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  nickandbro
  A lot of people are saying it’s disconnected, but even if it was, if a string of your country’s top rocket experts started disappearing, you wouldn’t just sit idly by
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  littlecranky67
  > McCasland, 68, disappeared from his Albuquerque home on Feb. 27 of this year, leaving on foot with only a .38 caliber revolver. [...] Government contractor Steven Garcia, [...] disappeared from Albuquerque in August 2025, last seen on surveillance footage leaving on foot with a handgun.Not american, so I can't judge if this is a common thing or irregular, but both were last seen carrying firearms as if they'd be thinking someone is after them.
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  wmf
  I don't have the link but someone estimated the number of scientists working in the defense field (it's a lot) and the number of deaths per year you'd expect (over 100). There's probably nothing here. It probably doesn't hurt to have the FBI take a second look at any death of somebody who has a security clearance or is working on export-controlled tech, but OTOH that might be a lot of work.
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  himata4113
  This appears to be for investigating how many scientist have left the US sponsored by state powers. But this also seems like bad communication on the FBI and perhaps poor publishing.I think there is some confusion that there are more people going missing and dying in the sector while not outlining that there are more people going missing AND dying.Or I'm just completely wrong, the only reason why I am making such assumptions because there is more information about this in the ASML case where a whisleblower leaked that china has poached ASML engineers and have given them new identities to work in chip manufacturing sector in china.
• bawolff
  11 people over 4 years doesn't seem like that much. Its not clear to me how big a population that is out of but if its government scientists i assume there are tens of thousands of those if not hundreds of thousands.Still, FBI should be investigating every suspicious death of people with high level clearence.
• kelnos
  Of those who are missing and not dead, I wonder if they are largely not US citizens, or citizens who have strong/stronger ties outside the US. It would not surprise me if people like that have decided to take their talents elsewhere, given the current state of anti-intellectualism in the US.
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  neurocline
  Once I saw “James Comer” I knew I could ignore this.
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  etaweb
  It reminds me of The Three-Body Problem novel/series. At the beginning, the police is investigating on multiple suicides by scientists.
• Melatonic
  Surprised they don't mention any of the scientists and engineers that were on flight MH370 (disappearance still unsolved) from Freescale
• anon
  undefined
• red_admiral
  I'm sure there's something behind deaths and disappearences of key rocket, defense, and nuclear scientists in Iran. Has been going on for a while.For the US, my money is on "more evidence is needed". I could imagine the more "diverse" among the scientists deciding it's time for a career/employer change over the past year or so, though.
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  xer0x
  Odd, I saw this bubble up on social media this week as a tinfoil hat curiosity. I don't know what's real anymore.
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  coppsilgold
  One more addition to the conspiracy theories: The frequency of fireballs in our planet’s skies seemed to grow in recent months. NASA and other meteor experts can’t agree on what explains it. ... In response to growing public interest, a NASA public affairs official said in a blog post at the end of March, “While it may seem like meteor reports and sightings have been more frequent recently, it is not out of the ordinary.” The post explained that from February to April, there is often a 10 to 30 percent increase in the number of extremely luminous meteors — and nobody is quite sure why. Mr. Hankey said that this 10 to 30 percent increase was already baked into the American Meteor Society tally, and that it doesn’t explain the apparent doubling of fireball sightings in the year’s first quarter. <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/science/march-fireballs-m...>
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  mmooss
  The article doesn't seem to reveal the source of its information about these alleged disappearances. Is it the letters from the members of Congress?Also, what interest would a foreign power have in planetary defense against asteroids? Is there some dual-use technology in that?
• Frieren
  > Later on Monday, Comer said the string of deaths was unlikely to be a coincidence.Release the rest of the Epstein files. This seems the kind of conspiracy that could be found there.
• jagermo
  Is there a polymarket bet that they have been abducted into some billionaire's lair? There is a lot of Bond-type villain vibe going around there.
• anthk
  Also, some plasma/antigravity researches like the Chinese-origin one in America, among others.
• Kaibeezy
  Came here looking for the SC comments, was disappointed. (doorbell rings)
• heikkilevanto
  Why would FBI ever announce that they are investigating something? Is it that time of the year where they have to convince budget makers about their importance? Or are they trying to direct attention from something else? Epstein?
