How a speculative story about dead and missing scientists went from the fringe to the White House

By T.M. Brown, CNN

(CNN) — In an April 15 press briefing, Fox’s Peter Doocy asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt an unexpected question. “There are now 10 American scientists who have either gone missing or died since mid-2024. They all reportedly had access to classified nuclear or aerospace material,” he said. “Is anybody investigating this to see if these things are connected?”

Leavitt told Doocy she would look into it; the next day, Doocy asked President Donald Trump about it in person, and Trump said he had “just left a meeting” on the subject. On April 17, Leavitt announced that the White House would launch an investigation.

On April 20, the House Oversight Committee announced that it was planning an investigation of its own. “If the reports are accurate, these deaths and disappearances may represent a grave threat to U.S. national security and to U.S. personnel with access to scientific secrets,” Republican lawmakers James Comer of Kentucky and Eric Burlison of Missouri wrote in a statement.

Behind all the high-level talk about getting to the bottom of a mystery, though, was a different puzzle: where did this story about a purported pattern of dead or missing scientists come from?

Doocy’s questions and the White House’s responses were the culmination of a four-month journey from the fringes of the internet to the center of the federal government — a journey that demonstrated how alternative media platforms and social media can swiftly and deeply penetrate contemporary politics.

In January, Daniel Liszt, who runs the website Dark Journalist and writes about extraterrestrial life and deep-state conspiracies, recorded a three-hour YouTube stream in which he discussed the death of Nuno Filipe Gomes Loureiro, the MIT physicist who was killed by Claudio Manuel Neves Valente in December days after Valente had killed two people and wounded nine in a mass shooting at Brown University.

Liszt, who has 188,000 YouTube subscribers, compared Valente’s movements around New England to those of the Boston Marathon bombers and of the lead September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. He offered up the theory that Loureiro was “working on something that is potentially so transformative, that if you get a real leg up in the research — if you learn something, then you become a sort of database that needs to be erased potentially.” From there, he went on to describe a purported historical set of deaths among scientists who had worked on the United States’ Strategic Defense Initiative, and then ran through some other contemporary cases, proposing that a similar pattern was emerging.

“I had put all these things out there and I was amazed that people weren’t picking up on the missing people,” he said in a phone interview this month. “And then everybody picked up on it.”

On February 20, writer and influencer Jessica Reed Kraus wrote a post on her Substack publication, House Inhabit, discussing both Loureiro and Carl Grillmair, who was killed on his porch in a rural area north of Los Angeles in 2026, eight weeks after Loureiro’s killing. (Local law enforcement arrested a suspect and charged him with the killing and a separate carjacking and burglary.) Grillmair was a highly decorated astronomer and astrophysicist, working with NASA on investigations of exoplanets light-years away from our own solar system.

Kraus found the close proximity of both deaths suspicious and offered her own theory. “[A]s we stand on the verge of a president potentially disclosing life on other planets… I’d argue the slaying of two men respected in these fields probably deserves a closer look,” she wrote.

Kraus started as a lifestyle influencer sharing pictures of her California home. She pivoted to topical coverage by coming to the defense of Ghislaine Maxwell — she wore a “Free Ghislaine” T-shirt to the 2024 Democratic National Convention — in 2021 and by taking Johnny Depp’s side in his 2022 defamation suit against Amber Heard. She now has more than a million followers or subscribers across Substack and Instagram, and she has become a powerful surrogate for Trump generally and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his MAHA agenda specifically. In 2025, she was among the people who received binders that were supposed to contain the “Epstein Files” in a White House photo opportunity.

Kraus also writes about “disclosure,” the watchword among a community of independent journalists like Liszt and government officials like Republican Reps. Tim Burchett of Tennessee and Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who have been pressing the federal government to disclose whatever it may know about “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP),” the currently preferred term for what are popularly known as UFOs.

“I have sources who are particularly interested in the UAP stuff, and they’re usually right about everything,” Kraus said in a phone interview. She said a source who had been talking to her about Jeffrey Epstein drew her attention to Loureiro’s death, and when she learned about Grillmair’s shooting, “I jumped on it immediately, because I knew there was something to this.”

On March 11, Kraus followed up her earlier Substack item with a post about Grillmair and Loureiro on her Instagram account. The post went viral.

