He biked them. He knew every trail. This wasn't a man losing his bearings but the kind of guy who could out-ski most millennials. This was also a town he knew by heart. McCasland once commanded the Phillips Research Site at Kirtland, an Air Force base notorious for hosting advanced weapons research right nearby. He wasn't a stranger to this place. It was basically his backyard. His wife would also issue another statement, saying McCasland had some risk, but not from dementia. He was not confused and disoriented. But a clear head didn't make him any easier to find. The Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office said that they had surveillance footage from both ends of his street and still couldn't confirm his direction of travel. They made public appeals for doorbell cameras, dash cams, GoPros, anything. "If you have any information where McCasland may be, contact BCSO.com." Within the span of a week, the search expanded from the Sheriff's Office, to the FBI's Albuquerque Field Office, to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, New Mexico State Search and Rescue, Albuquerque Mountain Rescue, horseback teams, three types of search dogs, drones, helicopters, and neighborhood canvassing. And despite living in an era with enough cameras to catch almost every delivery on the block in which he lived, no footage of him ever surfaced. Police accessed his electronic devices and searched his usual hiking spots, like the Domingo Baca Canyon. But there was still no trace of him. After weeks, all they could find was a gray Air Force sweatshirt a mile east of his house. And even after testing it, they couldn't confirm it was McCasland's. So we're talking about a regimented, physically active military vet who vanished from his house without leaving a single digital or physical fingerprint behind. That alone is strange. But it gets stranger once you understand who McCasland actually was and the world he came out of. General McCasland, his disappearance was discussed. UAPs were discussed. So I don't think this story is going away, Jesse. This was a man who spent his career deep in the black world of American defense. When you read his official Air Force biography, you realize he had access to things that the rest of us aren't even supposed to know exist. The foundation of the American military is the fact that McCasland was a military man. The foundation for that kind of clearance started when he graduated from the Air Force Academy, earned a Ph.D. in astronautical engineering from MIT on a Hertz Foundation fellowship, and later studied at Harvard's Kennedy School. He went on to lead the Space-Based Laser Project office, served as vice commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center, was the materiel wing director at the Air Force Research Lab's Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland, and spent part of his career in the National Reconnaissance Office, the world of black, off-the-record satellites. His career spanned everything from directed energy, to space weapons, to nuclear oversight. You probably get the point. This was a man who could out-credential most presidents, and probably had more access than them, too. And there are two jobs on his resume that matter more than the rest. From June 2009 to May 2011, McCasland served as director of special programs at the Pentagon, in the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisitions, Technology, and Logistics. The title is a mouthful, but according to the official Pentagon training documentation, that office oversees acquisition special access programs. These programs are the ultimate category of secret black projects. In fact, they account for about 75 to 80 percent of all special access programs in the Department of War. These are the programs built to protect the Crown Jewels. Extremely sensitive research in the process of building something, like a next-generation weapons system, or a craft that doesn't officially exist. This is where sensitive technology moves from theory, to prototype, to something that the military can actually fly. And if you're wondering where UFO reverse engineering programs would possibly hide, this is the place. In the classified world, McCasland's office was the motherlode. His Wikipedia page goes a step further, claiming that the role made him executive secretary of the Special Access Program Oversight Committee, the body that reviews and approves every single special access program in the Pentagon. But that's not even the most interesting job on his resume. From 2011 to 2013, McCasland commanded the Air Force research lab AFRL at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, overseeing a $2.2 billion science and technology portfolio. One of the largest research operations in the entire Pentagon. Advanced material science, future weapons, and of course, exotic propulsion. And if you're familiar with UFO lore, you also know that Wright-Patterson isn't just famous for Project Blue Book. It's the alleged home of the Roswell crash debris. "I call Curtis" "Curtis LeMay and I said, General, I know we have a room at Wright-Patterson where you put all this secret stuff. Can I go in there? I've never heard him get mad, but he got madder than hell at me." Depending on who you believe, this place houses some of the most exotic materials in the history of the U.S. government. It's the place where they get studied, stored, reverse engineered, and obsessively hidden from public view. That's not even a conspiracy. This is the place during World War II where the U.S. would reverse engineer advanced Nazi tech. And General Neil McCasland ran the entire thing. That's new. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, and availability varies 18 plus. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney Plus. Hop on. The must-see galactic adventure comes home on Disney Plus. This is the way. I like this kid. Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu, now streaming on Disney Plus. Rated PG-13. But what really put him on the radar of UFO World is that his name showed up somewhere no one expected. In 2016, WikiLeaks published the hacked emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and the campaign chairman, and one of the most powerful political operatives in Washington. Buried in that email dump is an email from Tom DeLonge to Podesta. The subject line, General McCasland. DeLonge writes, He mentioned he's a skeptic. He's not. I've been working with him for four months. I've just got done giving him a four-hour presentation on the entire project a few weeks ago. He tells Podesta that McCasland just has to say that out loud. Because he is very, very aware. Because he was the man in charge of all of this stuff. When Roswell crashed, they shipped it to the laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. General McCasland was in charge of that exact laboratory up to a couple years ago. He not only knows what I'm trying to achieve, he helped assemble my advisory team. He's a very important man. DeLonge was after UFO disclosure for the American people. That's the whole point of To the Stars Academy. General McCasland, who was a member of the Star Wars Academy, was a member of the Star Wars Academy as well. The fact that McCasland being involved in those early efforts is a big deal. Some people try to dismiss Tom DeLonge and say that he was never in touch with Neal McCasland. After all, these leaked emails were never publicly confirmed. But even his wife Susan would come to acknowledge that McCasland was caught up in the Russian hack and had less contact with Tom after the emails were released. Key word here, less, not zero. And she's implicitly admitting that they were in close contact previously. In fact, in that same email batch that leaked, a calendar notification shows that Susan herself accepted a Google Calendar invite for something called a DeLonge-Podesta meeting. So at minimum, McCasland and his wife were in the room for conversations about UFO disclosure. We're not talking about a 4chan thread here. We're talking about Podesta's actual inbox. And as for Susan McCasland, she has a quite impressive background herself. She's a PhD astrophysicist, a colonel in the Air Force Reserve. She was a NASA astronaut semifinalist and had stints at both Boeing and Raytheon. She might even have her own clearance history. After McCasland disappeared, she told the press that he only held commonly held clearances since retirement. Maybe. But a man who spent his career this deep in the black world likely saw the full portfolio. And you don't really unsee that. Susan later made a statement on Facebook. She wrote, But it's undeniable that the phrasing is odd. She doesn't say Roswell material doesn't exist at Wright-Patterson. She just says McCasland doesn't have any special knowledge about it. An event that, mind you, has been reported on ad nauseum in the open source world. So she might just be saying there's nothing that Neil McCasland knows about Roswell that you, the public, don't already know. Now look, any reasonable person should be hesitant to parse or speculate on the words of a grieving wife. And Susan and Neil deserve all of our thoughts and prayers. But also, to any reasonable person, these words almost feel like a cipher to decode. An invitation to speculate. Just a little bit. And the statement ended up provoking just that. They spurred a lot of public speculation. If anything, the internet theorizing went into overdrive. I do think that there are secrets that obviously will not be released because we have technologies that other nations don't and just see the superiority of our forces right now with Iran. Had McCasland been quietly folded into some continuity of government program? Or taken into protective custody in preparation for the war with Iran? Had he been taken by a foreign adversary that understood exactly how valuable he was? People in UFO World associate McCasland with the Majestic 12, an elite and top-secret presidential advisory panel dating back to Truman and Eisenhower that deals with the UFO topic. There are a lot of reasonable questions as to whether this Majestic 12 committee ever really existed. But perhaps the person deepest on the UFO truth, at least from the government