Missing Los Alamos scientist found dead. People are blaming UFO disclosure.
A retired UFO general. A Los Alamos worker. A NASA hiker. A Pentagon physicist. Eleven names in three years, and the House Oversight Committee just asked the FBI to explain why.
A 53-year-old Los Alamos National Laboratory worker named Melissa Casias, missing for nearly a year, was found dead in a New Mexico national forest this weekend. A handgun was lying next to her remains. The cause of death has not been determined.
She is the 11th person connected to U.S. nuclear, aerospace, or UFO research to die or disappear since 2023, and the House Oversight Committee has formally asked the FBI to explain what is going on.
The most well-known name on the list is retired Air Force Major General William Neil McCasland, who commanded the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and was so deeply involved in the Pentagon’s UAP investigations that researchers nicknamed him the “UFO general.” He walked out of his Albuquerque home in February 2026 and has not been seen since. He was on the House Oversight Committee’s interview list at the time he vanished.
Then there is Melissa Casias.
The doorbell camera
At about 6:15 on the morning of June 26, 2025, Casias dropped her husband Mark off at the Los Alamos lab where they both worked. She told him she would have the car back by 11. She did. She came home, picked up lunch, and drove into Taos to bring it to their daughter Sierra at her workplace.
Then she vanished.
A Ring doorbell camera in the small community of Talpa caught her walking south along State Road 518, alone, with no purse and no phone. That was the last time anyone saw her alive.
When Sierra got home that afternoon, her mother was gone. The car was in the driveway. Her keys were on the counter. Her purse, her ID, her work phone, her personal phone, her computer, and her badge for the lab were all still in the house. Nothing was missing except Melissa.
The search ran for 335 days.
On May 28, 2026, a hiker in the McGaffey Ridge area of the Carson National Forest found human remains and a handgun about six miles from where the camera had captured her. On Saturday, May 30, the New Mexico State Police confirmed the identification.
Her family is grieving. The investigators are working. And for the first time, a case that would normally have stayed local is on the front page of national news.
That is because of the UFO general.
The UFO general was supposed to talk to Congress
McCasland is the reason Casias is national news.
He was not a typical retiree. He had spent decades inside the most classified corners of U.S. aerospace research. His name appeared in the 2016 WikiLeaks release of John Podesta’s emails, where various researchers discussed what the U.S. military actually knew about UAP. Within UFO research circles, he was famous.
When McCasland walked out of his house in February 2026 with his wallet, his hiking boots, and a .38 caliber revolver, he left behind his phone, his prescription glasses, and the wearable tech devices he normally wore. He has never been found.
Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri, a member of the House Oversight Committee, told Fox News Digital that his staff had been planning to interview McCasland about UAP disclosure when he vanished.
“He was on our list to talk to, and he disappeared, so that kind of piqued our interest,” Burlison said.
That sentence is why this story exploded.
The rest of the list
Once people started looking, more names surfaced.
Anthony Chavez, 79, a former Los Alamos worker, walked out of his own home seven weeks before Casias and has not been seen. Monica Jacinto Reza, a materials engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, disappeared while hiking in California in June 2025. Reza had worked at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico in the early 2000s, the same base where McCasland had been stationed.
Steven Garcia, a government contractor at an Albuquerque facility, vanished in August 2025 with a handgun and no ID.
Michael David Hicks, a NASA JPL scientist who studied comets and asteroids, died in July 2023. No cause of death released.
Frank Maiwald, another JPL researcher, died in July 2024. No cause of death released.
The unexplained cases now number at least six. Other cases on the broader congressional list have known killers but remain unsettling. Nuno Loureiro, an MIT plasma physicist, was shot in his home in December 2025 by a former classmate who killed two more people in a Brown University lecture hall the next day. Carl Grillmair, a Caltech astrophysicist who collaborated with NASA, was shot on his porch in February 2026.
Eleven names total. The shape of the cluster depends on which cases you count.
Why Congress is involved
On April 21, 2026, the House Oversight Committee sent a formal letter to FBI Director Kash Patel and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Chairman James Comer of Kentucky and Burlison asked the FBI, the Defense Department, the Department of Energy, and NASA for briefings on the pattern.
Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, one of the most active congressional voices on UFO disclosure, summed it up to CNN in one line.
“If 12 used car salesmen or 12 Baptist preachers went missing, we’d be paying attention to it.”
