Why Are Top U.S. Scientists Disappearing Or Dying?

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Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026. I'm Dave Anthony. It's a mystery. Getting so much attention, Congress is now investigating. Eleven people with ties to the scientific community have either died or gone missing the past four years. So it's really disturbing. People don't normally walk out of their home without their cell phone, their keys, their wallet. It just never returned. I'm Jessica Rosenthal. A shift may be coming in the way we think about the future of the job market with the rise of artificial intelligence as morality and technology collide. In these kinds of transitions, there is always pain and there is always opportunity. And I wish that that wasn't baked in to the capitalist system, but it is. And I'm Greg Jarrett. I've got the final word on the Fox News rundown. It's like something out of the X-Files. And to summon Congress, the truth is out there as lawmakers start to investigate a mystery, getting more and more attention. Eleven members of the scientific community have either died or disappeared in the past four years. It's very unlikely that this is a coincidence. So Congress is very concerned about this. Our committee is making this one of our priorities now because we view this as a national security threat. Republican James Comer chairs the House Oversight Committee and is asking the FBI and NASA and the Departments of War and Energy for more information. Telling Fox, some of these people were... Leaders in the research in helping to ensure that we stay the leader in nuclear technology. So that's why it's a concern. Some worked for NASA, others for the Los Alamos National Lab, and the biggest name among them is retired General William McCasland, who went missing two months ago, walking away from his home in New Mexico without his phone. He was somebody that people in the UAP community were trying to talk to. And the fact that he just completely disappeared, walked out of his front door and has not been seen again, peaked a lot of interest. Congressman Eric Burleson is a Republican from Missouri, who's on Comer's Oversight Committee. He's also in the House's UAP Caucus, investigating unidentified aerial phenomena. And then as you looked back, people started realizing, okay, wait a minute, there's a pattern here of some of the scientists that were working. Under the general, under his direction, under his appropriations, whether it was at Los Alamos Labs or at the Air Force Research Labs, he seems to be the point of connection for a lot of these missing person cases. Okay. That's where it's all kind of seems to be coming together and what is very strange. You have all these scientists that were working on programs, some of our nation's most top secret advanced technology, very innovative. areas that they were working, whether it was plasma research, advanced materials for hypersonic missiles, propulsion technology, all related to aerospace industry. And the funding was being directed by the general that disappeared. So it's really disturbing. People don't normally walk out of their home.

without their cell phone, their keys, their wallet, it just never returned. Yeah, that is the case with the general, and that happened earlier this year. And the investigation, do we know anything more about that? That's late February. Where are we on that investigation that you know of? You know, what's strange is how people don't seem to be looking very hard for him. When Nancy Guthrie went missing, the whole nation, was on high alert, right? We were watching it day after day. And so here we have another individual that completely went missing and very few people talked about it. And what's really disturbing is before he, the general went missing. The first one was Anthony Chavez that went missing back in May. Then Monica Reza Pahlavi in June and then in late June, Melissa Cassius went missing. All of which those individuals, Melissa and Anthony both walked out their front door, just like General William Nail. There's another individual named Stephen Garcia, who is also working in New Mexico. And his research was tied to the nuclear weapons program. Same story. Went missing. Apparently he walked out the front door with only a gun, with only a firearm. And obviously, it's a mystery as to why they would all disappear without a phone or keys or all that. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, when was the last time you walked anywhere without your phone? Yeah. In fact, if you leave the house or you walk to your car and you don't have it, you know it right away and you go back to get it. Right. It's weird. Within the scientific community, this is not the first time people have speculated about there being a weird circumstance. And it's not the first time people have talked about foreign countries possibly being involved. Nations very much pay attention to the scientists of any other nations. And I mean, just recently you have an operation that China has that we're aware of. We've had oversight hearings on this operation called Operation Fox Hunt, where... The Chinese government is using people in the United States, activities in the United States to try to intimidate and bring Chinese scientists. to repatriate back to China. And they'll use very strong efforts to do that. So look, they're very bold in their activity in the United States. So it's not surprising that there may be some kind of foreign connection here. Now to the other six who have died. Jason Thomas had gone missing from his home last December. He'd worked on chemical biology at Novartis. His body was found last month in a lake in Massachusetts. Michael David Hicks died in 2023. Frank Maywald in 24. Both had worked for years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We've not been given a cause of death for either. Amy Eskridge was working on anti-gravity technology. Her father had been with NASA. She committed suicide in 2022.

