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At least 10 people tied to sensitive US research have died or disappeared
- mjd 5mo agoLast time I looked into this (last week, I think) it was a big wad of nothing. The people had disappeared over a span of many years. They weren't tied to any particular program, employer, or even any particular area of study, just “uh, tech stuff”. Some of them were technical experts, some weren't; one was an administrative assistant. One was killed by a campus shooter who also killed two students. Typical example: “In the years since, several others connected to JPL have also died or disappeared: Frank Maiwald, a specialist in space research, died in Los Angeles in 2024 at 61.”
- cyanydeez 5mo agoYeah, it's like "At least 10 people with a red sweater on Tuesday have gone missing". Or stupider: At least 10 people flipped a coin and it ended up on Heads! The fact that it reached CNN levels of stupid means journalism is part of the overall USA's intentional brain drain.
- mjd 5mo agoIt's worse than that, it's 11 people who wore sweaters in various shades of red, orange, and pink, at some point in the past ten years. “Anthony Chavez, 79, worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory until he retired in 2017. He reportedly disappeared on May 8, 2025.”
- walletdrainer 5mo agoThis is the same network that breathlessly covered the obviously fake “drone swarms”.
- hrldcpr 5mo agoTo be fair to CNN, this article is about an FBI investigation.
- walletdrainer 5mo agoIt’s sanewashing.
- jasonlotito 5mo ago4 separate government agencies are putting time and effort into something. The headline is accurate. The reporting is accurate. Should CNN not report what the government is doing? Or are you confused and assume that the investigation has returned and finding? Or maybe, we should highlight the things the government is doing. Why do you find what the article is saying sane?
- wat10000 5mo agoIf the weather service starts an investigation into Tuesday’s rain shower, that should be reported. But if that rain shower was completely within the normal range of weather for that location and time of year, that should also be part of the reporting. This article takes everything from the government at face value.
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- walletdrainer 5mo agoCNN should accurately report just how bizarre the reasoning behind these investigations appears to be.
- mjd 5mo agoI wonder if it is reasoning. To me the sequence looks something like this: 1. The story is promulgated by a long-retired ex-FBI analyst 2. Fox News picks it up and runs with it 3. Fox News watchers get excited about it on social media 4. Someone behind a desk at the FBI is assigned to pick up the phone and say tiredly “Yes, yes, we're investigating it all very seriously” 5.The FBI waits for the new Flavor of the Week to distract the Fox News people, then closes the investigation Meantime, CNN reports on phase 4.
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- Mistletoe 5mo agoI need to see stats on how many would be expected to die or disappear from natural causes and I’m never seeing that on these stories. Weird things happen all the time to people in any field of work, it’s only concerning if this is rising above the natural noise. The fact that the current administration, which has proven time and time again it is ignorant about statistics and pretty much all things science, is raising the alarm does not bode well for this being an actual issue.
- zimpenfish 5mo agoVia [0], "Well, there are about 2 million researchers in the US. There are about 25 deaths per million people per day in the US, that’s 50 scientists dying each day, or 73,000 scientists over a four year period. Finding 11 that have some vague connection does not seem unusual to me." (there's more detail at the link, obvs.) [0] https://www.stevennovella.com/neurologicablog/whats-with-the-dead-or-missing-scientists/ https://www.stevennovella.com/neurologicablog/whats-with-the...
- abcd_f 5mo agoShow some rigor. > 25 deaths per million people per day That's not the same age range as actively practicing researchers.
- notahacker 5mo agoBut then if we're doing age ranges, the 10 people "tied to sensitive research" who have disappeared or died are 59, 61, 60, 68, 53, 60, 78, 47, 67, 39 (with the two youngest identified as homicide and suicide). How does a cohort with an average age in their 60s compare with the age range of actively practising researchers?
- zimpenfish 5mo agoI should imagine you could look at the CDC data for those cohorts and perform the same kind of analysis as he has.
- Zigurd 5mo agoColor me skeptical. Whenever I see this come up in a social media feed it's a UFO influencer. It's leaked out into the legacy news presenters who have great haircuts and no critical thinking skills.
- baq 5mo ago[flagged]
- Zigurd 5mo ago"There's no basement at the Alamo."
- walletdrainer 5mo agoPizzagate is still a (particularly nutty) conspiracy theory, if you genuinely believe otherwise you should seek urgent treatment.
- gruez 5mo agoUnfortunately the Trump administration's handling of the Epstein files has added fuel to pizzagate and adjacent "pedophile elites" conspiracy theories.
- OutOfHere 5mo agoPizzagate still is a nonsense conspiracy.
