The disappearances or deaths of at least 10 people linked to most attention-grabbing investigations in the United States are generating scrutiny from amateur cyber web detectives and, now, federal investigators. But for grieving relatives, all the speculation is “disgusting.”
Carl Grillmair would have laughed at conspiracy theories surrounding his murder, his widow says.
“It seems absolute nonsense to me,” says Louise Grillmair. “I mean, there are the facts, and they are public.”
Her 67-year-old husband was gunned down in their home in Llano, California, last February.
Grillmair’s alleged killer — a 29-year-old local resident named Freddy Snyder — was charged with murder and burglary, and is due in court next week for arraignment.
Despite the arrest, Grillmair’s figure occupies a prominent place in conspiracy theories that revolve around the deaths or disappearances of nearly 10 people with links to top-secret laboratories or scientific work.
They are often lumped together under the label “missing scientists”; However, the list includes an administrative assistant, an Air Force overall, an engineer and a janitor, and covers diverse fields, from exoplanet research to the pharmaceutical industry.
Amateur cyber web sleuths have suggested the cases could be linked, even prompting the US House Oversight Committee and the FBI to announce investigations, despite other established explanations and attempts by relatives to quell the hysteria.
Misguided revenge
Grillmair’s wife believes her husband was the target of a misguided revenge plot.
Months before the murder, a man had “entered into [su propiedad] with a rifle,” alleging that he was hunting coyotes. She says that her husband had told the suspect to go to a nearby mountain.
The man had also been causing disturbances at other homes in the area, she adds, and one of the residents called 911.
Grillmair was not the one who made the call, but his wife believes the man had blamed her husband for it, because his behavior had been “escalating.”
The man returned with a baseball bat two weeks before Grillmair was killed, but left without causing any further trouble that day, she said.
He later returned on February 16 and allegedly fatally shot Grillmair, a renowned astronomer who worked at IPAC, the data and science center for astronomy and planetary sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
“We believe that [él] “He came looking for revenge, thinking that Carl had been the one who called 911,” says Louise.
She pictures her late husband as “probably the kindest man who ever walked the face of the Earth.”
Skeptics have poured cold water on the wild theories surrounding these deaths.
“U.S. aerospace and nuclear workforce authorized by top secret It amounts to about 700,000 people,” Mick West, science writer, researcher and pseudoscience debunker, wrote on his Substack blog on April 16.
“Ordinary mortality over a 22-month period predicts about 4,000 deaths, about 70 homicides and about 180 suicides. The list in question contains 10 cases… The deaths are real. The families’ pain is valid. The pattern is not.”
Louise Grillmair, for her part, comments that — while her husband “would have laughed” at speculation that the deaths could be connected — he would also “probably have turned to statistics” to debunk such conspiracy theories.
Alleged secrets
The wife of retired Air Force General William Neil McCasland—the highest-ranking and highest-profile of the missing—took to Facebook the week after he disappeared on Feb. 27 at his home in New Mexico to “clear up some of the misinformation out there.”
Even in her 911 call — made three hours after returning home from a doctor’s appointment and discovering her husband was gone — Susan McCasland Wilkerson commented that she had “some indication that he must have planned not to be found.”
He explained to the operator that he had turned off his phone and left it behind, but had taken his gun, even though he “generally doesn’t” carry one.
She also noted that her husband had recently been suffering from anxiety, short-term memory loss, and lack of sleep; Furthermore, he had been “saying that if his brain and body continued to deteriorate, he didn’t want to live that way.”
A week later, he wrote on Facebook that while McCasland had access during his Air Force career to “certain highly classified programs and information,” he had retired “almost 13 years ago and has only had very common security clearances since then. It is quite impossible that he could have been taken away to extract very obsolete secrets.”
He also acknowledged that McCasland had acted as a consultant ad honorem for the organization To The Stars—founded by Tom DeLonge, leader of the band Blink-182—in its efforts to investigate UFOs and other related matters.
However, her husband “possessed no special knowledge about the bodies of extraterrestrial beings or the remains of the Roswell incident stored at horrible Wright-Patt,” Susan wrote.
He was referring to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Defective in Ohio, which — according to UFO legends — could be the final resting place of extraterrestrial remains from strange debris found by a rancher in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.
Dryly addressing conspiracy theories, Susan wrote: “At this point, and with absolutely no sign of him, perhaps the best hypothesis is that the aliens teleported him to their mothership.”
“However, no sightings of a mothership flying over the Sandia Mountains have been reported.”
Different cases
Eight months before McCasland disappeared—also in New Mexico, but 140 miles away in Taos—an administrative assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory disappeared.
Melissa Casias’ family also spoke out about the case on Facebook, once again indicating that their loved one had left deliberately. His comments did little to appease the theorists’ obsession with his case.
“It has been the hardest six weeks of our lives without you,” her husband, Label Casias, wrote on Facebook in August 2025.
“Sierra and I are starting to worry more and more about you every day; we think you’re fine, but we can’t understand why you haven’t contacted us.”
Other cases, like Grillmair’s, had clear and unequivocal explanations.
MIT physicist Nuno Loureiro was murdered by a former classmate who was also arrested for other homicides at Brown University; The suspect confessed to the crimes in video recordings that authorities later discovered.
Another researcher disappeared from his home the month after losing both parents just hours apart; His father suffered a fatal heart attack in his arms, just after his mother’s death.
His body was later found in a lake, and his wife told the American media how devastated her husband – an only child – had felt after the death of his parents.
Another scientist died at age 59 from “atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease,” according to a 2023 forensic report.
Louise Grillmair states that these explanations did not seem to deter conspiracy theorists; in fact, “many of them have contacted” her to ask her opinion.
“I said, ‘Well, I can offer you something better than just an opinion,’” he says. “I have the facts.”
These speculations, he adds, are “denigrating to the memory of the deceased.”
Other loved ones contacted by the BBC described such speculation as “terrible” and “disgusting”, noting that it aggravates the pain of families; However, they chose not to make public statements, as they did not want to spread these stories further.
In the case of Louise Grillmair—who met her husband in an astrophysics class—she would prefer that the world know not only of his innovative scientific work, but also of his kind and generous character.
“He helped everyone who needed it,” he says. “For example, he suffered two fairly serious car accidents… and he did not believe in judicial means. That is to say, the other drivers were to blame, but he simply refused to sue them.”
His obituary remembered Grillmair as “an enthusiastic pilot who flew small planes and gliders of his own, which he kept in his own home; he gladly accepted the invitations of those who wished to fly with him.”
“His friends and colleagues remember that he loved the outdoors, driving tractors and doing repairs and construction work at his home, where he also had a small observatory with several telescopes.”
His wife adds that he “had a very high ethical code… and lived by his principles.”
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