At least 10 people tied to sensitive US research have died or disappeared

mjd

Last time I looked into this (last week, I think) it was a big wad of nothing. The people had disappeared over a span of many years. They weren't tied to any particular program, employer, or even any particular area of study, just “uh, tech stuff”. Some of them were technical experts, some weren't; one was an administrative assistant. One was killed by a campus shooter who also killed two students. Typical example: “In the years since, several others connected to JPL have also died or disappeared: Frank Maiwald, a specialist in space research, died in Los Angeles in 2024 at 61.”

Mistletoe

I need to see stats on how many would be expected to die or disappear from natural causes and I’m never seeing that on these stories. Weird things happen all the time to people in any field of work, it’s only concerning if this is rising above the natural noise. The fact that the current administration, which has proven time and time again it is ignorant about statistics and pretty much all things science, is raising the alarm does not bode well for this being an actual issue.

Zigurd

Color me skeptical. Whenever I see this come up in a social media feed it's a UFO influencer. It's leaked out into the legacy news presenters who have great haircuts and no critical thinking skills.

jdw64

I think this is a case of flawed human pattern recognition. Even in the article, it lumps everything together as “in recent years,” but over the span of several years, people across a large country can die for all sorts of unrelated reasons. That’s just how basic mortality statistics work. Also, the category “scientists” is far too broad. Unless we’re talking about the same organization, the same field of research, and the same timeframe, it’s hard to justify treating these cases as connected. The scope is too wide and the professions too varied. It feels like people are constructing conspiracy theories out of weak patterns because those narratives are more stimulating. If we applied the same logic, we could take annual industrial accident deaths in the U.S. and claim they’re part of some coordinated assassination plan by capitalists. That obviously doesn’t make sense. (Although, to be fair, one could argue that industrial accidents reflect structural issues tied to capital, but that’s a different kind of argument entirely.) What I’m really trying to say is that this kind of article feels like a product of the internet’s incentive structure — framing loosely related events as something suspicious in order to attract clicks and attention.

shoubidouwah

Nice writeup on the whole thing basically being hyped politically with actual nothing behind it https://unherd.com/2026/04/behind-the-disappearing-scientist... Also ~10 in a year, modal age of established scientists + collaboration with us gov, the background rate is basically that... Basically a conspiracy theory at that point, and not even a good one.

delichon

The NameUs US public database of around 26k longer term active missing person cases adds around 600 new names per month. It doesn't seem odd that a handful over years would share a narrow professional interest. But that number, 20 disappeared people per day, is gut wrenching. (US murders are at around 40 per day.) Surveillance sucks, but maybe at least it can be leveraged to find patterns when married to NameUs data. On the other hand I can sympathize with someone who just doesn't want to be found.

rekrsiv

Yet another statistically misleading headline.

ljm

This basically sounds like the start of Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. Are we going to learn that physics no longer exists?

fortranfiend

I see this at there's no credible connection at this time, but these individuals have knowledge of technical details on projects and technologies that they don't want in the hands of an adversary. So they're trying to rule out a kidnapping by another power not trying to find them.

andyjohnson0

Three things: 1. Many people intuitively assume that clumping/clustering of events implies non-randomness, and that random processes are smooth and low-variance. The opposite is true [1]. 2. A consequence of 1. is that people often over-estimate their understanding of the likelihood of events and the degree to which they are conditional/dependent. 3. There was an intriguing comment on this site a few days ago [2], referencing Daniel Kahneman's work on System 1 and System 2 thinking. From memory it said that reality is a lot less explicable than we tend to think - and that a lot of what we casually think we know about the everyday world is just our brains filling in the gaps using quick and cheap System 1. As to why people are clutching at science-fictional interpretations: perhaps they're looking for some excitement or novelty? That would be very human. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion [2] Unfortunately I cant find the comment. I wish I'd favourited it.

mellosouls

Discussed here the other day: FBI looks into dead or missing scientists tied to NASA, Blue Origin, SpaceX (228 points, 170 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47858246

ilitirit

What was the "pattern" before this in these fields? What is the current pattern in other industries? Does the pattern exist elsewhere in the world?

rdtsc

I think what someone needs to do is before looking up these names or professions, first define a the category of "sensitive US research" well enough (specific institutions, areas, level of access, seniority, etc) and only after that look at history to total missing persons and then decide if there is more or less of them missing in proportion to the total.

gaigalas

Amy Eskridge made publications about concrete deterioration. A scholar, no doubt. Also, outside of her field, a nutcase with conspiracy theories about energy weapons and a troubled individual. No doubt a tragedy, but clearly an outlier (of possibly many). This is super weird, and I can't buy the narrative when clear outliers like this are in the mix. This is, as far as I can tell, sensationalist work that disgustingly aggregates troubled individuals deaths to put forward a patriot narrative that might not hold water.

tim333

Most people die at some stage. I wonder if there's any statistical evidence that this lot is abnormal?

dualvariable

What is missing is a denominator and some standardization. There could be 100,000s of people in the US who have jobs where their disappearance could be considered "concerning". And then we need a base rate for people of similar socioeconomic status. They're probably disappearing at a far smaller rate than the general population, since they're not poor, not sex-workers, not troubled teens, etc. However, there is still a base rate, and you still need to show that it exceeds that base rate--and I kind of doubt that it actually does. We have a large population, and over the course of a few years 10 weird things happening seems entirely normal to me.