As he was leaving the White House for Las Vegas on Thursday afternoon, President Donald Trump told reporters that he is looking into the circumstances surrounding the death or disappearance of 10 U.S. scientists over the last three years.
Almost all of the scientists involved either worked directly for the U.S. government or on government-funded programs related to nuclear energy, aerospace, or UFOs, working at places like Los Alamos National Laboatory, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Trump was asked by Fox News' Peter Doocy, "Based on what you've been briefed, do you think is happening here, and do you think that this is connected or totally random?"
BREAKING: President Trump vows to look into the 10 scientists who have gone missing or turned up dead:
— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 16, 2026
"I hope it's random, but we're going to know in the next week and a half."
"I just left a meeting on that subject."
"Pretty serious stuff... Some of them were very important… pic.twitter.com/VMgeZyayXl
Trump replied:
"I hope it's random, but we're gonna know in the next week and a half.
"I just left a meeting on that subject. So, 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 going to look at it over the next short period."
Five of the scientists disappeared without a trace; four of whom simply walked away from their homes without their phones or keys.
- Gen. William McCasland, 68, walked away from his Albuquerque home in late February with only a gun.
- Monica Jacinto Reza, 60, a pioneering scientist working at NASA JPL, disappeared while hiking with friends in June 2025.
- Steven Garcia, 41, walked away from his New Mexico home in August 2025 with only a pistol.
- Anthony Chavez, 79, walked away from his New Mexico home in May 2025.
- Melissa Casias, 54, walked away from her New Mexico home in June 2025.
According to the Daily Mail, Garcia "was a government contractor working for the Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC), a major facility in Albuquerque that manufactures more than 80 percent of all the non-nuclear components that go into building the military's nuclear weapons."
Reza, whose disappearance we covered previously, was the primary developer of Mondaloy, a nickel-based superalloy used in rocket engines. McCasland oversaw the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which funded Reza's research.
READ MORE: Missing Scientists, Classified Programs, Advanced Tech: Congress Demands Answers Now
Chavez and Casias both worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It's unclear what Chavez's focus was at the lab; he retired in 2017. Casias was listed as an administrative worker, but given the sensitive nature of the programs at the laboratory, it's doubtful that much would be known publicly about what any particular employee is working on.
The other five scientists tied to this swarm were murdered or died under suspicious circumstances.
- Nuno Loureiro, 47, a nuclear physicist working at MIT, was murdered in his Boston home in November 2025 by Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, the Brown University mass shooter.
- Carl Grillmair, 67, a world-renowned Caltech astrophysicist who studied distant planets, was murdered at his desert home in February 2026.
- Michael Hicks, 59, had just retired from NASA JPL, where he was part of a project testing to see if humans could deflect dangerous asteroids away from Earth when he died unexpectedly in July 2023.
- Frank Maiwald, 61, worked at NASA JPL and was the "lead researcher on a breakthrough that could help future space missions detect clear signs of life on other worlds" before he died unexpectedly in 2024.
- Jason Thomas, 45, a pharmaceutical researcher at Novartis, walked away from Boston-area home in December 2025; his body was found in a lake in March 2026.
Thomas' wife's description of how he left the home is eerily similar to the New Mexico disappearances:
"When the couple got home [from having dinner with friends] on December 12, they took care of the dogs, letting them out and giving them treats, before heading upstairs to their bedroom. According to Kristen, everything seemed normal. But after turning away for just a moment, she was surprised to find Jason had disappeared. She called out and he didn’t respond, so she went looking for him."
She then heard a banging noise, and recognized it as their mailbox closing. She looked out the front door and saw Jason near the mailbox. They locked eyes and he nodded at her, then turned and walked down the street. He would sometimes take walks late at night, she said, so she didn't think anything of it and went to sleep. But when she woke up around 1:30 a.m. and he wasn't there, she "realized Jason had emptied the pockets of his jacket when he came upstairs — his phone and wallet were on the bathroom counter. Shortly after that, she went outside and found his Apple Watch in the mailbox, presumably left behind when she heard the noise of the mailbox door closing."
According to the MIT News announcement of Loureiro's death:
His research on magnetized plasma dynamics, magnetic field amplification, and confinement and transport in fusion plasmas helped inform the design of fusion devices that could harness the energy of fusing plasmas, bringing the dream of clean, near-limitless fusion power closer to reality.
Trump's remarks come a day after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the deaths and disappearances were "worth looking into" in response to a question at the daily press briefing. Last month, Republican Rep. Eric Burlison (MO-07) asked the FBI to investigate the disappearances and deaths.