Mother Jones illustration; Getty
For the past several weeks, every sector of the media, from the fringe to the mainstream, has played host to allegations that a group of U.S. scientists are suspiciously missing or have died under mysterious circumstances, all of them supposedly with ties to UFO research. As tends to happen nowadays, those claims very quickly made their way to the to the halls of Congress and the White House, with President Trump directing FBI Director Kash Patel last month to investigate.
The issue, of course, is that the evidence that there’s any connection between the missing and deceased scientists is gossamer-thin. Even more interesting is the fact that this has, up to a point, happened before. A remarkably similar conspiracy theory has been circulating in alternative health circles for years, without significant breakthrough to the mainstream.
For at least ten years, people in natural health and anti-vaccine communities have been claiming that “holistic doctors” are being murdered; the implication is that the Deep State or Big Pharma fears their powerful knowledge. One of the most prominent purveyors of this conspiracy theory now claims that at least 100 unfortunate such doctors have met this fate.
The claims all involve people supposedly killed for knowing too much.
In some communities, the claim is now an article of faith, often referenced in passing at conferences and in newsletters as something everyone knows. But the story never went viral in the broader culture, was never picked up even by our most conspiracy-minded president, and never got the kind of widespread—and credulous—reception that this spring’s claim about missing purported UFO scientists has received. Among other things, the difference in the paths of the two stories shows how quickly and thoroughly our news ecosystem and political environment have mutated.
The missing scientists story began circulating in earnest in early April; the most prominent person to have been included is Major General William Neil McCasland, a 68-year-old retired U.S. Air Force official and former astronautical engineer who held a senior role on a base that’s long been linked to UFO lore. He was last seen on February 27 near his Albuquerque home, which sits near the edge of the vast Elena Gallegos Open Space trail system.
McCasland’s very real disappearance was soon connected with a variety of much more specious claims by people in the MAGA- and conspiracy-verse, as well as by outlets like the Daily Mail and New York Post. The Post has been particularly involved, running at least 14 stories identifying scientists and others whose death or disappearance they baselessly speculate are connected, including multiple people who died by suicide.
An early April Post story on the 2023 death of Michael David Hicks, a 59-year-old scientist who previously worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, appears to have been first time a mainstream news outlet linked the death of a scientist to the conspiracy theory. The article referred to him as a NASA scientist who “mysteriously died without any cause of death listed or autopsy,” adding that the occurrence was “sparking questions about whether he was part of a pattern of deaths tied to the US space and nuclear program.” But there’s no evidence that any significant “questions” were circulating before the Post published; Google Trends shows searches for Hicks’ name spiking on April 9, after the Post ran their first story about him. Nor did the claim that his cause of death was mysterious last very long; by the following week, The Times had reported Los Angeles County medical examiner’s records listed Hicks’ cause of death as heart disease.
Hicks’ brother told TMZ that his cause of death was not mysterious to his family, adding, “He’s had great scientific achievements and contributions to the field, and now he’s going to be remembered for some baloney, Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot conspiracy theory.”
Undaunted by any lack of evidence, prominent people have pressed on spreading the claims. “There is a pattern,” pro-Trump gossip blogger Jessica Reed Kraus, who uses the handle HouseInhabit, wrote on Substack in mid-April. “Scientists at the frontier of fusion, exotic propulsion, advanced metallurgy, and space surveillance are being silenced and taken out.”
“If you are feeling uneasy about the amount of scientists that have gone missing, died… you are correct in your intuition,” Rep. Anna Pauline Luna (R-Fla.), who often promotes conspiracy theories, wrote on April 21. “Something is up.”
Even the Trump administration and the FBI under director Kash Patel, a frequent and chipper purveyor of all manner of bullshit, have given the rumors credence. Patel has said that a “final report,” conducted at White House’s request, will be released soon. “We are trying to make sure, was there a connection? Did they, were they all working on the same thing or not?” he explained. “Those questions we’re answering right now with our state and local partners, and we’ll produce a report shortly.”
Almost no event has been deemed too distant or unrelated to be linked to the story. NewsNation even ran an interview with the parents of Chandra Levy, an intern at the Federal Bureau of Prisons whose 2001 murder remains unsolved, speculating that she, too, had somehow known too much. “There’s a big investigation about these missing and dead scientists,” host Jesse Weber explained, asking them if they thought there was a connection to their daughter’s case.
“There certainly could be,” her father said. “It all sort of fits together.”
“Could she have known something that she wasn’t supposed to know?” Levy’s mother added. “And could she have been wiped out because she knew too much?”
“It is peculiar to me that this wave is getting mainstream press.”
