Missing Scientists Episode 01 23 min
Where is Neil McCasland?
William Neil McCasland
On February 27, 2026, retired Air Force major general William Neil McCasland walked out the back door of his Albuquerque home and vanished into open desert. He is the first name on the list of eleven scientists, engineers, and contractors now under federal investigation.
President Trump on the South Lawn
00:00:00 00:00:25
President Donald Trump
Well, I hope it’s random, but we’re gonna know in the next week and a half. I just left a meeting on that subject. So, uh, pretty serious stuff, but we’re gonna be… Now, hopefully, I don’t know, coincidence, if you want it, whatever you wanna call it, but some of them were very important people, and we’re gonna look at it over the next…
Where is Neil McCasland?
00:00:25 00:03:17
Mike Davis
Eight weeks ago, on a quiet Friday morning at the end of February, a 68-year-old retired Air Force major general walked out of the back of his house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, vanishing in the New Mexico foothills. He took with him his wallet, a .38 caliber revolver, and a leather holster. He left behind his prescription glasses, his phone, and other wearable devices.
Mike Davis Retired Air Force Major General William Neil McCasland has not been seen since. The president is talking about McCasland because in the weeks since he vanished, ten other people — scientists, engineers, and contractors, all with sensitive access — have been identified as dead or missing.
Mike Davis All of them are believed to be connected to the McCasland vanishing. The others include a materials scientist from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who walked up a hiking trail outside Los Angeles last June and was never seen again. A Los Alamos employee that dropped off lunch for her daughter at school was later seen on the shoulder of a state highway, then seemingly vanished.
Mike Davis An MIT plasma physicist shot at the door of his home. An astrophysicist from Caltech shot on his front porch. It goes on. Six more were added to the list. But McCasland has ignited the story, and the theories attached to McCasland have, by association, attached themselves to the others on the missing list.
Mike Davis What happened to them? Was foreign intelligence involved? Were they silenced because of their involvement in UFO arenas, areas the public has little awareness of?
Mike Davis Were they unalived to protect nuclear propulsion research?
Mike Davis Did MKUltra-style domestic operations silence them?
Mike Davis And, theorized by the part of the internet that never sleeps, could they have been time travelers?
Mike Davis This show is going to take all of those theories seriously enough to look at them in daylight, then it is going to test what is actually provable. We will talk to people who think a pattern exists. We will talk to people who think the pattern is the story.
Catherine Lee And we are going to keep talking, keep asking, in plain English, the question the president asks quietly: “What is this?”
Mike Davis From the studios in Washington, D.C., this is Missing Scientists, episode one.
The Deadline This Week
00:03:17 00:04:03
Mike Davis
We just listened to President Trump speaking from the South Lawn of the White House. Just a few days ago, on April 16th, Peter Doocy of Fox News posed a question about the missing scientists. Trump called it pretty serious stuff. He said he had just come from a meeting on the subject. He said we would know in the next week and a half.
Mike Davis That deadline is this week.
Mike Davis Four days after the president spoke, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Representative James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, went on Fox News.
Comer: Something Sinister
00:04:03 00:04:54
Mike Davis Roll that clip.
James Comer Well, it does appear that there’s a, a high possibility that something sinister is taking place here. Uh, this has been going on, obviously, for the last three years. So, uh, what, what I found in, uh, three and a half years as chairman of the House Oversight Committee is sometimes government agencies don’t do a good job of sharing information —
Mike Davis Mm.
James Comer … on situations like this. So we’ve asked all those agencies — the Department of Energy, NASA, the Department of War — to all share information with us so that we can see if we can put it together and find any, uh, missing links to, to try to solve what’s going on here, because it, it’s very unlikely that this is a coincidence. So, uh, Congress is very concerned about this. Our committee is, is making this, uh, one of our priorities now because, uh, we view this as a national security threat.
Eleven Names
00:04:54 00:05:44
Mike Davis
That same morning, House Oversight sent letters to four federal agencies — the Department of Energy, NASA, the FBI, and the Department of War.
