Are America’s top scientists being kidnapped or disappeared by a foreign adversary? Right-wing media are abuzz with speculation that 11 different individuals working on issues related to secret technology or the investigation of extraterrestrial life have been picked off one by one: murdered, kidnapped, disappeared. The stuff of The X-Files, in short: “The truth is out there,” but shadowy forces don’t want you to know.
After working its way through the conservative press and the online Right, this narrative got a major boost last week, when White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the administration was looking into the matter. The next day, President Trump himself informed the media that he had attended a meeting on the issue, and commented that the matter was “very serious,” promising that we will know more in a fortnight.
The GOP’s hysteria apparatus — it’s now almost an official part of how the party operates — went into action. According to Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), for example, the disappearances and deaths are “too coincidental” to have happened by chance. He called on officials to “pay attention to this issue and make sure that our nation’s top scientists are safe and secure.”
Fortunately, this entire narrative appears to be, to put it gently, complete nonsense.
In a country with an estimated 2 million researchers, some of them are bound to fall victim to unfortunate events, possibly even within a short span of time. And there is nothing to indicate that the events that have been linked together in the Right-wing media have any connection to one another. The fact that this narrative has gone so far is both a damning indication of low journalistic standards in conservative media — and revealing sign of where their biases lie.
Until recently, the number of dead or disappeared scientists stood at 10. Fox News reports that these were “individuals tied to US military, nuclear, and aerospace research.” On Friday, an 11th name was added to the list: Amy Eskridge, a Huntsville, Ala.-based researcher who committed suicide in 2022.
Nearly everything about Eskridge’s background raises red flags about any narrative that might include her in a list of important scientists. She was the co-founder of an organization called the Institute for Exotic Science, where she purported to be working on something called “gravity-modification research,” which isn’t a recognized branch of science. In 2020, she claimed to be ready to present groundbreaking work on “antigravity” but needed approval from NASA.
Eskridge apparently believed that she was facing harassment from shadowy forces, who had fired a “directed-energy weapon” at her. There appear to be no credible scientists who have taken her claims or alleged research seriously. I say “alleged” research because, looking for peer-reviewed papers by an author named Amy Eskridge, I was only able to locate one from 2009, and it is unlikely to have been the same woman because she would have been about 21 years old at the time, and the topic is decidedly unexotic: bridge engineering.
Eskridge’s family placed an obituary for her in The Birmingham News. It noted that “after her graduation from [the University of Alabama in Huntsville] with a double major in chemistry and biology, she became an interdisciplinarian and a master of electrical engineering, chemistry, physics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology.” By that standard, Lisa Kudrow is a master of exobiology, nanochemistry, and gravitational waves; the Friends star studied science as a Vassar undergraduate, after all.
Which is more likely: that Eskridge, with a bachelor’s degree and big dreams, was a persecuted genius whom a foreign government recognized as a threat that had to be eliminated? Or that she was simply a crank who committed suicide?
Unlike Eskridge, many of the other 10 names on the list appear to have been more serious scholars. Yet they were for the most part individuals toiling in widely divergent fields, held different positions, had no obvious connections to one another, and lived in different parts of the country. They included a retired Air Force major general, an MIT professor, and a pharmaceutical scientist who apparently only made the list due to having a Pentagon contract.
Two of the names were shot and killed. Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor, was murdered by a former classmate from Portugal. This has led some to speculate that a personal dispute or professional jealousy might have been the motive, though we may never know, since the suspect killed himself. Carl Grillmair was a Caltech astrophysicist whose alleged killer had previously been reported for trespassing on his property. In addition to Grillmair’s murder, the 29-year-old suspect in the case has been charged with carjacking and burglary in separate incidents.
“You can often tell the ideological bias of an outlet by noticing when its reasoning ability breaks down.”
Melissa Casias and Anthony Chavez both had been employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and both disappeared within a few months of each other in 2025. This at first glance seems strange. But neither of these individuals was an important scientist doing cutting-edge research. Casias was an administrative assistant. Chavez had once worked at Los Alamos, but he was a 78-year-old man who’d been retired since 2017. It’s much more plausible that he fell off a hiking trail than that he was a prime target for a Kremlin-directed assassination.
