The missing scientists at the centre of a UFO conspiracy

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, the mysterious case of the missing scientists.

0:31businesses have skipped the line with stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply.

0:58So William Neill McCasteland is a 68-year-old retired Major General. He worked at the Wright-Patterson Air Base, or had in the past. Now that was connected to the so-called UFO Roswell incident in 1947. Phil Tinline is a writer and broadcaster, and he's been following the stories of American scientists making news headlines. And on 27th February this year, 2026, he went out one day. He said goodbye to his wife and he just left the house. My name is Susan Wilkerson. My husband is missing. And it's been about three hours. He left the house without his phone, without his prescription glasses, without any wearable devices.

1:47He may have also had with him his.38-caliber revolver and has not been seen since. William McCaslin retired from his job as an astronomical engineer at a government lab over a decade ago. But his name recently appeared on a list. A list with 10 others who appear to have gone missing or have died in the last few years. Because to some, these cases don't seem random. They're understood as some sort of cover-up.

2:25He disappeared six days right after Trump announced he was releasing the UFO files. And he's not the only one. If nothing else, there could be a foreign actor involved in a circumstance like this, but it just doesn't add up to me that... They go missing or are found dead. 11 that we know of. What did these scientists know? Is there a threat to national security? Questions that even President Trump is asking. What do you think is happening here? And do you think that this is connected or totally random? Well, I hope it's random. Hopefully, I don't know, coincidence, whatever you want to call it.

3:07But some of them were very important people. And we're going to look at it over the next day. Could it be true? Or are people falling for an American conspiracy theory that can be traced back to a 50-year-old British broadcast? Makes no sense. I mean, how can people just vanish off the face of the earth in this day and age? Answer our questions! No, man, it is me! Where did they go? And why? And indeed, how? What, if anything, was the common factor?

3:46From The Guardian, I'm Nashi Nekbal. Today in Focus, the mystery that went mainstream and launched an FBI investigation.

4:00Phil Tenline, welcome to Today in Focus. How's it having me? Now, you're an author and documentary maker specialising in conspiracy theories, and you've looked into these claims that scientists have been disappearing under suspicious circumstances. Can you outline first of all what it is that people have widely believed has happened to them? Well, so what seems to be forming in people's heads is this very dramatic story, not entirely coherent, but very dramatic story where people are involved with some sort of secret UFO work. Now, quite what that means is left, you know, enticingly vague and maybe involved with the nuclear program.

4:42So if anybody who is in that sort of situation goes missing, you immediately have what appears to be a story. And so what seems to have formed in people's heads is the idea that these scientists are going missing essentially because they know too much. Either they want out and they're being killed or they're being kidnapped in order to get the information from them. Yeah, there's scientists that have gotten whacked and or missing and a couple of generals as well. That's all connected somehow or another to UFO technology and anti-gravity technology and nuclear scientists. Think how little we know.

5:17Like the amount of like, yeah. Like you and I? Just human, just like Americans. What do we know about what happened to William Neal McCasland and what did his wife say to the emergency services? you know he was clearly it would seem in distress he had apparently been unusually clingy and down that morning she said and said he didn't want to go on like this he'd been withdrawing from some of the work he'd been doing he was a retiree but people obviously fade gradually from their work sometimes uh because he was suffering from what they call brain fog and so you know uh i don't want to speculate about what happened to him but it would certainly seem perfectly possible that there is an explanation drawn from that evidence which has nothing to do with UFOs.

6:01Can you talk to me about some of the other cases on the missing the scientists list that people have speculated about? There's an astrophysicist called Carl Grillmeier who's shot dead outside his house. The Caltech campus is in mourning tonight after a renowned astrophysicist was killed during a carjacking. Carl Grillmeier was described as a brilliant man, And a man who helped us... There's a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist called Nuno Lurero, who's killed by former classmates. 47-year-old Nuno Lurero was a nuclear scientist and engineering professor. He was shot several times in the foyer of his Brookline home.

