Every Town - The Scientists Are DISAPPEARING. Here's What They All Had In Common

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

Today we have a situation happening that most certainly deserves a deep dive in. It looks like a good old fashioned cleaning up of loose ends of sorts. The questions for us then are what exactly was in need of such a cleansing and WHO is behind all it? Let’s get into it. This is Dead or Missing: What’s Really Happening To The Scientists Who Know Too Much 🗣Watch on Spotify. Spotify Premium users get no commercial breaks on my show. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/E-_4O8WsPVQ 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready to dive into the unknown? Join me, Peyton Moreland, on Into the Dark, the True Crime podcast from Ono Media with a hint of horror and mystery. Each week, I dive into a different case, breaking down the facts and pondering the age-old question, why do people do what they do? Now, sometimes the answer isn't so clear, and that's why I'll also explore conspiracy theories, hauntings, and all things spooky. From the Green River Killer to the Mothman incident, we will unravel all of the questions that keep us up at night. So don't miss out.

Subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Into the dark, where true crime meets the eerie unknown. Learning English is hard. That's why I make easy stories in English, where you can have fun while you learn. You can listen to stories full of action. romance and mystery.

Each episode, I tell stories for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners, and there's a story for every mood. Whether you want something to wake you up or relax before going to bed, easy stories in English is the podcast for you. Every town has a dark side. When something happens once, you can dismiss it as random chance. When it happens twice, you might start to wonder. But when it happens three times, we're talking same circumstances, same outcome, same result.

That's no longer coincidence, that's a deliberate pattern. Something is being done intentionally. And today, we have six people, all of whom have gone missing without a trace or have wound up dead under mysterious circumstances. And this all happened within the last nine months, and the thing that connects them, all is that each and every one of these individuals we're working at facilities guarding America's most sensitive information. Hey guys, it's Andrew. Welcome to another episode of Everytown Where Today, we have a situation unfolding that most certainly deserves a deep dive in. It looks like a good old-fashioned cleaning up of loose ends of sorts. The questions for us then are what exactly

was in need of such a cleansing and who is behind it all? Let's get into it. This is dead or missing what's really happening to the scientists who know too much. William McCasland is not a name you're likely to recognize, but inside the world of American aerospace and defense research, he was a top official. He graduated from the Air Force Academy in 79 with a degree in astronautical engineering, then went to MIT for a master's and then came back for a doctorate. His Ph.D. supervisor, the one who sat across from him and guided his most serious, academic work, had personally designed a guidance computer for the Apollo program.

And so, from the very beginning of his career, McCastland wasn't just adjacent to America's most serious science. He was right inside it. And what followed was a career of more than three decades, spent climbing through increasingly classified corners of the Air Force, director-level positions at the Pentagon, and work alongside the National Reconnaissance Office, which is the agency responsible for operating America's spy satellites. It's an organization so secretive that its existence wasn't even publicly acknowledged until 1992. He commanded the Phillips Research site at Curtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, a facility associated with directed energy weapons and advanced space technologies

that most Americans have never heard of and never will. And then in 2011, well, he received his final posting. He took command of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base over in Dayton, Ohio. Wright-Patterson, as you might know, isn't just any base. In the world of UFO research, it occupies a position something like the Vatican, a place of reverence, of rumor, and of mystery, that has persisted for nearly eight decades and shows no sign of fading. It was the home of Project Blue Book, the Air Force's official investigation into reported UFO's sightings that ran from the early 50s through 1969. And over the life of that program, investigators logged nearly 13,000 reported sightings.

And most of them, they could explain away, but 700 and one of them were officially classified as unidentified, and it remained so to this day. and the base has long been rumored to be where physical materials recovered from the 1947 Roswell incident were eventually transported and then studied. The Air Force, of course, has always denied this, but the rumors have never gone away. And that's really because researchers, former military personnel, and even people who worked inside it, every once in a while opened their mouths about stuff they had seen or things they've heard. McCasland ran the research lab at that base for two years, and to put it into perspective how real of a deal this was, he oversaw a combined annual budget of $4.4 billion with a B, and a workforce of nearly 11,000 people.