Mike Davis The letters commanded staff-level briefings on the eleven scientist deaths and disappearances going back to 2022. The committee has asked for that briefing by Tuesday.
Mike Davis Eleven names.
Mike Davis Eleven missing scientists, vanished or dead.
Mike Davis We are going to spend the rest of this episode with one of them — the one Chairman Comer led with, the one retired Air Force Major General William Neil McCasland.
From Kirtland to Wright-Patterson
00:05:44 00:09:07
Mike Davis
McCasland’s biography is unusual without trying to be. Public school, an appointment to the Air Force Academy. The Air Force then sent him to MIT for a doctorate in astronautical engineering — which is what people who design systems that move objects through space, sometimes with people inside, tend to begin with. For the next thirty-three years, McCasland worked at the edge of classified operations where the United States Air Force conducts its quietest business. Assigned to the Phillips research site at Kirtland Air Force Base, McCasland directed energy work, lasers, and satellite vulnerability. For most of the last twenty-five years of his career, McCasland’s professional life ran along an arc that began and ended in the same New Mexico desert he eventually disappeared into. He led the space-based laser project. He held assignments at the National Reconnaissance Office. He was named director of space acquisition for the Office of the Under Secretary of the Air Force, and then Director of Special Programs for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.
Mike Davis Director of Special Programs —
Mike Davis that is the title the United States government gives the person who runs the programs that the United States government does not name.
Mike Davis And then in 2011, the Air Force gave him the job he had spent his entire career readying for. They made him commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio.
Mike Davis Wright-Patterson — from which beginning in 1947, the United States Air Force ran Project Sign, then Project Grudge, then Project Blue Book. Three consecutive official inquiries into reports of unidentified flying objects, often referred to as UFOs.
Mike Davis Don’t worry, we’re going to come back to that.
Mike Davis McCasland held the Air Force Research Laboratory command for two years, retiring home to New Mexico in 2013. He took a job as director of technology at a defense contractor in Albuquerque, Applied Technology Associates — work he was in some form still doing on the morning he disappeared. And briefly, on an unpaid basis, he took on a second post-retirement role: consultant to To The Stars Academy.
Mike Davis To The Stars was founded by the rock musician Tom DeLonge, from the band Blink-182. The group’s publicly stated purpose is to investigate what the United States government does and does not know about unidentified aerial phenomena.
Mike Davis That is not a conspiracy theory. That is the public record.
The Day He Vanished
00:09:07 00:11:18
Mike Davis
February 27th, 2026. Friday morning. We have a verified timeline from the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office released on March 12th. 10:00 AM, a repairman at the McCasland house sees Neil McCasland. They speak briefly. The repairman leaves. 11:10 AM, Susan McCasland Wilkerson, Neil’s wife, leaves for a medical appointment. 12:04 PM, Susan returns home. The house is unlocked. Her husband is gone.
Mike Davis 3:07, she calls 911.
Mike Davis In the hours after the call, the deputies build an inventory. What is in the house, what is not. Left on the kitchen table: his cell phone, his prescription glasses, the wearable devices that knew where he had been every day for the last four years. Missing from the closet: a pair of hiking boots, his wallet, a .38 caliber revolver, a leather holster.
Mike Davis He may have been wearing a long-sleeve outdoor shirt, light green.
Mike Davis Eight days after he vanished, a search team found a gray sweatshirt with the words “Air Force” across the front, a mile and a quarter east of the house in open ground. There was no blood on it. The sheriff’s office has never confirmed it was his. The phone, the glasses, the wearables — left behind. The boots, the wallet, the revolver, the holster — taken.
Mike Davis A man does not leave his prescription glasses, his phone behind by accident. A man does not take a gun and holster by accident. Those are two decisions made by a person who knew what he was doing — and McCasland’s wife stated he did not usually carry his gun. In fact, he had never done that before.
Mike Davis So the question is whether he made these choices himself.
Field Report: Quail Run Court
00:11:18 00:14:06
Mike Davis Our colleague Tom Devereux is at the McCasland house. Tom?