One of the individuals on the list, Frank Maiwald, is simply listed by media outlets as a 61-year-old who died, with no public cause of death given. There is nothing particularly unusual about a man of that age passing away, and his inclusion on the standard list just goes to show how far conspiracy theorists need to go in order to build their case that something strange going on.
I could go on. We’re not talking here about, say, the 11 top scientists in the country disappearing in a short period of time. To get the list of 11 people over a four-year period, the conspiracy theorists have had to scour the land for retirees, government contractors, random cranks, and administrators.
Where did this narrative even come from? The earliest article on this topic is dated March 22, and was published in the Daily Mail. It notes five missing scientists. The article quoted Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), a man who rarely meets a conspiracy theory that he doesn’t think is worth promoting on social media (unless it implicates Donald Trump).
Two days later, a website called The Liberty Line added another name, expanding the list to six. According to its X account, the website specializes in “Philadelphia sports and whatever else comes to mind.” Right-wing media and influencers kept adding names until we reached Eskridge, with old cases treated as breaking news. Finally, the story made its way to Fox News and the White House briefing room.
What is the lesson here? I’ve written in these pages about the problem of Right-wing influencers proliferating crank information. Yet the disappearing-scientists story came from the more “highbrow” — I use the term relatively — corners of the conservative press. The narrative has been pushed by the New York Post, The Daily Mail, and Fox News. Each of these outlets is a cross between professional journalism and the tabloid press. They report real news, and you can trust that most of the time they aren’t fabricating nonsense. But these outlets also sensationalize stories, engage in celebrity gossip, focus more than the mainstream media on personality over substance when discussing politics, and often play fast and loose with the facts in service of a narrative.
You can often tell the ideological bias of an outlet by noticing when its reasoning ability breaks down. With the Left-leaning press, we see particular hysteria surrounding men alleged to have engaged in sexual misconduct. A prominent man can be accused of anything from forcible rape to making passes at women, and once it is decided he might have behaved inappropriately, no accusation is too small or too poorly verified to get a hearing. Behold the feeding frenzy over Rep. Eric Swalwell, who has articles written about him in which accusations of drugging and raping women are placed alongside tales of flirtatious text messages. See also Michael Tracey’s coverage of the Epstein Files, and the degree to which the most salacious accusations about human trafficking remain widely believed despite the lack of evidence.
Where does logical reasoning break down in the Right-wing press? First, there is just a general conspiratorial orientation. The narrative about disappeared scientists is linked to excitement over the idea that the government is hiding the truth about UFOs. In early 2024, a Pentagon report determined that most UFO sightings can be explained as ordinary objects, and concluded that there was no evidence that we are being visited by extraterrestrial lifeforms. Yet in the world of Right-wing media, conspiracy theories never die once they take hold. Ignoring previous reports, Trump recently promised a TPUSA crowd “very interesting documents” related to the UFO phenomenon.
In Trump, conspiracy theorists have the president of their dreams, and the halls of Congress are likewise filled with lawmakers who pander to them. Yet they remain disappointed on topics like UFOs and Jeffrey Epstein. Where are the arrests of all the shadowy pedophiles? Where are the little green men? It can’t be that there is nothing there. Some end up disillusioned with Trump, believing he is no better than the members of the Deep State he supposedly displaced, while others keep trudging to TPUSA events, holding out hope that in another week or two, Trump is going to get to the bottom of things.
For Fox News, however, this isn’t simply a matter of playing to conspiracy theorists. The network is always in search of a narrative involving foreign threats. While the podcast sphere and the online Right have been disappointed with hawkish Trump administration policies like the war with Iran, on Fox News it might as well still be 2005. The story of the 11 dead or missing scientists thus not only scratches a conspiratorial itch, but also has the potential to hype the audience up for hawkish policies abroad.
The online Right lives and breathes exciting fever dreams that appeal to the less educated based on distorted or fabricated information. The mainstream Right-wing press is preferable but still plays footsie with the conspiracy theorists and cranks who compose its audience. Increasingly, members of Congress find it beneficial to play to the same crowd, if they are not conspiracy theorists themselves. All of this is a recipe for a constant stream of false narratives. The story of the disappearing scientists is yet another case proving this point.
Do not expect anything to come of it. Soon, they will move on to something else.