- mikeyouse 5mo agoMichael Hastings was on DMT, smoking weed, and having a manic episode. His family was so worried about his erratic behavior that his brother had flown out to try to get him to check into rehab.. His brother met with Michael the day before he died and realized he was going to need more help, so he called his other brother to fly to LA to try to convince Michael to go to rehab or check into an inpatient psych ward. Michael snuck out in the middle of the night while they were waiting for their other brother and crashed his car into a tree. In his brother's own words, "I really rule out foul play entirely. I might have been suspicious if I hadn't been with him the day before he died. After all, he definitely was investigating and writing about a lot of sensitive subjects. But based on being with him and talking to people who were worried about him in the weeks leading up to his death, and being around him when he had had similar problems when he was younger, I was pretty much convinced that he wasn't in danger from any outside agency." It's an exceptionally dumb conspiracy theory among many other exceptionally dumb ones. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/michael-hastings-interview_b_4261386 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/michael-hastings-interview_b_...
- jdw64 5mo agoI think this is a case of flawed human pattern recognition. Even in the article, it lumps everything together as “in recent years,” but over the span of several years, people across a large country can die for all sorts of unrelated reasons. That’s just how basic mortality statistics work. Also, the category “scientists” is far too broad. Unless we’re talking about the same organization, the same field of research, and the same timeframe, it’s hard to justify treating these cases as connected. The scope is too wide and the professions too varied. It feels like people are constructing conspiracy theories out of weak patterns because those narratives are more stimulating. If we applied the same logic, we could take annual industrial accident deaths in the U.S. and claim they’re part of some coordinated assassination plan by capitalists. That obviously doesn’t make sense. (Although, to be fair, one could argue that industrial accidents reflect structural issues tied to capital, but that’s a different kind of argument entirely.) What I’m really trying to say is that this kind of article feels like a product of the internet’s incentive structure — framing loosely related events as something suspicious in order to attract clicks and attention.
- OutOfHere 5mo agoThey have a distinct commonality of nuclear research. As such, is the limitation in pattern recognition not yours? If you are overlooking it, you are suppressing it, and are a a part of the conspiracy.
- jdw64 5mo agoFrom what I’ve looked up, the range is actually quite broad from astrophysics to aerospace to administrative roles. Here are the individuals mentioned: * Michael David Hicks (JPL, comets/asteroids research) * Frank Maiwald (space research / JPL) * Monica Reza (aerospace engineer, JPL) * Nuno F.G. Loureiro (MIT, nuclear science and fusion) * Carl Grillmair (Caltech astrophysicist) * William Neil McCasland (Air Force, aerospace research) * Melissa Casias (Los Alamos National Laboratory, administrative role) * Anthony Chavez (Los Alamos, construction foreman) I’m not sure what standard is being used to claim a meaningful connection here. The category seems extremely broad. And the idea that “if you question it, you’re part of the conspiracy” is pretty convenient reasoning. Honestly, I’d love to be part of some shadow organization secretly running the United States from behind the scenes — do you think they’re accepting applications?
- shoubidouwah 5mo agoNice writeup on the whole thing basically being hyped politically with actual nothing behind it https://unherd.com/2026/04/behind-the-disappearing-scientists-hysteria/?edition=us https://unherd.com/2026/04/behind-the-disappearing-scientist... Also ~10 in a year, modal age of established scientists + collaboration with us gov, the background rate is basically that... Basically a conspiracy theory at that point, and not even a good one.
- dijksterhuis 5mo agoalso related, a bbc article on the impact from the speculation on the families: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyw9rpdl4po https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyw9rpdl4po > The speculation, she says, is "denigrating to their memories". > Other loved ones reached by the BBC called the speculation "terrible" and "disgusting," compounding families' grief - but chose not to speak on the record because they didn't want to give the stories any more airtime. this shit is harmful to people.
- gpjt 5mo agoThanks for the link -- I read that when it was published, then the other day I wanted to send it to someone but I'd forgotten where it was.
- delichon 5mo agoThe NameUs US public database of around 26k longer term active missing person cases adds around 600 new names per month. It doesn't seem odd that a handful over years would share a narrow professional interest. But that number, 20 disappeared people per day, is gut wrenching. (US murders are at around 40 per day.) Surveillance sucks, but maybe at least it can be leveraged to find patterns when married to NameUs data. On the other hand I can sympathize with someone who just doesn't want to be found.
- esseph 5mo ago> Surveillance sucks, but No.
