Mysterious NASA Deaths! (Or Maybe Not...)
Let's do a few calculations and look at "mysterious" deaths of the past
The following story was brought to my attention, and I do love stuff like this:
9 April 2026, NY Post: Another mysterious NASA death as ninth scientist linked to secret programs dies [emphasis added]
A NASA scientist mysteriously died without any cause of death listed or autopsy — sparking questions about whether he was part of a pattern of deaths tied to the US space and nuclear program.
Michael Hicks, who worked on a myriad of NASA space science missions, died in July 2023 at the age of 59 and worked at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) from 1998 to 2022.
He assisted on the DART Project, the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking Project, the Dawn Mission, and the NASA Deep Space 1 Mission.
It is unclear if there’s any foul play linked to Hicks’ death, but his obituary asks for donations in his memory to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. He joins eight other scientists or top officials who have died or disappeared recently.
Before I jump into really digging into this, I’m going to note the increase in alcohol-related deaths during the pandemic, which I wrote about in the following pieces:
Jul 2025: RIP Michael Madsen: On Heart Disease, Alcoholism, and Men
Jun 2025: Men’s Health Week 2025: RIP, Brian Wilson and Men’s Mental Health Issues, Drug and Alcohol Use/Abuse
Mar 2022: Dead is dead: Increased Alcohol-Related Deaths, U.S., 2020-2021
Mar 2022: Alcohol-related deaths, part 2: Geographical Differences for 2019 and 2020
Here is a graph:
Okay, back to the article, where I will pull out the other 8 people mentioned, in the order they were mentioned.
Monica Reza, JPL’s former director of the Materials Processing Group, disappeared in June 2025 while hiking and has still not been found.
Retired Air Force Gen. William Neil McCasland also disappeared in February, walking out of his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, without his prescription glasses or phone.
JPL astrophysicist Carl Grillmair was murdered on his front porch in February, and Frank Maiwald, another JPL scientist, died in July 2024 without explanation. Maiwald was a longtime co-worker of Hicks.
Two nuclear workers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory vanished from their homes in 2025 under mysterious circumstances. Anthony Chavez, a longtime worker at the lab, and Melissa Casias, an administrative assistant there, were last seen leaving their homes without critical personal items like their wallets or phones.
Boston fusion energy researcher Nuno Loureiro was killed at his home in December 2025 by former classmate Claudio Neves Valente, who was from Portugal.
Lastly, pharmaceutical researcher Jason Thomas was found dead in a Massachusetts lake last month after also disappearing several months earlier.
He was researching cancer treatments at Novartis.
Okay, do we have the yarn diagram assembled? Are you ready?
I see that Jason Thomas and Nuno Loureiro aren’t on this diagram, but let’s not worry about that right now.
For all this work-up, some of these deaths aren’t mysterious at all (especially the Nuno Loureiro one - that was pretty well-covered when that occurred).
In many of these cases, the details of the deaths aren’t our business, so we’re not being told about them. In others, the reporters are eliding over some salient details to make it seem mysterious.
But let’s look at the oogy-boogy claim:
Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker told the Daily Mail that the cases should be considered suspicious.
“You can say these are all suspicious, and these are scientists who have worked in critical technology,” Swecker told the Daily Mail.
Swecker believes foreign intelligence agencies have been targeting US technology for decades, potentially revealing who could be responsible for the disappearances or mysterious circumstances of scientists and officials.
Ah, Chris Swecker is a fellow North Carolinian! I agree with him that lots of people target U.S. tech.
But, my dude, one need not kill anybody over it. Especially not an administrative assistant.
Oh, and are you aware of how many people work for NASA JPL/LANL? That might be a little bit relevant when it comes to how many people one expects to die/go missing. We’ll be coming back to that number.
Because I want to go back in time… to 2019.
When there was a different “mysterious death” series of stories from the NY Post.
But it didn’t involve NASA.
It involved the Dominican Republic and NY tourists.
STUMP Classics: “Mysterious” Dominican Deaths
Boy, I enjoyed this one. This was the “Mortality with Meep” version of Soda Tax, and don’t worry if you don’t understand that.
There was a bit of a panic in 2019 about people in the NY area vacationing in the Dominican Republic… and DYING! MYSTERIOUSLY!