Anna Merlan, a senior reporter at Mother Jones and the author of “Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power,” said that this is how niche theories spread in the current political environment. “A claim like this will go from a far-right forum or social media account and then to a news outlet that is willing to promote conspiracy theories before going to a bigger outlet like Fox News where the president will see it on TV,” she said.

The distance between those links is smaller, Merlan said, because so many figures in the Trump administration, like Pete Hegseth and former deputy director of the FBI Dan Bongino, are themselves media figures.

Kraus said that members of Congress like Luna, whose personal Instagram account follows Kraus’s, started talking about the scientists soon after she wrote about them. “My readership has expanded into high-level officials and people who are at the White House,” she said.

Kraus also wrote a Substack item on March 2 about William Neil McCasland, a retired Air Force major general with alleged connections to UFO research, who disappeared on a hike near his New Mexico home in late February.

“In my opinion, it was all highly suspicious. These were not random targets,” she said in her interview.

Both Kraus and Liszt pointed out supposed connections between McCasland and John Podesta, the longtime Clinton associate, whose hacked emails were the central focus of Pizzagate conspiracy theorists.

“I remembered McCasland immediately because his work was released through WikiLeaks, where Podesta was emailing with Tom DeLonge from Blink-182,” Liszt said. (DeLonge, a co-founder of the band, is a longtime alien enthusiast.) “DeLonge was talking about, McCasland was going to help him take all of this public. McCasland retreated dramatically after that leak.”

McCasland’s disappearance also attracted the attention of Burchett, who was one of the first government officials to speak about the purported links among the group of scientists. Burchett said in an interview that he was “tuned in to the whole thing” for a while and said he received calls from sources when “something odd started happening” to these scientists.

McCasland’s disappearance in February was the catalyst for him to take a closer look, though. “He disappeared and left his home with no phone, no glasses, no keys, but he took his revolver,” Burchett said. (CNN reported that McCasland’s gun was unaccounted for. There is no evidence that he took it with him the day he disappeared.)

Burchett claims that there is a general coverup of UAP activity, and that McCasland might have been silenced for being a potential whistleblower. “Certain alphabet agencies tell me that these things don’t exist, and then I’m briefed and told those things do exist and they have photos and testimony,” he said.

Meanwhile, the idea was taking hold among established media outlets, with the Daily Mail showing the way. Starting on March 22 — with the headline “Mystery of five missing scientists sends chill across America. Three are dead. And one troubling link is now under scrutiny in DC” — the British tabloid’s website published a string of stories about the “pattern” of deaths and disappearances, citing Liszt and what it described as other “independent researchers” alongside comments from current and former government officials. The coverage included a running tally of dead or disappeared figures and a diagram of their alleged connections to one another.

“The Daily Mail got in touch with me in February to talk about the report I put out,” Liszt said. “But it wasn’t until McCasland went missing that they ended up wanting more info about it.” He said that Chris Melore, the Daily Mail science editor who has written all of the tabloid’s coverage of the conspiracy, has watched several of his videos on the topic.

Among the Daily Mail’s sources was Burchett, who it quoted saying, of McCasland, “There have been several others throughout the country that have disappeared under suspicious circumstances.”

In his phone interview, he said McCasland’s disappearance struck him as yet another entry in a long ledger of alleged alien researchers meeting mysterious ends. “If 12 used car salesmen or 12 Baptist preachers went missing, we’d be paying attention to it,” he said.

A source close to Luna said that the congresswoman started paying closer attention to the alleged connections between the dead scientists after seeing posts on social media and the stories from the Daily Mail.

Other outlets picked up the story as well. Also on March 22, Ross Coulthart, a NewsNation correspondent, attempted to link together the disappearance of McCasland with that of Monica Jacinto Reza, a materials engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who died on a hike in June 2025. “There are more and more mysteries confounding not only the disappearance of General McCasland but the mystery of this scientist and potentially others as well,” Coulthart said in the segment.

But Coulthart also readily dismissed a wider ranging conspiracy. In an email, he wrote “I do believe there are individual cases… that do raise suspicions and warrant further investigation. But I am at odds with many of my own colleagues who have been running stories suggesting there is some kind of sinister link between the deaths/disappearances of certain people.”

