The 12 Missing or Dead Scientists Point to the Great Disclosure Deception

One does not have to be a Bible-believing Christian or a conspiracy theorist to appreciate the possible scenarios, but it helps.

On the evening of April 17, 2026, a single-engine Mooney M20 went down over South Carolina, killing all four people aboard. The pilot was James “Tony” Moffatt, 60 — a decorated military veteran, experimental test pilot trained at the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, and a man who had spent 14 Space Shuttle missions supporting ISS construction as a payload and flight crew specialist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. His wife Leasa, 61, and their two sons — Andrew, 30, a research engineer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and William, 28, an IT professional — died alongside him. An entire family. An entire repository of knowledge. Gone in one moment.

Moffatt founded an aerospace consulting firm after retiring from the Army in 2008. He worked on the Army’s Degraded Visual Environment Mitigation program and the Next Generation Unmanned Aircraft System technology demonstration. He was, by any measure, exactly the kind of man whose expertise sits at the intersection of advanced propulsion, military aviation, and the kind of classified aerospace research that governments do not discuss at press conferences.

He is also the twelfth name on a list that the United States Congress has now formally asked four federal agencies to explain.

• Here is my podcast on this very topic.

The List No One Can Explain

Begin with the general. Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from MIT and degrees from Harvard. He commanded Kirtland Air Force Base’s Phillips Research Site and, most significantly, the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio — the facility that served as the headquarters for Project Blue Book, the military’s official UFO investigation program from 1952 to 1969, and which has long been associated in declassified documents and congressional testimony with materials recovered from the 1947 Roswell crash site.

In leaked emails from 2016 — obtained when Russian hackers breached the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta — Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge described McCasland as a key advisor to his UFO disclosure project. DeLonge wrote that McCasland was “very, very aware” of classified material and that the general had helped assemble his advisory team. After his Air Force retirement, McCasland worked as an unpaid consultant on DeLonge’s media and fiction projects related to UAP disclosure. Whatever one thinks of DeLonge’s enterprise, the documented link between a sitting Air Force Research Laboratory commander and an organized effort to bring classified UAP information into public view is not nothing.

On February 27, 2026, McCasland walked out of his Albuquerque home during a one-hour window while his wife was at a medical appointment. He left behind his phone, his prescription glasses, and his wearable devices. He took his hiking boots, his wallet, and a .38-caliber revolver. Despite weeks of searches involving drones, dogs, helicopters, horseback teams, and the FBI, no trace of him has been found.

His wife has pushed back on theories connecting his disappearance to his classified history. She noted he had no active high-level clearances and no “special knowledge” about Roswell. She is almost certainly telling the truth about what she knows. The more pressing question is what she may not know — and what he knew that she was never told.

Then there is Monica Reza. In the early 2000s, working at Rocketdyne, she co-invented a nickel-based superalloy called Mondaloy — a material engineered specifically for advanced rocket engines, funded in part by the Air Force Research Laboratory. The same organization McCasland later led. Congressional investigators have flagged this overlap as unexplained. By June 2025, Reza was serving as Director of Materials Processing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. On the morning of June 22, she went hiking near Mount Waterman in the Angeles National Forest with a companion. They were roughly thirty feet apart on a well-traveled trail. The companion turned to check on her. She smiled and waved. He turned back. Moments later, he looked again. She was gone. No body has ever been found. No explanation has ever been offered.

The case of Amy Eskridge is the one that should stop every reader cold. Eskridge was 34 years old and held a double major in chemistry and biology from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, later earning a master’s in electrical engineering. She co-founded the Institute for Exotic Science with her father, retired NASA plasma physicist Richard Eskridge, with a stated and public mission: to bring anti-gravity propulsion research out of the classified world and into public discourse. In 2020, she announced she was prepared to present new foundational anti-gravity research — but required NASA authorization before doing so. She never received it.