6:39Let's get out to WB... And there's a chemical biologist at Novartis, the drug manufacturer called Jason Thomas, who disappeared in December and whose remains were found in Massachusetts in March. It appears the body of a Wakefield man missing since December has been found in a lake, Lake Quantapowit. The medical examiner will determine an official identity and the cause of death, but no foul play is suspected right now. Now, all of these, again, are stories that open up questions, but that doesn't mean to say you should just steam in and answer them with UFOs. Well, quite, because some people have made a connection to UFO research as to why these people have gone missing.

7:20Others think it's another suspicious government plot. And on the face of it, there are individual elements to some of these cases on the list that are strange. I mean, this is not something that's happened sort of in a quick sequence. And one of the things you often notice about quote-unquote conspiracy theories that are constructed out of lots of what I would say are actually disparate incidents is that in order to make the construction as rich as you need it to be, to have sort of diagrams with scientists' faces in circles with lines between them. The red string. Right, right. That actually, you know, you need to cast your net pretty wide in order to have, you know, a sufficient number of people to talk about.

8:03So there's a woman called Monica Reza who's working in similar territory, working on what some of the journalism has described as space age or futuristic metals. And so she's on a hike with a friend and goes missing. To developing news tonight, the search is on for a 60-year-old woman missing in the Angeles National Forest. Monica Reza was last seen near Mount Waterman yesterday at about 9 a.m. She had been working with McCaslin, but that finished, you know, over a decade ago. Well, why is this happening now, therefore, right? There are more and more mysteries confounding not only the disappearance of General Neil McCasland, but the mystery of this scientist and potentially others as well.

8:48The other intriguing twist in this... So, you know, the sense that these people are connected is very easy to establish. But actually, you know, the job of an investigative journalist is not to make connections. We can all do that. The job is to check whether those connections mean anything. Phil, what is it about these stories that has sparked such feverish speculation? Well, I think what sparked speculation is just this idea that these people know something that we don't, that a secret is being kept from us. And that's something that has been playing through American culture ever since the end of the Second World War.

9:20That's at the root of it. It's the moment in 1940. What we're not being told. Yeah, the moment in 1940, because the whole point about America, right, is America is a rebellion against the Death Star, the Death Star being ours, right? But it wakes up in 1945 as the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. And it has the most powerful weapon the world has ever seen. And it creates the National Security Agency and the Pentagon and the CIA, none of which it had had before. And so this kind of high wall goes up around the American security state. And there's this sense for many people in America that the country is becoming something that it wasn't meant to be, that it's becoming this very secretive, centralized power sort of machine.

9:57And that just generates all of this stuff, really. That's when the UFO stuff starts kicking off.

10:10Phil, you've obviously looked at this as a culture, as a phenomenon for quite some time. And if you were to draw your own red string theory as to where it kind of emerges, what do you look at? Well, it's very curious because one of the media outlets that's done most to popularise this story recently is a British one, even though this is entirely an American subject. Right. It's the Daily Mail. Actually, if you look back, you can see another British source which is pointing towards this story as well. If you go back nearly half a century to 1977, there's this very curious documentary called Science Report, which investigates something called Alternative 3.

10:56at that point too scientists are going missing and so this science program made by Anglia TV in East Anglia sets out to investigate what's going on it seems to be at first something to do with what used to be called then the brain drain people going to work in America because you get paid better and Britain was falling apart supposedly in the 70s but then they discover something much more sinister Those people you've just seen have all lost someone close to them A relative, a colleague, a friend Lost in mysterious circumstances, sudden and... It opened with Tim Brinton, who was of course known as a newscaster This is David Ambrose He was behind this special broadcast of Science Report in 1977 He's 83 years old and still working today Looking very gravely into camera, saying we bring you this special edition of Science Report tonight.

11:56We were looking for patterns. Who were the people leaving this country? What were their reasons? And what were their feelings about it afterwards? Because four stories we've been working on separately have suddenly come together in an extraordinary way that suggests this big conspiracy that we are now going to investigate. The first story was basically the brain drain. Like many others in her position, Anne Clark is contemplating joining the brain drain and leaving the country. Well, it's entirely a question of facilities. I mean, look, look at the mess I'm supposed to work out of. Look at this building.

