Proponents of some variant of the conspiracy, Radford adds, are working backward. “They’re finding people who are already dead or missing and then trying to find some connection, however tenuous,” Radford says, “to the defense industry, the Pentagon, UFOs, UAP, NASA.” (McCasland’s flimsy link to the UFO community is, among the scientists, the most substantive connection to these subjects.) In a comprehensive rejoinder to the theory, UFO investigator and pseudoscience debunker Mick West pointed out that the US top-secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce includes about 700,000 people. Ordinary mortality rates over the time span of some of the purportedly linked deaths and disappearances would predict, he said, around 4,000 deaths, 70 homicides, and 180 suicides in this community—as of this week, Rogan, Kraus, et al. are working with 11 cases.
“People just kind of go looking for names,” West tells me, “and if you go looking for names, you’re gonna find them.”
What West describes as “death-list fallacies” have a rich history as a kind of conspiracy theory folk tradition. Beginning in the 1960s, the early JFK-assassination conspiracy theorist Penn Jones Jr. kept a list of witnesses whom he claimed had likely been “systematically and skillfully eliminated,” with the number eventually exceeding 100 in his calculation; the so-called Clinton body count theory, which asserted that the former president and first lady arranged for the murders of their political opponents, originated with the militia-movement extremist Linda Thompson, though she acknowledged, per a 1994 U.S. News & World Report story, that she had “no direct evidence” of Bill Clinton killing anyone. In both cases, an ever broadening category of deaths functioned as inexhaustible proof of an expansive government cover-up.
In Radford’s view, the trope runs deeper still: think the Bermuda Triangle, the conspiracy surrounding King Tut’s tomb (newspapers suggested in the 1920s that anyone who disturbed it would be cursed), or even a child’s notion that death comes in threes. “It’s really a psychological thing where people want to see patterns in the world around them for various cognitive reasons,” he says, adding that the missing-scientists conspiracy “is only the latest in a long, long line of what you might call mystery-mongering data mining.”
There is no singular Jones or Thompson in this instance, according to experts who have monitored the evolution of the missing-scientists list, but a few sleuths can lay claim to stoking the flames after McCasland’s disappearance. Australian NewsNation investigative correspondent Ross Coulthart has described the engineer’s disappearance as a “grave national security crisis,” and former State Department analyst Marik von Rennenkampff told the network that “we might have passed that threshold” where the list can no longer be attributed to coincidence. Republican watchdogs in Congress, including representatives Tim Burchett, Eric Burlison, and Anna Paulina Luna, have appeared on the Rogan-adjacent podcasting circuit to air their claims about a government scheme to conceal the truth regarding unidentified aerial phenomena. (“He’s the guy that had a lot of nuclear secrets,” Burchett has said of McCasland. “I’ve been told by several sources that he was the gatekeeper for the UFO stuff.”)