Like Levy, not everyone mentioned in connection with this most recent conspiracy theory is even a scientist. Melissa Casias, for instance, who’s often been added to the tally, was an administrative assistant at the Los Alamos National Labratory; her family has said they believe she may have disappeared on purpose. Among other people Kraus cited was prominent UFO author and conspiracy theorist David Wilcock, who died by suicide on April 20, an act witnessed by police. After his death, Wilcock’s family issued a statement saying Wilcock had long dealt with depression and debt.
“While he was known as a charismatic and engaging teacher to fans, those who were closest to him knew the depth of his untreated mental health struggles intimately,” the statement read. “Many who knew him from afar have speculated that there is a cover-up involving his death, but we can assure you there was no foul play.”
In today’s virality-hungry news ecosystem, it’s neither surprising that the scientists story has spread far and wide, nor that the conspiracy-addled Trump administration would get involved.
But over the past few decades, there have been several versions of the same claim: that a group of people who stumbled upon supposedly hidden or secret knowledge have been killed or disappeared. Journalist and author Mike Rothschild, the author of several books about QAnon and related topics, wrote recently about a particularly fascinating example: a conspiracy theory in 1970s England that scientists connected to British defense research firm GEC-Marconi were being killed. Other portions of the UFO world have baselessly claimed for at least two decades that whistleblowers and inventors who have discovered the secrets to “free energy” have been killed; conspiracy theories about the suppression of free energy have been so widespread over time that there’s even a Wikipedia page for them. There are also the very old and equally false claims that Bill and Hillary Clinton have killed a platoon’s worth of political opponents, and, of course, recurring claims that the Deep State is responsible for the deaths of people like former President John F. Kennedy Jr., or, more recently and even more improbably, Charlie Kirk.
But the claims about supposed murders of free energy whistleblowers and holistic doctors are both remarkably similar to the current missing scientists rumors, as they all involve people who have been supposedly killed for knowing too much about powerful, forbidden technologies.
The holistic doctors rumor first began circulating around 2015, with the general idea being that they were being killed by a medical establishment intent on covering up cures for serious illnesses like cancer. One of the main promoters of the claim is Erin Elizabeth, who describes herself on X as a “journalist, author, public speaker, small farm owner.” Her site Health Nut News has helped her become a major figure in the alternative health and anti-vaccine worlds, where she often promotes conspiracy theories—especially ones about the pharmaceutical industry. Elizabeth is also the longtime partner of Dr. Joseph Mercola, a prominent natural health entrepreneur and supplement salesman, whose business has been reportedly thrown into chaos after he began taking advice from a psychic medium.
“I wrote the series on the holistic doctors in real time as they happened, often about our friends and even neighbors, starting in 2015,” Elizabeth recently explained in an email, adding that she documented a “statistically unusual cluster of deaths and suspicious incidents involving holistic doctors, researchers, and practitioners working in areas like GcMAF, autism treatments, and alternatives to mainstream protocols. Many cases followed regulatory raids or involved odd circumstances that families still question.”
“Are the deaths related?” Elizabeth added. “I doubt all of them are, but it’s difficult to say that none of them are. Some still raise forensic questions. Many were part of a close knit community. Several were colleagues, two were my neighbors, and some I considered friends. The pattern is what caught my attention.”
In the end, though, such claims didn’t break through to the mainstream, although Elizabeth was interviewed for a 2015 episode of the Gaia TV show Beyond Belief, titled “Who’s Killing Holistic Healers?” The claims sometimes resurface in connection with other news events, including the 2019 murder of rapper Nipsey Hussle, who at the time he was shot was at work on a documentary about Alfredo Bowman, a prominent alternative health entrepreneur known as Dr. Sebi. Bowman, who was popular in Black communities, died in 2016 in Honduran police custody while under arrest on charges of money laundering. Discussion of the doctors’ deaths also circulate periodically in conspiratorial portions of TikTok.
Elizabeth told me that it’s unclear to her if today’s UFO scientist rumors are connected to her earlier work tracking the doctors: “While the current missing scientists story doesn’t fully line up with the holistic doctors cases, some of the scientists I covered in my series were working on topics that overlap with what we see now, so there are definitely similarities.” On Instagram, she’s been more definitive, writing that she planned to add some of the missing scientists to her existing database of missing doctors.
“It is peculiar to me that this wave is getting mainstream press when the holistic doctors never did,” Elizabeth told me, especially, she added, since several of the missing healers had high-profile celebrity clients.
“It could just be that we’re in a different time now,” Elizabeth told me. “And more people are getting their news on the internet. I haven’t quite figured out why, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about.”