12:33Where were certain very important, significant, capable scientists disappearing to? They weren't just disappearing in a sinister way. They were apparently taking jobs and going off somewhere, but nobody could then trace them. We had a couple on whose son had gone on some experimental project in Australia, but they found out after about a year that he wasn't where he was supposed to be at all, and the letters were faked. Then there was this friend of hers that was going out there, and we said, why don't you look up over Ryan and give him a surprise? He got there, the address we'd given him, I never heard of Brian.

13:16All these stories that kept coming together built up into, well, what looked like a sort of, well, conspiracy, frankly. Why were all these people disappearing? And what was really going on? All I'm prepared to say is there were three alternatives for discussion. The first two were crazy. Forget about them. The third alternative, maybe not so crazy. Can you tell me what it was? And we put the whole thing, the whole thing was a succession of talking heads who didn't quite have all the answers, then a newspaper report which had been suppressed, which added something more, and little by little, this picture came together of what was really going on.

14:02And so where were the scientists going? They were going to Mars. International cooperation in space. A space shuttle, but shuttling what to where? First of all, to the moon, where this gigantic rocket was being built. Of course, you could get off from the moon, a much bigger ship with much less power than you could from Earth. So the whole of the NASA project and what seemed to be the competing Russian space projects were actually just ferrying the necessary materials from Earth to build this gigantic rocket on the dark side of the moon, invisible from Earth. That since the 50s, America and Russia had been working together to build, essentially, a Noah's Ark to get as many people off of the Earth as was possible before the cataclysm, which everyone knew, well, everyone at the highest levels of government knew, was inevitable, but of course had to be kept from the public because there would be absolutely terrible panic and riots if it were ever to get out.

15:16We believe that that operation is Dr Karl Gerstein's Alternative 3. It has been our task, however, to present the facts as we understand them and to await the response. Good night.

15:42And the aftermath of that programme airing must have been quite a sensation. How did people respond? With alarm. When the programme came to an end, within seconds, all television companies' switchboards were jammed with anxious viewers saying, is this true, is this true? Newspapers, newspaper switchboards were jammed. Even police stations were getting calls. And there was nothing on any other talk show for about 10 days. Did you have people approaching you, you know, just wanting to know more about these missing scientists? Well, one day, a young man arrived at my door in Hampstead on his bike.

16:27And he'd come from California. and he said he'd trekked all across to London to find me because he was convinced that I was telling an essential truth, I was getting an essential truth out to the world. Came in and sat down with my wife and me and we chatted and he was deeply crestfallen when after about 45 minutes I persuaded him that the whole thing was a made-up piece of fiction. A piece of fiction. Yes, that's right. David Ambrose, a novelist and screenwriter, made the whole thing up and pulled off one of the greatest hoaxes in British television history. Well, it was desperation in the first place.

17:16I was under contract to write three plays for Anglia Television. I delivered two and was completely stuck for the third. I was scratching around for an idea, and I began to wonder about disappearing people. How many people totally disappear in this country every year, and where do they go? And then the idea hit me. Do it as a documentary. Even more than a documentary, a sort of emergency broadcast almost, a special edition of a programme. And David, how did you respond to the viewers and to the coverage the programme was getting? Well, absolutely wickedly. Wow. Imagine. This is fun. I mean, thank God it did no harm to anybody, but simply on an artistic level, if you like, it was a triumph.

18:16And so straight from the Orson Welles playbook, where he duped America with his War of the Worlds broadcast, you created Alternative 3. Well, I didn't in any way steal it from him. In fact, I worked with Orson in 1968. And it was in 76 that I came up with this idea and wrote it. And it didn't even cross my mind that I was doing something similar to Orson's famous radio broadcast.

