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.
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.
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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. …
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.
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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.