perspective that we know about over the last 70 years, is a guy named Colonel John Alexander. And at one point he admitted that the Majestic 12 was basically just a cover for continuity of government programs. People in the military-industrial complex, where if the president and his direct cabinet were incapacitated, they would take over. To be honest, McCasland sounds like he squarely fits that profile. Theories around his disappearance kept multiplying, and the timing of all of this didn't help either. In the summer of 2025, the mainstream Italian magazine Le Espresso published an article from a confidential source. It claimed that President Trump was wrestling control of special access programs away from the Pentagon and under the command of the White House, a move that supposedly sparked tensions between military leaders and some of the president's advisers. The article goes on to mention Project Preserve Destiny, a program involving communications with non-human intelligence housed under the National Security Agency, or NSA. The program involves some of the best of the best. "It has some of the most bizarre protocols and has some of the most profound implications of anything we've ever covered on this show. Just listen to the experience of Air Force Sergeant Dan Sherman. This is what he was told the program was about." "The genesis of it was in 1947, we came in contact with an alien species, and in 1960 they started a project, it was called Project Preserve Destiny, and it was designed to genetically manage fetuses, human fetuses, so that they would have the heightened ability to do this particular thing that I was going to school for. My mother was one of the selected targets, or whatever you want to call it." And on the night of February 19th, 2026, Trump announced on Truth Social that he was directing the Pentagon and other agencies to begin identifying and releasing government files related to aliens and the UAP phenomenon. "Trump is always shooting from the hip, you don't really get the sense that that post was planned. And you have to think, if a UFO legacy program does in fact exist, they were thinking deeply about their most important personnel." Eight days after that announcement, McCaslin vanished from his neighborhood. I'm not going to pretend I know what this means, and I'm not saying that Trump's announcement is the reason he disappeared, but the timing is a data point, there could be a few reasons. There are two reasons why that timing is important. "Neil McCaslin, I mean you have to wonder the timing, President Trump saying I'm going to release these files, and then six days later, Neal McCaslin goes missing." If McCaslin was involved in these programs and felt he could be implicated in any way, the release of these UFO files could have been a pressure point, maybe enough to make him crack and disappear into the wilderness. This also could have explained the deep anxiety leading up to that moment. Maybe the intense hiking and biking was to relieve stress. What many online are saying is the most simple explanation for McCaslin's disappearance is that he walked into the Sandia foothills with his gun, and that whatever was in his head after a lifetime near the most secretive programs in the country simply became too much to carry, a burden too great to bear. The fact that he changed his clothes before leaving, making it harder to identify what he was wearing, adds to that theory. But after weeks of searching terrain that experienced teams covered repeatedly, they haven't found a body. So the opposite could also be true. This was a man who was already involved with early disclosure efforts. McCaslin wasn't hiding from transparency, if anything he was working toward it. And that makes him quite dangerous and a liability to the people who don't want disclosure. To them, this is the law. It's the last person you'd ever want to put on the witness stand. He was a man who saw behind the curtain and knew exactly what was hanging there. Harvard lawyer and civil rights activist Danny Sheehan, the constitutional lawyer behind the Pentagon Papers, recently went on the Third Eyedrops podcast with my buddy Michael Phillip and described what he calls the "association." "There has arisen an insurgency group that has occupied extremely high positions in the defense department, inside the Central Intelligence Agency, inside some of the private aerospace corporations, and inside the military services, and I happen to know who they are. And what they've done is they've formed an association, and they're working to try to drag the program back into the government." This is a covert circle of 24 retired high-ranking officials, from the DOD to the FBI and the CIA and private aerospace, a secret brain trust quietly working to drag classified UAP programs back into the light of government oversight and towards transparency. They're all retired, and they all took their Rolodexes and credibility with them. So did McCasland have his own little black book? Was he one of those 24? We don't actually know, but he does fit the profile: retired, credentialed, connected, and sympathetic to justice. He's a very good example of a man who's been in the military for a long time. He's been in the military for a long time. For one of the most intensive searches in recent New Mexico history, the absence of evidence is bizarre. But it might be a data point unto itself that points to someone who's sophisticated, who knows how to work the blind spots. And McCasland isn't the first to vanish. Congressman from Tennessee, Tim Burchette, has been trying to get answers himself, but claims that some of our intelligence agencies are actively stonewalling his attempts to investigate why our top researchers are disappearing at such a high rate. He told the Daily Mail that 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." - I had a T-shirt on my merchantforcongress.com website that said more people believe in UFOs than believe in Congress, and it sold out. So, I mean, there's something going on out there, brother. - But while Burchette was looking for answers in Washington, the internet was doing its own digging. After his story broke, an online manhunt zeroed in on a potential smoking gun, an ex-account called TMB Spaceships. The account posts about plasma propulsion and spacecraft systems, but hasn't posted since February 27th, the day McCasland disappeared. I looked into it. Its account claims that in 1991, its owner was attending the University of Texas as a U.S. Air Force Butter Bar electrical engineer, which is slang for a newly commissioned second lieutenant, except McCasland reached second lieutenant on May 30th, 1979, and by April 1991, he had reached lieutenant colonel. His official Air Force biography also puts him in Los Angeles from 1988 to 1992, not Texas. The account also mentions a brother-in-law who spent 40 years in navigation and started working for Texas Instruments in the 1950s. But the only McCasland brother-in-law we could actually verify doesn't fit that profile. Based on these posts, the user behind the account doesn't appear to be McCasland. While the internet was busy trying to unmask this ex-account, the real story was hiding in plain sight. Today's episode is sponsored by Incogni. Something that comes up a lot when I talk to UFO whistleblowers, physicists, and researchers who work on sensitive projects is how carefully they have to manage their digital footprint. Most people have no idea how much of their personal information is sitting on sites they've never heard of. Personal phone numbers, addresses, family members' names, all collected without your knowledge and sold to anyone willing to pay for it. That's what got me first using Incogni about a year ago. They go after data brokers directly and get your information removed immediately, not just buried, actually deleted, and they keep following up until it's confirmed. The feature I found most interesting and I find most useful is custom removals. If you find your information on some random people finder site, you paste the link into your dashboard and their privacy experts immediately handle the takedown. You get unlimited submissions and they completely eliminate the back and forth you'd usually have to deal with to get your information removed from these sketchy websites. Take your personal data back now with Incogni. Use code AmericanAlchemy at incogni.com/americanalchemy for 60% off an annual plan. Again, that's 60% off if you sign up with our code today. I'm also including a link in the description. When you dig into the $2.2 billion science and technology portfolio McCasland oversaw at the Air Force Research Lab, you'll find a thread that leads somewhere specific. And that thread is metal. A super alloy of metal, co-invented by another missing scientist. Monica Jacinto Reza. Monica worked in one of the most brutal corners of propulsion science. An age-old limitation had kept advanced rocket propulsion pinned down by the same ugly problem. If you want to get heavy satellites into orbit, you need a high-pressure, oxygen-rich environment. The metallic alloys strong enough to hold the engine together in these situations would go up in flames. And the alloys that didn't catch on fire were too weak to trust with the guts of an engine. So the U.S. military needed to find a sweet spot, but nobody could find one. So we were forced to rely on the Russian RD-180 engine for sensitive national security space launches. This meant that during the Cold War, we were literally stuck buying defense hardware for the most sensitive missions from our biggest geopolitical rival. ♪ ♪ The stalemate finally shattered in the 1990s thanks to the hard work of Dallas Hardwick and Monica Reza at the Rockwell Science Center. They engineered a nickel-based alloy tough enough to survive the crushing pressure, but stable enough to not go up in flames or fracture in an oxygen-rich hellscape. They named this super metal Mondolloy. The first three letters of each of their names fused into one. By 1999, the Air Force Research Laboratory, or AFRL, began co-funding their work. The same Air Force Research Laboratory that was later headed up by Neal McCaslin. Monica told Space News that over the next two decades and after multiple Air