When he retired in October of 2013, the general who replaced him said publicly that McCasland had developed capabilities the country would be relying on for decades, though he said nothing about what those capabilities actually were. And after retiring, while he moved into the private sector, director of technology and a defense company in Albuquerque. But somewhere in that post-retirement period, quietly and never on the record, while he became involved in Tom DeLong's disclosure project. A source described McCaslin to the New York Post as a gatekeeper and participant in the UFO community,

community. Someone who sat at the intersection of what was classified and what the outside world was trying to piece together from fragments. And belongs to the Stars Academy, the organization, those conversations helped shape, and later played a direct role in pushing the Pentagon to release authentic Navy footage with unidentified aerial phenomenon 2017. In three videos, in fact, three encounters between Navy pilots and objects that moved in ways, no known aircraft would explain. The release of that footage triggered the current wave of congressional UAP hearings and set off a chain of events that reshape the entire conversation, and culminated in 2003 with a former Pentagon official testifying under oath before Congress, the United States

government had been operating a secret program to recover and reverse engineer what he described as non-human craft. And whether you believe that testimony or not, Something has genuinely shifted in the last several years. And UFO disclosures moved from sketchy internet forums and into formal Senate hearings and sworn congressional testimony. And William McCasland, well, he was one of those figures hanging quietly in the background of it all when that shift began. And now comes the first part,

that is difficult to explain away with coincidence. On February 1st of 2026, Six days before he vanished, President Trump publicly announced he was directing the Pentagon and federal agencies to begin releasing government records related to extraterrestrial life in UAPs. And six days later, McCasland, the man who most certainly could have helped releasing all that information,

he walked out of his Albuquerque home on foot and was never seen again. I hope you're not too desensitized at this point to really let that sink in. because what I just described is not a movie or a conspiracy. It's all factual information that you can look up, and it's only the tip of the iceberg. In terms of what we know about his disappearance, it's this. That morning, a repairman was at his home around 10 a.m.,

and he spoke briefly with him, and then left. At 1110, his wife left for a medical appointment. When she returned at 12.04, her husband was gone, and she reported him missing at 307 p.m. He's left his phone, he changed his clothes, and I don't know what. I think he's on foot. His wearable devices like smartwatch that had tracking capabilities. What may have gone with him was a red backpack, a 38-caliber revolver, and its leather holster.

He also left without his wallet, essentially gone with no way to contact anyone, no way to be tracked, and no way to buy anything. There was a huge search for this man. I mean, they pulled out all the stops in the FBI field office in the area, even got involved. But as of the making of this, there have been zero confirmed sightings of William McCasteland since the morning of February 27. Eight months before McCasland disappeared on June 22nd, 2025, a woman named Monica Reza went hiking in the Angeles National Forest in the mountains above Los Angeles. Alaska. The last scene hiking in the Los Angeles forest with a companion.

By all accounts, everything seemed normal that day. She was about 30 feet behind that person she was hiking with, smiling and waving. He turned around. Next thing you know, she was just completely gone. They searched immediately, and then rescue teams arrived, helicopters, canine units, and drones. Dozens of agencies combed that mountain for days, and then weeks. and they found nothing. It was not a piece of clothing, not a single footprint,

not a physical trace of her anywhere on that terrain. And the case was transferred to the LA County Sheriff's Homicide Bureau Missing Persons Unit. Monica Reza remains listed as a missing person today. Now, here's who she was. Under her professional name, Monica Jacinto, she spent decades as a technical fellow at Aerojet Rocketdyne. the highest technical rank that the company offers.

