In the geometry of American defense research, three cities form the backbone of the nation’s most classified aerospace programs: Southern California, where the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech’s infrared processing centers anchor NASA’s planetary work; Albuquerque, home to Kirtland Air Force Base and Sandia National Labs; and Dayton, Ohio, where Wright-Patterson has for decades been the nerve center of the Air Force Research Laboratory. Since July 2024, at least nine scientists, engineers, and defense-connected personnel tied to these exact nodes have died under unexplained circumstances, disappeared without a trace, or been found murdered. Congress is alarmed. The FBI is involved. And the institutions that lost these people have, in nearly every case, said as little as possible.
That silence is the first thing that demands explanation.
On the latest episode of Based Underground, JD goes into details about why this story must not be allowed to go away.
Consider the deaths themselves. Monica Jacinto Reza, a NASA aerospace engineer and co-inventor of Mondaloy — a family of nickel-based superalloys designed to withstand oxygen-rich environments and extreme heat in rocket engines — vanished on June 22, 2025, while hiking with friends in the Angeles National Forest. Despite searches involving helicopters, drones, and canine units, only a beanie and lip balm were recovered. Her body was never found.
Melissa Casias, an administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, disappeared just four days later, last seen walking alone on Highway 518 near Talpa, New Mexico.
Carl Grillmair, an astrophysicist at Caltech’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center who spent nearly thirty years validating data pipelines for detecting Earth-threatening asteroids, was shot dead on the front porch of his home in Llano, California, on February 16, 2026.
Retired Major General William Neil McCasland, who once oversaw $4.4 billion in classified aerospace research and development and served as executive secretary of the Special Access Program Oversight Committee — the body with full purview of every SAP in the Department of Defense — vanished from his Albuquerque home on February 27, 2026, leaving behind his phone and glasses but taking his wallet, boots, and a .38 revolver.
Nuno Loureiro, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and a leading researcher in nuclear fusion and nonlinear plasma dynamics, was fatally shot at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on December 15, 2025.
Jason Thomas, assistant director at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research with active Department of Defense contracts, was reported missing on December 13, 2025, and found dead in a Massachusetts lake on March 17, 2026.
Each case, taken alone, might be explained away. Taken together, they compose something harder to dismiss.
The natural response of a prudent mind is caution. Coincidence exists. Defense researchers live in the same country as everyone else and are not exempt from homicides, accidents, or suicides. Several analysts have noted that available reporting does not establish a verified, coordinated campaign and that coincidence, occupational risk, or unrelated criminal acts could explain parts of the pattern.
That is true… if you believe in coincidences. Some of these deaths have clear explanations but that doesn’t mean they’re not manufactured to look disconnected. The deaths at Wright-Patterson in October 2025 — involving an Air Force acquisition manager, his wife, and a 25-year-old operations analysis officer — appear to have been the result of a murder-suicide, captured on security cameras. The murder of Loureiro has been connected to a suspect with a prior shooting at Brown University.
But the argument from coincidence weakens considerably once you examine what these individuals actually knew and who they worked for, and once you notice what their institutions chose not to say.
The Sentinel Network, which has traced the professional connections between these individuals through patent filings, congressional testimony, DTIC records, and federal contract databases, argues that this is not a loose collection of people who happened to work in defense — but one documented system, traceable through institutional linkage.
Reza vanished in Los Angeles County. Grillmair was killed in Los Angeles County. Both worked in the shadow of the JPL/Caltech corridor where America’s planetary defense infrastructure is built. McCasland vanished in Albuquerque, home of Kirtland AFB and Sandia. The Wright-Patterson deaths occurred in Dayton. Southern California. New Mexico. Ohio. The precise triangle where AFRL operates.
And at each point on that triangle, the same response from the institutions involved: the minimum possible disclosure. JPL said nothing about Reza. NASA said nothing. Caltech’s statement about Grillmair described him as having “passed away suddenly” without using the word “shot.” Wright-Patterson offered counseling services. Whether this silence reflects the ordinary bureaucratic instinct toward self-protection, genuine sensitivity over classified programs, or something more troubling is precisely what we do not know. But it is a pattern within the pattern, and it deserves to be named as such.
Congress has begun to notice. Representatives Tim Burchett of Tennessee and Eric Burlison of Missouri have both spoken publicly about their concern. Burlison requested FBI involvement in the disappearances, telling Fox News that McCasland’s case — in which a retired general apparently walked out of his home, leaving all his devices, and never returned — is “deeply concerning.” Burchett, who told podcaster Benny Johnson that “something dark is going on,” added: “I know these scientists and researchers. They have testified. We’ve got to get to the bottom of it. It’s just too much, too much is going on right now — and by the way, I’m not suicidal.”
That last remark is not a throwaway line. It is a congressman preemptively distancing himself from the list of the dead.
The question that haunts this story is not whether there is a grand conspiracy, but whether the American government — which has, in the current political moment, shown some appetite for declassifying what it previously concealed — is capable of conducting a genuine inquiry into what is happening to the people who built and sustained its most sensitive programs. The country has, over the past several years, inched toward acknowledging that its defense and intelligence apparatus has been less than fully honest with the public on matters ranging from the origin of certain viruses to the contents of certain programs at certain air bases in Ohio. The same apparatus now finds itself losing, through death or disappearance, an unusual number of the very people who would have known where the bodies, figuratively or otherwise, are buried.
The Book of Numbers records that when men went to scout the land and returned with their report, the question was not whether the giants they described were real, but what should be done in response. The land was real. The giants were real. The question was courage. We are at a similar juncture. The deaths are real. The silence is real. The connections are real enough to demand a serious accounting, not from partisan commentators, but from the institutions entrusted with the nation’s security and with the lives of those who serve it.
Whatever the explanation turns out to be, the American people are owed one.