Force and NASA contracts, the metal she created was eventually scaled into a family of super alloys, Mondolloy 100 and 200, each engineered for different temperature and pressure conditions. ♪ ♪ This was the vital national security hardware, that would allow us to stop relying on Russia. Fast forward, and Mondolloy ends up in kerosene-fueled AR-1 engines, Rocketdyne's US-built replacement for the Russian RD-180. Then in May of 2011, none other than Neal McCaslin came to Wright-Patterson as the new commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory while the Mondolloy program was still active. And Monica's co-inventor, Dallas Hardwick, who had been at Wright-Patterson since the year 2000, was right there alongside him, embedded in the lab's materials directorate until her retirement in 2012. This was the exact place where Mondolloy 200 was co-developed. In fact, a National Academies report shows the Mondolloy partnership was shared between the Air Force Research Laboratory and Monica's team at Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, which later became Aerojet Rocketdyne. The Air Force knew that mastering materials like Mondolloy could shape the future. And at Wright-Patterson, cutting-edge science has long been rumored to blur into the unexplained. But there's a long and much weirder history of exotic metallurgy coming out of Wright-Patterson. And this is where the story goes somewhere familiar. Some researchers connect Mondolloy to a specific lineage of exotic metal that goes all the way back to the alleged Roswell crash of 1947. In an interview with journalist Bob Pratt, Jesse Marcel, Jr., the Army Air Force intelligence officer at the Roswell crash site, described some of the debris as thin and foil-like. And when he held a lighter to it, it didn't burn. The theory goes that whatever was recovered at Roswell eventually became a classified R&D seed program at Wright-Patterson's Air Force Research Lab. And over decades, that seed inspired families of advanced alloys designed to mimic or exploit the same impossible properties. Shape recovery, extreme strength-to-weight ratios, burn resistance, not chemical clones of the Roswell metal, but descendants of the same research tree. You have to admit, it's a bit bizarre that Wright-Patterson had a contract with Battelle Memorial Institute in 1949, studying nickel-titanium alloys long before the material became associated with memory metal. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. Memory metal extremely similar to what Jesse Marcel described, just two years after he reportedly handled it. Then fast-forward to the 1960s at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, and the world was introduced to nitinol, an alloy that remembers its shape. It was seen as a breakthrough in modern metallurgy, but for anyone steeped in Roswell lore, it looked eerily familiar. Now, Mondeleuil lives in a very different metallurgical neighborhood. It has about 45% titanium, while Mondeleuil has only small amounts of titanium, about 1% to 4%. And if you look at the actual science behind Mondeleuil, the exotic metal theory hits a wall. Monica's patents for Mondeleuil mentions Haines 214 and Monol alloy K500. So is Monica's super alloy some kind of Roswell starship derivative? Maybe not. But who's to say these exotic metal lineages didn't have a little outside inspiration along the way? away. You have to admit, the optics are bizarre. A scientist co-invents a superalloy inside the same research portfolio McCasland oversaw, and now they've both vanished? If you look at the world they came out of, intelligence agencies have warned for decades that foreign agents target America's space and defense world. McCasland was practically a walking hard drive, not for a single piece of knowledge, but for the vault in his head. The same way Monica's value wasn't just Mondeley, it was the person behind it. A mind capable of solving one of the toughest problems in American rocketry is capable of solving the next one too. So let's go back to June 22, 2025, when the woman who taught us how to tame fire vanished. The search is on for a 60-year-old woman missing in the Angeles National Forest. Monica Reza was last seen near Mt. Waterman yesterday at about 9:00 AM. Search and Rescue scoured the area for eight days by land and by air, but found nothing other than Monica's beanie, which photographs from the day show was tucked into the hip belt of her pack. The visor was recovered about 400 yards off the trail the day after her disappearance. When no other evidence surfaced, as is protocol, the synthetic aperture of the visor was not found. The visor was not found. Monica's search and rescue mission was completed, and the investigation was handed off to the Homicide Bureau, the Missing Persons Unit. But Monica's community had already mobilized, organizing volunteer groups, including expert mountain rescue teams, who began searching the areas outside the search and rescue perimeter, but the weeks wore on, and the volunteer exhibitions kept going out every few days. Hope of rescue dimmed, but the goal was to at least recover Monica's body. The organizers begged for volunteers to keep deploying until Monica's birthday in December, six whole months after her disappearance. The weeks turned into months, and still, no sign of Monica. She had vanished without a trace. That fateful June morning, Monica was well equipped with a backpack. Hiking boots. Hiking pants. And plenty of water. It's still unclear if she had her cell phone on her. Some theorized she could have been attacked by a mountain lion or bear, but no dens were found in the area. No remains. The San Gabriels are mountain lion country. The terrain is extremely rugged. There are many giant boulders and cave-like shelters that could obscure Monica from the view of rescuers. Still, multiple civilian searchers who descended the ravine nearest to Monica's last report location described the terrain as steep, but not steep enough to be fatal if someone fell. Something about her disappearance feels off. If someone had wanted to kidnap Monica, it's conceivable they could have intercepted her on the trail, and led her to a car parked along a different section of the highway. We may never know if her disappearance was just a tragic twist of fate, a crime of opportunity, or something much more nefarious. Beyond her invention of the Maundaloy, the heat-resistant coating for interiors of rockets and satellites that allow for entry and re-entry into our atmosphere, most importantly, we want to honor Monica's life. The outpouring of prayer, support, and resources from her family, friends, and colleagues demonstrates how deeply she is and will continue to be missed. The last entry on the volunteer Facebook group for Monica's search and rescue efforts was on November 18th, 2025. One hundred and fifty days after her disappearance, the group was still planning a recovery expedition that week. As disturbing as Monica's disappearance is, four days later, another woman disappeared. Back in the day, I used to chug coffee like I was prepping for a quantum jump, but then I'd crash like my nervous system got slingshotted through a kaleidoscope. Anxiety spiking, aura flickering, and REM sleep never met her. It's like drinking battery acid on an empty stomach. Then I found Mudwater. It doesn't fry my circuits or my synapses. I use Mudwater's original blend over ice. 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It's been nearly a month since anyone has seen Melissa Casillas, her stepdaughter says, and she's been in the car for a long time. She's been in the car for a long time. If she had left voluntarily, momentarily, she might have wanted to wipe her message history and make herself harder to track down. The Los Alamos connection, of course, put Melissa on everyone's radar. And even though administrative roles can overlap with classified material, we don't know what her position entailed. And when you add in the confusion about the badge, the factory reset phones, the personal items she took, and the financial stress, this starts to look like someone who made a decision to disappear on her own terms. Maybe she saw something she wasn't supposed to at the lab. And her phone and hair appliance were a neat cover story for somebody who didn't want her to speak out. Whatever happened, Melissa's still missing, and her family is still looking. Her parents have set up a GoFundMe offering a $5,000 reward for any information that brings her home. But not every disappearance near a sensitive facility is foul play. The evidence looks like it points somewhere more tragic and personal than a sinister game. We're including her because she deserves to be found, but we're not including her as evidence of something darker. For that, we have to look 700 miles west at what was happening under the stars just outside Los Angeles. On February 16th, 2026, about 30 miles northeast of Waterman Mountain, where Monica Reza disappeared, another colleague from Caltech and JPL would meet an equally tragic and suspicious end. The great astronomer, Carl Grillmayer. In the small, unincorporated community of Llano, tucked away near the Los Angeles and San Bernardino County line, a world-class astronomer had built his home in Los Angeles. His own observatory on a remote stretch of land. He chose to set up shop in the secluded Antelope Valley, 20 miles east of Palmdale, precisely because of how thinly populated it was. Carl Grillmayer wanted the darkest night skies possible, with the least amount of light pollution. Carl Johan Grillmayer, born in Calgary, Alberta in 1959, dedicated his life to studying galactic astronomy in distant planets. His work focused on mapping the structure of the galaxy, and his work focused on mapping the structure of the galaxy. Carl Grillmayer, born in Calgary, Alberta in 1959, dedicated his life to studying galactic astronomy in distant planets. Identifying stellar streams, remnants of smaller galaxies, or clusters torn apart by gravitational forces. These incredibly faint, stretched-out ribbons of stars drift through our Milky Way and tell the story of what was left behind. Modern science sometimes suffers from hyper-specialization, but Carl Grillmayer did not. Within astrophysics, he