What Are The Chances Of All These Scientists Dying, Killed, Or Going Missing?

Pretty good, as it turns out

Apr 20, 2026

Might I beg you, if you find it useful, to show this article to those who are growing concerned or agitated about this story? Don’t miss the ending.

Here’s a headline and juicy story: Mystery surrounds death of NINTH scientist tied to US secrets as disturbing pattern grows.

Another scientist with ties to America’s space program has now joined the growing list of deaths and disappearances around the US.
Michael David Hicks, a research scientist at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), passed away on July 30, 2023 at the age of 59, but the cause of death was never made public, and no record of an autopsy being performed could be found….
While there have been no public allegations of foul play, Hicks’ case marks the ninth person with ties to America’s space or nuclear secrets who has died or mysteriously vanished in recent years, which has set off alarm bells among US national security experts….
Two other men with deep ties to JPL died recently, including a long-time coworker of Hicks, Frank Maiwald, who died in July 2024 at age 61, with even less public acknowledgement of his untimely passing.
Meanwhile, astrophysicist Carl Grillmair, 67, was murdered on the front porch of his home on February 16, 2026….
The disappearance of McCasland, who reportedly held nuclear and UFO-related secrets, has been tied to Reza and Grillmair through their work on advanced missile or rocket science….
Chavez, 79, worked at the nuclear research lab until his retirement in 2017. Casias, 54, was an active administrative assistant at the facility and is believed to have had top security clearance…
In another mysterious incident, Jason Thomas, a pharmaceutical researcher testing cancer treatments at Novartis, was found dead in a Massachusetts lake on March 17, 2026, after disappearing without a trace three months earlier.

There are plenty of lurid details here, but I cut a lot, so go to the original to read it all. I particularly enjoyed the Daily Mail noticing there was no autopsy on one of the dead. Which sounds bad. But you could say the same, I’m betting, about your Great Uncle Fred, whose death you can make sound ominous by remarking, “My great uncle Fred died, and the one thing we always wondered was why they didn’t do an autopsy on him.” Try it in company.

Since that first story, it was early last week reported another man went missing: “Steven Garcia, 48, vanished without a trace on August 28, 2025. He was last seen leaving his Albuquerque, New Mexico home on foot, carrying only a handgun.” Note the date. Note all dates.

Update: After I had written this, there were last Thursday more lurid headlines, like this, again from the Daily Mail (they were far from alone): “BREAKING NEWS: Eleventh scientist found dead”. For good reason, I’ll save this for last, leaving the rest of what I wrote untouched. Below, I will reveal the most shocking death of all, heretofore unreported, bringing the tally to 15.

Here’s the Daily Mail’s most recent graphic (which leaves out some people):

From the reports I’ve seen, I make it 5 missing and 5 dead. Two of the dead were at JPL, one only had “connections” to that lab, and the other two dead were at Los Alamos or elsewhere. The missings you can see from the graphic. They all, dead or missing, were in a range of jobs, from secretarial to administrator to engineer to scientist.

Oddities

The strangest missings, or at least the two most remarked on, are the bottom: Reza and McCasland.

According to a more detailed report, Reza (60) went out hiking on a “a ridgeline in the Angeles National Forest.” She waved at a person she was hiking with (500 feet below), and then, like rare things will, she vanished. They haven’t recovered her body. This was 22 June 2025. (The DM and other sources have different ages for many.)

McCasland (79) on 27 February 2026 walked out his Albuquerque house “and into the Sandia Mountain foothills.” No one is known to have seen him since.

The graphic makes it appear he and Reza were pals, whereas McCasland was an administrator at Kirtland AFB (I’ve been, nice place), which oversaw funding that went to Wright-Patterson, which gave some to JPL, which Reza got a portion of. Along with many others.

Last week, the most competent and benevolent government of these once United States announced they were going to investigate these strange occurrences. Let’s beat them to it.

The Theories

If you are like me, especially if you’re like me since I resemble these guys, you notice that the dead were all entering the Great Downward Slope of Life. It is not unusual (sadly) for those sliding into their sixties to peg out. It’s less likely, given ordinary conditions, any would be whacked, though it all depends on circumstance. And you know what I mean.

The proposition before us, at least how the lurid headlines paint it, is this: Some entity is taking out scientists involved in certain secret research.

We want to know the chance of that. We don’t per se want the chance a person in his or her 60s keels over or disappears while hiking.

The two probabilities are not the same. We mustn’t confuse the rarity of people handing in their dinner pails, if it turns out to be a rarity, with the opposite likelihood that Peter Thiel, or whomever we suppose is behind the mysterious plot, is sending out minions on manhunts. It must be somebody or some group doing the killing and abducting if all these people share the same cause of demise and disappearance.

Just saying that, putting it into concrete terms, makes the idea of a Conspiracy, for that is what it has to be, seem unlikely. Not impossible. Unlikely. To me. Because Conspiracies require real work, real organization, a lot of planning and intricate machinations. Think to yourself about how to whack one scientist and make it look like an accident while also keeping your tracks perfectly covered, and covered so well even your favorite fictional TV detective couldn’t finger you.

