David Wilcock’s life changed forever when, as a child, he found an old book about U.F.O.s that had been gathering dust in the basement. His father, Donald, remembers that the book wasn’t written for children. David devoured it.
As an adult, David became increasingly interested in the supernatural. In 2004, he co-wrote a book that claimed he was the reincarnation of Edgar Cayce, a famous 20th-century psychic. He regularly appeared on the popular series “Ancient Aliens” and started a paranormal-themed YouTube channel Divine Cosmos, which has 550,000 subscribers.
Even as he became a well-known commentator on the subject of extraterrestrial life, he faced mounting financial troubles. He was also prone to depression. In 2021, his marriage of four years broke up.
“I knew he was struggling,” his father said. But not in “a million, million years” did he expect what happened this past April.
Shortly before 11 a.m. on April 20, sheriff’s deputies in Boulder County, Colo., were called to David Wilcock’s house in Nederland, in the Rocky Mountain foothills. When they arrived, David emerged holding a gun. “Within minutes of deputies’ arrival, he used the weapon on himself,” according to the sheriff’s office.
The pain that swept down on Donald Wilcock was like an avalanche: “No father should ever have to go through what I’m going through,” he said in an interview.
But soon, his grief would transform into rising anger, as he watched his son’s death become grist for a conspiracy theory metastasizing across the internet.
For weeks, online sleuths had been piecing together what became known as the “missing scientists” theory — based on an observation that 10 to 12 figures involved in nuclear, aerospace or extraterrestrial research had died or disappeared. Some of these figures, like Frank W. Maiwald, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had died years before (in Dr. Maiwald’s case, 2024). Other characters in this dark drama, like a retired Los Alamos National Laboratory construction foreman, Anthony Chavez, who went missing last spring, were highly unlikely to know any sensitive information.
Maybe it was Iran exacting revenge for its own slain scientists, or China trying to gain an edge? What if the U.S. was silencing its own best and brightest, in fear of what they might reveal? There was no evidence for any of these suggestions, yet they proliferated all the same. The border between fact and fiction has become so porous, it was inevitable that the implication of serial scientist killing would find its way to the White House.
“I hope it’s random,” President Trump said in an interview on the South Lawn. “Some of them were very important people,” he added a few minutes later.
On the same day that Mr. Wilcock died by suicide, Rep. James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky, who heads the House Oversight Committee, announced an investigation into “a possible sinister connection” between the disappearances and deaths. “It’s highly unlikely that this many coincidences happen,” he said on Newsmax that evening. The following day, the F.B.I. said it was “spearheading the effort to look for connections.”
In response to a query about the status of the investigation, a White House spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, said, “The White House continues to coordinate across the interagency in order to investigate these events and provide transparency to the American people. We will not get ahead of the investigation.”
(In late April, Mr. Trump tamped down expectations of blockbuster revelations: “We have a lot of scientists,” he said. Asked about the investigation in late May, the F.B.I. repeated its message, saying only that it was “spearheading” an effort “to find answers,” and that it was working with the Energy and Defense Departments.)
Unlike the QAnon conspiracy theory, this is not purely a far-right phenomenon lapping at the edges of the mainstream. “These are just entirely too many cases to ignore,” Jennifer Welch, a progressive commentator, said on her podcast. Joe Rogan offered similar musings on his: “If you were a competitor country, I could see why you would want to take out one of those scientists.”
The Wilcocks released a statement insisting that foul play was not involved in David’s death, but it was not enough to stem the conspiratorial tide. David Wilcock “was silenced for speaking out against the Federal Government and it’s never been more obvious,” David Woltkamp, who runs a conspiracy-themed YouTube channel, said in a social media post.
The miasma of lies surrounding his son’s suicide has felt, to Donald Wilcock, like indignity layered on tragedy. “Nothing in my life of 82 years has come close,” he said. And as the number of deaths and disappearances swept into the storyline has grown, family members like Mr. Wilcock have discovered a dark new dimension to their grief.
