- 1 rocket scientist lost while hiking - 1 astrophysicist killed at home by someone arrested a few months before at his home with a gun - 1 physicist in another field killed without cause of death made public - 1 engineer in instrumentation killed also without the cause made public - 1 schizophrenic crank woman died by suicide - 1 plasma and nuclear scientist killed at home by a jealous former classmate who went just after on a mass killings spree - 1 pharmatical scientist found in a lake after missing - 1 military executive who left with only his gun and disappeared - 1 administrative employee walked from home and disappeared after leaving her car and personal phone behind - 1 decade year old retiree from the same laboratory who did the same - 1 property custodian from a totally different place also left with a gun and disappeared
Totally aliens https://img.astroawani.com/2014-03/51395638721_freesize.jpg
the big grain of salt: this doesn't take into account the differences in social and economic demographics of researchers and suicide + homicide victims. I'd suspect scientists skew wealthy and are less likely than average to be victims of suicide or homicide, but I don't know.
No. That is surprising. Any statistics you'd find about the rates of any one or more of these kinds of disappearances are going to be population level, averaged out over groups that are much higher risk and therefore skew the average rates to seem higher than their priors actually dictate for many sub populations, eg, working professionals at large corporations of this specific type.
Surprising != something actually being connected, but it sure as hell is surprising and isn't something to dismiss as "well, law of large numbers so ::shrug::"
I'm genuinely curious if you found any data to support it especially when you add JPL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT, Caltech, and the Kansas City National Security Campus to the list, over four years.
And what puts an even bigger question mark on the whole thing is that the FBI embarked on this whole thing after being asked by members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform when they read about it in the newspaper. How critical are these people and how surprising their final fate if the US needs a tabloid to ring the alarm?
And Americans are having sex with their own children and waging a rape war through Power. You only noticed something is off when something really weird happens. Which side are you on? The side of the deniers.
You say “schizophrenic crank” like that isn’t the same thing as the voices in our heads murdering and suiciding among us.
The great big conspiratorial secret is that WE ARE NOT ALONE IN OUR OWN MINDS and a long standing community among us use the occult power of thought control to run a secret war for Power among us all.
And the aliens, while real, aren’t the problem and don’t have anything to do with it. I know, the really really strange part is that the aliens are the no big deal.
Americans Thought control and thought controlled Americans are waging a secret war among us THROUGH POWER! That means THE POWER TO TRAVEL THROUGHOUT OUR MINDS!
I know you’re not ready for this. It has to be said.
What's sad is, 5-10 years ago, no adversary would think simply off-ing American scientists was effective strategy, America was a new scientist generation machine.
Now thanks to Research funding falling off a cliff and massive immigration restrictions, this is no longer true.
I really hate the discourse around this stuff. Like, yes, disguising murder as suicide is a thing and obviously three-letters agencies do it.
But someone saying publicly they're not suicidal gives you close to zero information. People with suicidal ideation almost never advertise it publicly because, one, there is a heavy amount of social stigma attached to it, and two, publicly declaring you're suicidal is a good way to get involuntarily committed to a mental health institution.
I see a ton of jokes on social media that go "remember, X is not suicidal". How the fuck would you know? This discourse is so disrespectful to people struggling with suicidal thoughts.
Then, you know, bringing up suicide and it being a warning sign they're about to? The odds have shifted a bit.
If someone is struggling with suicidal thoughts and is publicly lying about it, they shall not have my respect anyway: I'm ok with being disrespectful to them.
Things have changed. The weapon was acquired by DOD.
Ah, so a portable pulsed microwave device. Current phased array technology is certain to be able to produce a narrow and powerful beam. Current energy densities of batteries allow for a significant amount of portable power. Expecting to see "Show HN" on this soon...
It’s been a great source of fodder for conspiracy theorists though.
What if they're interrogated in an attempt to extract something very specific? The deaths could be kidnappings gone wrong.
X-Files music plays
I suppose the top AI talent may become subjects of a similar game.
So I can imagine American allies recruiting scientists en-mass, to protect themselves from America. The US has currently demonstrated a desire to take over allies completely (Canada, Greenland), and I'm sure few know who may be next. Some scientists may have simply wished to move abroad, and also, have quite valuable skills which are restricted in some way, hence them "disappearing".
not necessarily from America. The goal #1 of the US dominated NATO for example was to prevent Germany from getting nuclear weapons in exchange for protection by US. Now with US de-facto withdrawing, Germany would have to quickly get nukes (as well as missiles to carry them) - i don't see other option for Germany here giving the environment in Europe and MidEast. So they would also need such scientists. South Korea, Japan, Australia seem to be in the similar situation too. (and everybody understands that a nuclear weapons program can't be a long multi-year endeavor - somebody will try to stop you - and so it must be very fast once started, and thus you have to have ready-to-use skills and knowledge)
And at this point NATO has pretty much collapsed. Trump turned his back on Ukraine and nobody wants to join operation Epstein Fury.