Here are ALL the posts I did on the situation: [not in chrono order]
19 June 2019: Mortality with Meep: How Many Deaths Before it’s No Longer a Coincidence?
24 June 2019: Mortality with Meep: People Continue to Die in the Dominican Republic and the PR Problem Continues
10 July 2019: Deaths in the Dominican Republic: Westchester Woman Dies
5 July 2019: Deaths in the Dominican Republic: Bad Booze?
15 July 2019: Deaths in the Dominican Republic: How Many are We Up To Now?
20 June 2019: Mortality with Meep: Dominican Republic and Raw Death Rates
22 June 2019: Mortality with Meep: Even More Dominican Republic Deaths
Back in 2019, I wrote:
One of the big reasons this is a story is a lot of the people dying are from New York, or the general area. There are a variety of reasons NYers are central to this:
1. There are a lot of Dominicans who live in NYC… so there are a lot of flights from NYC to the DR.
2. A lot of cheap flights to DR, and vacation packages for NYers.
3. A lot of people live near NYC.I’m no longer going to calculate a damn thing (okay, if somebody else writes a piece that has stats in it, I’ll link, but I don’t feel like calculating any probabilities right now…..
I did do some rough stats in a later post (and now, I have my pal Gemini to help me), but there didn’t seem to be any particular uptick in DR death of tourists, just a media-generated panic.
The problem then was that the DR public relations folks didn’t know how to handle things…
But nobody really has a bias for thinking that somebody is going around murdering Americans in the Dominican Republic.
Let’s think of something that’s far more endemic: antivaxxers. They will not be convinced by numbers. It’s purely emotional reaction at this point.
Truth is one of my highest values, and I have a bias of digging into my assumptions. I am particularly aware of cognitive biases.
But that’s not how most people are (and I wouldn’t even argue that’s how most people should be. I don’t dig into every damn thing myself because it gets exhausting. Somebody needs to make the donuts and not spend time questioning everything.)
So they need to find some good emergency communications people, because this ain’t cutting it.
I agree that the numbers themselves don’t show a problem, but the problem is no longer about the numbers.
I have no recommendation on this score, because this really isn’t something I have expertise about. I can only tell the “you probably won’t die” is not a good message to convey. “Most people survive!” is not any better.
DO BETTER.
Again, that was 2019.
Basically, there wasn’t anything in particular going on, other than perhaps some bad booze/drugs in a few of the cases. Most of the deaths being specified were just accidental deaths, like car crashes. In a few of the cases, people were reaching back to prior years, for no good reason, to try to claim patterns. There was no pattern.
In a year, this frippery was forgotten.
Estimating Death Rates for NASA Employees (and contractors)
So, let’s get back to this “targeting random NASA JPL employees”. [and some other government employees/contractors]
Because it’s not like these people are that closely tied.
Here’s the problem.
How many NASA JPL employees die each year? And LANL? And the contractors?
This is just cherry-picking some of them. This guy Swecker (howdy, fellow Carolinian!) isn’t in the HR department, checking the group life benefits or anything like that.
I had a little chat with my friend, Gemini, with respect to the population we’re drawing from. (And, by the way, why are we throwing in two guys from Massachusetts? Who cares?)
After talking about doing some estimates, Gemini gave this as part of its analysis:
The source given for the workforce composition: Oct 2023, Aerospace America: Advice for NASA on solving its workforce shortage:
Recruiting and hiring skilled engineering workers has become a mission-critical challenge for NASA, an agency of 18,000 employees. An internal review last year of development of the Psyche asteroid probe, now scheduled for launch this month, attributed the project’s one-year delay and cost increases partly to workforce shortages. The review concluded that the problem existed not only at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where Psyche was built, but also at other of the agency’s 10 field centers.
In recent years, NASA’s average attrition, meaning the percentage of workers who leave the agency, has been around 6% annually, the agency’s acting chief human capital officer told me in a statement. About half of that comes from retirements, meaning the workers who’ve spent their careers there are quickly aging out. NASA is top heavy with older employees too: Nearly 40% of the agency’s science and engineering workers are age 55 and older, according to the April report, “NASA’s Efforts to Increase Diversity in its Workforce,” from the NASA Office of Inspector General.
Now, I did point out that we had a few cases of missing persons and murders (I will get back to one of the murders, which isn’t mysterious):
So we expect there to be a few dozen “external causes of death” among NASA employees/contractors and a few missing persons over three years, according to those statistics.
Here’s the deal (and I didn’t feel like getting into it w/ Gemini) — we all know that missing persons, homicides, etc. are not random, per se.
The person in the lake could be a suicide. The “unexplained” deaths could also be suicides (I don’t know). I bet there were other suicides among NASA employees. They’re not going to tell us the cause of death of everybody — there is privacy.
