ELEVEN people with links to space programs and nuclear research have either died or disappeared in mysterious circumstances over the past four years.
Online sleuths and experts have speculated on a sinister link to all of these cases over the last months.
Feverish chatter among online conspiracy theorists has now spread all the way to the White House, where Donald Trump has addressed the rumors for the first time on Thursday.
Although no official connections between any of these deaths and disappearances have been made, the president vowed to have answers “in the next week and a half.”
“Hopefully a coincidence, or whatever you want to call it,” he said.
“Some of them were very important people, and we’re going to look at it over the next short period.”
Trump addressed the rumors on Thursday after Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt promised the administration would look into the cases during a press conference the day before.
In a statement on Friday, Leavitt confirmed the White House would be looking into “these troubling cases,” which will include working with the FBI and “all relevant agencies.”
“No stone will be unturned in this effort, and the White House will provide updates when we have them,” Leavitt said.
Here we take a look at all eleven victims who have either died or vanished over the years.
June 11, 2022: Amy Eskridge (Dead)
Eskridge, 34, allegedly died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in Huntsville, Alabama.
Conspiracy theories surrounding Eskridge’s death have only ramped up after a 2020 interview resurfaced where she warned, “My life is in danger.”
While she is only the most recent person to be identified and connected to the swath of missing or dead scientists in recent years, she appears to be the earliest death so far in the ongoing mystery.
Eskridge co-founded the Institute for Exotic Science with her father, Richard, a retired NASA engineer.
The Institute was unaffiliated with NASA; there, she had been working on developing anti-gravity technology.
Years before her death, which was ruled a suicide, Eskridge had spoken cryptically about why she had founded the Institute in the first place.
“If you stick your neck out in public, at least someone notices if your head gets chopped off,” she said in a May 2020 interview with YouTuber Jeremy Rys.
“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 continued.
“That’s why the institute exists.”
In the interview, Eskridge drank a beer while she answered Rys’s questions and discussed the government’s potential disclosure of information regarding UFOs.
Franc Milburn, a retired British intelligence officer, has claimed that Eskridge contacted him before her death, according to the Daily Mail.
She had allegedly claimed to be the victim of harassment and intimidation – this included physical attacks and the use of “energy weapons,” Milburn said.
July 30, 2023: Michael Hicks (Dead)
Hicks had worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab before he died in 2023. He was 59 years old.
“His research specialty was the physical properties of comets and asteroids,” the Division for Planetary Sciences wrote in his obituary.
“He served on the science teams of the DART Project, the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) Project, the Dawn Mission, and the NASA Deep Space 1 Mission,” the obit continued.
A cause of death for Hicks has not been made publicly available, and an autopsy has not been performed.
July 4, 2024: Frank Maiwald (Dead)
Maiwald was a longtime senior scientist and researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Los Angeles, California.
A cause of death has not been released, and according to the Daily Mail, an autopsy had not been performed. He was 61.
“Frank managed the development of the SBG-VSWIR instrument and had previously overseen the successful delivery of two instruments for the AMR-C program,” his obituary stated.
“His roles included serving as a technical group supervisor and contributing to various significant projects such as AMR/SWOT, COWVR, AMR/Jason 3, and HIFI.”
The same month he died, Maiwald’s research on the development of an instrument that would monitor the chemical composition of cabin air for human spaceflight missions was published.
He had also done a study on water and oceans located on Jupiter in 2016.
May 8, 2025: Anthony Chavez (Missing)
Chavez, 78, was reported missing from his home in Los Alamos, New Mexico, according to police, in May 2025.
Chavez had been retired from his job as a staffer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, known for housing the top secret Manhattan Project during World War II, making it the birthplace of the atomic bomb.
June 22, 2025: Monica Jacinto Reza (Missing)
Reza, 60, vanished while hiking in the Angeles National Forrest in California. She was with two friends at the time and has not been seen since, according to police.
She had been walking on a popular trail just 30 feet behind one of her companions, who claims he turned around to find her gone.
At the time of her disappearance, Reza worked at NASA’s JPL as the Director of Materials Processing.
She also co-created a special “super-alloy” used to build rocket engines while working at Rocketdyne.
Years prior, she had previously worked on a rocket project at the Air Force Research Laboratory overseen by US Major General William Neil McCasland, who himself would disappear less than a year later.
June 26, 2025: Melissa Casias (Missing)
Casias, 53, dropped off lunch for her daughter at work one June day in 2025 – and then never came home.
The married mom worked as an administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The day she went missing, she was captured on surveillance camera walking alone along a highway.
She did not have her wallet, phone, or keys on her – and had told family and friends she would be working from home, according to Dateline.
August 28, 2025: Steven Garcia (Missing)
Steven Garcia, 48, was last seen leaving his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in August 2025.
Surveillance showed him on foot and carrying a handgun. Like Cassias, he had left behind his phone, wallet, keys, and car, according to police.
Garcia worked as a government contractor with alleged ties to the Kansas City National Security Campus, which makes non-nuclear material components used for national defense systems.
His role as a contractor gave him a high level of security clearance, according to Fox News.
December 16, 2025: Nuno F.G. Loureiro (Dead)
MIT scientist Loureiro, 47, was found dead inside his home in Brookline, Massachusetts; he had been shot multiple times while his wife and daughter were home.
A suspect in the shooting was identified as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente.
Officials stated that the two men had gone to the same university together in Portugal between 1995 and 2000.
According to police, Valente died by suicide inside a storage unit in Salem, Massachusetts, just one day after Loureiro had been shot.
Loureiro had been named to take over as the lead of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center in 2024, where he worked on advancements in clean energy technology.
He had been a researcher in Lisbon at an institute studying nuclear fusion before his move to MIT.
February 16, 2026: Carl Grillmair (Dead)
Grillmair was found shot outside of his home in the remote Antelope Valley, located in the desert just 75 miles outside of Los Angeles.
When police arrived at the scene, they attempted to perform life-saving measures on Grillmair, but he was pronounced dead at the scene with a gunshot wound to the torso.
Freddy Snyder, 29, was arrested for the murder and held on a $2million bond.
Grillmair had been a researcher at Caltech at the time of his death.
He specialized in galactic astronomy – this included dark matter, galactic structure, and stellar populations.
He also served as the principal investigator for the Hubble Space Telescope.
Colleagues of the 67-year-old scientist had praised him and his work as “ingenious,” noting that he had discovered the existence of water on a planet outside of our solar system.
Source : https://www.the-sun.com/news/16237713/space-experts-scientist-dead-missing-timeline/
