The woman who speaks for the most powerful government on earth stood at the podium Wednesday and admitted she had nothing to say about ten people connected to classified American programs who have either turned up dead or simply ceased to exist.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt fielded the question at the White House briefing, the first time the administration had been publicly confronted with what independent researchers have been tracking for over two years — a cascading series of deaths and disappearances among men and women who held knowledge of America’s nuclear arsenal and space programs.
When pressed on whether the Trump administration had been made aware and whether intelligence agencies were actively pursuing possible links between the incidents, Leavitt drew a blank.
“I haven’t spoken to our relevant agencies about it,” she said. “I will certainly do that, and will get you an answer.”
She continued: “If true, of course, that’s definitely something I think this government and administration would deem worth looking into. So let me do that for you.”
The admissions landed hard with the American public. Social media filled immediately with reactions from citizens who found the response inadequate.
“Truly sad that somebody has to bring it up before they look into it,” one person wrote. “Scientists with sensitive information that many of our enemies would absolutely love to have and do have now. They were NOT abducted by aliens.”
Others were more pointed. “FINALLY! You mean she didn’t know until today??? I call B*******!!” one X user wrote.
Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett had been pushing on this long before Wednesday’s briefing.
The Republican lawmaker has publicly stated that retired Air Force General William Neil McCasland — one of the missing — maintained direct ties to classified American programs involving unidentified aerial phenomena.
Burchett said his own attempts to obtain answers from the intelligence community had gone in circles.
“I’ve been constantly ran down different rabbit holes with them, so I don’t have any need to talk to them at all,” he said in March. “The numbers seem very high in these certain areas of research. I think we’d better be paying attention, and I don’t think we should trust our government.”
McCasland, 68, sits at the center of the emerging pattern. The retired Air Force general walked out of his New Mexico residence on February 27 and has not been seen since.
He carried a pistol. He left behind his phone, his glasses, and his wearable devices. His wife, in a 911 call, described the situation plainly — her husband appeared to be trying “not to be found.”
His disappearance was not isolated.
Between May and August 2025, four other individuals connected to McCasland through his prior command of the Air Force Research Lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base also vanished from Southwest states under nearly identical circumstances — each one last seen walking away from home, leaving behind phones, vehicles, and identification.
Wright-Patterson has carried rumors for decades. The base has long been associated with the study of recovered extraterrestrial technology, a legacy stretching back to the 1947 Roswell incident.
While stationed there, McCasland reportedly greenlit funding for the work of Monica Jacinto Reza, a materials scientist developing a next-generation metal alloy called Mondaloy for use in rocket engines.
Reza, 60, vanished on June 22, 2025, during what was described as a hiking outing with friends in California. She had just assumed the role of director of the Materials Processing Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Three of the other missing individuals worked inside America’s nuclear complex. Steven Garcia, 48, was last seen August 28, 2025, departing his Albuquerque home on foot with a handgun.
According to a source who spoke to the Daily Mail, Garcia was a contractor for the Kansas City National Security Campus — the facility responsible for manufacturing more than 80 percent of the non-nuclear components that go into the country’s nuclear warheads.
Anthony Chavez, 79, and Melissa Casias, 54, both had ties to Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the crown jewels of American weapons research. Chavez worked there until retiring in 2017, though the nature of his work has never been made public.
Casias was an active employee believed to hold top-tier security clearance. Both, like the others, were last seen on foot, without keys, wallets, or phones.
Law enforcement has issued no updates in any of these cases since last year.
The disappearances represent only one dimension of what researchers have been cataloguing. Five scientists in fields intersecting with national security have also died within the past three years, two of them murdered inside their own homes.
Nuclear physicist Nuno Loureiro was shot to death in his residence, as was astrophysicist Carl Grillmair. Loureiro had been conducting research in nuclear fusion with the potential to transform the global energy industry.
Grillmair worked with NASA’s NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor programs, instruments whose underlying tracking systems are shared with military satellite and missile surveillance operations.
Two more JPL scientists, Frank Maiwald and Michael David Hicks, died in their fifties under circumstances that remain unexplained.
Maiwald had completed a research breakthrough capable of detecting biological markers of life on other planets just 13 months before his 2024 death.
Hicks departed JPL and died one year later at 59, having worked on the DART mission — humanity’s first test of asteroid deflection technology.
NASA has not commented on either death.
A sixth case sits apart from the rest geographically but follows a similar arc of mystery.
Jason Thomas, a pharmaceutical researcher at Novartis working on cancer treatment trials, disappeared in December 2025 and was pulled from a Massachusetts lake on March 17, 2026. Police said they did not suspect foul play.