What I will say is the odds of them all being connected to some nefarious plot is probably not the case. And Amy is one of those individuals on that list. Her story is really tragic when you read about her story and the kind of emotional struggles that she was going through. She was telegraphing to friends and family that she was being harassed and intimidated. She ended up hiring a gentleman, and I don't have his name right in front of me, but... He was a British intelligence person to investigate some of the claims that she was making. After his investigation, he confirmed that she was a victim of Havana syndrome. So she had been hit with whatever that energy type microwave weapon. Many of our intelligence community have been hit with. Okay. So maybe it is part of the mystery. I think that there's certainly something that happened to Amy that deserves to be investigated. Look, I think that what is common about all of these scientists is that we're working on extremely important research for the United States government. And many of them were read in at top secret, if not beyond top secret levels. And they had information that would be valuable to any other nation. The fact that we've had so many scientists die or go missing in just a few months is disturbing. But I don't think that it's fair to say that they were all connected to the same kind of plan. The other two scientists were murder victims. Carl Grilmer worked for Caltech, a NASA partner. He was shot and killed outside his home in California back in February. The suspected gunman's in custody. and also accused in a separate carjacking and burglary. Then there's Nuno Larero. You may recall, he was the MIT professor, shot and killed by the same gunman, who two days earlier back in December went on a shooting spree at Brown University, killing two students and wounding nine. He had then killed himself days later. I think as a nation, we need to recognize that our scientists are extremely important and probably worth protecting. Clearly, they are vulnerable, and these people have a great importance to our national security and are probably worth providing a little bit more security to. Nuno is an interesting individual. He was working on advanced plasma physics, which is something that is connected to advanced research in aerodynamics and propulsion. Now, there was a UFOologist, or uvologist, I guess that's how you say it, Dr. Stephen Greer. You may have crossed past with him at some point. He had told Fox News Digital that certain people may either be taken because they knew too much or made themselves disappear because they knew they could be assets, that could be interrogated or even charged with various crimes. Do you understand what he's getting at there? I do not. I don't know exactly what he's referring to. I've heard a lot of speculation that there is a lot of money movement that has been illegal. That's all speculation. That I've not seen any kind of facts that would back that up yet. Okay. And then he went on to say this is no joke. We have heroic and patriotic people who have been trying to come forward, but the government has failed them by not providing adequate protections.

Now, that is true. That is true. And I just know personally, individuals that have come forward, provided information, and then the government has turned their back on them. They lose their pensions. They lose their clearance levels. And these are patriots who tried to go the right way of being a whistleblower, go through the proper steps, go to Congress. And, you know, many of them have lost their jobs. And that is tragic. And they've had physical intimidation as well. There are conspiracy theories, of course, that always come up when you have something like this that is getting more and more attention. You have been part or our part of what's called the UAP caucus on Capitol Hill, the unidentified aerial phenomenon. I still think of them as UFOs, but I guess UAP is the more modern way to look at this. You've been involved investigating this kind of thing. Do you see any kind of possible connection here between all of this and UAPs or no? Look, within that group, I am the skeptic in the room. So I think that the most likely scenario is that what we're seeing is advanced technology. Okay, because I know we've covered hearings on Capitol Hill regarding videos from the military, showing objects, doing things that supposedly are not possible. But you think that is possible. We just don't know about it. Yeah, I think the most likely explanation is it's not the most. you know, sensational. The most likely explanation is that we have companies that are doing work and research under grants from our federal government that is extremely top secret, and sometimes those things are being seen and cited. So the truth is, the phenomenon is real? The question is, is it us? Is it our scientific community working for military contractors? Or is it a foreign actor or the other? is left to be answered. And it's something that is intriguing and something that we're working to try to investigate with a level head. And all of this that you've done and all the research you've done in the hearings and everything, nothing has convinced you that we have been joined by extraterrestrial anything. There's nothing that's convinced me of that. Now, what I am convinced of is that someone has developed a type of physics that we have never seen before. And I mean, like, not just a unique way of propulsion or flight. I mean discovered or hacked something within the physical universe that we've...

We have no idea of, I mean, like an entirely new form of science. Something to the, like a breakthrough technology or something that has happened. That is clear in the things that we're observing in our skies. As far as the investigation and to the missing or dead scientists, what's next? So we've sent the letter, Chairman Comer has joined me in my letter to the FBI requesting that they look into these mysterious deaths and or missing persons and that they respond. And I would hope that we would get a full briefing on both the scientists and our military intelligence people. Well, you certainly have a lot of attention from a lot of people as this mystery deepens. Congressman Eric Burleson, Republican from Missouri on the House Oversight Committee, great to have you here. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Anytime.