She co-invented something called Mondoloy, a family of nickel-based superalloys engineered to withstand the extreme heat and oxygen-rich conditions inside rocket engines. The stated purpose of Mondoloy in the Air Force press release was specific and strategic to eliminate America's dependence on foreign rocket propulsion technology, which really meant to stop relying on Russian, and made engines for national security launches, so America could do what it wanted without any

other country knowing. When aerojet rocket down was sold for $4.7 billion to defense contractor L3 Harris in 2023, L. Reza moved quietly to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada, Flintridge, California. And now, here's the question worth sitting with. Who had overseen the government side of the Mondaloy Research Program, well, it was the Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicle Directorate, commanded during a key period of that work by William McCasland. And the scientists who invented the alloy and the general who ran the program that funded it, they both vanished in the American West, eight months apart, leaving no physical trace behind. And now this is where things start to ramp up.

Just four days after Monica disappeared from that mountain trail, Another woman vanished. Her name was Melissa Cassius, and the date was June 26, 2025. She was an administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. And that place, if you don't know, is one of the most secure and sensitive scientific facilities in the entire United States. It's the birthplace of the atomic bomb. And today, it's where classified research into energy, material science, and national security, happens at the highest levels. During World War II, the U.S. government essentially built an

entire secret city in the New Mexico Mountains, and population classified, location classified, and purpose classified. And this is Los Alamos. The facility covers nearly 40 square miles. Accesses control down to the room level. Employees are compartmentalized, meaning most people only know what they need to know for their specific role and nothing more. And Melissa, she worked there. Her role gave her access to sensitive nuclear research data and much more. Cassius was the last seen here at Tulsa, just southeast of Rancho's That house. Her family says all of her belongings, like her wallet, keys, and valuables were all left

inside of her home. Her work and personal phone were also found inside of the home, but reset to manufacturing. So not lost or broken, but deliberately wiped clean. Every contact, every message, and every piece of data she had stored on those devices was gone, a race before she walked out the door and disappeared. Right now, Melissa Cassius is still missing. So, three people, three disappearances, all of them gone within eight months of each other, all of them connected in one way or another,

to the most protected corners of American science and defense. And this next story definitely made the news, but that doesn't mean the answers are all there. In fact, it's quite the opposite. And because of how fast the news cycle is, well, this story has faded into the background, and that's likely been done on purpose. On the evening of December 15, 2025,

a man named Nuno Lerero was shot in the entryway of his apartment building in Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. He was transported to a nearby hospital and died early the following morning. Lerero was 47 years old. Born in central Portugal, he had earned a doctorate in physics from Imperial College London. Lerrero was a professor of nuclear science, engineering and physics, and also director of MIT's plasma science and fusion center. He was a husband and father of three.

Colleagues in Portugal remembering Lerrero as friendly. In January of 2025, just months before he was killed, President Biden personally presented him with the presidential early career award, the highest honor the U.S. government gives to young scientists. His work was in plasma physics and nuclear fusion, the science of superheated ionized gas, and how to harness it as a clean, unlimited energy source. Now, fusion is ever cracked at scale. The world's dependence on oil, gas, and coal ends just like that. Lorero was, by the assessment of his colleagues and MIT itself,

one of the people most likely to help make that happen. Gunman Claudio Nevis Valente attended the same university in Portugal as Lerrero did at the same time in the late 90s. Lerrero graduated from the physics program in 2000. That same year, Nevis Valente was let go from his post as a teaching assistant. It was also identified as the suspect in a shooting at Brown University two days earlier, where he had injured people before making his way to Brookline. So, was it a personal grudge between old classmates? Perhaps.

A man gone crazy? Well, could be. But also, for a crazy man with a possible grudge to get on a plane in Portugal, stake out L'Orero's neighborhood on the day of the shooting, well, that takes a certain level of capability. and it would need to be one heck of a grudge. Or what the motive really was, well, that's never been formally established, and most likely never will.