It’s only in some very public cases that we know details of deaths. Such as murder.
Murder of Nuno Loureiro… and a Couple of Other People Not Mentioned Above
In particular, one of the homicides mentioned in the NYP piece is extremely unmysterious, and the murders of a few other people were involved (not to mention the suicide of the murderer). But the murders of those other people weren’t mentioned… they weren’t tied to NASA, I suppose.
It happened in December 2025, not that long ago… at Brown University. It has its own Wikipedia page: 2025 Brown University shooting
On December 13, 2025, a mass shooting occurred at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, United States, during the second day of final examination week for the fall semester.[7] The shooter, Cláudio Manuel Neves Valente, entered the Barus and Holley Building and killed two students and wounded nine other students[8] who were attending a review session, and then fled the scene before police arrived.[9]
Two days later, on December 15, Nuno Loureiro, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics professor and former classmate of Valente, was fatally shot at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts.[10] During a five-day manhunt by the FBI and local police, officials released images and videos of the perpetrator, whose identity was initially unknown to authorities.[11][12][13][14]
Valente was a Portuguese national with United States permanent resident status and a former graduate student at Brown University. On December 18, he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot inside a storage unit in New Hampshire.[15] He was found with two guns; officials said the suicide weapon was the gun used in the Brown University shooting.[16] Law enforcement agencies alleged him to be responsible for the shooting.[16]
“Alleged”
If you read the whole thing, they put “speculated” and “alleged” throughout, because “it was never adjudicated!”
My guys, the man (Valente) killed himself. It’s never going to be adjudicated. You don’t have to wait around for a court to tell you what’s true, okay?
Anyway, the issue is that Valente and Loureiro were pretty much from the same university in Portugal as undergrads, came to the U.S. for graduate work, and Loureiro did well for himself, but Valente did not.
Most people who drop out of grad school without achieving their academic dreams just move on with their lives. They certainly don’t go on shooting sprees (especially not decades after they got stuck in loserhood.)
Plenty of losers throughout history have killed people. It’s not a grand conspiracy or a mystery.
The NASA connection is that Lunoeiro’s NASA connection showed he was successful, and Valente was not. That’s it.
That was not a random murder, and that wasn’t a mysterious murder. I wouldn’t factor this into any sort of “expectation” at all.
So that leaves us Grillmair’s murder as “random”, as far as we know. And one “random murder” in a workforce of tens of thousands … and it’s actually not three years (which I will get to in a bit, as well).
Missing People: More Likely to Go Missing in Some Places
What about missing people?
Well, how many people “disappear” in the U.S., and where?
Even without looking at the comments or chatting with Gemini, I can think of lots of reasons for these patterns:
ALIENS (not a serious answer)
Highest rates in states with a LOT of empty space, especially desert and tundra (or surrounded by water, in the case of Hawaii) - if someone dies while hiking alone, their body may not be found for a long time
Higher rates in states with a lot of Native Americans (including Hawaii) - may have all sorts of issues (this is mentioned in the small print)
“Missing persons” can be code for “missing dead bodies” or can be “people who ran away from unsatisfactory home life…” or “people with marginal living situation to begin with” … lots of stuff going on, and some of these may be more likely to be reported to the cops than others
Could be Mexican gang activity in some cases, near the border… (or Canadian gang activity, as the case may be)
Alaska has a really high rate and number of missing people. I think we have an idea that these are dead people whose bodies we can’t find. (except in polar bears’ bellies?)
In any case, the NASA JPL and LANL are located out West, and a lot of those people enjoy hiking. Most of the “missing people” cases involving NASA folks may be people who had unfortunate accidents while hiking, and their bodies weren’t found.
We recently had the case of Brian Doherty, who fell while hiking in the Bay Area:
His body was found, but if he had fallen into the Bay and his body never found… it would be a “mysterious disappearance”. As opposed to a tragic accident.
I wouldn’t be surprised that something similar happened in these cases in New Mexico.
Period of Time? Not Well-Defined Ahead of Time
Here’s the issue with conspiracy theorists, though.
When they go for their “pattern”, they cherry-pick whatever they want, which means they’ll extend the time period to whatever fits their desired narrative.
I was talking about three years above… but if they needed two years or five years or whatever, they’d contract or extend it to that.
People have a very bad idea of what randomness looks like, so it’s easy to take a random sequence and then just look for something in it that looks like a pattern.
