What's sad is, 5-10 years ago, no adversary would think simply off-ing American scientists was effective strategy, America was a new scientist generation machine.
Now thanks to Research funding falling off a cliff and massive immigration restrictions, this is no longer true.
What if they're interrogated in an attempt to extract something very specific? The deaths could be kidnappings gone wrong.
I suppose the top AI talent may become subjects of a similar game.
The "if" is doing the heavy lifting here. And universe has lot of "ifs". Here's one:
If this was a perfect distraction spun up to distract from Epstein files, it has succeeded and you have been had.
It is not surprising that the FBI did not detect an actual pattern before now, considering the various ways that the entirety of it spent the entirety of 2025.
Is it? Or is there just more scrutiny when more important people die?
When someone who ain't worth shit OD's nobody takes allegations that they were murdered seriously. When someone who's worth a lot of money ODs, the "they only bought fine cocaine, their dealer never would have cut that shit" allegations get looked into because "more equal animals" is more of a scale than a binary when it comes to this particular issue.
He goes into greater detail further down to assuage the "BUT BUT that's genpop not JPL!" whatabouters and does some "how TF are these people connected?" musing.
[0] https://theness.com/neurologicablog/whats-with-the-dead-or-m...
- 1 rocket scientist lost while hiking - 1 astrophysicist killed at home by someone arrested a few months before at his home with a gun - 1 physicist in another field killed without cause of death made public - 1 engineer in instrumentation killed also without the cause made public - 1 schizophrenic crank woman died by suicide - 1 plasma and nuclear scientist killed at home by a jealous former classmate who went just after on a mass killings spree - 1 pharmatical scientist found in a lake after missing - 1 military executive who left with only his gun and disappeared - 1 administrative employee walked from home and disappeared after leaving her car and personal phone behind - 1 decade year old retiree from the same laboratory who did the same - 1 property custodian from a totally different place also left with a gun and disappeared
Totally aliens https://img.astroawani.com/2014-03/51395638721_freesize.jpg
the big grain of salt: this doesn't take into account the differences in social and economic demographics of researchers and suicide + homicide victims. I'd suspect scientists skew wealthy and are less likely than average to be victims of suicide or homicide, but I don't know.
No. That is surprising. Any statistics you'd find about the rates of any one or more of these kinds of disappearances are going to be population level, averaged out over groups that are much higher risk and therefore skew the average rates to seem higher than their priors actually dictate for many sub populations, eg, working professionals at large corporations of this specific type.
Surprising != something actually being connected, but it sure as hell is surprising and isn't something to dismiss as "well, law of large numbers so ::shrug::"
The frequency of fireballs in our planet’s skies seemed to grow in recent months. NASA and other meteor experts can’t agree on what explains it.
In response to growing public interest, a NASA public affairs official said in a blog post at the end of March, “While it may seem like meteor reports and sightings have been more frequent recently, it is not out of the ordinary.” The post explained that from February to April, there is often a 10 to 30 percent increase in the number of extremely luminous meteors — and nobody is quite sure why.
Mr. Hankey said that this 10 to 30 percent increase was already baked into the American Meteor Society tally, and that it doesn’t explain the apparent doubling of fireball sightings in the year’s first quarter.
"People see more stuff in the sky" is a common sign for people getting more anxious about attacks from the sky. To my knowledge, first UFO reporting waves happened during cold war when people started to get paranoid about soviet spying.
I have seen many social media videos of fireballs in the sky in the last few months.
It feels reductive to point out that this has coincided with a massive increase in the number of small satellites with limited lifespans up there.
(And yes, you'd expect NASA and the AMS to have thought of that but I honestly wouldn't put it past them to be deliberately ignoring Starlink satellites given Musk's political power and petulance to people who cross him.)
But Comer... oof, it's hard to take seriously anything he focuses on.
But who knows? Broken clocks, twice a day, etc.
;-)
Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), the chair of the Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs, sent letters to FBI Director Kash Patel, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, requesting staff-level briefings no later than April 27.
Not to be confused with James Comey.