Then you have to multiply that by ten. That’s a lot of secrets the Conspiracy has to keep! Not that it can’t be done by an earnest organization. But it cannot be conceived as easy. Think: making folks disappear, with no corpora delecti. Hard labor, that.

The Dead

There are some 5 to 6 thousand JPL employees, a majority of whom can be classed scientists or technicians. But consider we’re not only discussing scientists, as many headlines have painted it. And as many are sharing the story. We have secretaries, admins, and others kinds of employees and contractors, along with scientists. That’s our first glaring clue how to think about all this: sloppy irresponsible reporting (in other words, the usual) and taking that reporting at face value, which at this late date is remarkable.

Call it 4,000 for a conservative number of any we can class as “scientist” alone. But you have to add in some number of ex-employees, people who have moved on and are still above ground. Maybe it’s back up to 5,000.

The CDC, taking into account whatever measures they have on dead and living bodies, says there’s about a 1% chance a white man ages 55-64 permanently loses the ability to join any new wars (deaths from any and all causes). A little less for the Equal sex. That seems a reasonable guess to me, given my long experience with medical data.

With this premise and 5,000 employees in this age range, we’d thus expect about 50 to die in a year, with more than a 99% chance from 30 to 70 would croak. If they only had, say, 1,000 in this age group, then it’s obviously less: Some 10 per year, with a range of about 5 to 15. The numbers dip a bit if you consider women separately, but not to zero. Somebody should call a local florist and see how often they’re sending over bereavement bouquets to the labs.

Los Alamos boasts of some 14,000 to 18,000 employees, so we expect a bigger pile of bodies there. And that’s what was found. One more than JPL, anyway. It depends on how many of these you want to consider to be in the scientist pool, but there is going to be a slow and steady attrition rate from death. And then the people listed in the reports weren’t all scientists: there were secretaries, and etc. We might guess well over all 100 people connected or employed at Los Alamos die each year (the “expected” value is 140 to 180). If only half were in the age group, then we’d guess 70 to 90.

So far, we can conclude that the number of deaths is not unusual, and is even expected given our background information on employment and demographics. It’s stranger, in fact, that we don’t hear of more such deaths, given the number of employees these labs have. It could, as I said, be that our “denominator” is wrong at JPL. Maybe they only have, say, 1,000 scientists and ex-scientists 55 or over. Yet even then we’d still expect about 10 deaths, with a over a 90% chance there’d be 5 to 15 a year. And then about three times these numbers at Los Alamos.

And then there will be the odd death of those under 55. So it doesn’t matter much, either, if we lower that 1% chance per adult. Even if were one tenth of that, we’d still have a nice crop of corpses each year (below I use this modified number in the Missings analysis). And again, we’re talking several years here, not just one.

“But I don’t hear of all these deaths. Just these mysterious ones. It’s suspicious.”

Right. You don’t hear about most deaths, thank God. About 8,5000 people die each day in the States. That’s about 3.1 Million a year. Imagine having to hear about all 8,50o deaths every single day. And we’re not talking about only one year here, but at least two, if not three. This is a very large pile of bodies from which to choose stories. Consider that second Daily Mail story. Sounds like they went to great efforts to find that extra body. The Daily Mail is stretching to find bodies and connections.

Below, we’ll try the exercise ourselves.

The Missing

What about missing people? “Missing” isn’t dead, necessarily, because some that can’t be found eventually turn up alive or their bodies are found. One source reports around 400,000 adults go missing per year in the States. There are about 270 million adults in the USA. That’s a rate of about 0.1%. That surely varies by age, but I didn’t look into how, because it isn’t that crucial.

Again, Los Alamos has some 14,000 to 18,000 employees. We might expect about 14 to 18 each year to be reported missing. And maybe 5 at JPL. Each year. If that 0.1% chance for adults holds. And here we have not just one year, but two to three. Meaning we expect stories on 15 to 45 from Los Alamos over three years, and 5 to 15 from JPL. More, if we’re including people merely connected to these labs.

The Connections

The Daily Mail graphic makes it clear connections can be made between people working at each lab, and even between them, suitably mediated by government funding administrators. All these people were working on projects which seemed to be related, at least loosely. They are all science projects at least.

I once had a job at Lawrence Livermore but I was pre-fired after one of the global warming True Believers found out I was a “climate denier” (apparently I deny there is a climate). But at that near-miss job, I would have been in charge of a statistics group involved in all manner of activities and projects, including the nuclear side (I had a Top Secret-SCI clearance; I did electronic cryptography in the Air Force). And that would not have been unusual. It’s easy at and between these labs to be said to be working on “similar” projects or even the “same” projects.

The probability is certain as can be that you can find at least funding connections between people at different labs who all work for the government on similar matters. For one, they all work for the government. For another, they’re all working on similar matters. And because they’re at national labs, and this is where the research on nukes and such things happens, there’s a lot of natural overlap.

