WASHINGTON — The deaths or disappearances of 11 top US scientists and researchers is a matter of urgent national importance, a member of the House Oversight Committee insisted Friday.
Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) said his office had already been eyeing some of the “too coincidental” disappearances a year before President Trump told reporters Thursday that he had ordered an investigation.
The lawmaker argued the fate of the scientists is almost “certainly” linked to the access some had to classified aerospace, defense and UFO information, and may involve bad actors from China, Russia or Iran.
“This is a rallying call to pay attention to this issue and make sure that our nation’s top scientists are safe and secure,” Burlison told Fox News' “Fox & Friends.”
“This is too coincidental, and so we have to be investigating this. We need to have our nation’s top investigators, the FBI and every agency looking into this matter.”
Some of the scientists, Burlison noted, “literally just disappeared” without a trace, including Air Force Maj. Gen. William “Neil” McCasland, who vanished in February after Burlison said he tried to contact him twice about his research into Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), government-speak for UFOs.
Investigators claimed McCasland had experienced “mental fog” before disappearing from his home in Albuquerque, NM.
The retired general had worked in top positions pertaining to space research and acquisition, with his name even appearing in the WikiLeaks dump of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, with former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge claiming to have conversed with him about UAPs.
In many cases, the congressman continued, these scientists “felt some form of threat” and “left all of their devices at home” before they dropped out of sight.
“This is not normal,” Burlison said on Fox. “These are some of the most advanced scientists, researchers in our nation, some of the most important people for national security efforts. And they all just mysteriously disappeared.”
Burlison’s call for “bipartisan support” for a federal probe into the concerning cases comes after another scientist’s mysterious death came under scrutiny Thursday, NewsNation reported. Amy Eskridge, 34, who was involved in extensive research into anti-gravity technology, UFOs and extraterrestrial life, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at her home in Huntsville, AL. in 2022, according to the Daily Mail.
Her death was ruled a suicide and no public information was released.
Before her death, Eskridge had launched a research company, “The Institute for Exotic Science” in order to create a “public-facing persona to disclose anti-gravity technology.”
She chillingly said that she had started the company because “if you stick your neck out in private… they will bury you, they will burn down your house while you’re sleeping in your bed and it won’t even make the news.”
Eskridge revealed in a 2020 interview that she had plans to disclose information about UFOs and extraterrestrials to the public, and was receiving threats as a result.
“I need to disclose soon, man. I need to publish soon because it’s like escalating. It’s getting more and more aggressive,” she said.
“This has been going on for like four or five years, and over the past 12 months, it’s been escalating, like more aggressive, more invasive digging through my underwear drawer and sexual threats.”
Eskridge partnered with retired British intelligence officer Franc Milburn to investigate the alleged harassment, according to the Daily Mail.
Milburn, who submitted his findings to Congress in 2023, concluded that Eskridge did not kill herself and at one point was attacked by a “directed energy weapon” that burned her body with microwaves.
The other missing or dead scientists include:
Melissa Casias, who had a security clearance at Los Alamos National Laboratory and vanished last June; Anthony Chavez, a retired Los Alamos National Laboratory worker who went missing last May; Jason Thomas, who led Novartis’ chemical biology team and was found dead this past March; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer Frank Maiwald who died in 2024; famous MIT physicist Nuno Loureiro who was shot dead last December; exoplanet researcher Carl Grillmair, who was killed in February; Steven Garcia, who worked on security for a producer of non-nuclear components in American-made nukes and went missing in August of last year; aerospace engineer Monica Jacinto Reza, who went missing last June.
While widespread theories about the researchers and their fate have spread online, officials have not identified any connection between those deaths and disappearances.
There is something profoundly unsettling about this pattern. When the most brilliant minds working at the frontier of aerospace, defense, and the most sensitive questions surrounding unidentified anomalous phenomena begin to vanish or turn up dead under circumstances that strain credulity, one does not dismiss it as mere coincidence without inviting accusations of willful blindness. These are not ordinary citizens. These are individuals entrusted with knowledge that could alter the balance of global power. The instinct of any serious nation must be to treat such losses not as isolated tragedies but as a potential assault on its strategic advantage.
Rep. Burlison is right to sound the alarm. When scientists who have touched classified material on UAPs, anti-gravity propulsion, or exotic technologies start leaving their devices behind, reporting escalating threats, and then simply disappear, the burden of proof shifts. It is no longer sufficient for officials to shrug and mutter about suicide or “mental fog.” A republic that cannot protect its own intellectual capital in matters of national security is a republic that has already begun to surrender the future. The involvement of foreign adversaries, whether Beijing, Moscow, or Tehran, is not conspiracy but the cold logic of great-power competition. Nations that covet America’s edge have every incentive to neutralize those who guard it.
The case of Amy Eskridge is particularly haunting. A young researcher bold enough to speak of public disclosure, she warned explicitly of the consequences: those who “stick their neck out” risk being buried without ceremony. Her words carry the chill of prophecy. That she died by what was ruled a self-inflicted wound, after reports of directed energy attacks and invasive harassment, only deepens the unease. When even those who attempt transparency through “public-facing” institutions meet such ends, it suggests a machinery of suppression that operates beyond the reach of ordinary accountability.
This is not the time for partisan squabbling or institutional complacency. It is a moment that demands rigorous, transparent investigation, free from the reflexive dismissals that have too often characterized official responses to uncomfortable anomalies. The American people deserve to know whether their country’s premier scientific talent is being systematically targeted. Anything less is an abdication of the first duty of government: to secure the republic and those who defend its secrets.
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