In the years before her death, Eskridge gave public interviews stating explicitly that her life was in danger. She described years of escalating harassment — physical surveillance, alleged directed-energy attacks, and psychological intimidation. She told audiences she was “scared” and “tired” and felt compelled to disclose soon because “it’s like escalating.”

She enlisted a retired British intelligence officer, Franc Milburn, to document the harassment. Milburn concluded she had not committed suicide. On June 11, 2022, Amy Eskridge was found dead in Huntsville, Alabama. Authorities ruled her death a self-inflicted gunshot wound. No investigative report has ever been released to the public. No medical examiner’s findings have been made available. Independent investigators later presented Milburn’s findings to Congress, including testimony from journalist Michael Shellenberger that Eskridge was killed by a private aerospace company because of her involvement in the UAP disclosure conversation. After her death, the Institute for Exotic Science’s website went dark.

And then there is Moffatt — the twelfth name, the most recent, dying with his entire family on a clear April evening. The NTSB and FAA are investigating. No cause has been released. In isolation, a small plane crash is a tragedy. On a list that now includes a vanished general, a disappearing rocket scientist, and a dead anti-gravity researcher who predicted her own murder, it becomes something harder to dismiss.

The Disclosure Problem

President Trump has promised UFO disclosure. We should believe him and not take it as bluster because it has been confirmed through executive action and repeated public statements.

The White House has directed the FBI, the Department of Energy, and NASA to investigate the deaths and disappearances of the scientists now drawing congressional scrutiny. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the probe. Trump himself told reporters, after acknowledging he had just left a meeting on the matter, that he hoped the pattern was “random” but expected answers within a week and a half.

Congress is not waiting. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer formally demanded information from four federal agencies, warning that “something sinister” may be at work. Rep. Eric Burlison, who has called McCasland’s disappearance “deeply concerning,” has noted publicly that the general had “a lot of information” on the topic of UAPs. Rep. Tim Burchett has blasted the intelligence community’s “alphabet agencies” for being unhelpful and obstructionist.

The mainstream framing of all this is predictable: either the deaths are a tragic coincidence of unrelated events among a small professional community, or they represent foreign espionage — China or Russia eliminating American scientific assets. Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker offered exactly this binary on NewsNation: either random, or “modern-day espionage.”

Both explanations are worth taking seriously. Neither asks the question that actually matters.

What if the threat is domestic? What if the force with the most to lose from honest disclosure is not Beijing or Moscow, but the apparatus inside the American national security state that has spent seventy-five years building and maintaining the UFO secrecy program — and has the most to gain from controlling what disclosure looks like?

The Theory No One Wants to Say Out Loud

This is speculation. It is offered as such, with no claim to confirmed evidence beyond what is documented above. But speculation, honestly labeled and carefully reasoned, is not the same as fantasy. It is the beginning of inquiry.

Here is the theory.

The United States government has, for decades, operated classified aerospace programs involving propulsion technologies that bear striking visual resemblance to what the public calls UFOs or UAPs. These are not extraterrestrial craft. They are the product of human engineering, possibly with demonic influence — black-budget programs, advanced physics research, and materials science that the public has never been permitted to see. The scientists and engineers who built these systems, tested them, and developed the underlying theoretical frameworks are the people now dying and disappearing.

The convergence is not random. Consider what each of our four key figures represents. McCasland commanded the laboratory at Wright-Patterson — the hub of American aerospace black programs — and was actively involved in UFO disclosure conversations. Reza developed the advanced materials that make exotic propulsion possible and was professionally connected to McCasland through the very research programs that would undergird such technology. Eskridge was actively attempting to bring anti-gravity propulsion into public view and was explicitly warning that forces were trying to stop her. Moffatt spent his career as an experimental test pilot — the exact category of person who would have flown classified aircraft and be able to identify, in a public disclosure environment, what was man-made and what was not.

Now consider what Trump’s promised disclosure could look like if it proceeds without these witnesses. The public is shown craft that appear to defy known physics. Officials — carefully selected officials — confirm that these objects are not from any known human program. The conclusion, presented to a world primed by decades of science fiction and cultural preparation, writes itself.