It would be harder, and probably close to impossible, to find no connections. They are connected by definition because they work at, for, or with these labs. There must be connections. And notice that not all are working on the same project, say a nuclear shell to repel Aliens, but merely similar ones. Again, those jobs must be similar. If they weren’t, they be working somewhere else.

The Chances of Our Theories

These numbers were computed assuming the Natural Causes theory was the cause of these deaths and missing people. Another name for this is the Nothing To See Here theory. It is a dull theory that excites no one. People that promulgate it are not loved, even hated, the party poopers.

What numbers would we expect if Peter Thiel’s Band of Assassins Conspiracy or similar theory were true? Same numbers!

The tally of dead and missing are so tiny, relative to employment, they wouldn’t bump up the Natural Causes stats enough to seem suspicious, especially over a multi-year period. The connections are also perfectly banal. You cannot work at these labs and not have Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon not come into play. Even I have an Erdos number of 5 (for those who know what that is).

To believe the Conspiracy, or give it real weight, we’d thus need evidence beyond that of body count and vague assertions of project similarities at labs run for the purpose of making similar-project jobs. The numbers we have aren’t even close to letting the Conspiracy theory carry the day.

What might this Conspiracy evidence look like? Could be many things. Like somebody reveals emails connecting, say, six or seven of these guys dead scientists, with cryptic messages about The Secret (whatever that might be). Or the same kind of communications from minions boasting of how they did the deeds. Any number of things could work, but they grow increasingly esoteric.

For instance, a leading alternate theory is—shall I tell you?—UFOs. Yes, really. Hello, 1970s. Our “scientists”, which we see includes secretaries and others, were either killed by Men In Black, beamed up to ships, or are in witness protection programs (yes, people say this). No evidence is presented for these views, except insinuation. But insinuation is enough when you want to believe. “Wake up” is a popular phrase.

For this we can blame desire. The desire is strong in many that there should be a connection, and that powerful secret entities are carrying out mysterious assassinations and kidnappings as part of their plan to Rule The World. Desire is what accounts for many not looking beyond or into the media headlines. How at this late date any media story is believed is perhaps the most disappointing aspect, to me, anyway. This lesson ought to have been learned better by now.

People who favor the Conspiracy hate hearing criticisms (like these), and think those that make them are bad or are ignorant and naive or are in on it. So don’t take this as me trying to talk you out of anything if you want to believe. I understand. We can still be friends.

The Shocking Eleventh Body

The headlines last Thursday all announced an eleventh scientist was “found dead”. Some gave the name, most just blared the increased tally. This is an excellent demonstration of how a truth, the scientist was indeed “found dead”, can be false. For the scientist, Amy Eskridge (34) was “found dead” in 2022 after she shot herself (videos of her show an unhappy person; her dad was forced to tell a reporter “Scientists die also, just like other people”).

She wasn’t just found. She was found four years ago. Which shows that once these mini-panics get going, they are difficult to stop. We saw above that there is an excellent chance each of these labs have multiple deaths a year. Now we’re talking over four years. And yet there are only reports so far on half a dozen deaths, from a pool that is almost surely much larger. That make the chance all but certain that we will see more headlines. Beyond number 11, I mean.

I am going to provide them.

Reporters (not a good word here) and rando researchers will reach back and sift through obituaries, looking for any connection to these, and surely other, labs. And they will be rewarded in their efforts. There are bound to be many more deaths “uncovered”. Just saying “uncovered”, like stating “there was no autopsy”, makes the deaths seem suspicious, does it not? Because you can’t “uncover” something known to all, so the temptation to believe these some entity tried to “cover up” these deaths is powerful.

After a full three minutes of searching (two spent in not realizing my enemies placed a typo in my search terms) I uncovered the death of Thomas Eldon O’Hare (88), who was found dead in his Los Alamos home, from what they say was metastatic cancer. There is no record of an autopsy. O’Hare was Air Force and “flew missions as an ECM Operator on B-36 ‘Peacemaker’ aircraft that took him to locations throughout North America and the Atlantic Ocean”.

Significantly (my emphasis), “After leaving military service he spent the rest of his career in New Mexico while maintaining a government security clearance by working for a contractor to the Sandia National Laboratories, which then led to a twenty year career with the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).”

That brings the body count to 12!

No, 13! For we have to add S. Fredric (Fred) Marsh who was a “Los Alamos National Lab analytical chemist”, working at the mysterious “Materials, Science and Technology (MST-12) group”, and was found dead in 2023.

Make that 14! Add in Roy White, Jr., who was found dead in 2022, and who worked “over 30 years as a facilities engineer in C Division. He was very involved with all the new supercomputer installations and maintenance.”

I was wrong. It’s 15! And the most shocking death of all. Charles F. McMillan (69) who died in a suspicious car accident in 2024. Get this: McMillan was the 10th Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), from 2011 to 2017, and the President of Los Alamos National Security, a private company. He was deeply involved in “planetary exploration via the Mars Rover.” Think about that. There wasn’t anything this guy didn’t know.

And dead in a car crash? How dumb do they think we are?

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