• Jamesbeam
  It is good that there is a proper investigation, and I think it’s likely just a statistical anomaly.My personal opinion is that scientists should be off-limits for any military as long as they are not directly involved in operational planning and execution in an active state of war.That said, targeting and capturing scientists is a military policy with a long history.https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/alsos-mission/The United States and Israel have allegedly carried out the most attacks on (nuclear) scientists after WW II.There is a rather extensive scientific discussion about the legality and morality of this kind of targeting.https://www.legitimacyasatarget.com/books/drones/The overall conclusion in the broader scientific context, though, is that this approach is not effective.https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501760341/all-...Removing individual expertise may delay strategic asset acquisition, but targeting alone is unlikely to destroy a programme outright and could even increase a country’s desire to strengthen research and acquire even more expertise.You can see good examples of this with how the Israelis fail horribly over and over, preventing Iran from acquiring weapons-grade nuclear material. They failed so hard that the President is telling the public that Iran was within weeks to have a functional nuclear weapon and has set the world economy on fire over this with millions all over the planet suffering right now as a direct consequence of that decision.Just a few days ago, a Ukrainian electronics expert for drone tech was hit in his home with five Shahed drones by Russia.https://united24media.com/latest-news/russian-shahed-drone-h...The result of his survival will likely be that more Ukrainians want to learn what he does and result in an even stronger drone electronics programme to gain a further advantage over Russia even quicker, especially in the midrange strike capabilities of the Ukrainians. If he had died, the same effect would have likely occurred. So touching this scientist / engineer was a huge long-term strategic error by the Russians.Just like when the Ukrainians car-bombed Alexander Dugin’s daughter https://www.kyivpost.com/post/23139, which resulted long-term strategically in a Ukrainian brain drain by bullets behind ears.https://acleddata.com/report/personal-payback-assassinations...Regardless of my or your opinion on this, this practice will likely persist as part of the foreign policy toolkit for states aiming to prevent proliferation.And if you allow the US and Israel, or Russia or the United Kingdom, who all did kill scientists, to follow this policy unpunished, you need also to respect that their adversaries have the same right to do so.Which means US scientists will end up as targets. Reality is, it has never been easier to kill a person with drones without risking capture or even consequences for the assassin, so the US might get some of its own medicine, and the only one who can stop that is the average citizen by putting enough public pressure on this issue to force a policy change.If you care about your scientists, start calling your representatives and make sure to tell them how unhappy you are with the US targeting acquisition and policy, and ask them what they are going to do about it if they want to deserve your vote.
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  F7F7F7
  Turns out scientists die too?
• panda-giddiness
  I'm surprised this article is gaining traction on HN when it's propping up such obvious conspiratorial drivel. For a counterpoint I would recommend this article [1], but I'll summarize the main points here:- The investigation concerns somewhere between four and a dozen people spanning nearly half a decade. A dozen people dying or disappearing over the course of 4 years is hardly the statistical anomaly the articles claims it to be.- Despite attempts to link these scientists together, there really is no common thread. One person was a biologist, not a rocket scientist; and two of the "scientists" weren't even scientists at all.- Many of these purported "mysterious" deaths are hardly that mysterious. Two likely died of natural causes, one was murdered by a former classmate, and one disappeared while hiking. Most of the others appeared to have suffered from psychological distress.And look, I don't want to minimize these people. These deaths and disappearances are all tragedies. The families and friends deserve closure. But dragging them into the conspiracy theory circuit is not going to do them any favors. If anything, it will likely make matters worse.And as a scientist myself, the administration's "concern" about missing scientists feels like a slap in the face. This administration has been more hostile towards us than any other in modern history. I'll leave the article with the last word because I couldn't have worded it any better.> 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.---[1] "The Single Dumbest Conspiracy Theory of 2026." The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/04/missing-scientis...
• m3kw9
  Something about ufo conspiracy theories.
• xorgun
  [dead]
• golem14
  [flagged]
• imglorp
  How many of the disappearances were defections?
• ghstinda
  Doesn't seem connected, but makes a nice film. I think ignorance is bliss and due to the current climate, many people checking out...