“We Hope It’s Random.”
Amy Eskridge was 34 when she died from a gunshot wound to the head in Huntsville, Alabama, on June 11, 2022. Officials called it suicide. No public investigation. No follow-up. Case closed.
Except Amy had been working on anti-gravity technology — the kind of research that doesn’t make it into peer-reviewed journals because it lives in the space between classified defense programs and fringe science that makes people uncomfortable.
Two years before her death, she sat for an interview and said this:
“If you stick your neck out in public, at least someone notices if your head gets chopped off. If you stick your neck out in private, they will bury you, they will burn down your house while you’re sleeping in your bed, and it won’t even make the news.”
She’s now the eleventh person tied to sensitive national security research — space programs, nuclear facilities, advanced propulsion systems — to die or vanish since 2022.
I’ve written about this pattern before [Alien Abduction?] — turns out it’s worse than anyone thought.
The List Keeps Growing
Here’s the updated roster:
Amy Eskridge, 34 — founder of The Institute for Exotic Science, investigating anti-gravity technology. Found dead from a gunshot wound in Alabama, June 11, 2022. Ruled suicide. No public investigation details released.
Before her death, Eskridge contacted retired British intelligence officer Franc Milburn, claiming she was being harassed with “energy weapons.” Journalist Michael Shellenberger later testified at a public hearing that Eskridge was “murdered by a private aerospace company.”
General William Neil McCasland, 68, retired Air Force general who oversaw classified space and defense programs. Disappeared February 27, 2026, during a hike in New Mexico. Described by investigative journalist Ross Coulthart as “a man with some of the most sensitive secrets of the United States.”
Monica Jacinto Reza, 60 — NASA aerospace engineer and inventor of Mondaloy, a space-age metal used in advanced missile systems. Vanished June 22, 2025, while hiking in California. Former colleague of McCasland on rocket propulsion projects.
Steven Garcia, 48 — government contractor with top security clearance at the Kansas City National Security Campus, which manufactures 80% of non-nuclear components for America’s nuclear arsenal. Last seen August 28, 2025.
Melissa Casias, 54 — administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory with high-level clearance. Disappeared June 26, 2025.
Anthony Chavez, 79 — retired Los Alamos lab employee. Vanished May 2025, leaving behind his car, phone, wallet, and keys.
Nuno Loureiro, 47 — MIT physicist working on nuclear fusion breakthroughs. Shot to death in his Massachusetts home on December 15, 2025. Police say the gunman was a former classmate from Portugal. Motive unclear.
Carl Grillmair, 67 — Caltech astrophysicist working on infrared space telescopes used in military satellite tracking. Shot on his California front porch on February 16, 2026. No clear motive has been released.
Jason Thomas — pharmaceutical researcher testing cancer treatments at Novartis. Found dead in a Massachusetts lake on March 17, 2026, three months after disappearing. Police say no foul play.
Frank Maiwald, 61 — NASA researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lead scientist on a project to detect signs of extraterrestrial life. Died July 4, 2024. No cause of death disclosed.
Michael David Hicks, 59, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who worked on the DART Project testing asteroid deflection. Died July 30, 2023. No cause of death has been released.
Eleven people. Four years. Zero federal investigation until this week.
The UFO Files No One Was Supposed to Find
Then there’s the Los Alamos cybersecurity chief who died and left behind files his son wasn’t supposed to discover.
Boxes of documents. Internal memos. Scientific reports. Polaroids of UFO cases. Records of high-level government meetings discussing “atmospheric anomalies.”
The son — call him Johnny — sent the files to investigative journalist Jeremy Corbell, who’s featuring them in his documentary Sleeping Dog, dropping May 12.
“This is a real scientific study at the classified level within our military of UFOs,” Corbell said. “These documents are 100 percent proof that Los Alamos was taking it very seriously.”