- spacephysics 5mo agoI’d slightly disagree, the profile of people who go missing is as important as a random chance there is a coincidence. Former military officers, high-level scientists. These individuals have training, money, and live in areas where this tends not to happen. A disappearance of someone from the above background, vs someone who is say in midwest rural America or near areas where human trafficking crimes occur at a higher rate than normal, matters. Further, their research/knowledge of sensitive government material also implies they likely have some form of overwatch or at least minimal monitoring for foreign agent threats from our government (or had in the past). Its not uncommon for high ranking military officials to have some form of training in counter surveillance tradecraft for this exact reason. The odds these events are due to a foreign adversary given the multiple wars and geopolitical tensions are not negligible
- derektank 5mo ago>Former military officers, high-level scientists. These individuals have training, money, and live in areas where this tends not to happen. From my personal experience, these are also the kinds of people that enjoy challenging and thrill seeking hobbies like mountain climbing, backpacking, etc that put them in a position where there’s some not insignificant chance of death in a remote location.
- rglover 5mo ago[dead]
- rekrsiv 5mo agoYet another statistically misleading headline.
- ljm 5mo agoThis basically sounds like the start of Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. Are we going to learn that physics no longer exists?
- Eldt 5mo agoSome UFO guys have been claiming that a hoax will be conducted around the idea of an alien ship detected travelling towards Earth
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- fortranfiend 5mo agoI see this at there's no credible connection at this time, but these individuals have knowledge of technical details on projects and technologies that they don't want in the hands of an adversary. So they're trying to rule out a kidnapping by another power not trying to find them.
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- andyjohnson0 5mo agoThree things: 1. Many people intuitively assume that clumping/clustering of events implies non-randomness, and that random processes are smooth and low-variance. The opposite is true [1]. 2. A consequence of 1. is that people often over-estimate their understanding of the likelihood of events and the degree to which they are conditional/dependent. 3. There was an intriguing comment on this site a few days ago [2], referencing Daniel Kahneman's work on System 1 and System 2 thinking. From memory it said that reality is a lot less explicable than we tend to think - and that a lot of what we casually think we know about the everyday world is just our brains filling in the gaps using quick and cheap System 1. As to why people are clutching at science-fictional interpretations: perhaps they're looking for some excitement or novelty? That would be very human. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion [2] Unfortunately I cant find the comment. I wish I'd favourited it.
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- Jblx2 5mo agoAnyone else feel a bit queasy about citing Kahneman as a source anymore? https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-underpowered-studies-nobel-prize-winner-admits-mistakes/ https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und...
- andyjohnson0 5mo agoPoint taken. But I'm not an academic and this is just hn - and I think the comment was well made. Edit to add: The critique in the linked blog post refers to weak studies relied-on in one chapter of one general-readership book by Kahneman. I'm not aware of anyone claiming that he is generally unreliable as a scientist.
- k12sosse 5mo agoYou say "just HN" but deep down it's a cabal where the rich and elite gather to laugh at the affected and groom future billionaires through advanced snobbification.
- mellosouls 5mo agoDiscussed here the other day: FBI looks into dead or missing scientists tied to NASA, Blue Origin, SpaceX (228 points, 170 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47858246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47858246
- ilitirit 5mo agoWhat was the "pattern" before this in these fields? What is the current pattern in other industries? Does the pattern exist elsewhere in the world?
- rdtsc 5mo agoI think what someone needs to do is before looking up these names or professions, first define a the category of "sensitive US research" well enough (specific institutions, areas, level of access, seniority, etc) and only after that look at history to total missing persons and then decide if there is more or less of them missing in proportion to the total.
- gaigalas 5mo agoAmy Eskridge made publications about concrete deterioration. A scholar, no doubt. Also, outside of her field, a nutcase with conspiracy theories about energy weapons and a troubled individual. No doubt a tragedy, but clearly an outlier (of possibly many). This is super weird, and I can't buy the narrative when clear outliers like this are in the mix. This is, as far as I can tell, sensationalist work that disgustingly aggregates troubled individuals deaths to put forward a patriot narrative that might not hold water.
- tim333 5mo agoMost people die at some stage. I wonder if there's any statistical evidence that this lot is abnormal?
- dualvariable 5mo agoWhat is missing is a denominator and some standardization. There could be 100,000s of people in the US who have jobs where their disappearance could be considered "concerning". And then we need a base rate for people of similar socioeconomic status. They're probably disappearing at a far smaller rate than the general population, since they're not poor, not sex-workers, not troubled teens, etc. However, there is still a base rate, and you still need to show that it exceeds that base rate--and I kind of doubt that it actually does. We have a large population, and over the course of a few years 10 weird things happening seems entirely normal to me.