Category: Claudio manuel neves
Speculation mounts over mysterious deaths and disappearances tied to US space and nuclear program
As the list of dead and missing individuals with ties to American space and nuclear programs grows, so too does the speculation about them.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said when asked about a possible trend on Wednesday, “If true, of course, that’s definitely something I think this government and administration would deem worth looking into.”
Missing
Steven Garcia, a 48-year-old Albuquerque resident, went missing on Aug. 28, 2025, according to the New Mexico Department of Public Safety.
The Daily Mail, citing an anonymous source, reported that Garcia — who was last seen leaving his home on foot, carrying only a handgun — was a government contractor working for the Kansas City National Security Campus.
The KCNSC manufactures 80% of non-nuclear components that go into the nuclear stockpile.
Blaze News reached out to KCNSC for comment but did not receive a response by deadline.
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Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker told the Mail, “I think we’ve even seen instances where nuclear scientists have been taken out. They’ve been assassinated.”
On Feb. 27, retired U.S. Air Force Major General William McCasland, 68, similarly left his Albuquerque home never to return.
In their search, authorities found his shirt and hiking boots at his second home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, but said that his wallet, revolver, holster, and red backpack remain unaccounted for, reported CNN.
“There’s no indication, and we are not putting forward that Mr. McCasland was disoriented or confused,” said Lt. Kyle Woods of the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office. “Arguably, he would still be the most intelligent person in the room that any of us would be in. Highly intelligent, highly capable.”
‘There’s just too many of ’em disappearing.’
Some have suggested that McCasland’s disappearance might have something to do with his time commanding the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where the Pentagon conducted advanced aerospace research.
“If there was ever a center of gravity for research and development and for all the spooky things that the U.S. government works on, Wright-Patterson’s right there at the top of the list,” former Pentagon intelligence officer Luis Elizondo told CNN.
The general’s wife cast doubt on “some of the misinformation” circulating about McCasland’s disappearance.
“It is true that when Neil was in the Air Force, he had access to some highly classified programs and information. He retired from the AF almost 13 years ago and has had only very commonly held clearances since. It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him,” Susan McCasland Wilkerson wrote in a March 6 post on Facebook.
Wilkerson noted further that her husband had a “brief association with the UFO community” but that “this connection is not a reason for someone to abduct Neil.”
“Neil does not have any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash stored at Wright-Patt,” she wrote. “Though at this point with absolutely no sign of him, maybe the best hypothesis is that aliens beamed him up to the mothership.”
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department asked the public for help in finding 60-year-old rocket scientist Monica Jacinto Reza, noting that she was last seen hiking on June 22, 2025, on Angeles Crest Highway.
Reza worked at Aerojet Rocketdyne where she moved the ball forward on a family of superalloys for use in rockets across multiple NASA and Air Force contracts.
She said in a 2017 interview with SpaceNews.com, “I worked with the Air Force to scale up production, look at different processing methods and get the material ready for insertion into a rocket engine. All of that positioned us very nicely to have the alloy [Mondaloy] at a maturity level that it could be used for the AR1 and the Hydrocarbon Boost and a few other programs.”
The Air Force noted in a 2016 release that an objective of the Hydrocarbon Boost program was to “help eliminate the United States’ reliance on foreign rocket propulsion technology,” adding that “this is key to ensuring our national security.”
McCasland reportedly oversaw funding for Reza’s project.
A staffer linked to the Los Alamos National Laboratory — a nuclear design and physics facility in New Mexico that is the lead agency for the B61, W76, and W88 warheads, helped develop the first atomic bomb, and produces plutonium pits — also recently went missing that month.
On June 26, 2025, Melissa Casias, 54, dropped her husband off at the Los Alamos lab where they both worked. Casias, an active administrative assistant at the lab, told her husband that she was headed to a second location within LANL to complete a work-related task, reported Dateline. She returned, however, to their home in Ranchos de Taos.
Around 12:30 p.m. that day, Casias grabbed lunch for her daughter and dropped it off at the cafe where she works. After a brief and normal encounter with her child, the mother departed.
New Mexico State Police PIO Sergeant Ricardo Breceda said that a family acquaintance “observed Melissa walking eastbound on NM518 from the Talpa, New Mexico, area towards Pot Creek.” This was her last known sighting.
Breceda noted further that “all belongings, including Melissa’s purse and factory reset phones, were found inside Melissa’s home.”
Dead
Deaths of individuals connected to American nuclear and space programs have also fueled speculation.
Frank Maiwald died on July 4, 2024, at the age of 61. The German-born scientist worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and, according to his obituary, contributed “to various significant projects such as AMR/SWOT, COWVR, AMR/Jason 3, and HIFI.” No cause of death was publicized.
Michael David Hicks, another Jet Propulsion Laboratory alum, died the previous July at the age of 59. He worked on the science teams of the DART Project, the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking Project, the Dawn Mission, and the NASA Deep Space 1 Mission. Hicks specialized in the physical properties of comets and asteroids.
While no cause of death for the divorcé was given publicly, his obituary noted that donations could be made to Alcoholics Anonymous.
Carl Grillmair, a highly esteemed California Institute of Technology astrophysicist who spent over four decades researching galactic astronomy and distant planets, was gunned down on the front porch of his home in Antelope Valley, California, on Feb. 16.
Grillmair — who the Los Angeles Times reported had worked at Caltech’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, which partners with NASA — previously had issues with his alleged killer, Freddy Snyder. On Dec. 20, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department reportedly responded to a trespassing complaint from Grillmair and allegedly found Snyder carrying a loaded rifle not registered in his name.
Nuno Loureiro, the director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, was assassinated at his Brookline, Massachusetts, home on Dec. 15, 2025, while enjoying a quiet evening with his wife and kids. The gunman believed to have shot him — Claudio Manuel Neves Valente — is the same dead gunman alleged to have carried out the Brown University mass shooting two days later.
Investigators said that Loureiro and Valente attended the same university program in Portugal between 1995 and 2000, reported CBS News.
Among those who’ve expressed concerns about the deaths and disappearances is Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett (R), who said in a recent interview, “There’s just too many of ’em disappearing.”
“Nothing happens by coincidence in this town,” he added.
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