Doesn’t seem like the kind of material Vanity Fair covers but they obviously felt they had something to say >One morning this February, William Neil McCasland walked out of his home in Albuquerque for the last time, leaving his phone and prescription glasses behind. Nearly two months into the search for the 68-year-old, his .38-caliber revolver remains unrecovered, and there is still no official account of the retired Air Force major general’s sudden disappearance. For an extraterrestrial enthusiast of a certain stripe, the mystery has landed like a modern-day Roswell. McCasland had overseen classified aerospace research at a laboratory that UFO lore identifies as the secret site of debris from the 1947 crash. After he retired in 2013, he worked as a consultant on media projects for Tom DeLonge as the Blink-182 frontman’s longtime obsession with alien-relatedconspiracy theories was bursting into broader view—a 2016 WikiLeaks dump revealed that DeLonge had emailed Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta about McCasland. In online UFO communities, the astronautical engineer’s life had long been pointing to revelations just beyond reach, and his unexplained vanishing was proof that they must be onto something. >McCasland is the most high-profile of 11 scientists whose deaths or disappearances over the last four years have formed the basis for a conspiracy theory that has recently crossed over into mainstream visibility. There are various spins on the line of inquiry, and the specifics are hard to pin down, but it revolves around the idea that these occurrences are connected and point to some manner of government cover-up (often, but not always, having to do with UFOs; other accounts deal with nuclear secrets or rocket technology). >The missing-scientist theory has traversed the Daily Mailand New York Post, a leading Substack newsletter published by MAGA-MAHA personality Jessica Reed Kraus, and the airwaves of prominent podcasters—Joe Rogan recently exemplified the typical tenor and precision of the coverage when he proposed that the disappearances could have something to do with “plasma technology, whatever the fuck that is.” >Last week the conspiracy reached its apex in the White House after a Fox News correspondent asked press secretary Karoline Leavitt at a briefing whether anybody was “investigating this to see if these things are connected.” Leavitt assured him that, if it were true, “that’s definitely something I think this government and administration would deem worth looking into.” >”I hope it’s random,” Donald Trump soon told reporters. “Pretty serious stuff…hopefully, I don’t know, coincidence, whatever you want to call it. But some of them were very important people, and we’re gonna look at it over the next short period.” The House Oversight Committee chairman announced on Monday that the group was beginning to investigate, proposing that “these deaths and disappearances may represent a grave threat to US national security and to US personnel with access to scientific secrets,” and the FBI added in a statement on Tuesday that it is “spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists.” submitted by /u/silv3rbull8 [link] [comments]