Where is Monica Reza?

Mike Davis 00:00:34

Here we are again. Eleven months ago, June 22nd, 2025, on a quiet Sunday morning, Monica Reza, a 60-year-old aerospace engineer employed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, went on a hike in the Angeles National Forest with two of her friends. She never came back. Sergeant John Gilbert of the Crescenta Valley Station told reporters the three were weekly hikers, experienced, in good shape. They started at the 6,000-foot gate on Angeles Crest Highway and walked up the Mount Waterman Trail. Somewhere near the ridge line, Monica began to lag behind. It now appears, Sergeant Gilbert reports, that Monica left the trail. One of her hiking friends later told a national news outlet that Monica was lagging about 30 feet behind them. When she realized that Monica wasn’t keeping up, she turned around to check on her. Monica waved and smiled. Monica was fine. The two friends hiked on. When they checked back a second time, Monica had vanished. Her friends, after a quick search, reported her missing. The only evidence of Monica ever recovered was her red beanie that searchers found down the trail. She was never seen again. She had not vanished from some obscure, hard-to-get-to wilderness. No, Monica Reza vanished from a known and popular hiking trail that she herself frequented. From the studios in Washington, DC, this is Missing Scientists, episode two.

Catherine Lee 00:02:23

The terrain on Mount Waterman runs between 7,000 and 8,000 feet. The off-trail landscape includes boulders, rocky topography, and dangerous vegetation, specifically Eriodictyon, or poodle dog bush, an extremely poisonous plant. Within hours, search and rescue hit the ground. Drones and helicopters hit the sky. Mount Waterman Trail is not easy terrain for searchers. At one point, helicopters had to rescue searchers trapped in a poisonous thicket of the poodle dog bush, more poisonous than poison ivy.

Mike Davis 00:03:08

And they didn’t give up easily. As late as August, the drones were still searching on Mount Waterman. Even in November, the log shows another search. A 60-year-old woman dressed in a bright red coat and hat, in good visibility, on a Sunday morning, vanished from inside a group of three. No body, no trace, no apparent scene. One red beanie. Not another clue Monica Reza had ever been to the park. Oh, yeah, and remember the disappeared U.S. Air Force Major General Neil McCasland, episode one, missingscientists.com? Well, guess what? McCasland was Monica’s boss. Our colleague Tom Devereux is on Mount Waterman, where Monica Reza vanished. Tom? Tom?

Mike Davis 00:09:32

Thanks, Tom. There is a version of Monica Reza you only hear in the United States after February twenty-seventh of this year. I want to give it to you the way the people who tell it give it. Inside a certain kind of rocket engine, the kind the United States has spent a quarter of a century trying to build domestically, hot, high-pressure oxygen moves through metal plumbing. That metal is supposed to stay metal. Oxygen at that temperature, at that pressure, is not in the mood. It wants to turn metal into fuel, a cutting torch in the plumbing. The metal that can sit inside a cutting torch and not burn, that is one of the hardest problems in domestic rocket propulsion. Russia solved it forty years ago. The United States, for most of the last forty years, did not. The alloy that solved it on this side of the ocean has a name: Mondaloy. Later, Mondaloy 200. The patent was filed in September of two thousand and one. The inventors of record are a woman named Dallas Hardwick and a woman named Monica A. Jacinto, our missing Monica. Monica A. Jacinto is on every public record from nineteen ninety-nine to twenty-two, the same person CBS Los Angeles called Monica Reza. The patent was published. The work after the patent was not. Monica Jacinto was credited across the next fifteen years for maturing the alloy, for doing what the patent could not do on its own: making it work at scale inside hardware that actually fires. The Air Force Research Laboratory says Mondaloy 200 was used for the first time in a real rocket-engine environment in twenty sixteen, developed by the Air Force and Aerojet Rocketdyne inside a program called Hydrocarbon Boost, tied to the American effort to stop renting Russian engines for our national security launches.