was a renaissance man, a polymath with research interests at every scale. From the research of our own solar system, to giant galaxy clusters, to the search for extraterrestrial life, Grillmayer discovered the Lethe Stream, a vast river of stars yanked into the Milky Way from nearby globular clusters. Using the Sloan Digital Survey, or SDSS, Grillmayer tracked subtle disturbances in the paths of these stellar streams, leading to key insights into dark matter, a mysterious missing mass which forms a cosmic glue that holds galaxies and their clusters together. Stars, galaxies, planets, and matter as we know it are only 5% of the observable universe. Think of them as the foam on an incoming wave crashing on the beach. Dark matter forms much of the rest of the ocean. A vast halo of dark matter envelops the Milky Way. Its immense gravity would disturb the path of incoming stellar streams by tugging on them and changing their paths. And by tracking these changes, Grillmayer was able to make profound insights into one of the universe's biggest mysteries. What is most of it made out of? Through his comprehensive study of stellar streams, Grillmayer helped reshape our understanding of how galaxies evolve. And his work with exoplanets was arguably even more profound. Using the Spitzer Space Telescope, Grillmayer did pioneering work studying the atmospheres of exoplanets, breaking down light passing through distant worlds to search for molecular fingerprints that tell us what they're made of. In 2007, Grillmayer was part of the team that discovered the first ever instance of water vapor in an exoplanet's atmosphere. Today, the techniques he pioneered are proving pivotal in the scientific search for alien life, as the same capabilities can now probe the atmospheres of habitable planets for biosignatures, footprints of living ecology altering the planet's chemical balance. His colleague at Caltech, Sergio Fayardo Acosta, described his approach to exoplanets and galactic structures as truly detective work. Carl Grillmayer was an extremely renowned scientist, and I would say he still is because his legacy will keep on. And it becomes the consensus reality in conventional astronomy that we're not alone. We'll owe a lot of that paradigm-shattering insight to Dr. Grillmayer's groundwork. But Grillmayer also studied celestial bodies much closer to home. He worked closely with NEOWISE, an instrument which serves as planetary defense. You heard me right. NEOWISE could be the first line of defense against humans going the way of the dinosaurs. So Grillmayer had as frontline a view as you can get when it came to the potential for Earth's extinction. He's published extensively, and his research has earned him a number of accolades, including NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 2011. Recently, Grillmayer had begun work on a new project, testing new instruments. He's also been working on a new experiment at Caltech's Palomar Observatory to monitor for meteor impacts on the moon's surface during an upcoming lunar eclipse. Another colleague, collaborator, and lead scientist, Joe Massiero, said, "It is a really exciting project, and I know Carl was looking forward to seeing what we could learn about the near-space environment from that. It made perfect sense that someone so passionate about the night skies would build a home outfitted with his own observatory." And what makes no sense is why a neighbor would seemingly stalk him on his property in December and return to kill him in February. On December 20th, 2025, according to sheriff officials and court records, Carl Grillmayer called the police to report someone trespassing on his sprawling lot in Llano. Deputies were dispatched, and when they arrived, they found 29-year-old Llano resident, Freddie Snyder, wandering the rugged landscape nearby, carrying a load of weapons. Carl called the police and said, "It's a loaded, unregistered rifle." Snyder claimed he was just headed to the post office and carried the weapon for self-defense against wild animals. But the LA Times uncovered Snyder's property records, indicating the post office was in the opposite direction of his and Grillmayer's home. The sheriffs arrested Snyder on a felony weapons charge and booked him at the Palmdale Station Jail, where he was accused of attempting to escape before his court appearance. When Snyder showed up at court, the judge told him to complete a gun safety course, citing his lack of past criminal record and an unnecessary prosecution's law as the reason for his leniency. Snyder was released from jail on his own recognizance. Things calmed in the new year, at least temporarily, until another 911 call came in on February 16th. At 6:10 a.m., deputies responded to a 911 call for assault with a deadly weapon. Carl Grillmayer had been shot on his porch. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene. While the deputies responded to the 911 call at the Grillmayer residence, another call came in. A carjacking had occurred just down the road. Freddy Snyder was arrested for the carjacking and was subsequently linked to Grillmayer's shooting. Snyder, the man who was released from custody for lacking a criminal record, was now charged with several felonies, including burglary, carjacking, and murder. This time, his bail was set at just above $3 million. Investigators have yet to uncover a motive, and they've found no evidence that Snyder and Grillmayer were acquainted. No one has an explanation for why this man suddenly went on a crime spree that began and ended with Carl Grillmayer. And Freddy Snyder's arraignment was postponed from March 26th to April 29th, so it may take many months to uncover just what happened here. Could Grillmayer have stumbled upon something he wasn't supposed to? Was Snyder being controlled by darker forces? Was he just a patsy or an extension of something deeper? Recently, Dr. Grillmayer had been working on the revolutionary Vera Rubin Observatory, an observatory which saw its first light mere months before his untimely death. The Vera Rubin Observatory is one of the largest scale surveys of the sky ever undertaken. It produces over a thousand images every night, covering the entire southern hemisphere from horizon to horizon, and it promises to revolutionize the search for interstellar objects. Currently, we've only ever detected three objects confirmed to be entering the solar system from beyond, but astronomers estimate Vera Rubin will discover 50 by the time its run is over. It will show us our own solar system in unprecedented detail. On its first act of night, it revealed over 2,000 previously undiscovered asteroids. Here's where things take an interesting, albeit very speculative, turn. In 2017, we discovered Oumuamua. The first-ever interstellar object to visit our solar system. It had some very strange properties, especially the way it accelerated without any visible cometary tail, leading past American alchemy guest and Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb to speculate that it may be a spacecraft or alien artifact. It was given the name Oumuamua because it means in the Hawaiian language, a scout, a messenger from far away. All the proposals that were put on the table to explain the anomalies of Oumuamua invoked a rock of a type that we've never seen before. With Rubin now online, we're poised to discover many more Oumuamuas, which is why Vera Rubin is now motivating mainstream SETI researchers to start scanning our solar system for more anomalies which could be alien spacecraft or probes. If our solar system is in fact filled in extraterrestrial spacecrafts and artifacts from visiting civilizations, Rubin is perfectly poised to pick them up. But there's also a big limitation. All of Rubin's imagery has to be approved by the Pentagon. This is not a conspiracy theory. It's a publicly known fact, as reported in this article from The Atlantic. Every image gets reviewed by the intelligence agencies before the scientific community is allowed to see it. As The Atlantic article reports, it would chip in $5 million for the construction of a dedicated network for moving sensitive data. Each time the telescope were to take one of its 30-second tile images of the sky, the file would be immediately encrypted without anyone looking at it first and then sent to a secure facility in California. Next, an automated system would compare the image with previous images of the same tile. It would cut out small postage stamp pictures of any new object it finds. Be they asteroids, exploding stars, or spy satellites. It would filter out the postage stamps that might depict secret U.S. assets, and one minute later, send all the rest, together with their coordinates, to an alert service available to astronomers worldwide. This level of intense intelligence community oversight over what you might expect to be a conventional astronomical tool is not unprecedented — a much smaller all-sky survey called the Pan-STARRS, the same one which discovered Oumuamua, underwent massive censorship from the Air Force, with swaths of imagery redacted or blacked out. Astronomers complained that these redactions often got in the way of their work. Now, what if you were to spot a UFO on one of these things? Of course, the publicly stated reason for this has nothing to do with UFOs, and everything to do with classified spy satellites and military space assets. Most of the time, this is probably true, but it does have other implications. Past American alchemist Dr. Beatrice Villareal discovered a possibly vast population of unknown objects orbiting the Earth. She found tens of thousands of transients — light-reflecting, mirror-like objects — orbiting the Earth. And she found them on astronomical plates from 1949 to 1957, before Sputnik or any American satellites were up in space. She also found them on astronomical plates from the Palomar Observatory, the same place associated with Karl Grillmeier. Villareal is currently working on replicating her results, and if I had to guess, I think we're going to find some interesting corroboration for them. I've been working with transients for a while. I think a lot of people know about this transient work. We have been looking for, like, multiple transients in images. Sometimes you