The files included witness sketches from the 1987–1991 Gulf Breeze UFO sightings in Florida — dozens of reports of disc-shaped craft with portholes, some estimated to be 120 feet wide. Crop circle photos. Russian sighting reports. Names of scientists Corbell recognized — people who’d never told him they’d worked on UFO research.
Most still won’t talk.
Former FBI Boss: This Is Espionage
Chris Swecker spent 24 years at the FBI, including time as assistant director of the Criminal Investigative Division.
“The first thing you go to is it’s potential espionage,” he told the Daily Mail. “Our scientists have been targeted for a long time, especially in the rocket propulsion area, by hostile foreign intelligence services.”
He listed the usual suspects: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, India.
“They target this type of technology. It’s been happening since the Cold War.”
The tactics are straightforward — steal the information or eliminate the people who have it.
“Kidnapping and trying to extract information from someone is not unheard of. I think we’ve even seen instances where nuclear scientists have been taken out. They’ve been assassinated.”
Swecker pointed to the connections between McCasland and Reza — both tied to the Air Force Research Laboratory, both working on advanced propulsion systems, both gone.
“This has to be fully investigated by the FBI, not different local police departments. This is the type of investigation that the FBI has to take over, or at least work jointly, and look for potential connections to a hostile foreign intelligence service.”
The White House Finally Noticed
On April 15, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked directly whether the administration was investigating the string of cases.
Her answer: “I haven’t spoken to our relevant agencies about it. I will certainly do that and will get you an answer. If true, of course, that’s definitely something I think this government and administration would deem worth looking into.”
Translation: No one had connected the dots.
The next day, Donald Trump held meetings on the subject and told reporters, “I hope it’s random, but we’re going to know in the next week and a half. Pretty serious stuff… hopefully a coincidence, or whatever you want to call it. Some of them were very important people, and we’re going to look at them over the next short period.”
That’s the most specific timeline the government has offered so far.
The Pattern Everyone Ignored
Four disappearances from nuclear facilities. Three deaths tied to NASA. Two murders with no clear motive. One woman who warned she was in danger before she died. One man died on the Fourth of July with zero public explanation.
And until this week, local police departments treated each case in isolation. No foul play. Lone gunmen. Missing persons with no leads. No one is asking why all eleven people had access to some of the most sensitive national security information in the country.
Amy Eskridge founded The Institute for Exotic Science with her father, Richard, a retired NASA engineer. The company was a “public-facing persona to disclose anti-gravity technology” — unassociated with NASA.
She knew what she was doing was dangerous. She said so on camera.
“That’s why the institute exists,” she said in 2020, explaining why she chose to work publicly rather than in private.
Two years later, she was dead.
What Happens When the Dots Get Connected
If Swecker’s right — and the pattern suggests he is — then this isn’t a string of coincidences.
It’s a coordinated effort by foreign intelligence agencies to compromise, extract, or eliminate people who know things adversaries want to know.
Nuclear propulsion. Fusion energy. Satellite tracking. Hypersonic missile defense. Anti-gravity research. UFO programs that may or may not involve recovered materials.
The kind of information that doesn’t just leak — it gets hunted.
“There’s a whole lot of different ways that espionage occurs,” Swecker said. “They target individuals and try to compromise them or bribe them.”
Or, apparently, they just make them disappear.
The Silence That Speaks Loudest
Eleven people. Four years. Zero federal investigation until a reporter asked about it at a press briefing.
No inter-agency task force. No public statements from the FBI. No acknowledgment from NASA or the Department of Energy that multiple employees with top security clearance have vanished or died under suspicious circumstances.
Just local police saying “no foul play” and a White House press secretary saying she’ll “look into it.”
Corbell warned that whistleblowers in these fields often face retaliation. “There have been some situations that give everybody pause… whistleblowers have been squeezed.”
Maybe that’s why the people who are still alive aren’t talking.
The White House says it’s investigating. Trump says he hopes it’s random. A former FBI boss says it looks like espionage.
And somewhere in New Mexico, a retired general is still missing.