The best conspiracy theory I've seen online is that top-secret energy/weapons plans were sold by a traitor, and these scientists were kidnapped to be the worker bees.
Terribly dark and implausible, but also, we are living through a storyline that writers wouldn't even consider a draft because it's too on-the-nose.
Improbable events do not defy probability.
Not american, so I can't judge if this is a common thing or irregular, but both were last seen carrying firearms as if they'd be thinking someone is after them.
He was the commander of the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. This would have given him direct oversight of all of the Air Force's most sensitive technology for decades. His intelligence value to a hostile adversary, even retired, is incalculable.
He was an avid hiker and biker in his neighborhood trails, so it's very unlikely that he just got lost.
Left behind were his prescription glasses, along with all his personal electronics (phone and watch).
It's shocking and alarming that there wasn't a full blown military search and rescue operation mounted within hours of his wife calling him in as missing.
How far could a 68 year old man travel on foot within 8 hours?
He was reported missing within three hours of his last contact with his wife.
New Mexico Search and Rescue wasn't dispatched until Sunday, two days later.
Again, why wasn't the DoD tasked to find him at all costs on the same day he went missing, given his knowledge of the Air Force's most sensitive technologies?
They know where he is and we (the public) don't have a need to know where he is?
My personal theory is: He's offworld with the other non-terrestrial officers Gary McKinnon found :)
I think there is some confusion that there are more people going missing and dying in the sector while not outlining that there are more people going missing AND dying.
Or I'm just completely wrong, the only reason why I am making such assumptions because there is more information about this in the ASML case where a whisleblower leaked that china has poached ASML engineers and have given them new identities to work in chip manufacturing sector in china.
This is just not a serious organization anymore, and the lack of such a thing at the federal level leaves us insanely vulnerable to our own criminal operations.
The same thing happened with the IRS even earlier, multiple rounds of intensive they just cannot pursue criminals of a certain type, and the criminals know it. So they can run basically unchecked, looting all of us for billions.
Also, what interest would a foreign power have in planetary defense against asteroids? Is there some dual-use technology in that?
The belief is that the first country to have this reliably at scale breaks the “mutually assured destruction” paradigm that has governed nuclear weapons policy for decades. If the U.S. can send nuclear ballistic missiles, but can’t be hit by nuclear missiles, what stops them from just nuking anyone who disagrees with them?
When was the news ever publicly verifiable? If Walter Kronkiue said that the North Vietnamese shot at our naval vessels twice on two different days you had no way of even accessing alternative viewpoints and that the 2nd day was questionable, you just had to trust him.
Today with all the contrarians and competing alternate sources it's arguably better because if there's some smoking gun that something is BS it almost certainly will get talked about. It might be bullshit on both sides but at least it's there to look at if you want.
Still, FBI should be investigating every suspicious death of people with high level clearence.
- The investigation concerns somewhere between four and a dozen people spanning nearly half a decade. A dozen people dying or disappearing over the course of 4 years is hardly the statistical anomaly the articles claims it to be.
- Despite attempts to link these scientists together, there really is no common thread. One person was a biologist, not a rocket scientist; and two of the "scientists" weren't even scientists at all.
- Many of these purported "mysterious" deaths are hardly that mysterious. Two likely died of natural causes, one was murdered by a former classmate, and one disappeared while hiking. Most of the others appeared to have suffered from psychological distress.
And look, I don't want to minimize these people. These deaths and disappearances are all tragedies. The families and friends deserve closure. But dragging them into the conspiracy theory circuit is not going to do them any favors. If anything, it will likely make matters worse.
And as a scientist myself, the administration's "concern" about missing scientists feels like a slap in the face. This administration has been more hostile towards us than any other in modern history. I'll leave the article with the last word because I couldn't have worded it any better.
> Ironically, America doesn’t seem to need much help when it comes to disappearing scientists. About 1,000 employees have been laid off from NASA’s JPL in the past few years. One senior scientist who is still there told my colleague Ross Andersen last October that he’d never seen the place so empty and lifeless. In the meantime, the Trump administration has repeatedly proposed cutting NASA’s science research funding in half, a plan that would surely lead to further loss of staff at JPL, not to mention the abandonment of probes that have been sent into our solar system.