President Trump also commented, telling reporters he hoped the connections were just coincidence but acknowledging the situation was “pretty serious stuff.”
The UFO context that makes this story matter
The last three years have been the most active period of UAP disclosure in U.S. history.
In July 2023, former intelligence officer David Grusch testified to Congress that the U.S. government has secretly recovered crashed UAPs and the bodies of “non-human pilots.” The Pentagon denied his claims. Congress kept investigating. Sitting senators publicly called for full disclosure. Pentagon reports confirmed repeated UAP incidents near U.S. nuclear facilities. The 2023 UAP Disclosure Act forced the government to begin reviewing classified UAP material for public release.
In the middle of all of that, the people closest to those programs started ending up dead or missing. McCasland’s career was UAP research. Casias and Chavez worked at the lab that has been UFO-adjacent for 80 years. Reza had been stationed at the air force base that has been the subject of UAP investigations for decades. The NASA scientists worked on the deep-space imaging programs that get cited in UAP discussions all the time.
The pattern is either a coincidence so unlikely it deserves serious investigation, or a coincidence that the internet is mistaking for a conspiracy because it pattern-matches to decades of UFO mythology.
Nobody outside the FBI knows yet. The FBI has not said anything publicly.
The skeptical view
The mainstream press has pushed back. CNN ran a long analysis in April 2026 tracing how the missing scientists story moved from fringe message boards to the White House. The reporting pointed out, fairly, that many of the cases have ordinary explanations. Some involve identified killers. Several involve people who had been retired from active research for years. McCasland himself had cited “mental fog“ when leaving research groups before his disappearance, according to Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Kyle Woods.
There is no public evidence that any of the people on the list communicated with each other before their deaths or disappearances. There is no public evidence of a coordinated plot.
There is also no public explanation for why the country’s most prominent retired UAP researcher walked out of his house on a winter morning and is still missing four months later.
Both things can be true at the same time.
Where this leaves the Casias family
For Mark Casias and his daughter Sierra, the wait is partly over. They have their wife and mother back, in the only way they were going to get her back after nearly a year. The Office of the Medical Investigator will determine cause of death. The handgun found next to her is being traced. The New Mexico State Police are handling the local case. The FBI is engaged on the broader question.
For everyone else watching, this is now a story with momentum. The House Oversight Committee is moving forward. The FBI is on the clock. The names keep coming. And the audience that started paying attention because of UFOs is going to keep paying attention until somebody official explains what happened to the UFO general, or to Melissa Casias, or to any of the other nine people on the list whose deaths and disappearances remain unsolved.
The doorbell camera in Talpa captured a woman walking down a highway last June. The hiker in Carson National Forest found her last week. Whatever happened in between is the question her family, the New Mexico State Police, the House Oversight Committee, and a growing portion of the American internet are all waiting for the FBI to answer.
Whether that answer comes in months, years, or never is the question the next chapter of this story does not yet have a way to answer.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
New Mexico State Police (May 30, 2026), official news release identifying Melissa Casias’ remains
Los Alamos Reporter (May 30, 2026), full NMSP statement and OMI identification details
NBC News, KRQE, The Hill, Taos News, and Santa Fe New Mexican (May 30 to June 1, 2026), Casias disappearance and discovery timeline
NBC News Dateline archive (July 2025), Mark Casias’ original interview quotes
Albuquerque Journal (June 1, 2026), Anthony Chavez and Steven Garcia LANL and Albuquerque facility connections
House Oversight Committee (April 20, 2026), official press release from Reps. James Comer and Eric Burlison requesting FBI, DoD, DOE, and NASA briefings
Fox News Digital (April 21, 2026), Rep. Eric Burlison’s verified “UFO general” quotes
CNN (April 21 and April 30, 2026), full investigation coverage and verified Rep. Tim Burchett “Baptist preachers” quote
Axios (April 23, 2026), Lt. Kyle Woods of Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office on McCasland’s “mental fog”
Men’s Journal and Union Leader (April-May 2026), expanded list of 11 to 13 cases
Fox 11 Los Angeles (April 20, 2026), McCasland and Reza Kirtland Air Force Base connection
NewsNation, Daily Mail, and New York Post (March-May 2026), Ross Coulthart analysis and McCasland background
2016 WikiLeaks release of John Podesta emails referencing McCasland and UAP research
2023 David Grusch congressional UAP testimony and Schumer-Rounds UAP Disclosure Act archive coverage