The Single Dumbest Conspiracy Theory of 2026

The mystery of the missing scientists began with a Silver Alert. In late February, a retired Air Force major general named Neil McCasland left his house in New Mexico for a walk and never returned. Rumors spread on social media that the elderly former astronautical engineer had been abducted or killed. Forget Nancy Guthrie, they said. Here was a guy who used to run a “UFO-linked” lab. Here was a guy with knowledge of “America’s deepest, darkest secrets.” So where was this guy?

McCasland’s wife did her best with a post on Facebook to address what she called the “misinformation circulating about Neil and his disappearance,” but wild notions only multiplied. Dots were added, then connected: Another scientist—an advanced-materials researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) named Monica Reza—had disappeared while hiking near Los Angeles in June 2025. A physicist at MIT had been murdered in December. “What is going on seems to be an enemy action,” Walter Kirn, the novelist and podcast contrarian, said last month.

Things got even dottier from there: Another eight names were added to a growing list of scientists who have recently either died or gone missing. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer expressed concern about the 11 missing scientists and said that “something sinister could be happening.” Another member of that committee proposed that China, Russia, or Iran might be involved. And last week, on the White House lawn, President Trump told a reporter from Fox News that he’d just been in a meeting to discuss the matter. (Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the administration will address the “legitimate questions about these troubling cases” and said that “no stone will be unturned.”)

[Read: Walter Kirn and the empty politics of defiance]

Which is all to say that another piece of flagrant nonsense has ascended to the highest levels of U.S. politics and media. To call it a conspiracy theory would be far too kind, because no comprehensive theory has been floated to explain the pattern of events. But then, even the phrase pattern of events is imprecise, because there is no pattern here at all. Given all the people who could have been roped into this narrative but weren’t, any hope of finding meaning falls away. Barring any dramatic new disclosures, the mystery of the missing scientists has the dubious honor of being a sham in every way at once.

The conspiracy theorists can’t even put their finger on the field of U.S. research that has fallen under threat. Our leading scientists are being targeted by foreign powers—but which ones, exactly? Well, it’s the people who study space technologies, or maybe the people who study asteroids and comets, or maybe the people who work on plasma physics? The Fox News reporter Peter Doocy tried to sum it up like this: The scientists who have died or gone missing are the ones “with access to classified stuff—nuclear material, aerospace.” Kirn’s attempt was somehow even less coherent: The missing experts, he said, work “in the most advanced realms of space-rocket propulsion and, you know, Air Force–NASA–type endeavors.”

If these attempts at explanations sound stupid, it’s because the people on the list of missing scientists have no common area of expertise. Sure, many happen to be physicists or engineers; some are or were affiliated with government labs. But what about Jason Thomas? His tragic death over the winter made the list even though he was a chemical biologist working for Novartis on ways to improve the process of drug discovery.

And what about Melissa Casias, a Los Alamos National Laboratory employee who went missing last year? She was not a scientist at all, but rather an administrative assistant. (Perhaps she had access to some “classified stuff”; who knows?) Another person on the list is Amy Eskridge, who was a “scientist” only in the way that a subway preacher is a “theologian.” Whatever fame she had derived from her claiming that her father, a former NASA propulsion engineer, had discovered the secret of antigravity and that she would soon go public with this world-changing scientific breakthrough. She also made frequent reference to a friend of hers, a “katana-wielding, time-traveling soldier” named Dan.

Maybe Casias chanced to open some ultrasensitive file in the course of doing her job, and had to be abducted. Maybe Eskridge really was onto some new technology. The bigger problem with the story is this: Their deaths and disappearances aren’t really unexplained. Reza went missing while hiking, a fate that probably befalls hundreds if not thousands of people every year. Two more people on the list, a pair of JPL-affiliated astrophysicists, each about 60 years old, may have died of natural causes, as happens to roughly 35,000 other Americans of their age each year. The MIT physicist was murdered by a former classmate who also shot and killed two undergraduates at Brown University. Several people on the list appeared to be suffering from personal distress: Thomas, the chemical biologist, was distraught over the recent loss of both of his parents; Casias had very significant personal problems, according to her daughter, and may have tried to run away from them; McCasland was tormented by brain fog and physical deterioration, according to his wife, and he’d told her more than once that “he didn’t want to live like that.”

And then there’s Eskridge, the antigravity theorist with the time-traveling-soldier friend. In what seems to be her final media appearance, from 2020, she is (by her own account) drunk and high, and appears to be in the grips of a paranoid delusion. Over the course of the interview, she claims that someone sneaked into her home while she was out and closed her bedroom window and that, in another incident, someone broke in and unplugged the charger for her boyfriend’s wireless headphones. Eskridge also said that she’d been followed by a car with a license plate that kept changing, that she’d been roofied multiple times, and that strangers at her local bar had been taunting her by using “buzzwords” relevant to her life. “I’m scared,” she said near the end of the interview. “I’m tired. I’m real tired.” Eskridge died in June 2022.

Read: An act of cosmic sabotage

Note the date: June 2022. Any good conspiracy theory starts with a notable coincidence. (The bacteria that cause Lyme disease were first discovered on an island that happens to be just 10 miles away from the former site of a military research lab …) But again, this is not a good conspiracy theory. When on the White House lawn Doocy asked for comment on the missing scientists, he described them as having “all gone missing or turned up dead in the last couple of months.” If that were true, we might indeed be looking at a “cluster” of events. In fact, the cited instances of dead or missing people extend across a span of nearly four years, from Eskridge’s death by suicide to McCasland’s disappearance two months ago.

Add in the diversity of individuals and circumstances—recall that we’re talking about a group of people who were either scientists or nonscientists, and who died of natural causes or got murdered or went missing—and it’s crystal clear that no coincidence actually exists. The loss of life is real, and families are mourning, but nothing sinister is going on. The “mystery” is just a p-hacked panic and a waste of everybody’s time.

[Read: Every scientific empire comes to an end]

Ironically, America doesn’t seem to need much help when it comes to disappearing scientists. About 1,000 employees have been laid off from NASA’s JPL in the past few years. One senior scientist who is still there told my colleague Ross Andersen last October that he’d never seen the place so empty and lifeless. In the meantime, the Trump administration has repeatedly proposed cutting NASA’s science research funding in half, a plan that would surely lead to further loss of staff at JPL, not to mention the abandonment of probes that have been sent into our solar system.

And while the FBI looks into potential foreign involvement in professors’ deaths at MIT and Caltech, the Trump administration says that it intends to halve the budget of the National Science Foundation, which in recent years has furnished those two schools with hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. Already, more than 40 percent of the NSF’s scientific staff have left or been fired.

This is just a subset of the harms that have been done to the U.S. research enterprise since the start of 2025. In response, some top scientists have been getting up and walking out the door. Their absence can’t be blamed on China, Russia, or Iran. Maybe the White House should look into it.