The Birth of a Conspiracy Theory
There are 73.6 million Americans who work in scientific and science-related fields, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The number involved in researching astrophysics and spaceflight is, of course, far smaller, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics still puts the number of jobs in physics and astronomy in the U.S. alone at 26,400. The occupants of those jobs die, just like the rest of us. They go missing, as do hundreds of Americans each day.
Thousands of people have security clearances, too, explained Scott A. Roecker of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which are parceled out on a strict need-to-know basis. The idea that a small handful of scientists has access to a kind of shadow archive of secret knowledge (encounters with aliens, colonies on Mars) makes for good screenwriting copy but isn’t close to being true. “You wouldn’t do damage to the U.S. nuclear program by targeting a dozen officials or scientists that work in it. That wouldn’t have a strategic impact,” Mr. Roecker said.
Still, our brains have an inherent bias toward sense-making; life would be too chaotic otherwise. Perhaps for this reason, the human mind is subject to the “clustering illusion,” which teases out patterns that don’t actually exist. Studies have also found that conspiracy theories provide a sense of community, which is sorely lacking in society today. Suddenly, you’re no longer an atomized individual but part of a truth-seeking collective.
In some cases, apparent clarity about a case has only led to further speculation. Melissa Casias, an administrative assistant at Los Alamos, went missing outside of Taos in June 2025. On May 28, 2026, a hiker discovered her remains in the Carson National Forest, according to a social media post from the New Mexico State Police. “Investigators also learned that a handgun was located alongside the remains,” the post said.
To some, this was a mystery solved. But to others, the mystery had only deepened. “Roughly half of these cases turned out to be ‘suicides.’ Yeah, suuuure, like Epstein,” wrote social media influencer Mario Nawfal, who has 3.5 million followers on X, seemingly referencing the death of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which some refuse to believe came at his own hands.
It hasn’t helped matters that some of the deaths have indeed been the result of foul play. One such victim was Carl J. Grillmair, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology who studied distant exoplanets; in 2007, he made an important discovery about how to analyze the light emanating from them for clues about their atmospheres. The following year, his discovery helped confirm that water vapor existed in the atmosphere of HD 189733b, a planet 64 light-years away.
Late last year, Dr. Grillmair called the police because he saw a man with a rifle trespassing on his property, according to The Los Angeles Times. Officers arrested Freddy O. Snyder, then 29, a father of two who lived nearby. Mr. Snyder was soon released. He reportedly had no criminal record, and charges were eventually dropped. On Feb. 16, prosecutors say, Mr. Snyder returned, shooting and killing Dr. Grillmair on his porch.
His widow, Louise, wanted to go to Mr. Snyder’s arraignment in April, but given the attention her husband’s death was attracting from the internet’s darkest corners, she thought it best to stay away.
There has been no indication that Mr. Snyder knew Dr. Grillmair was a renowned scientist, or that the killing was anything more than a dispute between neighbors. But that didn’t satisfy Jessica Reed Kraus, whose newsletter has more than 440,000 subscribers. In a Feb. 20 post, she noted that in mid-December, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist, Nuno F.G. Loureiro, was murdered in his Brookline, Mass., home. The killing was committed by Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a former classmate of Dr. Loureiro who’d also killed two people at Brown University. Mr. Valente took his own life.
The two murders had “eerily similar contours,” she wrote, and people were “rightfully skeptical over coincidence — the fact that two respected scientists versed in planetary catastrophes were shot at their homes within weeks of each other, and media just scraped right over it.”
Experts find such notions fanciful. “To me it’s all a big coincidence,” said James A. Tegnelia, a former director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. “I don’t see any science to back up any of the connections.”
Symptoms of a Deeper Malaise
Watching the videos in which the theory’s adherents make their case, one can perceive their sense that the nation is in crisis, and past its scientific peak. China seems to be winning the artificial intelligence race. Iran’s cheap drones have frustrated our military. “There’s this sense of America being outcompeted by our enemies, this sense we’re losing our superpower status,” said Will Sommer, author of “Trust the Plan,” a book about right-wing conspiracy theories.
