A lot of people are saying it’s disconnected, but even if it was, if a string of your country’s top rocket experts started disappearing, you wouldn’t just sit idly by
What's sad is, 5-10 years ago, no adversary would think simply off-ing American scientists was effective strategy, America was a new scientist generation machine.
Now thanks to Research funding falling off a cliff and massive immigration restrictions, this is no longer true.
Amy Eskridge - who publicly stated she was not suicidal before "committing suicide" reported to her friends that she received burns to her arms and hands through her window in an attack that sounded similar to this microwave/havana syndrome stuff. She was very vocal about the fact that she was being harassed over her work before she died.
Lets say an American scientist in a strategic area was offered a boatload of money (or some other piece of mice) from China or similar. Legally probably he can move, though export control probably applies to the brain content too. How sure the said scientist would be that he isn't going to have a car accident? Gerald Bull would have a word on it. So, "disappear" may start to look like an attractive alternative. A related example - Russia has put a bunch of top hypersonic missile related scientists into prison for supposedly working with China (and may be they worked, though official charges have so far been obviously fabricated - like for publishing in a journal of an research article on a non-secret project with that article making all the typical rounds for months through peer-review, etc) as well as making a law giving FSB full control over any scientific interaction between domestic and foreign scientists and institutions.
I suppose the top AI talent may become subjects of a similar game.
It doesn't have to be China or Russia. As others have mentioned, the current political climate in the US is... "weird". At least, as an outsider, I just don't know how else to describe it. It's like watching/listening to gibberish.
So I can imagine American allies recruiting scientists en-mass, to protect themselves from America. The US has currently demonstrated a desire to take over allies completely (Canada, Greenland), and I'm sure few know who may be next. Some scientists may have simply wished to move abroad, and also, have quite valuable skills which are restricted in some way, hence them "disappearing".
Or the scientists and engineers themselves are wanting out of the US and were offered secret offers to "dissapear" and live elsewhere under a new identity
not necessarily from America. The goal #1 of the US dominated NATO for example was to prevent Germany from getting nuclear weapons in exchange for protection by US. Now with US de-facto withdrawing, Germany would have to quickly get nukes (as well as missiles to carry them) - i don't see other option for Germany here giving the environment in Europe and MidEast. So they would also need such scientists. South Korea, Japan, Australia seem to be in the similar situation too. (and everybody understands that a nuclear weapons program can't be a long multi-year endeavor - somebody will try to stop you - and so it must be very fast once started, and thus you have to have ready-to-use skills and knowledge)
Show me somewhere that says research funding has decreased? Not an article that says "we projected to increase funding by 100m but it was slashed to 50m". That's not decreasing funding, its slowing the growth. The only difference is that 50y ago US govt funded 80% of research and now funds 20%, but that's because you have private companies funding so much of it.
it does not pass the smell test, because what's the purpose of communicating about this FBI ongoing investigation ? at best it won't harm the investigation. it's probably propaganda
> McCasland, 68, disappeared from his Albuquerque home on Feb. 27 of this year, leaving on foot with only a .38 caliber revolver. [...] Government contractor Steven Garcia, [...] disappeared from Albuquerque in August 2025, last seen on surveillance footage leaving on foot with a handgun.
Not american, so I can't judge if this is a common thing or irregular, but both were last seen carrying firearms as if they'd be thinking someone is after them.
It is probably more uncommon that they leave by foot in New Mexico - I mean where are some 60-year old going to go by foot and shot themselves without their bodies being found.
I don't have the link but someone estimated the number of scientists working in the defense field (it's a lot) and the number of deaths per year you'd expect (over 100). There's probably nothing here. It probably doesn't hurt to have the FBI take a second look at any death of somebody who has a security clearance or is working on export-controlled tech, but OTOH that might be a lot of work.
Deaths and mysterious deaths are not at all the same. Mysterious deaths and vanishings become increasingly rare the higher up the socio-economic curve you climb.