On March 23, the topic of McCasland was the center of a Fox News segment: “Disappearance of retired Air Force general tied to UFO community, killing of scientist spark questions.”

Burchett continued to ring the alarm as well. On March 24, the right-wing YouTuber Benny Johnson hosted Burchett on his show to reiterate his conspiratorial accusations. “There’s just too many of them disappearing, nothing happens by coincidence in this town or around this town. Something is going on,” he told Johnson.

As the story spread, more people started looking for more dots to connect, so the number of names involved kept growing. “For Those of You Scoring at Home, the Count of Missing Scientists With America’s Most Sensitive Information is Now Up to SIX,” read a Barstool Sports headline from March 27. Barstool writer Jerry Thornton said in a phone interview that he’s “fairly certain” he first heard about the story via the Daily Mail, and that other pieces of information had come from X.

“UFO posts have always gotten good traction,” he said. That Barstool was picking up the story showed how quickly the alleged conspiracy had spread and how wide its appeal was. Merlan called this sort of story “viral gold” for its boosters. “Media companies and the Trump Administration are both part of the attention economy,” she said.

On March 27, the New York Post likewise followed the Daily Mail’s lead, with a story headlined, “Married mom who vanished last year could be tied to missing and dead US scientists: report.” On March 29, Rep. Burlison appeared on Fox News to discuss the missing scientists and tell Americans he was pushing for answers in Congress.

Through early April, the Daily Mail, New York Post and Newsweek kept publishing pieces about the scientists, dragging the story fully into the mainstream, and adding more cases to the count. “ninth scientist linked to secret programs dies”; “11th Case Raised.”

For devoted explorers of UFO mysteries, something was getting lost in the noise of popular attention. “I appreciate the fact that the story is getting around and the awareness is growing,” Liszt said. “But you get distortions when this story starts merging with other stories that don’t fit the pattern.” He pointed specifically to the inclusion of the deaths of several Chinese scientists working across artificial intelligence and advanced weaponry in the conspiracy, as in a Newsweek headline from April 23 reading “Chinese Scientists Have Been Dying Mysterious Deaths Too.”

But by then the story already belonged to the big-time podcasters. On April 9, Joe Rogan spoke about the missing scientists on his podcast, giving the theory perhaps its largest audience to date. Luna discussed the disappearances on Glenn Beck’s podcast on April 15, the same day that Doocy probed Leavitt about whether the Trump administration would be looking into it.

A speculative story about a group of dead and missing researchers had gone from outsider hypothesis to mainstream topic, on its way to becoming conventional wisdom endorsed at the highest level of government. Burchett wasn’t surprised Trump had taken an interest in the case. “I’ve talked to the president about it,” he said. “We just want total transparency on what’s going on.”

Even if the questions about the cases had a potboiler premise — brilliant minds filled with the nation’s most vital secrets, vanishing one by one — the available answers looked much less compelling. Not all of the names on the list were actually scientists, and CNN’s reporting on the federal probes found that a majority of the deaths or disappearances were regarded by investigators or family members as having unmysterious explanations, or as lacking any link to sensitive secrets.

“People should realize that scientists die also and not make too much of this,” said the family of Amy Eskridge, the co-founder of the Institute for Exotic Science, who died in 2022 at the age of 34.

On April 30, Doocy asked Trump about possible connections among the scientists again, and Trump replied, “Well, so far, I mean, they’re individual. We have a lot of scientists.” He added that “so far, we’re finding that there’s not much of a connection,” but went on to assure Doocy, “We’re going to be doing a full report, and it’s very serious.”

Whatever the story may lack in internal or external coherence, it has successfully made up for in attention. And the conspiracy theory has continued to get bigger. On April 23, the New York Post added a 13th death to the count: Joshua LeBlanc, a NASA nuclear engineer who died in a car crash in July 2025.

The spread of these stories can have a counterproductive effect for the local authorities who are trying to locate missing persons or identify suspects. “Online sleuthing typically means law enforcement agencies get flooded with dubious tips,” said Merlan.

For Kraus, the flow from her independent platform to the mainstream is an encouraging sign. “I think we all want to know what’s happening… I was happy that it became a talking point in some of these recent press hearings, and that the president mentioned it directly,” she said. “I think the media is finally catching up.”

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