> And while the FBI looks into potential foreign involvement in professors’ deaths at MIT and Caltech, the Trump administration says that it intends to halve the budget of the National Science Foundation, which in recent years has furnished those two schools with hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. Already, more than 40 percent of the NSF’s scientific staff have left or been fired.
> This is just a subset of the harms that have been done to the U.S. research enterprise since the start of 2025. In response, some top scientists have been getting up and walking out the door. Their absence can’t be blamed on China, Russia, or Iran. Maybe the White House should look into it.
---
[1] "The Single Dumbest Conspiracy Theory of 2026." The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/04/missing-scientis...
I'll point out, though, that it's still only April. Plenty of time for even dumber conspiracy theories to take hold!
For the US, my money is on "more evidence is needed". I could imagine the more "diverse" among the scientists deciding it's time for a career/employer change over the past year or so, though.
- people working in space top secret research 20,000 (conservative estimate, probably much smaller)
- adult disappearances 1/50k to 1/100k per year
- demographics are stable, high earners, so more like 1/100k per year or less
- so for the pool of 20k, then 0.2 per year on average
- these disappearances are a 1:10,000 to 1:20,000 probability
- homicides made this situation even more unlikely 1:100,000
Conclusions: A conspiracy is highly unlikely, but the situation is very unlikely. Shrug.
Release the rest of the Epstein files. This seems the kind of conspiracy that could be found there.
My personal opinion is that scientists should be off-limits for any military as long as they are not directly involved in operational planning and execution in an active state of war.
That said, targeting and capturing scientists is a military policy with a long history.
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/alsos-mission/
The United States and Israel have allegedly carried out the most attacks on (nuclear) scientists after WW II.
There is a rather extensive scientific discussion about the legality and morality of this kind of targeting.
https://www.legitimacyasatarget.com/books/drones/
The overall conclusion in the broader scientific context, though, is that this approach is not effective.
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501760341/all-...
Removing individual expertise may delay strategic asset acquisition, but targeting alone is unlikely to destroy a programme outright and could even increase a country’s desire to strengthen research and acquire even more expertise.
You can see good examples of this with how the Israelis fail horribly over and over, preventing Iran from acquiring weapons-grade nuclear material. They failed so hard that the President is telling the public that Iran was within weeks to have a functional nuclear weapon and has set the world economy on fire over this with millions all over the planet suffering right now as a direct consequence of that decision.
Just a few days ago, a Ukrainian electronics expert for drone tech was hit in his home with five Shahed drones by Russia.
https://united24media.com/latest-news/russian-shahed-drone-h...
The result of his survival will likely be that more Ukrainians want to learn what he does and result in an even stronger drone electronics programme to gain a further advantage over Russia even quicker, especially in the midrange strike capabilities of the Ukrainians. If he had died, the same effect would have likely occurred. So touching this scientist / engineer was a huge long-term strategic error by the Russians.
Just like when the Ukrainians car-bombed Alexander Dugin’s daughter https://www.kyivpost.com/post/23139, which resulted long-term strategically in a Ukrainian brain drain by bullets behind ears.
https://acleddata.com/report/personal-payback-assassinations...
Regardless of my or your opinion on this, this practice will likely persist as part of the foreign policy toolkit for states aiming to prevent proliferation.
And if you allow the US and Israel, or Russia or the United Kingdom, who all did kill scientists, to follow this policy unpunished, you need also to respect that their adversaries have the same right to do so.
Which means US scientists will end up as targets. Reality is, it has never been easier to kill a person with drones without risking capture or even consequences for the assassin, so the US might get some of its own medicine, and the only one who can stop that is the average citizen by putting enough public pressure on this issue to force a policy change.
If you care about your scientists, start calling your representatives and make sure to tell them how unhappy you are with the US targeting acquisition and policy, and ask them what they are going to do about it if they want to deserve your vote.
The man is, for want of a better word, a full-on Republican dipshit performing dipshittery in an attempt to get Trump to notice him.
(His wikipedia page is an excellent summary of his asshattery.)