American Alchemy with Jesse Michels
Why America’s Top Scientists Are Going Missing [They Knew Too Much…]
21 Apr 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
What do you call it when a retired Air Force general, one who once ran the most notorious lab in UFO history, vanishes from his house in broad daylight? The general was involved with the Pentagon's most advanced aerospace research. When the NASA material scientist behind a breakthrough rocket engine alloy disappears 30 feet from her friend on a hike.
She was right behind them, 30 feet behind them, and then she disappeared.
Chapter 2: What happened to General Neil McCasland and why is it significant?
when one of MIT's top plasma physicists is gunned down outside his own front door.
This many top scientists getting killed or going missing in just under a year looks like a major red flag.
Who were the first people the Israelis killed in Iran when they went in? The first thing you do is kill your scientists.
It's the kind of thing that sounds like the Chinese science fiction book, The Three-Body Problem. A world where scientists don't just make discoveries, but become the frontline of a war they don't even know they're in. A world where the future rests on some of the most important minds on Earth. And those minds start disappearing. Except here, the names and the people behind them are real.
Chapter 3: What connections exist between McCasland's disappearance and UFO disclosure?
Casillas went missing after taking lunch to her teenage daughter at a cafe in Taos Plaza. Some of them were very important people, and we're going to look at it over the next special.
What we're looking at might not just be geopolitics in the dark or pressure coming from nation states, but from an unseen force shaping our timeline from somewhere above it, and a hidden struggle over who gets to control humanity's next leap. or maybe none of these cases are connected. It's really sensitive stuff and I'm not a big believer in coincidences.
So tonight we're following the trail through missing scientists, murdered physicists, defense world gatekeepers, in the strange shadow land that forms wherever advanced knowledge becomes too dangerous to leave walking around. There's a state that researchers called hypnagogia, that threshold between waking and sleep where the brain is doing something genuinely unusual.
The kind of thing that comes up in remote viewing accounts or other out-of-body experiences. And honestly, some of the most fascinating conversations I've had on this show. Since moving to Austin, sleep is something I've thought about a lot more. mostly because I'm not really doing it. That is, until recently.
I used to sleep on whatever mattress I'd had for years, and it was clearly not helping me get the sleep I need. Then I did a comprehensive search, and I learned that most mattresses are kind of lame. And a total insomniac friend of mine told me that he tried Helix and it fixed all of his issues. Helix is the mattress of the future.
They have a sleep quiz that matches you to the right mattress based on your sleep position, your body type, and whether you sleep hot or cold. I got matched with the Helix Midnight.
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Chapter 4: Who is Monica Reza and what led to her vanishing?
It has a cooling cover, which I know is going to matter a lot in these extremely hot Austin summer days. When I started using it, the change hit immediately. I'm waking up feeling like I actually recovered overnight. For someone who does four and five hour interviews, sleep is maybe the most important thing for me to dial in.
Chapter 5: What role did advanced metallurgy play in the story of missing scientists?
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Visit helixsleep.com slash jessemichaels to take advantage of their spring savings event and get 20% off site-wide. And 20% is a lot when it comes to mattresses. Again, that's helixsleep.com slash jessemichaels, Michaels with no A. The trail begins in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the shadow of Sandia Mountains. It's February 27th, 2026, a late Friday morning on Quail Run Court.
Neil McCasland, a 68-year-old retired Air Force general, is at home in a quiet neighborhood at the edge of the Cibola National Forest. A repairman sees him at the house around 10 a.m. Then about an hour later, around 11.10 a.m., his wife leaves for a medical appointment. At 12.04, barely an hour after that, she's back home.
Chapter 6: How did the murder of Carl Grillmair relate to the series of disappearances?
but her husband is gone. Left behind are his prescription glasses, his phone, which had been switched off, and his smartwatch, all the things that would make him trackable in the 21st century. But what's missing is a red backpack, his wallet, and a .38 caliber revolver with its holster. Not the best combination,
At 3.07, his wife Susan reports him missing, and the official police investigation begins. In a newly released 911 call, she tells the dispatcher he's been gone for about three hours.
I have some indication that He must have planned not to be found.
She said he changed his clothes and appears to be on foot since none of their cars or bikes were missing. She also tells dispatch that he's been dealing with some medical issues and that both of them were seeing a doctor for anxiety, lack of sleep, and short-term memory problems. In fact, it was the same doctor she had seen earlier that day.