“There’s a feeling, increasingly, the U.S. government doesn’t know what they’re doing in terms of national security, to the extent that someone could be nabbing all our nuclear scientists,” Mr. Sommer added.
A version of that dynamic appeared to be at work last month, after the Department of Defense released a trove of files related to U.F.O. sightings. Among those who had expected more definitive evidence, some wondered if scientists were being silenced precisely so that such evidence did not come to light.
Eleven days after Dr. Grillmair’s killing, William N. McCasland, a retired major general in the U.S. Air Force, disappeared from his home in Albuquerque, possibly taking a .38-caliber revolver but leaving behind his cellphone. He may have headed into the Sandia Mountains, to the east of where he lived with his wife. Despite a concerted search, no signs of General McCasland have been found.
Here was a conspiracy theorist’s dream. General McCasland had once been head of the Air Force Research Laboratory, home of sophisticated research efforts into propulsion, quantum computing and directed-energy weapons. The lab is based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio, a key locus of U.F.O.-related conspiracy theories. Believers maintain that a facility called Hangar 18 (which does not exist) contains evidence of an alien crash near Roswell, N.M., in 1947.
General McCasland also appears in the 2016 WikiLeaks release of John D. Podesta’s emails. A top Democratic adviser, Mr. Podesta was a target of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, whose advent coincided with Mr. Trump’s political ascent.
General McCasland’s wife, Susan McCasland Wilkerson, acknowledged that her husband once had a high-level security clearance, but he surrendered it at his retirement some 13 years ago. “It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him,” she wrote on Facebook. “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.”
It was an attempt at humor, a bid to dispel a little of the darkness. It didn’t work. “The fact that Gen. Neil McCasland has disappeared off the face of the earth is a grave national security crisis for the United States of America,” said Ross Coulthart of NewsNation, echoing what quickly became a popular view.
‘We’ve Divorced Ourselves From Death’
“If you start looking for patterns, you will find them,” said Elizabeth Weiss, recalling something her husband, Nick Pope, a prominent U.F.O. researcher, would often say. During his career, Mr. Pope tried to separate good-natured curiosity about what lay beyond our solar system from lurid, overheated suppositions that discredited the entire field of extraterrestrial research. After being diagnosed with esophageal cancer, he expressed a wish to die at home, which he did in April at age 60.
“I was with him right up to his last breath,” Dr. Weiss said. “I was right by him.”
“In some ways, I don’t feel anything about it because my grief at losing Nick is so overwhelming,” Dr. Weiss said in late May, several weeks after her husband passed away. At the same time, she felt that the conspiracy theories about his death sullied his legacy, the seriousness with which he approached his own investigations.
“The conspiracy theory turns our — mine and Nick’s — painful journey into a farce,” she wrote in an email. “To believe the conspiracy theory, you would have to believe the government planted a cancer gene that would lead him to have cancer when he was 59 years old; or that the doctors would be in on it; or that the various tests — from M.R.I.s to blood work — would be faked.”
Dr. Weiss is an anthropologist. She has often thought about how ancient cultures faced mortality — and how our own culture avoids doing so, reverting to a conspiracy of silence.
“We’ve divorced ourselves from death,” Dr. Weiss said. “People die in hospitals, so it seems like death is this foreign thing: ‘Oh, something must’ve gone wrong. There must be a bad reason that this happened, not just bad luck.’”
It was perhaps the wisest and most humane explanation for why, after Mr. Pope’s death, he became yet another disappearance for the conspiracy theorists to obsess over.
“Another Military UFO Guy Just Died,” said a headline on the tech site Futurism. A commenter on Facebook wondered, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t he the fourth or fifth one recently?”
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
The post The Toll of a ‘Missing Scientists’ Conspiracy Theory on the Families Left Behind appeared first on New York Times.