can see multiple of them appearing and vanishing within half an hour. So if there truly is a transient object orbiting the Earth, it's likely that this is the place where it is. If there is a population of UFOs surrounding the Earth, the Rubin Telescope, Grillmeier's pet project at the end of his life, would certainly catch them. But again, anything it sees would have to get a Pentagon stamp of approval before ever reaching the general public and scientific community. Now this is definite speculation, and I want to make the disclaimer that there's no direct evidence suggesting this, but the question has to be asked: Did Grillmeier potentially see something in this? If he saw something more anomalous, it would be hard to tell him in good faith as a scientist to not tell the public. We may never know, but Dr. Grillmeier's targeted killing leaves many questions unanswered. Snyder's bizarre lenient treatment. The disappearances of General McCasland, Monica Reza, and Melissa Casais are all notable because of the access they had to the Earth. The murder of Carl Grillmeier - if premeditated and intentional - would represent a terrifying escalation in this attack on science. A mind like Grillmeier's doesn't come along very often. A senseless act of violence is always a tragedy, but when the expertise of an astronomer like Carl is wiped off the planet, we can leave no stone left unturned. It brings us to another shocking and senseless act of violence that took out another of the world's preeminent scientific minds. This time, an expert on nuclear fusion. That's new. Check responses, setup required, compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney Plus. Hop on. This is the way. I like this kid. This is the way. This is the way. I like this kid. This is the way. profile, Nuno recalled how everyone else wanted to be a policeman or a fireman. He couldn't quite place the origin of his scientific interest. He followed that passion to Lisbon, where he received his undergraduate and master's degree at the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon. Nuno then went on to attend Imperial College in London, earning a doctorate in physics in 2005, with a dissertation on tearing modes in plasma. After graduating, Nuno arrived in the United States to join Princeton University as a post-doctoral researcher at the Plasma Physics Lab in 2005. From 2007 to 2016, Nuno worked in a laboratory for the UK Atomic Energy Authority and as a researcher at the Plasma and Nuclear Fusion Institute in Portugal. In 2016, Loureiro returned to London to study plasma and nuclear fusion. returned to the United States, joining the faculty at MIT as a professor and fusion scientist. I'm Nuno Loureiro. I'm a professor at MIT. My main appointment is in nuclear science and engineering. He flourished at MIT and by 2022 became deputy director of MIT's largest lab, the Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Which is an umbrella research center at MIT for all the plasma and fusion-related activities that we do on campus. And in January 2025, President Joe Biden presented him with the Presidential Early Career Award, the highest U.S. government honor for young scientists. To say Nuno was a renowned physicist would be a massive understatement. He was a leading expert in plasma physics. The work Nuno was conducting at MIT, was attempting to solve the hardest problems in nuclear fusion. Problems that would unlock our capabilities in clean fusion power, potentially solving the world's energy crisis forever. For those unaware, nuclear fusion would be the ultimate clean energy dream, bringing the sun to the earth and powering our whole society. No fossil fuel pollution or Chernobyl-style meltdown necessary. Wielding fusion power would automatically reduce the human need for fossil fuels. And with that, we might be able to avoid a lot of the geopolitical escapades we're seeing happening today. But there's one great challenge. Plasma is a chaotic soup of charged ionized gas, which behaves in wildly unpredictable ways. To contain it, and to force the atoms to fuse, demands a special magnetic field. One which binds the plasma up into just the right geometry. And under just enough pressure to force the atoms to merge, despite the immense repulsive force between them. There are many challenges to nuclear fusion, but perhaps the greatest, is the problem of the containment field. It is no simple task, but it's where Nuno Loureiro excelled. His research Research was especially focused on one of the greatest challenges in plasma containment fields: magnetic reconnection. Consider the loops of plasma we see on the sun. Plasma gets trapped in arcs of opposite magnetic force. It usually gets trapped in tubes of electromagnetic energy: hot particles rising out of the sun's surface and falling back in. Sometimes, like a rubber band that's been stretched too much, it snaps. The field lines break. All the energy stored in the field bursts out as the particles heat up and accelerate out. Then the field reconnects. This process causes solar flares and coronal mass ejections, the kind of events that could one day fry our entire grid with an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. Nuno was a real blue sky researcher. Using the phenomenon of magnetic reconnection itself. But his work had extremely practical applications. Because just as reconnection causes flares from the sun, it's also a major factor in our attempts to bring the sun's power down to earth. And do so in the form of real nuclear fusion. Giant donut-shaped tokamak reactors use powerful magnets to contain superheated plasma. And magnetic reconnection is one of the greatest ways to do that. It's one of the greatest obstacles to sustained nuclear fusion. Just like plasma ejections from the sun, often with fusion, a leak gets created, leading to rapid cooling and pressure loss. This effectively stops the fusion process dead in its tracks. Nuno Lurero was one of the world's experts in understanding the intricacies of exactly how and why these magnetic reconnection leaks happen. We don't know if Nuno came close to solving the problem of magnetic field lines. But we do know he was probably as close as anybody. And at 47 years old, it's safe to say he had many impressive decades of discovery and invention ahead of him. Except on December 15th, Dr. Nuno Lurero was gunned down inside his Brookline, Massachusetts home. Nuno Lurero was a husband, a father, an award-winning scientist, and expert in his field. He was shot in the foyer of his apartment while his wife, mother, and daughters played a card game inside. The only other person who saw his killer was his 12-year-old daughter, who first answered the door for what she thought was a delivery man. Later, authorities would report that Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, the Portuguese national and top suspect in the shooting at Brown University that had occurred just two days prior, was likely also Nuno's killer. In some ways, this seemed very plausible. Nuno and Claudio had both studied physics together 20 years ago at Portugal's Instituto Superior Técnico. Physics programs are tight-knit. They're also highly competitive. The men certainly knew each other and were part of the same graduating class. But Nuno was actually an average student in undergrad, whereas Claudio was tied with another student for top of his class. Claudio had his heart set on MIT for graduate school. But as a surprise to everyone, he didn't score very well on his graduate school admissions test, making MIT a reach. He ultimately didn't get in. Claudio Valente was accepted to Brown University instead, but felt let down by a lack of academic rigor in their physics program, insisting his classes were too easy, covering material he'd already learned in undergrad. Claudio was described as egotistical and combative by his classmates at Brown. He only made it a year into the program. Before taking a leave of absence. Eventually, he dropped out of the program entirely and returned to Portugal. That year, he posted a disgruntled note online. Happy now? And some now believe Valente harbored deep resentment for his former classmate Nuno Loureiro, whose massive success would have been a salt in the wound. Back in Portugal, tail between his legs, Valente worked at an internet company called SAP. His colleagues described him as highly competent and rigorous, polite, but aloof. His closest friend at work, Sergio Bastos, who worked with him for seven years, insisted Valente was an extraordinary professional. He did things that few people were capable of doing, but admitted that he was very lonely. "I think one of the great regrets he had was that he couldn't create his own family," Mr. Bastos said. "He had few social skills. And I don't think he had any girlfriends in the years we worked together." One day, in 2013, Valente reported to work. He declared it would be his last day. He turned in his laptop, and he was never seen again. Bastos tried in vain to reach out. But at this point, no one from Valente's former life could make contact, including his own family. In 2017, Valente applied for and was awarded a scholarship. In 2017, he applied for and was awarded a visa to the United States. He settled in Miami, Florida, where authorities are still trying to piece together how exactly he spent his time. What we do know is that for the past three years, Valente rented a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, and returned to Providence numerous times to conduct surveillance on the Brown campus. Investigators eventually traced Valente to Boston as early as November 17, 2025. By late November, he had checked into a Boston hotel and began making repeated trips to Providence. A janitor at Brown saw a masked man matching Valente's description inside the Barris and Hawley Engineering Building on November 28 and again on December 1. On December 1, Valente rented a blue-gray Nissan Sentra with Florida plates. That car was seen repeatedly around Brown between December 1 and December 28. The picture was clear: This was pre-operational reconnaissance. Valente executed his plan on Saturday, December 13, 2025. He barged into an open lecture hall in the Barris and Hawley Building, the home of the physics