No shit? Why would they have to? Is someone ready to nuke them if it turns out they’re no longer under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, or are they some special snowflakes who should have them while Iran (and most other countries) shouldn’t?
No. The nukes prevent the aggression even by a conventionally armed aggressor. Nukes ins't to win a war, it is to prevent one. Lets say Germany has successfully repelled Russian tank-and-soldiers invasion - it would still be a devastating thing for Germany which the nukes would help prevent from starting at all.
>are they some special snowflakes who should have them while Iran (and most other countries) shouldn’t?
Yes, i listed those several special snowflakes who were kept safe by the US nukes, and would need their own umbrella with US no longer providing the one. Iran's situation is obviously very different.
Yes, very different as in 'Our blessed homeland vs their barbarous wastes' meme.
We (and our allies) should have nukes because we want to prevent wars. But no one else should have them, since the situation is obviously very different (we wouldn’t want them to be able to prevent wars).
And I used to think that Little Rocketman was a crazy bastard, but it looks like I was wrong.
exactly. Iran's policy declaration of destroying whole countries (US and Israel in this case) and conducting of actual proxy-wars in order to achieve those goals make them barbarians from whom the civilization must be defended.
>we wouldn’t want them to be able to prevent wars
they don't even try. They want nukes to be able to conduct wars.
>And I used to think that Little Rocketman was a crazy bastard, but it looks like I was wrong.
absolutely. For all their tremendous faults, NK uses their nukes for deterrence as they want to genocide their own people in the comfort of personal safety. Whereis ayatollahs are hellbent on waging wars and destruction in order to spread their Islamic Revolution.
The "if" is doing the heavy lifting here. And universe has lot of "ifs". Here's one:
If this was a perfect distraction spun up to distract from Epstein files, it has succeeded and you have been had.
It is not surprising that the FBI did not detect an actual pattern before now, considering the various ways that the entirety of it spent the entirety of 2025.
Is it? Or is there just more scrutiny when more important people die?
When someone who ain't worth shit OD's nobody takes allegations that they were murdered seriously. When someone who's worth a lot of money ODs, the "they only bought fine cocaine, their dealer never would have cut that shit" allegations get looked into because "more equal animals" is more of a scale than a binary when it comes to this particular issue.
So no, it's not expected that "some of a group of 5.000 Persons" would die or go missing.
He goes into greater detail further down to assuage the "BUT BUT that's genpop not JPL!" whatabouters and does some "how TF are these people connected?" musing.
[0] https://theness.com/neurologicablog/whats-with-the-dead-or-m...
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.
He was the commander of the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. This would have given him direct oversight of all of the Air Force's most sensitive technology for decades. His intelligence value to a hostile adversary, even retired, is incalculable.
He was an avid hiker and biker in his neighborhood trails, so it's very unlikely that he just got lost.
Left behind were his prescription glasses, along with all his personal electronics (phone and watch).
It's shocking and alarming that there wasn't a full blown military search and rescue operation mounted within hours of his wife calling him in as missing.
How far could a 68 year old man travel on foot within 8 hours?
He was reported missing within three hours of his last contact with his wife.
New Mexico Search and Rescue wasn't dispatched until Sunday, two days later.
Again, why wasn't the DoD tasked to find him at all costs on the same day he went missing, given his knowledge of the Air Force's most sensitive technologies?
They know where he is and we (the public) don't have a need to know where he is?
My personal theory is: He's offworld with the other non-terrestrial officers Gary McKinnon found :)
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.
This is just not a serious organization anymore, and the lack of such a thing at the federal level leaves us insanely vulnerable to our own criminal operations.
The same thing happened with the IRS even earlier, multiple rounds of intensive they just cannot pursue criminals of a certain type, and the criminals know it. So they can run basically unchecked, looting all of us for billions.
But Comer... oof, it's hard to take seriously anything he focuses on.
But who knows? Broken clocks, twice a day, etc.
;-)
Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), the chair of the Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs, sent letters to FBI Director Kash Patel, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, requesting staff-level briefings no later than April 27.
Not to be confused with James Comey.
As for irrelevant crude sex jokes, go for it if makes any contribution here, I won't be offended, whenever you're ready.
Still, FBI should be investigating every suspicious death of people with high level clearence.
