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Atlantic calls missing-scientists panic 2026's dumbest conspiracy [1]

['Ellsworth Toohey']

Date: 2026-04-22  

In late February, retired Air Force Major General Neil McCasland stepped out for a walk from his New Mexico home and didn't return. His wife has said he'd been struggling with brain fog and physical decline and had told her more than once that he "didn't want to live like that." Social media had other ideas. He'd run a "UFO-linked" lab, they said. He knew "America's deepest, darkest secrets."

Daniel Engber at The Atlantic calls the missing-scientists panic a "sham in every way at once". The people on the list aren't all scientists, aren't all in the same field, and didn't die or disappear in any kind of cluster.

Other names piled on, and the list quickly stopped making sense. Melissa Casias, a Los Alamos employee who went missing last year, was an administrative assistant, not a scientist. Jason Thomas was a chemical biologist at Novartis, working on drug discovery. Amy Eskridge, Engber writes, was a "scientist" only in the sense that "a subway preacher is a 'theologian'" — she claimed her father had discovered antigravity and that she had a "katana-wielding, time-traveling soldier" friend named Dan. She died by suicide in June 2022. The deaths span nearly four years, not, as Fox News's Peter Doocy told the president, "the last couple of months."

If the White House really wants to find disappearing scientists, Engber writes, it doesn't need to look abroad. Roughly 1,000 people have been laid off from NASA's JPL in the past few years. The Trump administration has proposed cutting both NASA's research budget and the National Science Foundation's in half. Over 40% of NSF scientific staff have already quit or been fired. "Their absence can't be blamed on China, Russia, or Iran. Maybe the White House should look into it."

Previously:

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2026/04/22/atlantic-calls-missing-scientists-panic-2026s-dumbest-conspiracy.html

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