18:51Ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to continue the broadcast from Grover's Mill. Evidently, there's some... So if there was an unconscious sort of nudge, possibly, but I wasn't certainly conscious of it. We became actually very good friends, and in fact, he gave me a wonderful series of one-on-one lessons about screenwriting, which was completely fantastic. We got on very well. And I asked him one time, I said, you know, when you did that radio program in 1938 and you panicked America, I'd seen film of him being interviewed afterwards, looking very solemn and regretful and apologetic.

19:32I had no idea it was going to have this kind of, you know. And I said, did you mean that? He said, nah, of course I didn't. I knew what it was going to do. That's why I was doing it. We did the Martian broadcast. we were fed up with a way in which everything that came over this new magic box, the radio, was being swallowed. We wanted people to understand that they shouldn't swallow everything that came through the tap. If you're writing or broadcasting or anything or making money, you like to have an impact.

20:12Phil, this alternative three theory, which is a televisual hoax from the 1970s, it took on a life of its own after it aired. What has that 50-year journey looked like? It's been broadcast in multiple countries, in Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Canada, but not in the United States. the way it finds its way to the United States is that because it's a big sort of splash somebody says let's do a tie-in book the job falls to a journalist called Leslie Watkins he writes the book and he's then able to refer to the TV show and so once you start to have that kind of pattern that more complex pattern of a book talking about a TV show you haven't seen that starts to add sort of you know ersatz credibility to it obviously a book can have more detail there's a suggestion that The reason it was announced to be a hoax was kind of a cover story and all that sort of stuff, right?

21:04So he plays it quite a bit in the book. Yeah, yeah. And the book then is published in the States and takes off there. And, you know, in this period, there's this particular figure called Milton William Cooper, who grew up on military bases, his dad working there, then in Vietnam, pretty troubled guy, you know, alcoholism, domestic violence, you know, some mental health issues. but who becomes one of the great gurus of UFO theory. I can assure you that Alternative 3 is real. The headquarters of the international conspiracy is in Geneva, Switzerland. The ruling body is made up of representatives of the governments involved as well as the executive members.

21:43And so he starts to get very involved in it. He puts together a kind of compilation of these things called Behold a Pale Horse. And Alternative 3, bits from the book, I think are in there, if I recall correctly. and there's another similar character called Jim Keith who is an enthusiast for this sort of thing and he publishes a book called Casebook on Alternative 3 with a chapter called Missing Scientists So are these like alternative like publishers who are putting these books out or is it just like Yeah I mean so Behold the Pale Horse is supposedly the most shoplifted book in America Get out It's a great conspiracy theory on its own Right It influences the X-Files Yeah It influences very influential or is visibly influential with a lot of 90s rappers and Nass refers to William Cooper at one point I think.

22:34And then it just sort of mulches down into the culture really so that it's just there as a sort of set of memes people may or may not be consciously referring to them but you see this with a lot of other conspiracy theories it's just the idea of missing scientists just have a kind of resonant kind of history. And so not to go further down the rabbit hole How do you draw the link between the original 1970s Alternative 3 mockumentary and this contemporary conspiracy theory about the missing American scientists? When I sort of saw that this missing scientist thing was taking off, it made me think of Alternative 3 and its sort of history.

23:10And so I started having a look and lo and behold, of course, there are people saying, ah, this reminds me of Alternative 3. Not in the sense of a mockumentary which has taken us around this kind of chase before, But, you know, this is perhaps further evidence of the theory. It didn't take long looking around online to find people saying that. Sandy Corcoran says, does DJ think some of these scientists could still be alive and were they moved off planet? Matthew Jones says it's a modern day Alternative 3. You know, things like Alternative 3, how the government would take these scientists and reassign them in kind of a witness protection type.

23:42But what I think this points to as well is the way that, you know, it's not like Alternative 3 is the sole cause of this. had that screenplay never been written, no one would be saying this today. Because that's just not how things work. And actually what that does, if you go down that route, is to kind of construct a counter-conspiracy theory where you trace the one secret source of the whole thing. I mean, the whole point about life as against movies, as against conspiracy theories, is it's complicated.

24:12Coming up, Trump orders the FBI to investigate the missing scientists.

24:31Still waiting in line? Again? That's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply. Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you.

25:15Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com.