Also, what interest would a foreign power have in planetary defense against asteroids? Is there some dual-use technology in that?
The belief is that the first country to have this reliably at scale breaks the “mutually assured destruction” paradigm that has governed nuclear weapons policy for decades. If the U.S. can send nuclear ballistic missiles, but can’t be hit by nuclear missiles, what stops them from just nuking anyone who disagrees with them?
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.
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.
"People see more stuff in the sky" is a common sign for people getting more anxious about attacks from the sky. To my knowledge, first UFO reporting waves happened during cold war when people started to get paranoid about soviet spying.
I have seen many social media videos of fireballs in the sky in the last few months.
It feels reductive to point out that this has coincided with a massive increase in the number of small satellites with limited lifespans up there.
(And yes, you'd expect NASA and the AMS to have thought of that but I honestly wouldn't put it past them to be deliberately ignoring Starlink satellites given Musk's political power and petulance to people who cross him.)
- people working in space top secret research 20,000 (conservative estimate, probably much smaller)
- adult disappearances 1/50k to 1/100k per year
- demographics are stable, high earners, so more like 1/100k per year or less
- so for the pool of 20k, then 0.2 per year on average
- these disappearances are a 1:10,000 to 1:20,000 probability
- homicides made this situation even more unlikely 1:100,000
Conclusions: A conspiracy is highly unlikely, but the situation is very unlikely. Shrug.
Release the rest of the Epstein files. This seems the kind of conspiracy that could be found there.
When was the news ever publicly verifiable? If Walter Kronkiue said that the North Vietnamese shot at our naval vessels twice on two different days you had no way of even accessing alternative viewpoints and that the 2nd day was questionable, you just had to trust him.
Today with all the contrarians and competing alternate sources it's arguably better because if there's some smoking gun that something is BS it almost certainly will get talked about. It might be bullshit on both sides but at least it's there to look at if you want.
Unless you personally are physically there with whatever necessary field expertise exists to run experiments or interrogate witnesses, you wind up having to trust somebody either way.
I mean the fact that the effect of all of this "alternative" media has been the complete dissolution of any kind of objective reality in favor of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, rather than holding power to account, should demonstrate that it isn't better.
When some source says something and backs it up with numbers and everyone on the other side attacks the conclusion but not the numbers that says something about the numbers.
Everyone who's been taken in by conspiracy theory and misinformation already thinks this way and it's why they'll believe the world is flat and the sky is held up by Nephilim and anyone who says otherwise is just attacking them and obviously not taking the "evidence" into account. The end result of this kind of thinking just winds up reinforcing your biases because in essence it's just vibes.
https://www.amic.media/media/files/file_352_3490.pdf seems to be the best study. It seemingly suggests that public interest media and democracy have non-trivial association. Remove one and the other falls.
Nuanced positions put up a fight. Strawmen keel right over.
>while perhaps big name old media of yore had a presumption of authority, morals, and public responsibility and that probably meant some degree of trust was potentially warranted (though no doubt abused at times), with the commercial push toward tabloidism and the internet all of those corrective influences have vanished, such that the presumption of authority no longer has legs. In fact, most of them have effectively turned in to subscriber-only outlets, which makes them directly commercial and capitulates any public service notion.
Exactly. And once that trust is gone there's no incentive to care.
>https://www.amic.media/media/files/file_352_3490.pdf seems to be the best study. It seemingly suggests that public interest media and democracy have non-trivial association. Remove one and the other falls.
I don't distrust the study on it's face but this is basically industry group saying they're vital to society. Realtors will say the same thing about themselves too.
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.
The best conspiracy theory I've seen online is that top-secret energy/weapons plans were sold by a traitor, and these scientists were kidnapped to be the worker bees.
Terribly dark and implausible, but also, we are living through a storyline that writers wouldn't even consider a draft because it's too on-the-nose.
Improbable events do not defy probability.
or just often on a good one at this hour,
based on your other comments.
Anyway, did you fix the hiccups?
Still meandering without contribution, a bit.
Edit:, in '72, Munich attacks.
While everyone in the Mediterranean was trading, sharing and mating each other (especially under the Roman empire) boosting commerce, sales and culture -relatively speaking to what you could find in a tribe-, these backwards shepherds (both sides) want to bring the world back to the Bronze Age.
Gnostics at least got it better, as Arrians.
The man is, for want of a better word, a full-on Republican dipshit performing dipshittery in an attempt to get Trump to notice him.
(His wikipedia page is an excellent summary of his asshattery.)
- 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...
I'll point out, though, that it's still only April. Plenty of time for even dumber conspiracy theories to take hold!