But Susan chalked the health issues up to garden variety things that you face in old age. She never thought that Neil would actually act in a way to harm himself.
Saying if his brain and body keeps deteriorating, he didn't want to live like that. But it seemed to me that was just a
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Chapter 7: What was the significance of Nuno Loureiro's work in nuclear fusion?
Man, I hate how this is going kind of thing.
A comment like that would naturally raise concerns about self-harm. But whether that was a real risk or just a throwaway comment on an off day, we don't actually know. When the police asked about the weapons, she said that her husband had a gun safe with multiple pistols and rifles, but at that moment couldn't tell whether anything was actually missing.
Although now we know that one of his .38 calibers was in fact gone. The next day, a silver alert goes out. This is the kind of statewide alert issued when authorities think a missing person might be disoriented or cognitively impaired. New Mexico state statute doesn't require any kind of formal diagnosis. Given what Susan had already told the police, that was enough to trigger it.
But even with those reported issues, McCaslin still doesn't fit the profile of a man who just wandered into a canyon.
Investigators say he's still highly intelligent and capable.
Friends say that the week before he disappeared, McCaslin cycled 60 miles. He hiked those very foothills. He biked them. He knew every trail. This wasn't a man losing his bearings, but the kind of guy who could out-ski most millennials. This was also a town he knew by heart. McCaslin once commanded the Phillips Research Site at Kirtland.
an Air Force base notorious for hosting advanced weapons research right nearby. He wasn't a stranger to this place. It was basically his backyard. His wife would also issue another statement, saying McCasland had some risk, but not from dementia. He was not confused and disoriented. but a clear head didn't make him any easier to find.
The Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office said that they had surveillance footage from both ends of his street and still couldn't confirm his direction of travel. They made public appeals for doorbell cameras, dash cams, GoPros, anything.
if you have any information where mccaslin may be contact bcso's missing persons unit within the span of a week the search expanded from the sheriff's office to the fbi's albuquerque field office to the air force office of special investigations new mexico state search and rescue albuquerque mountain rescue horseback teams three types of search dogs drones
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Chapter 8: What events surrounded the tragic shooting at Brown University?
From June 2009 to May 2011, McCaslin served as director of special programs at the Pentagon in the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisitions, Technology, and Logistics. The title is a mouthful, but according to the official Pentagon training documentation, that office oversees acquisition special access programs. These programs are the ultimate category of secret black projects.
In fact, they account for about 75 to 80% of all special access programs in the Department of War. These are the programs built to protect the crown jewels. Extremely sensitive research in the process of building something. like a next generation weapons system or a craft that doesn't officially exist.
This is where sensitive technology moves from theory to prototype to something that the military can actually fly. And if you're wondering where UFO reverse engineering programs would possibly hide, This is the place. In the classified world, McCaslin's office was the motherlode.
His Wikipedia page goes a step further, claiming that the role made him executive secretary of the Special Access Program Oversight Committee, the body that reviews and approves every single special access program in the Pentagon. But that's not even the most interesting job on his resume.
From 2011 to 2013, McCaslin commanded the Air Force Research Lab, AFRL, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, overseeing a $2.2 billion science and technology portfolio, one of the largest research operations in the entire Pentagon. advanced material science, future weapons, and of course, exotic propulsion.
And if you're familiar with UFO lore, you also know that Wright-Patterson isn't just famous for Project Blue Book. It's the alleged home of the Roswell crash debris.
I called Curtis LeMay and I said, General, I know we have a room at Wright-Patterson where you put all this secret stuff. Can I go in there? I've never heard him get mad, but he got madder than hell on me.
Depending on who you believe, this place houses some of the most exotic materials in the history of the U.S. government. It's the place where they get studied, stored, reverse engineered, and obsessively hidden from public view. That's not even a conspiracy. This is the place during World War II where the U.S. would reverse engineer advanced Nazi tech.
And General Neal McCasland ran the entire thing. But what really put him on the radar of UFO World is that his name showed up somewhere no one expected. In 2016, Wikileaks published the hacked emails of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman and one of the most powerful political operatives in Washington. Buried in that email dump is an email from Tom DeLonge to Podesta.
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