The shooting of a Calgary-born astrophysicist outside his Southern California home in mid-February sent shockwaves through his academic and professional circles.
Carl Grillmair studied at the University of Calgary before earning a master’s degree at the University of Victoria and ultimately completing his doctorate outside Canada. In the 1990s, he joined the California Institute of Technology’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, which collaborates with NASA on numerous research activities.
Grillmair, 67 at the time of his death, collected awards during his time at CalTech. In 2011, he was awarded NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal after studying space with several NASA telescopes.
“His methods on exoplanets and galactic structure studies were true detective work and allowed him to infer events that occurred many billions of years ago.” said CalTech astronomer Sergio Fajardoa-AcostaHe called Grillmair “irreplaceable.”
Two days after Grillmair was killed on February 16, a 29-year-old who lived two miles away in Llano, California, was charged with his murder. Freddy Snyder is scheduled to go on trial next week.
While all defendants are presumed innocent and a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office admitted that it does not appear that the victim and the alleged killer knew each other personally, police appear content to have their man.
Still, Grillmair’s name has surfaced for weeks as part of a series of deaths and disappearances of scientists working for the U.S. government or in related academic fields that have been identified as suspicious by online detectives.
This week, officials in Donald Trump’s administration and his Republican Party confirmed they were opening an investigation.
“Fails the smell test”
Republicans James Comer and Eric Burlison of the House Oversight Committee said the panel would investigate the disappearances and deaths since 2023 of “at least 10 individuals” with a connection to U.S. nuclear secrets or missile technology, and that these cases “could pose a serious threat to U.S. national security and to U.S. personnel with access to scientific secrets.”
This adds even more confusion to the matter, Comer of Kentucky Posted hours later that the deaths of “at least 11 of America’s top scientists” in these areas “are suspicious and fail the smell test.”
Meanwhile, the FBI – which has limited its prosecution of both cases since 2025 domestic extremism monitoring and Prosecution of foreign attempts to interfere with elections – told the right-wing news outlet Daily Caller this week that it is “leading efforts to search for links to the missing and deceased scientists.”
Burlison told NewsNation he wouldn’t be surprised “if our adversaries, China, Russia, Iran or any other adversary, saw an opportunity to take out some of our country’s best scientists.”
The probes were applauded from some true crime podcastersbut there are those who disagree with Burlison’s way of thinking.
Daniel Engber, an author known for debunking junk science studies, was devastating in the AtlanticHe considered it “another piece of blatant nonsense that has reached the highest levels of US politics and media.”
“It would be far too kind to call it a conspiracy theory, because no comprehensive theory has been put forward to explain the sequence of events,” he said.
Pattern “not real”
Mick West, 2018 author Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and RespectHe, too, is unimpressed by the supposed connections.
“The deaths are real. The families’ grief is real. The pattern is not,” he wrote on his Substack page.
West describes what happened as a “kill list error.” The most famous event of modern times probably dates back to the time when some authors in the 1960s made lists and cast a suspicious eye on the deaths of many people who were closely or only peripherally associated with President John F. Kennedy, his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and Oswald’s murderer, nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
West argues, based on a sample size estimated at approximately 700,000 top secret clearance individuals in the aerospace and nuclear agency working population, that the normal average mortality rate for such a population over a 22-month period is approximately 4,000 deaths, 70 homicides and 180 suicides.
James Walkinshaw of Virginia, one of the few Democrats to comment on the list of names, suggested to CNN on Tuesday that the connections could be dubious beyond statistical probabilities.
“The United States has thousands of nuclear scientists and nuclear experts,” Walkinshaw told CNN this week. “It is not the type of nuclear program that a foreign adversary could potentially significantly impact by targeting 10 people.”
The latest disappearance involves retired Maj. Gen. Neil McCasland, 68 years old. McCasland, who once headed the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Base in Ohio, has not been seen in his hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, since February 27 and his revolver is reportedly missing.
“He was on our talking list and he disappeared, so that piqued our interest,” Burlison recently told News Nation, presumably referring to the topic of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UFOs, that exist revived the committee for two years.
The local sheriff’s office, which is responsible for investigating his disappearance, has publicly stated that there is no evidence yet linking it to his secret work. Susan McCasland Wilkerson has alluded to unspecified health issues her husband has struggled with and is also dubious.
How it happens1:17:13The murder of an MIT professor and the mass shooting of Brown
“He retired from the (Air Force) almost 13 years ago and has received very frequent clearances since then,” she said in a Facebook post. “It seems quite unlikely that he was tricked into getting very outdated secrets out of him.”
McCasland Wilkerson also suggested that her husband’s unpaid consulting work for a UFO research organization led by Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge was so inconsequential that it did not warrant idle speculation.
It is not clear why adversaries resort to killings or enforced disappearances at a time of increasing cyber capabilities. And other individual cases may not stand up to scrutiny because they were the work of nefarious agents working for secret or political purposes.
As Engber points out, Melissa Casias was a 53-year-old administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, not a scientist. Casias’ husband worked in a senior position at the same lab – which could complicate any murder or kidnapping theory that links her demise to her work. Your daughter NBC said Dateline Her mother was struggling with “huge stress” before her disappearance in 2025.
The official cause of death of Jason Thomas, a 48-year-old Novartis “pharmaceutical researcher” described in the Comey-Burlison letter, is not known. Thomas’ body was found at a lake in Massachusetts, and it is known that his parents had died in quick succession shortly before his disappearance.
Monica Reza, who worked as a materials processing manager for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, was reportedly about 30 feet (9 meters) away from a hiking companion on the Waterman Trail in the Angeles National Forest last year when she was last seen. Deaths from hiking accidents are not uncommon, even near the trail where a woman ruled is said to have died of hypothermia four years earlier.
The “MIT scientist working on nuclear fusion” mentioned in the Comey-Burlison letter apparently refers to Nuno Loureiro, who was shot in December. But his alleged killer, Claudio Neves Valente, was an acquaintance from his native Portugal, and Valente also carried out a deadly mass shooting at Brown University before killing himself.
After Grillmair’s death, residents told the Los Angeles Times of Snyder’s erratic behavior, perhaps not the behavior of a secret assassin. Grillmair reportedly called police in late 2025 to report an incident of suspected trespassing by Snyder, perhaps providing a more prosaic motive for the deadly violence that followed weeks later.
Front burner30:48Kash Patel, who was controversial at the FBI