Tom Devereux Yeah, Mike. I am standing about thirty yards from the McCasland house. There is a silver alert flyer indicating someone elderly is missing. It’s still taped to the streetlight
Tom Devereux at the entrance to the cul-de-sac, sun-faded, now curling at one corner. There are, uh, eight neighbors on this circle, and by now, all eight of them are tired of being questioned. The house itself is single story,
Tom Devereux low-pitched roof, covered parking, a flagpole in the front yard. And the flag is up.
Tom Devereux There’s a wreath on the door that the wife leaves up because taking it down,
Tom Devereux well, that would mean something.
Tom Devereux Quail Run Court is short. There’s just a few homes, a turnaround, and then the backyards and the desert.
Tom Devereux The backyards are where this gets interesting.
Tom Devereux I’m coming around to the rear lot line now, twenty feet behind the McCasland property. The residential grid ends. There is no second street. There is no fence. There is open Bureau of Land Management ground that climbs east into the foothills of the Sandia Mountains.
Tom Devereux If a man wanted to leave this neighborhood without being seen by a neighbor or a Ring camera, all he had to do was walk out the back door.
Tom Devereux Sheriff’s deputies have canvassed more than seven hundred homes. They flew drones. Helicopters searched. They sent canine teams in. They requested every doorbell, every dash cam, every traffic camera, all the open-source intelligence within several mile radius.
Tom Devereux Eight weeks in now, and they have not produced a single confirmed sighting of Neil McCasland after 12:04 PM on February 27th, 2026.
Tom Devereux Not one video frame.
Tom Devereux Not one witness. Nothing that establishes which way he went.
Susan’s 911 Call
00:14:06 00:16:29
Tom Devereux The closest thing they have to a record of McCasland is the 911 call that his wife made at 3:07 that afternoon.
911 Operator This is April. How may I help you?
Susan Wilkerson Hi, April. My name is Susan Wilkerson. Um, my husband is missing.
911 Operator Okay.
Susan Wilkerson And he’s, it’s been about three hours. And I have some indication that he must have planned not to be found. He’s left his phone. He changed his clothes into I don’t know what. I think he’s on foot. All of our cars and bicycles are in the garage. I left for a doctor’s appointment at about 11:10 and, uh, he was here at that time at the house. And I got back from that at noon and he was gone. He turned it off and left it behind, which seems kind of deliberate because he’s always got his phone. He has a smartwatch. I don’t know if that’s with him or not.
911 Operator Has he ever done this before?
Susan Wilkerson Never. Nothing even remotely like it. He’s a retired Air Force major general. He’s very responsible, but he’s also facing some medical issues.
911 Operator Do you have any video at your home?
Susan Wilkerson No.
911 Operator Has he been diagnosed with any mental, um, disorders or anything like that?
Susan Wilkerson Well, we’ve been seeing a doc for both physical and mental in terms of anxiety, short-term memory loss, lack of sleep. The same doc I went to see today.
911 Operator Does he carry any weapons on him?
Susan Wilkerson Well, not generally. I… he does have a gun safe, and I went to look in the gun safe to see if anything was missing, but I couldn’t tell if anything was. He has quite a number of pistols and rifles. Other than
Susan Wilkerson saying if his brain and body keep deteriorating, he didn’t want to live like that. But it seemed to me that was just a, “man, I hate how this is going” kind of thing, because I told him, “Yes, you do. Yes, you do.”
911 Operator Okay. We’re gonna send some deputies up to talk to you, see if we can search a little bit and see what’s going on, okay?
Susan Wilkerson Sure. Thank you very much.
911 Operator You’re welcome.
I think he planned not to be found.
“He Planned Not to Be Found”
00:16:29 00:17:31
Tom Devereux I think he planned not to be found.
Tom Devereux That sentence is what the entire investigation has spent eight weeks trying to either confirm or break.
Tom Devereux I’m standing in his backyard right now. The Sandias are about three miles east. The wind is coming off of them at maybe ten knots. And six feet from where I’m standing, in the dirt, coyote tracks.
Tom Devereux A man with the highest clearances in the United States government walked out a back door into open desert
Tom Devereux in good hiking boots, with a wallet and a revolver.