department where students were taking final exams before their winter holiday. Around 4 p.m., Valente opened fire with a 9-millimeter pistol, killing two students and injuring nine others. Valente would leave a confessional video behind. It was filmed in his storage unit as a massive federal and state manhunt was still underway. He confessed that he had spent six semesters planning his attack at Brown. After the shooting on December 13, Valente successfully evaded law enforcement for two full days, using a burner phone with a European SIM card, as well as swapping out credit cards and the license plate on his rental car. His identity remained a mystery. Valente might have gotten away with his crimes, except for the fact that he had one more act of violence planned. At some point between Saturday and Sunday, Valente drove back to Boston. And on Monday, December 15, Valente spent the day pacing around Commonwealth Avenue. Maybe Valente saw Lurero as a representation of everything he couldn't amount to: a successful academic, a family man, a leader in his field of physics, a successful emigrant to America. This may have just been a modern physics-based rendition of an age-old Shakespearean play. But still, there's something both strangely calculated and apprehensive about Claudio Valente's actions leading up to his confrontation with Lurero. Authorities have much more information about Valente's whereabouts in Providence prior to his Brown shooting. After that, he kind of goes dark. And for the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday, Valente seems to drop off the map. On Monday, December 15, Providence police were still circulating surveillance clips from Brown. They were also still interviewing survivors. The shooter had not been identified. That same evening, at about 8:30 p.m., Lurero was shot at his home on Gibbs Street in Brookline, Massachusetts. Earlier that day, the familiar Nissan made its first appearance parked on Babcock Street around 8:00 a.m., five or six blocks from Lurero's home. Then, starting around 1:20 p.m., police say security cameras recorded a masked person at different points along Commonwealth Avenue. Nuno reportedly got home from overseeing Ph.D.-qualifying exams at MIT that day around 6:00 p.m. At 8:23 p.m., a camera records the suspect, now masked and wearing a vest over his darker clothing. At 8:30 p.m., the doorbell to Lurero's apartment rings repeatedly. His youngest daughter opens the front door and peeks into the foyer. She sees through the glass a man standing inside of the building, but on the other side of the foyer door. Her description of the man's clothing is mostly in line with the footage revealed. But she adds that the yellow vest he wore had some gray stripes. There are a few discrepancies in her observations compared to the footage seen of the suspect that day. She even describes the shooter as having short facial hair, which suggests that he's not wearing a mask. And according to her, he's also wearing a winter hat and carrying a cardboard package. about the size of a dictionary. She thinks he's a delivery man because the package has a barcode on it. Luero's daughter returns to the living room as Nuno replaces her at the front door to deal with the visitor. The whole family hears gunshots and rushes to Luero, who is wounded in the upper left chest, upper abdomen, right thigh, and has a graze wound through his left thigh. The daughter sees the shooter run to a blue or gray car parked across the street. At 8.35pm, the cameras outside a Boston University police department record a Nissan operated by someone wearing a high-vise vest. Minutes later, another camera records the vehicle heading out of the city. If we're to believe that the shooter was Valente, it seems clear that once Luero was shot, he immediately went into hiding. He switched the rental car's plates to an unregistered plate for Maine, then drove to his storage facility in New Hampshire. Investigators said Valente entered that facility about an hour after the Brookline shooting. The Department of Justice transcript of the videos that Valente later recorded in that storage unit adds a very grim layer to the story. In these recordings, Valente said he had planned the Brown attack for a long time. The language Valente uses implies that both of the attacks were intentional, but it still leaves the reason for targeting Luero maddeningly vague. Yes, the two men had studied in the same university in the 1990s, but there's no evidence of a recent dispute, direct contact, or a concrete grievance tied to the Brookline attack. A second anomaly is the mismatch between planning and execution. Valente seems to have surveilled Brown repeatedly. He would return constantly to the same building. He rented both a car and storage unit in advance. Yet his own post-crime confession depicts the actual Brown shooting as totally botched. He said he never wanted to do it in an auditorium. He even suggested that people could have escaped via an emergency exit. He also complained about his eye injury and described the whole thing as, quote, a little incompetent. A third anomaly is the timeline gap between the two attacks. Where exactly was Valente in the roughly 48 hours before Luero was shot? Where was he staying? How did he locate Luero? How could he even be sure Luero was home? Nuno had only just returned from a trip to D.C. Was he being tracked somehow? Valente's videos hint that the second slaying was also intentional, but not how far back the planning went. Detectives arrived on the scene to find Luero distressed but consciously alert. As he's transported to the hospital, one paramedic says he doesn't say anything. She believes he was in shock. He answers questions by shaking his head. But at the hospital, he was able to provide his name and information. If Luero had recognized his possibly unmasked killer as his former classmate, would he have said anything? Tragically, Nuno Luero went into surgery that evening, but did not survive. He was pronounced dead the following morning. In the days that followed, they spoke to the MIT professors, family, and colleagues, and they said that there was no threat present and they still have no motive. Everything about this case is shocking, but particularly Valente's combination of caution and sloppiness. He went to great efforts and lengths in Providence to wipe any trace of his movements, keep his identity hidden. But then he arrives in Boston and paces back and forth in public locations that would obviously have security cameras. It almost seems as if he was having cold feet. Or maybe he was awaiting instruction. Subliminal or conscious instruction. As we've covered on this show, the horrifying ability to program assassins is remarkably easy, and it's been demonstrated by governments globally and employed to take out targets at the highest level. What remains unresolved is why Luero was chosen, what exactly happened in the two days between the Brown Massacre and the Brookline attack, and whether Luero had been a long-standing target or simply became one after the Brown shooting was already underway. What we do know is that Nuno Luero was not the only one who was chosen. He was the only one who was chosen for the role of the head of MIT's plasma science and fusion center. Nuno was still an active professor, training the next generation of top scientific minds to push us farther in harnessing the power of our sun and creating clean energy on Earth. He was twice awarded the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering Outstanding Professor Award. He was given this for the first time in his lifetime. He was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics and MHD Theory of Fusion Systems. MHD, or Magnetohydrodynamics, also could have just as sensitive implications as nuclear fusion. It's the less focused on aspect of Luero's work, and these are called the magnetohydrodynamic equations. They're hydrodynamics, but now there's a magnetic field, so you refer to this as magnetohydrodynamics. Some believe that it could lead to a whole new paradigm in flight, in space, in space, in space, in space, in space, in space, in space, in space, in space, in space. To put it simply, Nuno was the tip of the spear on sustained, clean, widespread nuclear fusion energy. Could that be why someone wanted him dead? To finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks, Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Star Wars, The Mandalorian and Grogu is now streaming on Disney Plus. Hop on. This is the way. I like this kid. Star Wars, The Mandalorian and Grogu, now streaming on Disney Plus. Rated PG-13. This brings us to a strange coincidence we have to bring up when discussing Nuno Larrero's murder. Breaking news out of Brookline, an MIT professor shot and killed. He was shot several times in the foyer of his Brookline home. Just two days after Nuno's death, one of the top privately funded fusion companies in the United States, Nuno Larrero, was shot and killed. He was companies, TAE Technologies, announced a massive merger with a surprising publicly traded company. TAE would merge with none other than Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Trump's social media platform, Truth Social. The deal was announced on December 18, 2025. Lurero died on December 16. The announcement didn't coincide with any decisive technical breakthroughs. Nonetheless, this combined entity was suddenly valued at around $6 billion. TAE is a private long-running experimental company. Their mission is to build aneutronic fusion reactors using hydrogen-boron fuel to make commercial nuclear energy. But just like all fusion enterprises so far, they have yet to produce net energy or commercial power. TAE is still pre-revenue and pre-product in its core mission. So why is any of this relevant? Well, there are a few key competitors, in the race with TAE to produce commercial nuclear power. One of their biggest competitors is a company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is a company that emerged directly from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its founders built their work on decades of MIT's institutional research. The MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center collaborates closely