Greetings, Dear Readers,
I thought I was going to have to break another promise to you guys. I moved last Thursday. With two kids and a pregnant wife, that was a handful, but it’s not all. I graduated a class at the National Journalism Center on Friday morning, then did more moving that afternoon. Then we did unpacking all day Saturday, Easter vigil that night.
Then I woke up at 4 am with the stomach flu. YAY!
I’m still feeling a little shot, but I’ve got enough gusto this morning to keep my word.
With that, I give you …
MY FAVORITE NEW CONSPIRACY THEORY
Air Force Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland (ret.) took off his wearable devices, put his phone and prescription glasses down and left his home on foot February 27. He apparently took the time, however, to lace up his hiking boots, don his holster, and load his .38 prior to leaving.
Stranger yet is that it took about two weeks from the disappearance for the first news story to hit. McCasland has the highest possible clearance in the Department of Defense and oversaw the most classified DoD projects, including so-called “UAPs,” unidentified aerial phenomena, what the department now calls UFOs.
His longtime wife, Susan McCasland Wilkerson, posted on Facebook about a week after he had disappeared. She insisted McCasland, 68, had no risk of dementia, was retired 13 years from the Air Force, and no longer maintained special access to DoD secrets.
“Neil does not have any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash stored at Wright-Patt,” she wrote. “Though at this point with absolutely no sign of him, maybe the best hypothesis is that aliens beamed him up to the mothership. However, no sightings of a mothership hovering above the Sandia Mountains have been reported.”
This is an oddly flippant kicker to a post that was geared toward crowdsourcing any info that could be used to locate her missing husband.
Wilkerson, who was herself a NASA scientist, told a dispatcher in her initial call to authorities that she felt like McCasland “must have planned not to be found,” noting that not only did he leave behind his smart watch and his phone, but that he also took the step of turning his phone off before abandoning it.
Weird, right, Dear Reader? Well, it gets weirder.
McCasland is one of six to maybe even nine people associated with high-level, low-visibility research in aerospace and energy in the last year. I say six to nine because it depends on who is keeping count.
Almost a year earlier, in June 2025, Monica Reza, a rocket scientist whose alloy patent allowed the US to break free from use of Russian rockets, disappeared in almost identical circumstances as McCasland. Authorities mentioned pulling forensic data from her cell phone once, but never disclosed what they found. Like McCasland, authorities believe she was on a hike in the Angelus National Forest when she disappeared.
Four days after Reza’s disappearance, Melissa Casias, an employee at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and advisory board member, disappeared just like McCasland would several months later. She went a bit farther than McCasland. She factory reset both her phones, then left them behind. She was last seen on CCTV footage carrying a backpack. Authorities believe she simply walked the Carson National Forest and vanished.
Another LANL retiree, Anthony Chavez, 78, also disappeared while on foot. People who knew him described him as “very fit and slender, healthy and clearheaded.”
A close friend, Carl Buckland, posted this on Facebook. See if it sounds familiar:
“He is active and intellectually engaged. It is very much out of character or circumstance for him to be out of touch with his family or friends for more than a day. He is my best friend, and we were in contact regularly … His car was locked and parked in his driveway. His wallet, car keys and personal items were in his home, so it appears that he left his home with the intention of not being gone for more than a few minutes. He did hike in Pueblo Canyon often, but it does not appear that he left home prepared for a hike, plus the weather was very inclement. He does not carry a cell phone.”
And those are just the missing folks.
Nuno Loureiro, a leading MIT researcher in plasma science, was assassinated in extremely odd circumstances. The act at least appeared to be random and tragic … until Carl Johann Grillmair ended up dead in eerily similar circumstances. Grillmair was an astrologer working on cutting edge infrared detection systems that could spot incoming asteroids and Chinese satellites alike. They could also spot signs of life on far off bodies.
Grillmair was seemingly randomly shot dead on his porch by a repeat violent offender.
Finally, you have the murder-suicide that claimed the lives of three people working at one of the Air Force’s most classified facilities in Ohio.
A husband killed his wife, a young coworker, then himself, leaving behind three kids. Three people connected to the Air Force Research Laboratory dead in one day. It would seem to have been a grisly end to a love triangle, but oddly, months after the investigation, authorities still don’t have a motive.
“The public record contains no explanation for why Jacob Prichard killed a TS/SCI-cleared operations research analyst and his own wife on a Saturday night in October,” concludes a site called “The Sentinel,” which is entirely bought in on the conspiracy theory.
I guess I should get to the theory part of all this, which should be obvious at this point.
But, Dear Reader, that’s where things get a lot less clear. All we really know is that at the height of anticipation for “disclosure” – that authorities are going to admit aliens exist – a bunch of people around such low-visibility research have been removed from the board.
I should disclose from the outset that I, personally, do not believe in aliens. I could get into why, but it’s a long explanation that basically relies heavily on what we know about relativity and just how huge the universe is.
But I am at least open minded.
In the meantime, the mainstream media has started to pick up on the story. The International Business Times, CNN, Daily Mail and Newsmax have all picked up on the story.
There have also been the statements of current and former congressmen hitting the streams.
Reps. Tim Burchett and Anna Paulina Luna have made headlines with recent claims. So has former Congressman Matt Gaetz. Personally, I think the latter two can be a bit nutty, but Burchett is as sober as they come.
So what’s next, Dear Reader?
I really don’t know. Maybe this is just randomness. We humans love “connecting the dots,” so to speak. We love to believe there are patterns in things because those patterns give us some sense of control over existence.
Perhaps we have no control at all. Perhaps it’s all just chaos. Perhaps Trump will come out and say he’s got an extraterrestrial green bestie and they’ve been trading secrets this whole time.
Either way, I really do love this new conspiracy theory.
Let’s see where it goes next, shall we?
MORE LINKS
Why The F*** Are Men Wearing Giant, Fake Breasts?
A good question from Mr. Right after the whole Bryon Noem scandal.
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Trump Endorses Ex-Fox News Host For Governor’s Race
Will cause ripple effect.
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Soviet-Era Groups Work To Win American Hearts For Another Communist Regime
We don’t hate communists enough.
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Nothing says "grand UAP conspiracy" like a retired general with brain fog who left his phone behind, grabbed his .38, and wandered off into the mountains. Disclosure sounds sexier than dementia, I guess. The mothership must be short-staffed...