Mike Davis 00:12:23

Last week, we told you about a connection we found in the public record and only found once. Eleven names on Chairman Comer’s list. We were looking for a documented professional link between any two of them. We found exactly one. It runs between Monica Reza and Neil McCasland. Monica to Hardwick, inventors, same patent, same alloy, 22 years of public record. Hardwick to the Air Force Research Laboratory. By 2005, Dallas Hardwick is, in writing, the materials technology lead at AFRL Materials and Manufacturing, stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. Air Force Research Laboratory Materials to Mondaloy 200. Air Force release, May 16th, 2016, quote: “developed by the AFRL Materials Directorate and Aerojet Rocketdyne.” Mondaloy 200 to Hydrocarbon Boost. Hydrocarbon Boost to a NASA and Space and Missile Systems Center demonstration that was, in NASA’s words, risk reduction for a future domestic launch engine. McCasland to AFRL, May 2011 to 2013, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory. People I have spoken to, engineers, former contractors, one retired flag officer, describe what I have just walked you through with the same phrase: the same building, the same alloy, the same directorate, the same laboratory, the same general’s command. And that same laboratory at Wright-Patterson is, beginning in 1947, the home of Project Sign, then Project Grudge, then Project Blue Book, the three consecutive Air Force inquiries into reports of unidentified flying objects. Neil McCasland commanded that laboratory. Monica Reza Jacinto worked under McCasland at another lab. After the general retired, he became, on an unpaid basis, a consultant to To The Stars Academy, Tom DeLonge’s organization, founded to find out what the United States government does and does not know about unidentified aerial phenomena. That is the bridge, and that is the room the bridge sits in. Two of the eleven names on the list, working the same alloy inside the same lab under the same general’s command, in the room where the Air Force has been studying unidentified aerial phenomena since 1947. That is one of eleven.

Mike Davis 00:15:38

There is the page. Four days into the search for Monica Reza, while helicopters were still in the air over Mount Waterman, a memorial page appeared online. The website is called Find a Grave. The page used her full name, Monica Jacinto Reza. Death date, June 22nd, 2025. Place of death, Angeles National Forest, Los Angeles County, California. Form of burial: green burial. No body had been recovered. None has been since. The disclosure community understood the page the way the disclosure community understands everything. Somebody knew. Somebody in the first 96 hours, while the search teams were still flying drones, already knew Monica Reza was not coming home. And somebody put it on the internet in the form a person uses when a body has been recovered and laid to rest in the earth. And that is where we are left.

Catherine Lee 00:16:56

Okay, but it is also a real, ongoing eleven months of a real woman missing on a real mountain. I want to step outside before we go any further.

Catherine Lee 00:18:47

On April twenty-ninth, Los Angeles Magazine published an interview with Monica Reza’s family. The family said Monica was actively employed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when she vanished, not retired. Director of materials processing, calm, in her family’s words, not a risk-taker. Neither the FBI nor the White House has reached out to them. And the family told the magazine, and I want this sentence on the record, on this show, in front of every theory we have just walked through, people should realize that scientists die also.

Catherine Lee 00:19:31

That is the family. And on the McCasland side, last week, Susan Wilkerson posted again. Same Facebook page, same wife who told us last episode that Neil was at some risk, but not from dementia. Here is what she added this week, quote: maybe the best hypothesis is that aliens beamed him up to the mothership. However, no sightings of the mothership hovering above the Sandia Mountains have been reported. Susan is steering this. She is the only person with the standing to. And on April nineteenth, this happened at the White House podium. Listen for the conditional at the end.

Catherine Lee 00:20:51

If true. That is the entire White House posture on this story. One more thing, this is mine. What if Neil McCasland did not disappear? What if Monica Reza did not disappear? What if both of them walked, privately funded, off the books, the kind of propulsion work that gets done when government oversight is the obstacle, not the help? Not foreign intelligence, not silencing, not UAP. Recruited. I have one piece of internal logic for this and no documents. The logic is Susan Wilkerson’s first Facebook post from last episode: Neil is at some risk, but not from dementia. That sentence reads differently if you assume he chose this, a wife trying to protect a man who walked, instead of a wife trying to find a man who was taken. Sounds exactly like Susan sounds. I am not saying it is true that all of these reported people have been taken. I am saying it only has to be true once.

Catherine Lee 00:24:15

I’m Catherine Lee, here with Mike. Tom Devereux, tonight on Mount Waterman. Missing Scientists is a production of The Narrative, produced by Hunter Powers and Deborah Cavenaugh, directed by Hunter Powers.