with the company and contributes fundamental plasma physics essential to its reactor design. And Nuno Loureiro was the director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the time of his death. So the head of research that directly supports Commonwealth's aim of stable nuclear energy was assassinated on his doorstep. We want to give you some context on exactly where this happened. The shooting was on Gibb Street in Brooklyn. John is killed at his Brooklyn home. I'm walking around. I got children in the playground right around the corner. Authorities say the Portuguese professor died at a hospital this morning. And two days later? Two days later, one of Commonwealth's biggest competitors announces a merger with a sitting president's publicly traded company. Does that mean anything? I'm not entirely sure. And I genuinely don't want to insinuate anything. But I also think it's dogmatic and unreasonable to say that the timing isn't odd. Again, there are reasonable explanations for this merger. Most analysts say that any fusion company will need the support of the federal government to bring this nascent, unproven, and extremely costly technology out of the laboratories and onto the power grid. It's simply too cost and infrastructure intensive and would involve a complete overhaul of our current grid system. There are other power players in oil and gas who have an interest in TAE. A great example is Chevron. Ultimately, the question remains: What lengths would the power players in energy go to shore up their survival and dominance? There's clearly a race to control the technology that could determine the future of energy, aerospace, and intelligence in our modern world. And Nuno Loureiro's research was at the heart of it. I think on any given day, it's tempting to go for the low-hanging fruit, be a little more ambitious, and tackle the really hard problems. It would hardly be the first time scientific talent tied to strategic technology seemed to attract a shadow of danger. In the heart of the Cold War, as America raced to build Reagan's Star Wars missile shield, something deeply sinister began happening to the scientists building it. It's a story so rich in intrigue that if it were fiction, it would likely be a bestseller, because all of the dead, almost two dozen to date, worked in Western Europe's defense industry. You might not know that Star Wars, also known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, was actually a joint effort between the United States and some of its key allies, like Great Britain. Between 1982 and 1990, 25 engineers and computer scientists, all working for G.E.C. Marconi, on some of Britain's most classified defense systems, were working together to create the Star Wars missile shield. Projects all died, one after another. And each case was so bizarre, they consistently defied rational explanation. A 24-year-old jumped from a suspension bridge. His body was then found with mysterious needle puncture wounds in it. A 26-year-old allegedly drove his car away from a tree with a rope tied between his neck and its trunk, decapitating himself, and the coroner called it suicide. A Ministry of Defense consultant was found in his flat with his feet bound, a plastic bag over his head, and a rope coiled four times around his body. This was ruled an accident due to quote-unquote sexual misadventure. A senior radar scientist loaded his car into the car, and he was found dead in the car. Another man loaded his car with extra petrol cans and drove it at full speed into an abandoned café. Another was found electrocuted in his garden shed, wires attached to his body, a handkerchief stuffed in his mouth. Open verdict: one man simply disappeared during a research experiment at a reservoir and turned up months later in Paris, with no memory of how he got there. The British government investigated the incident, and found that a man was found dead in the car, with no memory of how he got there. The police investigated nothing, held no inquiry, classified the files, and to this day, not a single person has ever been charged. Was it the KGB, MI5, or something else entirely? Nobody knows. The case is officially closed, yet also unsolved. This is just one anomalously condensed example. Time and again, when scientific minds get closer to unlocking new facets of our reality, or get too close to the crown jewels of defense, they seem to be removed from the conversation. Take the disappearance of Mexican neurophysiologist and psychologist Jacobo Grinberg, who vanished in 1994, just after his biggest discovery. That space wasn't empty, but rather filled with a massive energy matrix he dubbed the "Lattice." How we see the world is not something we can do alone, but we can do it together. This is how we see the world. How we see the world was based on our tether to this matrix, and those with the honed ability to synchronize their cognition with the lattice would be able to bend the hologram to their own designs, just like Neo in the Matrix. Grinberg had seemingly stumbled upon something foundational, and then he was never seen again. After convening with some top scientific minds in the year prior, his lab was cleared out, and his records were erased. The only thing left behind was a single chilling note: "If you understand the system, you disappear." Speaking of disappearances, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention one of the most famous disappearances in modern aviation tied to the scientific realm. On March 8th, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on March 8th, 2014. flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people aboard. Somewhere over the South China Sea, its transponder stopped transmitting. Malaysian military radar later showed that after going dark, the plane made an unexplained U-turn, flew for another several hours in the wrong direction, then vanished from the earth so completely that despite the most expensive search in aviation history, only a small number of debris fragments believed to be from the MH370 crash have turned up alongside the coasts of Africa and a handful of Indian Ocean islands. And around that disappearance, a wild theory took shape. It centered on alleged drone footage and a companion infrared video. Researcher Ashton Forbes claims that these videos show MH370 over the Nicobar Islands, being encircled by three fusion-powered plasma orbs that generate a spinning wormhole teleporting the plane westward, likely toward the Maldives or Diego Garcia, as part of a covert military black program operation targeting high-value engineers. Now, I want to be super clear. I don't know what to make of these videos. Impressive people from the intelligence and military world have told me they are very fake. And that, for example, they've never seen thermal infrared imaging on these sorts of systems in full color. But there's another narrative that gets slept on and doesn't require any belief in UFOs zapping an airplane out of the sky. Among the documented passengers on the MH370 flight were 20 engineers from Freescale Semiconductor, an American semiconductor company that had just announced new products, including devices relevant to radioactivity and radioactivity. And they're not the only ones. They're the only ones who have had access to radar and electronic warfare for defense market applications. The employees included mostly Chinese and Malaysian specialists, whose work involved the kind of microchip technology that sits at the intersection of civilian computing and military applications. Some researchers believe that this is what made the group valuable, not just as passengers on a missing plane, but as carriers of highly specialized scientific expertise. If those engineers were in fact tied to the future of military microelectronics, then they represented a goldmine of technical knowledge for the next generation of defense technology. In any case, it's not the first instance of a mysterious aircraft malfunction claiming the life of a top scientist. Itzhak Bentov was a self-taught inventor and scientist. Born in Czechoslovakia during World War II, he escaped Nazi Germany to Israel. Once there, he helped invent the country's first rocket, despite lacking formal science training. But his true passion lay in unpacking the mysteries of consciousness, which he believed was made up of vibrating, harmonious atoms. His theories helped shape the foundation of the CIA's Gateway Process, a protocol developed by consciousness researcher Robert Monroe in Virginia to achieve ascended states in consciousness, and possibly even astrally project. Bentov also consulted with the Stanford Research Institute and worked closely with many of the people in the U.S. forming the CIA's psychic spy program, Stargate. Bentov's life was tragically cut short at 55 years old when American Airlines Flight 191 crashed shortly after taking off from Chicago O'Hare Airport, claiming the lives of all crew and passengers on board. Many researchers in parapsychology and consciousness say that Bentov was as close to the truth or a theory of everything in consciousness that you could get. He also had deep ties with American and Israeli intelligence. He was even a close associate of Andrei Puharich, who was one of the earliest architects of MKUltra, the CIA's mind control program, Bentov's extremely dense and almost indecipherable book about consciousness. Bentov was one of the first scientists to become a cult classic, and many people who research him say the same things about him that they do Grinberg. If there is a matrix, this guy might have found out how to control it, and how to get out. But not every scientist on this list was lost in a single catastrophic moment. Some seemed to fade from view and get marginalized as their work moved deeper into the classified world. Take Ning Li, a Chinese American physicist in Huntsville, Alabama, known for her radical work on superconductors and gravity control. Working with her colleague Douglas Torr, she proposed that cooled Type II YBCO superconductors might produce tiny gravitomagnetic effects, a theory that pointed towards a possible path to gravity control technology. After leaving the University of Alabama and receiving Defense Department funding, she largely