Claudio died in a storage facility center that night, taking any secrets along with him. Fast forward just eight weeks to February 16, 2026. At a house in Lano, California, along a remote stretch of desert that sits about 70 miles northeast of Los Angeles, Just after six in the morning, a 67-year-old man named Carl Grillmare was found on his own porch with a gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead at the scene. And Grilmer was an astrophysicist at Caltech's infrared science and data center.

His colleagues described him as ingenious and not as a courtesy, but as a precise description of how his mind worked. His research had contributed to the discovery of water in the air. atmosphere of a distant planet, a finding that pointed toward conditions potentially hospitable to life less than 160 light years from Earth. He had identified stellar streams in the Milky Way and vast rivers of stars left behind by the disruption of ancient galaxy clusters, a work that fundamentally reshaped how astronomers understand the large-scale structures of the cosmos. It led research programs using both the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, and I received a NASA exceptional scientific achievement

medal. He is, and I say in the present tense, car is irreplaceable because the ingenuity he injected into his research in astronomy is unparalleled. And where he lived in Lano, when this was the kind of place people choose specifically because it's far from everything. authorities arrested a 29-year-old man and Freddie Snyder nearby on a carjacking charge and later charged him with Grilmer's murder.

But no motive was ever publicly released and no explanation of whether Snyder knew Grilmer. There was no confirmation of whether this was a random crime of opportunity or something deliberate, pointed at this specific scientist, at this specific house, on this specific morning. That question has never been answered. And now, here's the final case, at least as of right now.

45-year-old Jason Thomas disappeared back in mid-December. He was last seen in the area of Murray and Chestnut Streets in town. Searchers and leads for the Novartis scientists have come up empty. A Novartis is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the entire world, with active research contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense. And Thomas's work focused on developing new medical. including potential treatments for cancer. He was missing for three months, and on March 17th of 2026, his remains were recovered from

Lake Quantipoet, not far from where he'd last been seen. Authorities did not announce evidence of foul play. The working assumption, at least publicly, appeared to be that his death was not suspicious. And maybe it wasn't. I mean, people go missing. Tragedies happen that have no sinister explanation and no connection to anything larger. But the timeline sits uncomfortably alongside everything else in this story. A defense-connected pharmaceutical researcher goes missing in December, has remained surface in March, and no motive is offered, no explanation of what happened in those three months.

No public accounting are the circumstances that led a 45-year-old man from his life. life to the bottom of a lake. So a quick recap just to lay this all out in sequence for clarity. June 2025, a NASA rocket scientist who co-invented strategic defense materials and worked directly under a program connected to McCaslin, vanishes off a hiking trail in daylight, 30 feet from her companions, and leaves no trace. Also in June, an administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Lab with access to sensitive nuclear research data vanishes without a trace.

And her phones, they're wiped clean. In December 2025, the director of MIT's nuclear fusion laboratory, he shot and killed in his home, and the motive never established. February, 2006, a pioneering astrophysicist is shot dead on his front porch at dawn,

no motive released. Also in February, the most prominent figure in the intersection of the U.S. military and the UFO disclosure world vanishes from his home in New Mexico and is simply never seen again. In March 2026, the chemical biologist body surfaces

in a Massachusetts lake, no explanation given. Six people, dead or missing, all of them working at the edges of aerospace research, advanced energy, defense technology, and, in at least one case, definitely the world of UFO disclosure. Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett has said publicly that he sees a pattern, that the numbers in these specific fields feel unusually high and that people in Washington need to be paying

attention. He also added that he doesn't think the government should be trusted to investigate itself on this. Former assistant FBI director Chris Swecker said his gut goes directly to a foreign intelligence service. Countries like Russia, China, and others have been running programs for decades, specifically designed to acquire American scientific knowledge at the level these people possessed, things like advanced materials, plasma physics, astrophysical data, propulsion technology. And Swecker noted that in the world of intelligence, targeting science,