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He and his eight-year-old son, home at the time, were not hurt. Well, throwing Molotov cocktails at anybody's house is really effed up and should be completely condemned by everybody. Futurist Jamie Metzell is the author of seven best-selling books, and the newest one is the AI Ten Commandments. And so, but I, and all of these attacks are just preposterous and frankly self-defeating. It's also my view that we're entering into a new era that's going to be pretty revolutionary. And we need to make sure that we're optimizing the good stuff and minimizing the bad stuff. So even though I'm net, net optimistic about the benefits of AI, that doesn't mean that there aren't real concerns we should be worried about. There's a reason why evolution has preserved the very natural feeling of anxiety. It's not just to stress people out, but to inspire people to say, hey, maybe something bad could happen. And we need to start taking action now to try to build the best possible future. So there will be some job losses in conjunction with AI revolution. There'll be job gains in conjunction with it, although it's harder to imagine them now because the losses are real and the gains are probably in industries that we can't even imagine. And most jobs will change as a result of these new technologies. But that's not entirely new. has happened with lots of other technologies. Our ancestors used to be hunter-gatherers, and then the technology of agriculture turned most of us into farmers and then industrialization helped us leave the farm and do other stuff. So this is part of that same trajectory, but it's going to be disruptive in some ways. And we need to manage that as much as possible so that people are feeling the benefits more. and the harms less, although there certainly will be harms, and we have to be honest about that. So we talk about unemployment a lot with AI, but there's another part of this, and that's AI being used in the workplace now. I want your take on this new survey out from an SAP-owned company called WalkMe. It found over half of workers avoid their company's AI tools to do the work themselves. While over 80% of bosses think AI's increased productivity, this survey found most workers feel they've lost time cleaning up after AI mistakes. And while 61% of executives said they trust AI for complex business critical decisions, only 9% of workers said the same. What do you make of this disconnect? I think it's really interesting. there's the abstract sense of what AI can do. And sometimes there are just very practical applications about what it can and can't do. And so if you are a person with a specific job and you know your job really well, you may be better able to spot problems in workflows than your big boss who is thinking of things in an abstract way. That's why we call generals generals in the military. And so I think it's not that AI is perfect now or it's going to solve every problem, it's going to have different roles in different contexts. It's going to do some things better and some things worse. And so I would be the first person say we shouldn't just have wholesale adoption of AI. But we need to figure out what it can and can't do. And that's a learning process. And that's why a top-down transformation isn't going to work. And a bottom-up alone transformation isn't going to work. This has to be...

iterative and layered, and we're going to have to figure out. what works and where the productivity gains are to be had. But a blanket adoption of AI is going to cause a lot of problems. And we see that with computer coding. So AI can do computer coding very fast. But if you're building layers of code and there's a bunch of little mistakes, it's going to take way more time to go through everything step by step to figure out where the errors are than it would be to write the code in a better way going forward. But that better way may not be human alone. I think it will be humans and our AIs working collaboratively together, but we're going to have to figure out how to optimally carry out those collaborations. In light of your recent book, The AI Ten Commandments, I want to ask you about the ethics of corporate America. Like, just because you can fire thousands of people, should you? And I think Envidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said, you know, these CEOs just... going through with these mass layoffs lack imagination, that they could be doing more with AI and those employees. I think we need to be to find the right balance. One of the reasons why the American economy has been so successful for so long is that we have had... a new level of flexibility. I mean, it used to be, like I said, everybody was farmers, and then people were doing other jobs, and then people were working for the, for Ma Bell, or whatever, the precursor, AT&T, and then going to work for IBM was the big thing, and then IBM shrunk, and now we have Google and these other tech companies, and so our job is not to keep... Our mission should not be to keep every single person in the country in the exact same jobs that they have now, but to allow for some kind of creative flow in our economy. And so we should have maximal creativity about what humans can do. There are some people who are saying that AIs are going to do everything that humans can do. I say this is total baloney. You've heard of artificial general intelligence, AGI, which is what people say will happen when machines can do. everything better than humans. And I always say AGI is BS. AGI is BS because humans represent almost four billion years of embodied evolution. We have so many tricks up our sleeves. Our intelligence isn't just raw processing power. It's so many different things. And so I don't believe that machines are going to be able to do everything that humans can do, not even close. But we're going to have to figure out what do humans do best and what do machines do best. And so having a human function in effect as a second-rate machine will be not a good use of that human time. And so we're going to, I agree with Jensen, that we're going to have to be creative about figuring out, well, what is the optimal use of a creative human?