The people who could say otherwise — the engineers who built the propulsion systems, the materials scientists who developed the alloys, the test pilots who flew the prototypes, the generals who ran the laboratories — are gone.

Dead men tell no tales. And missing generals cannot testify.

The Great Deception

Christians have a framework for this that predates the UFO era by two thousand years.

The Apostle Paul, writing to the church at Thessalonica, described a coming age of profound spiritual deception — one so convincing that, if possible, even the elect would be taken in. He wrote of “strong delusion” sent upon those who refused to love the truth, that they might believe a lie. The warning in 2 Thessalonians 2 is not directed at the gullible or the ignorant. It is directed at people who have access to the truth and choose something more comfortable instead.

Jesus himself, in Matthew 24:24, warned that in the last days false christs and false prophets would arise, performing signs and wonders of such magnitude that the deception would target even those who should know better.

The question worth sitting with is this: what is the single narrative capable of unifying a fragmented, post-Christian world under a new framework of meaning? What story could cause humanity to set aside its national, religious, and cultural identities in favor of a collective identity built around a shared cosmic revelation?

The answer has been rehearsed in popular culture for a century. We are not alone. The universe is populated with intelligences far older and more advanced than our own. Everything we thought we knew about our origins, our purpose, and our place in creation requires revision.

If that revelation arrives not as genuine discovery but as engineered theater — if the “extraterrestrial” craft are human-built vehicles, if the “contact” is a managed performance, if the “disclosure” is actually a controlled narrative designed to produce a predetermined cultural and spiritual conclusion — then the people most dangerous to the operation are the ones who can prove it is a lie. The engineers. The materials scientists. The test pilots. The generals who ran the laboratories.

Scripture does not name the mechanism of the Great Deception. It does not specify whether the lie will come through politics, through false religion, through signs in the heavens, or through all of the above simultaneously. What it specifies is that the deception will be extraordinary in its sophistication and that the protection against it is not intelligence or skepticism but a love of the truth — a willingness to hold fast to what is real even when the evidence of your eyes and the consensus of your culture insists otherwise.

As the prophet Isaiah wrote: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.” The ancient warning against the inversion of reality is not a metaphor. It is a description of exactly what a sophisticated deception operation does — it takes something man-madeand demonically influenced and presents it as cosmic, takes something hidden and presents it as revealed, takes a carefully constructed lie and presents it as the most important truth humanity has ever received.

What We Actually Know — and Why It Matters

To be clear about what this article is and is not: no confirmed evidence links these twelve deaths and disappearances to a coordinated program of suppression. Investigators have not established foul play in most of these cases. The official positions of the FBI, NASA, and the Department of Energy are that they are reviewing the cases for potential connections and have found none confirmed.

What is confirmed is this. At least twelve people with access to the most sensitive aerospace, propulsion, and nuclear research in the United States have died or vanished since 2022. The timing coincides precisely with the most serious push for UFO disclosure in American history. Congress — not fringe internet forums, but the House Oversight Committee — has formally declared the pattern potentially sinister and demanded answers. The President of the United States has personally engaged on the subject. And the scientists who are gone represent exactly the categories of expertise that would be most dangerous to a disclosure narrative built on false premises.

That may be coincidence. It may be espionage. It may be something else entirely.

But for those with eyes to see and the courage to ask uncomfortable questions, the pattern is not nothing. And for those whose worldview is anchored in the understanding that the rulers of this age operate in darkness, that deception is the primary weapon of the enemy of souls, and that the stage of human history is always being set for something larger than what appears on the surface — the convergence of these events deserves more than a shrug and a change of subject.

The truth does not need to be suppressed. Only lies do.

Whatever is being buried with these twelve names, someone does not want it to survive long enough for disclosure to arrive. That alone is reason enough to pay attention — and to pray for the discernment that no government investigation, however earnest, can provide.