scientists is not a new strategy. It goes back to the Second World War, when both sides were actively hunting each other's physicists and engineers. And that's important to remember in this case, because why these people have been killed or disappeared in odd ways probably isn't all tied to UFOs, Alien Secrets, and Roswell. Now, that's the sensationalized version of events, the ones that grab headlines and your attention. But that kind of wording also diminishes the truth and even the lives of all these people lost. UAPs, alien probes, all that stuff. These words alone carry a weight of cultural mockery that makes it genuinely difficult

to take this situation seriously. And it's understandable to be skeptical, but it also might be the intention of it all. The question of whether any of this is connected to extraterrestrial phenomena is actually separate from the question that matters most right now. The question that matters most is, would powerful institutions take extreme measures to protect certain kinds of knowledge and silence the people who hold it?

And would they actually harm individuals to preserve state secrets, whatever those secrets might be? Well, that question has a documented answer with a deep history, and the answer is a resounding yes, absolutely. Beyond individual targeted killings, and there are many documented examples of those, what's most unsettling isn't the idea that powerful institutions would eliminate a specific person who knew too much. It's that they've demonstrated a willingness to harm completely random people.

People with no strategic value, no secrets, no leverage, just ordinary civilians going about their lives. If you're willing to do that to strangers, to people who don't matter to you, you in any way, then removing someone who represents a genuine threat to state secrets is an leap. It's almost the easier call. For instance, Operation Lack from the 1950s had the U.S. Army secretly spraying zinc cadmium sulfide over large areas of the American Midwest, including the city of St. Louis, just to test dispersal patterns. Cadmium is a known carcinogen, so what it did to humans and animals down there, well, who knows for sure, but it certainly didn't help them. The government also conducted hundreds of radiation experiments on unsuspecting civilians,

including hospital patients, prisoners, and military personnel during the Cold War because, well, they needed to understand it better. This is a fact, formerly acknowledged by President Clinton back in 94. In the 1950s and 60s, the Army released swarms and mosquitoes in residential areas of Georgia and Florida, and they did fleas to test whether insects could be used as biological weapon delivery systems. And nobody in the public truly knows what the results were of that. And speaking of insects, but what about Lyme disease? Now that first showed up in 1975 in Old Lime, Connecticut, which just so happens to be located less than 12 miles from Plum Island.

The main attraction there is the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. where they can safely experiment on and research animal diseases. A Lyme came out of nowhere, and what started as a small cluster 50 years ago, now has about half a million people per year getting infected, and that number is growing exponentially. And there was this other disease that spread recently, actually all over the world starting in 2020. I can't remember the name, but it may have come from a bat or some animal,

or it may have been developed in a lab. It's tough to know for sure. If the lab leak is true, then, well, it may have been released by accident, but also maybe on purpose. Well, who knows, but I hear there's good money in pharmaceuticals. M.K. Ultra dose people without their consent. For 40 years, the U.S. Public Health Service told 400 black men in rural Alabama that they were receiving free treatment for bad blood. And they were actually being observed as their untreated syphilis progressed.

And when penicillin became available as a treatment in the 1940s, it was deliberately withheld so the study could continue. Many of them died from a curable disease. We could go on and on, but now we're starting to sound silly, so let's bring it back. The point is not that every unexplained death or disappearance is a government operation. It isn't. Most of them aren't. The point is that the instinct to say they would never do. do that. Well, that instinct has been wrong before, in documented, confirmed historical ways. And so when six people will carry highly sensitive knowledge in aerospace, energy, and defense

research, turn up dead or missing inside a year, the question of whether something deliberate is happening is not paranoid or fringe conspiracy. It's the exact right question to ask, and you're not weird to wonder what's going on. What's going on is strange. What's And if you don't question the narrative or lack thereof, well, then you need to pay more attention. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown. I appreciate you tuning in. If you're tired of all the ads, well, then go watch our episodes over on Spotify. If you're subscribed to Spotify Premium, you don't get any Spotify ads on my videos, so have at it.

Remember to come on back next week for another episode of Everytown filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories. because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.