and doing something that is uniquely human. That's where the real value ad is going to happen for companies. I was recently reading that the CEO of Verizon was warning that unemployment, he said, could soon climb to like 30% within two to five years. He said we are at Verizon overseeing the creation of this new program to retrain 13,000 soon to be fired workers and help them. transition to new jobs. Some of them are like sort of AI related and data related. Is this the kind of leadership we need or is something additional or else needed? Well, certainly we need more, but our society is going to change. You may imagine we were talking about industrialization. People said, well, we're going to lose all of these farm jobs. We wouldn't say, well, how do we keep the farm jobs? How do we keep everybody on the farm? We would say, how do we ease this transition so that we're re-skilling, retraining people? And that happened in this country and around the world over time. The challenge now is that the time frame is compressed. And so we're going to have to do a lot more. with the re-skilling, with the re-imagination, with seeding new companies and new opportunities so that the gap between what may be a partially destructive process for parts of our economy and the creative process of whole new industries that, like I said before, we can't even imagine. We need to shorten that gap as possible. But in these kinds of transitions, there is always pain and there is always opportunity. And I wish. that that wasn't baked in to the capitalist system, but it is. But that's the reason why when you look at the communist societies, they don't really do very well. And I say this as a liberal Democrat myself, they don't do well because if your goal is to kind of keep things as they are, the world is changing. And so staying where you are in a changing world is going to be a more and more dangerous place. So we have to. continue to evolve our economies and our societies. But that's the history of what we've been doing for, you know, pick your time, 12,000 years since agriculture, a million years since our ancestors learned to control fire. It's just that this is now happening at a much faster rate. Yeah. Speaking of communist countries, there's a new report out. Stanford University's Institute for Human-centered AI does an annual AI report. I'm sure you're familiar with it. It's asserting that we are falling behind China in some respects, including, I think they wrote in patents, AI-powered robots, and even research. How big a problem is this, or is there a broader picture that this report is missing? No, I've read the report. It's great. We should be hugely worried while China is focusing on building toward the future that it imagines. We are wasting so much energy in this country, fighting each other. You look at our toxic politics. We aren't making the kinds of real investments in education, in helping our companies upgrade and seeding new companies. In the United States, we are in the best position in the world.

to massively lead the AI revolution. But it's not going to happen on its own. It's going to happen through a combination, as has always been the case between our society, our government, our businesses, our universities. But right now, our government is in many ways at war with our universities. And there are certainly lots of things to be highly critical of with our universities. rampant bigotry and anti-Semitism certainly are among them. But we need to have the same kinds of collaborations like we had in the 1940s and 1950s that laid the foundation for everything that we have today in at least the technological part of our economy. Futurist Jamie Metzell, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. This is a new era of American innovation. Google is offering free AI training to U.S. small businesses with a Google AI professional certificate so they can start using AI to get more done. Learn more at G.com slash American Innovation. This week on the Fox True Crime podcast, psychotherapist and author Lena Durholy breaks down the mind of Chris Watts and the warning signs behind one of America's most disturbing family murders. Listen and follow now at foxtruecrime.com. Rate and review the Fox News rundown on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. It's time for your Fox News commentary. Greg Jarrett. What's on your mind? Newly declassified documents produced by the Director of National Intelligence prove how Donald Trump was set up and framed by people in the intelligence community who conspired with Democrats like Adam Schiff to manufacture a phony impeachment. The whistleblower was not a whistleblower at all. under the meaning of the statute. The formal complaint he filed against Trump should never have been sent to Congress because it was based on total hearsay. It didn't even qualify as a valid complaint. It never involved intelligence. Not only that, the whistleblower law does not apply to the president who was the target of the complaint. But all of that was ignored. Even worse, it turns out, that the whistleblower was a partisan mole with close ties to Joe Biden. He was an undercover operative from the CIA who was determined to engineer a fraudulent impeachment. He later apologized for his deceit, but even the apology was covered up. During the preceding seven years ago, I wrote numerous columns pointing out all of this, but these newly declassified documents prove it.

Shockingly at the time, the Inspector General Michael Atkinson is identified in the new documents as aiding and abetting the fake whistleblower who submitted false information in his complaint against Trump. Atkinson knew it, but he vouched for the man's credibility anyway and thereafter concealed exculpatory evidence that would have cleared Trump. The whistleblower's bias and deceit was hidden from Congress, the American people, and Trump's defense team. Atkinson exceeded his authority and weaponized the whistleblower process, according to Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence. Adam Schiff, who propelled the Trump impeachment, knew the truth but remained silent and joined the conspiracy. He had his staffers coordinate with a whistleblower before the complaint was even filed. In other words, Donald Trump was set up for a sham impeachment led by Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi. I'm Greg Jarrett for Fox News.

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