The missing scientists at the centre of a UFO conspiracy
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What is the missing scientists story that launched this investigation?
This is The Guardian.
Today, the mysterious case of the missing scientists.
So William Neil McCastland is a 68-year-old retired Major General. He worked at the Wright-Patterson Air Base, or had in the past. Now that was connected to the so-called UFO Roswell incident in 1947. Phil Tinline is a writer and broadcaster, and he's been following the stories of American scientists making news headlines. And on 27th February this year, 2026, he went out one day. He said goodbye to his wife and he just left the house.
My name is Susan Wilkerson. My husband is missing. Okay. And it's been about three hours since...
He left the house without his phone, without his prescription glasses, without any wearable devices. He may have also had with him his .38 caliber revolver and has not been seen since. William McCaslin retired from his job as an astronautical engineer at a government lab over a decade ago. But his name recently appeared on a list. A list with 10 others who appear to have gone missing or have died in the last few years. Because to some, these cases don't seem random. They're understood as some sort of cover-up.
He disappeared six days right after Trump announced he was releasing the UFO files. And he's not the only one. If nothing else, there could be a foreign actor involved in a circumstance like this, but it just doesn't add up to me that... They go missing or are found dead.
Eleven that we know of.
What do these scientists know? Is there a threat to national security? Questions that even President Trump is asking.
What do you think is happening here? And do you think that this is connected or totally random?
Well, I hope it's random. Hopefully, I don't know, coincidence, whatever you want to call it. But some of them were very important people, and we're going to look at it over the next... Could it be true?
Or are people falling for an American conspiracy theory that can be traced back to a 50-year-old British broadcast?
Makes no sense. I mean, how can people just vanish off the face of the earth in this day and age? Where did they go? And why? And indeed, how? What, if anything, was the common factor?
From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, the mystery that went mainstream and launched an FBI investigation. Phil Tinline, welcome to Today in Focus. Thanks for having me. Now, you're an author and documentary maker specializing in conspiracy theories. And you've looked into these claims that scientists have been disappearing under suspicious circumstances. Can you outline, first of all, what it is that people have widely believed has happened to them? Well, so what seems to be forming in people's heads is this very dramatic story, not entirely coherent, but very dramatic story, where people are involved with some sort of secret UFO work. Now, quite what that means is left, you know, enticingly vague, and maybe involved with the nuclear program.
So... If anybody who is in that sort of situation goes missing, you immediately have what appears to be a story. And so what seems to have formed in people's heads is the idea that these scientists are going missing essentially because they know too much. Either they want out and they're being killed or they're being kidnapped in order to get the information from them.
Yeah, there's scientists that have gotten whacked in or missing and a couple of generals as well that's all connected somehow or another to UFO technology and anti-gravity technology and nuclear scientists. Think how little we know. Like the amount of, like, yeah. Like you and I? Just like Americans.
And what do we know about what happened to William Neal McCasland and what did his wife say to the emergency services? He was clearly, it would seem, in distress. He had apparently been unusually clingy and down that morning, she said, and said he didn't want to go on like this. He'd been withdrawing from some of the work he'd been doing.
Who was William Neal McCasland and what were the circumstances of his disappearance?
He was a retiree, but people obviously fade gradually from their work sometimes, because he was suffering from what they call brain fog.
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