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On February 27, retired Air Force Research Laboratory commander William Neil McCasland, who once worked at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, an Ohio base steeped in UFO lore, mysteriously went missing after leaving his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
By March, the FBI had joined the search for the general, sending conspiracy theorists into a tailspin, with some arguing that the agency’s involvement was “evidence of foul play.”
Now the story is getting even stranger. McCasland is just one out of at least ten scientists and engineers with government ties who either died or disappeared within the last four years in incidents that the FBI is now actively investigating, Scientific American reports.
In a statement, the FBI said it’s “spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists.”
In a separate Monday press release, the House Oversight Committee announced it was “seeking information from the Department of Energy, Department of War, FBI, and NASA about the scientists and other personnel connected to US nuclear secrets or rocket technology who have died or mysteriously vanished in recent years.”
The committee pointed to reporting alleging that “at least ten individuals who ‘had a connection to US nuclear secrets or rocket technology’ have ‘died or mysteriously vanished in recent years.'”
Lawmakers suggested there could be a “possible sinister connection between a string of mysterious deaths and disappearances,” which could “represent a grave threat to US national security and to US personnel with access to scientific secrets.”
Among these scientists is NASA Jet Propulsion Lab scientist Michael David Hicks, who died in July 2023 of a still-unknown cause. He studied comets and asteroids.
His daughter, Julia Hicks, told CNN that she didn’t “understand the connection between my dad’s death and the other missing scientists.”
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