On April 20, the House Oversight Committee announced that it was planning an investigation of its own. “If the reports are accurate, these deaths and disappearances may represent a grave threat to U.S. national security and to U.S. personnel with access to scientific secrets,” Republican lawmakers James Comer of Kentucky and Eric Burlison of Missouri wrote in a statement.
Behind all the high-level talk about getting to the bottom of a mystery, though, was a different puzzle: where did this story about a purported pattern of dead or missing scientists come from?
… [T]he White House’s responses were the culmination of a four-month journey from the fringes of the internet to the center of the federal government — a journey that demonstrated how alternative media platforms and social media can swiftly and deeply penetrate contemporary politics.
In January, Daniel Liszt, who runs the website Dark Journalist and writes about extraterrestrial life and deep-state conspiracies, recorded a three-hour YouTube stream in which he discussed the death of Nuno Filipe Gomes Loureiro, the MIT physicist who was killed by Claudio Manuel Neves Valente in December ….
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On February 20, writer and influencer Jessica Reed Kraus wrote a post on her Substack publication, House Inhabit, discussing both Loureiro and Carl Grillmair, who was killed on his porch in a rural area north of Los Angeles in 2026, eight weeks after Loureiro’s killing.
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On March 11, Kraus followed up her earlier Substack item with a post about Grillmair and Loureiro on her Instagram account. The post went viral.
Anna Merlan, a senior reporter at Mother Jones and the author of “Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power,” said that this is how niche theories spread in the current political environment. “A claim like this will go from a far-right forum or social media account and then to a news outlet that is willing to promote conspiracy theories before going to a bigger outlet like Fox News where the president will see it on TV,” she said.
The distance between those links is smaller, Merlan said, because so many figures in the Trump administration, like Pete Hegseth and former deputy director of the FBI Dan Bongino, are themselves media figures.
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