“Oh, but these two rare things happened close to one another!”
Yes, I know all about coincidences.
If you don’t define what pattern you’re looking for ahead of time, it is extremely easy to find anything that looks like a pattern. It doesn’t mean it’s connected by any sort of cause-and-effect chain at all.
This is how lots of research projects, even ones that are not outright fraudulent, end up on Retraction Watch.
If you don’t preregister your research, you may just p-hack your way into publishing noise instead of a true signal.
When someone recommended I cover this story of mysterious NASA-connected deaths, someone else commented, “Didn’t The X-Files cover this?”, and I used Gemini to find multiple episodes/story arcs that could fit that… various characters getting killed off or mysteriously going missing to hide government secrets. The first season built up to a finale that was centered around just such a plot.
The X-Files was a work of fiction; it was scripted. It may be nice to think that all of these deaths were connected because THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE and foreign governments are trying to steal secrets about extraterrestrial life (or the cloning thereof… [oops, spoiler]).
But you know, people die every day, and it doesn’t require a large conspiracy.
Alas, We Are All Mortal… and in Large Groups of People, a Lot of People We Know Will Die
I am going to switch to both a happier (and sadder) topic.
I went to high school at the North Carolina School of Science and Math (and then to North Carolina State University). The happy bit is that one of our alumni is on Artemis 2: Christina Koch (both NCSSM and NCSU).
There had been more notable alumni from NCSSM than Koch before, but I think she’s currently the most notable.
Via my alumni connections, over the years, I’ve been able to attend events where Christina Koch was the headliner, such as when she spoke to our alumni groups from the International Space Station (which was super-cool).
Okay, that’s the happy bit. Here’s the unhappy bit.
One of our NCSSM alumni has been keeping death records, to the extent he can. (This is not public, sorry.) We’ve had suicides, homicides, accidental deaths, and natural deaths. Lots of cancer deaths. We don’t necessarily have tabs on everybody, so sometimes he finds out years later that somebody died.
The first graduating class was in 1980, so the oldest people from that class will be turning 65 this year.
Yeah, the rates are going to pick up pretty rapidly.
Some years back, knowing I am a life actuary, he asked me if there was a way I could compare his records against standard U.S. mortality, to see if anything odd was going on. At the time, I told him we didn’t have enough experience to make that comparison. Yet. We need to have a minimum number of deaths (and alumni-years) to test this.
In actuarial work, we call this credibility (and yes, this is related to Bayesian Credibility). You can take a look at the Society of Actuaries’ page: Credibility Methods Applied to Life, Health and Pensions — usually, we want a few hundred deaths to look at.
Nine deaths, as above, even with “weird” causes of death/missing people, is not enough to say something weird is going on, especially in a group of 60,000 people. Especially when these causes aren’t that “weird”.
I hope Christina and crew have a safe landing this evening, but if they don’t, it won’t be because of a conspiracy. It will just be another NASA disaster.
I didn’t mention that one of the people on the Challenger when it exploded in 1986 was an NCSSM trustee. If two people associated with my high school died due to NASA disasters (I hope not), it won’t be random… because it’s not random that a statewide science magnet school has links to NASA programs, and that a risky program has disasters.
I have links to all sorts of notable science/math people because of my high school. This is not random.
I wouldn’t build a conspiracy out of any of this.
Weird Stuff Does Happen… But Be Careful When Investigating It
I can give you the cases of the Russians being poisoned with radioactive isotopes by ex-KGB folks, if you want weird causes of death, but cherry-picking a few nasty deaths/missing cases out of hundreds that happen each year among tens of thousands of NASA employees isn’t that surprising.
So yes, sometimes there are conspiracies to kill people (you can read about the Russian example here in one of the victim’s own books: Allegations by Alexander Litvinenko), but maybe that’s not as exciting as fictional stories of ALIENS.
Now, I’m a regular listener to Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World podcast, which you may find of interest:
Youtube playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNbswtWzJYCK9g5gYH26HcUC-0hIDlftF&si=q2M8dorSLUbMFL5k
And those are fun stories, but you will find that many of them don’t have much going on other than the desire to believe something interesting was going on, when it was just someone having a bit of fun.
Jimmy tends to be careful in approaching stories (though he does leave some of these open.)
I liked the recent “mysterious shower of meat” episode, and I learned something really interesting from this one. I hope to never run into this phenomenon myself:
May you be able to avoid showers of meat. (Don’t eat meat that falls from the sky, btw.)