Tom Devereux He left his phone and glasses behind.
Tom Devereux No note. Just vanished.
Tom Devereux Mike?
One Story or Eleven?
00:17:31 00:21:21
Mike Davis Thanks, Tom.
Catherine Lee Okay, but I have to ask the obvious. Are we telling one story tonight here, or eleven?
Mike Davis The question is whether the answer matters.
Catherine Lee Go.
Mike Davis Let’s separate two things. On the same day the president was on the South Lawn — April 16th — the Department of War wrote to House Oversight Committee staff in writing to say that there are no active national security investigations of any reported missing current or former clearance holders involved in special access programs. None. The same day. The same week. The President of the United States had just left a meeting on that subject. Both of those are true.
Catherine Lee That’s not a contradiction. That’s a vacuum.
Mike Davis That’s the field we are playing on.
Catherine Lee There is a voice missing from this episode, and I want her to be heard before we go any further. Susan McCasland Wilkerson, Neil’s wife. She has not given a single television interview. She is talking only on Facebook — to friends, sometimes to strangers. These are her words.
Catherine Lee “Neil is at some risk, but not from dementia. It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him.” She knows the story that is being told around her. She is trying to steer it.
Mike Davis And she is the only person who has the standing to.
Catherine Lee So with Susan not giving any interviews, there are three threads this show is going to pull on in the weeks ahead. The first one is the UFO and legacy programs. Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, sitting member of Congress, told WABC Radio in March on the record about McCasland — quote, “He’s the guy that had a lot of nuclear secrets. I’ve been told by several sources that he was the gatekeeper for the UFO stuff.” The second is the foreign-intelligence thread. Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri told reporters this has, quote, “all the hallmarks of a foreign operation.” He named China. He named Russia. He named Iran.
Catherine Lee The third is also Burchett — MKUltra, by which he means a domestic operation. He told the Daily Mail this week, and I am going to quote him exactly, that, “If you are a chef who suspects your busboys of leaking your recipes to the competition, you don’t take out the chef. You rough up a few busboys to send a message up the chain.”
Mike Davis And there is a fourth possibility I keep coming back to.
Catherine Lee Go.
Mike Davis That some of these eleven scientists are unrelated tragedies. That the MIT physicist was killed by the same man who shot up Brown University last December.
Mike Davis That the Caltech astronomer was killed by a neighbor who had been on his property before.
Mike Davis That a Los Alamos administrator and a JPL engineer and a retired Air Force major general all disappeared in the same season for entirely different and entirely human reasons.
Mike Davis That what we are watching is a country teaching itself a new conspiracy theory.
Catherine Lee I’m not saying it’s true. I’m saying it only has to be true once. Just once.
I’m not saying it’s true. I’m saying it only has to be true once. Just once.
Next Week: Monica Reza
00:21:21 00:22:29
Mike Davis
There are eleven names on Chairman Comer’s list. Eleven scientists who, in the last three and a half years, have either died or vanished. We have spent the last three weeks looking for a documented connection between any two of them.
Mike Davis We found one.
Mike Davis Two of those eleven worked together. Same office, same specifications, same rocket engine. One of them is McCasland — the man we just spent eighteen minutes with. The other is sixty-year-old Monica Reza, a materials scientist working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who eight months before Neil McCasland walked out, parked her car at a trailhead in the Angeles National Forest and headed up the Mount Waterman Trail with two friends. They last saw her from about thirty feet away. She was trailing behind. They waved at each other.
Mike Davis When they checked on Monica again, she was gone. Vanished, and never seen again.
Until We Know More
00:22:29 00:23:12
Mike Davis Next week, Monica Reza.
Mike Davis Until we know more,
Mike Davis I’m Mike Davis in Washington.
Catherine Lee I’m Catherine Lee. Tom Devereux is in Albuquerque tonight. Missing Scientists is a production of The Narrative, produced by Hunter Powers and Deborah Cavenaugh.
Mike Davis If you have something we should know, the case file is at missingscientists.com.
Catherine Lee And follow the show wherever you listen. We’ll be back here when we know more.