vanished from public view, with rumors that her work had disappeared into the classified defense world. Her story took an even darker turn in 2014, when she was struck by a car on the University of Alabama campus and suffered permanent brain damage. She later developed Alzheimer's disease and died on July 27, 2021, leaving behind one of the more haunting stories in gravity research, a physicist who chased gravity, vanished into secrecy, and never really came back. And then there's the story of John Norsing, a former Navy pilot, weapons designer, and neuroengineer at Lockheed Martin, who is known for his work in biofusion, biometrics, neuroweaponry, and information security concepts tied to neural pattern recognition and human-machine integration. He talks about brain prints, the idea that we have fingerprints, but you might also have a unique kind of electromagnetic signature, just like iris or whatever. One close friend described his work in even different ways. saying the weapons he designed involved manipulation of the mind, ideas that pushed into territory we'd never now categorize as cognitive warfare. You said that John Norsing, you spoke to John Norsing, and he was at Allagash in 1976, in August, when you guys were there and experienced your abduction. Is that right? He read our report to the Ranger that same day. And what did he say he was doing? He said he was doing a TTR, tag, trace, retrieve, exercise with a subcutaneous device that they were testing that they could monitor field agents. You know, we tell them like blood pressure, heart rate, that sort of stuff. Norsing died while on business for Concurrent Technologies on September 27th, 2007. Exactly what happened remains unclear. Norsing's story brings us back to the larger pattern, because this is bigger than just one man or one strange death. Again and again, the people working closest to powerful, secret, scientific knowledge are the ones who seem to become the most vulnerable. So where does this leave us? With the realization that even our own government, the most powerful entity on Earth, seems unable or unwilling to fully protect the very people building its future. Or because every case points to the same explanation. For example, General Neil McCaslin's case seems eerily, possibly connected to Monica Reza's. The killing of Carl Grillmare seems possibly of the same variety as what happened to Nuno Loureiro. But ultimately. all of these cases could be isolated. Sometimes, the explanations for these things involve extreme human irrational emotion. But sometimes, they involve foul play. Whether it's homegrown black budget clean-up crews willing to kill anyone who gets too close to their proprietary technology, or foreign adversaries taking out experts to hollow out American brainpower before the next big war, aren't the weapons or the hard drives, but the minds, the judgment, the intuition, and the years of trial and error that most people never see. You can steal documents or hack a server, but if you really want to shortcut the future, you steal the person who already solved the problem. We like to imagine the black world as restricted hangers and test sites, but the most valuable assets in the world still get up in the morning and drive to work. Maybe there's an even stranger possibility hovering over all of this, one that moves beyond terrestrial politics and into the highly speculative realm of exopolitics, relations between Earth and other intelligences that average citizens might not even know exists. During the Bush administration, key players in the federal government were urged to read the Chinese science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem, written by a power plant engineer, Shijin Liu. It's about tricelarian extraterrestrials forced out of their own unstable solar system and headed for Earth. The tricelarians systematically monitor, mess with, and sometimes even kill human scientists at the frontier of human ingenuity. These are usually people working on nuclear weapons, nuclear, plasma, and particle accelerator physics. Sounds kind of familiar. Basically the scientists that control the rules of reality itself. So why was the upper echelon of the American government reading this book? Why did a presidential advisor named Harold Malmgren, who worked directly with JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Ford, and who was briefed on UFOs, why did he tell me that this is how the non-human intelligences operate? By tracking the frontier of human innovation. They were opposed to anything which threatened their control. So it's almost like the UFOs are more, it's not just the atomic connection, they're generically attracted to the tip of the spear as far as tech development. That's at the heart of it. Yeah. Why was Harold's daughter, Pippa, who was on George W. Bush's National Economic Council, tasked with reading The Three-Body Problem? And if connection, connecting missing and dead scientists with aliens sounds super far-fetched, I get it. But it's worthy asking yourself why UFOs so very often seem to cluster around the very technologies that define strategic power. They show up at nuclear sites across the United States and the world. I've personally interviewed many whistleblowers who've worked at these bases who claim this. Robert Hastings, the author of The Great, book UFOs and Nukes, has talked to almost 170 of these people. There was even a UFO crash right next to Brookhaven National Labs. In case you're not aware, Brookhaven houses a very powerful particle accelerator called Cosmotron. Witnesses of the UFO crash claimed that the wreckage was cleaned up and taken to the lab. This isn't just an American phenomena. Russian General Vasily Alexeyev said that UFOs would show up when they, "transported sensitive scientific technology." The Soviets have records around UFOs showing up around their national labs and nuclear sites, which brings us back to the strange question of why so many government officials were framing all of this problem. Maybe the three-body problem was hiding truth in fiction. There's an apocryphal story, and truthfully, I don't know how much weight to put in it, but it's absolutely wild. It involves former President Barack Obama, and Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder drunk around a campfire. Eddie presses Obama on the true nature of reality. He wants to know how the world really works at the highest level. He senses that there are things going on above his head. Obama's answer? Read the three-body problem. I've had a lot of conversations where people have asked me to do a video essay commenting on these missing scientists. I went to a lot of places. I went into this investigation, unsure of whether any of these cases were linked at all. And honestly, I came out feeling like on a human level, they're mostly not. Perhaps with the exception of Monica Reza and McCaslin. Maybe it represents forces operating on levels higher than human clearance systems. Many people forget that science itself is weird. There's a long history of "demons" in science, written about extensively and eloquently by former Harvard professor Ximena Canales. Whether it's Heisenberg downloading matrix multiplication at Elgoland, Dirac staring at the fire at Cambridge and downloading the Dirac equation, Pauli dreaming up the architecture of the hydrogen atom, or Descartes having a series of his own prophetic dreams. If we were to apply scientific scrutiny to the process of scientific discovery itself, it might begin to look less like conventional science and inductive logic, but more like revelation, or something received. Maybe entities higher than humans on the food chain are both inspiring and at times stagnating science. What we do know for sure is that where there's truth, there's violence. This goes back to Socrates, and it's historically been the case with religious mystics. And if you think religious truths are worth dying for, and that science and religion meet at some omega point, then maybe this is all true for science too. Because if science really is brushing up against something deeper, the questions underneath this pattern start to get very dark. But whether the forces at work deleting these scientists are human or something stranger, the cost is the same. The people closest to the edges of what we know, the ones rewriting the rules of physics, scanning the sky for threats we can't see yet, and unlocking the science that shapes the next century. These are the ones we keep losing. Their minds were the prize. They were the ones taking us into the future, and they are now disappearing. sharing. The search continues, and the list is growing. One of them is Alabama-based scientist Amy Eskridge. She was openly studying anti-gravity technology when she died in 2022. Her death was deemed a suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but she warned friends ahead of time that her life could be in danger. I don't believe that she killed herself. I just can't, because I spoke to her four hours before, and she told me time and time again I'm not going to commit suicide, I am not going to have an accident. If there's something suspicious about my death, it's because it is. If you're still watching, you're one of the first to hear about this. We just dropped a new limited merch collection: two tees, one off-white, one vintage black, plus hat. The design has a timeless retro-future feel. You can wear it every day. If you've been watching the show lately, you've probably already seen me wearing it. This is a limited run, so when it's gone, it's gone. Head to AmericanAlchemyMerch.com to grab the Believe drop today. And while you're there, the Cowboy UFO tee is a fan favorite we always keep in stock, along with the Atomic Age design. Thank you all so much for following and supporting the show. We'll see you next time on Mint Mobile. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile with your summer price forecast. Now, unfortunately, we're seeing rising costs across the country with possibility that big wireless hates you 100%. Now over here at Mint Mobile, we're seeing sunny skies and dropping prices. Every plan to just $15 a month. Give it a try at MintMobile.com/switch. 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