It is not surprising that the FBI did not detect an actual pattern before now, considering the various ways that the entirety of it spent the entirety of 2025.
Dying while experiencing nature is "mysterious" but also not uncommon among upper-middle class people. I would bet that the average victim of a backpacking or cross-country skiing mishap is wealthier than average.
>Mysterious deaths and vanishings become increasingly rare the higher up the socio-economic curve you climb.
Is it? Or is there just more scrutiny when more important people die?
When someone who ain't worth shit OD's nobody takes allegations that they were murdered seriously. When someone who's worth a lot of money ODs, the "they only bought fine cocaine, their dealer never would have cut that shit" allegations get looked into because "more equal animals" is more of a scale than a binary when it comes to this particular issue.
So are you saying that each of these "experts" is not an actual top of field expert but merely one of hundreds of expert cogs (per field!) in a giant machine so vast that of course some of them will crashout, be kidnapped, blackmailed, die outright, agree to a global government psyop, etc? But that's so much less fun, especially when you consider the espionage angle.
This appears to be for investigating how many scientist have left the US sponsored by state powers. But this also seems like bad communication on the FBI and perhaps poor publishing.
I think there is some confusion that there are more people going missing and dying in the sector while not outlining that there are more people going missing AND dying.
Or I'm just completely wrong, the only reason why I am making such assumptions because there is more information about this in the ASML case where a whisleblower leaked that china has poached ASML engineers and have given them new identities to work in chip manufacturing sector in china.
11 people over 4 years doesn't seem like that much. Its not clear to me how big a population that is out of but if its government scientists i assume there are tens of thousands of those if not hundreds of thousands.
Still, FBI should be investigating every suspicious death of people with high level clearence.
Yeah. Even without that it feels like one of those things where people see something that looks fishy, but given the large number of potential people involved, it's not actually weird at all.
But Comer... oof, it's hard to take seriously anything he focuses on.
Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), the chair of the Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs, sent letters to FBI Director Kash Patel, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, requesting staff-level briefings no later than April 27.
Of those who are missing and not dead, I wonder if they are largely not US citizens, or citizens who have strong/stronger ties outside the US. It would not surprise me if people like that have decided to take their talents elsewhere, given the current state of anti-intellectualism in the US.
I'm sure there's something behind deaths and disappearences of key rocket, defense, and nuclear scientists in Iran. Has been going on for a while.
For the US, my money is on "more evidence is needed". I could imagine the more "diverse" among the scientists deciding it's time for a career/employer change over the past year or so, though.
There's good news and bad news. Unfortunately they're the same news. Given the rapid dissolution of any sort of publicly verifiable 'news' outlet, and the abject commercialization of media, plus the doublespeak of politicians and businesses, the PR industry, self-censorship in response to cancel-culture and other divisive popular behavioral trends, and the replication crisis in science - it's not just you. It's everyone.
>Given the rapid dissolution of any sort of publicly verifiable 'news' outlet
When was the news ever publicly verifiable? If Walter Kronkiue said that the North Vietnamese shot at our naval vessels you had no way of even accessing alternative viewpoints, you just had to trust him.
Today with all the contrarians and competing alternate sources it's arguably better because if there's some smoking gun that something is BS it almost certainly will get talked about.
And how would you be able to publicly verify the competing alternate sources and the smoking gun? It's no different than the situation with old media, except there's more noise and disinformation. Unless you personally are physically there with whatever necessary field expertise exists to run experiments or interrogate witnesses, you just have to trust either way.
The frequency of fireballs in our planet’s skies seemed to grow in recent months. NASA and other meteor experts can’t agree on what explains it.
...
In response to growing public interest, a NASA public affairs official said in a blog post at the end of March, “While it may seem like meteor reports and sightings have been more frequent recently, it is not out of the ordinary.” The post explained that from February to April, there is often a 10 to 30 percent increase in the number of extremely luminous meteors — and nobody is quite sure why.
Mr. Hankey said that this 10 to 30 percent increase was already baked into the American Meteor Society tally, and that it doesn’t explain the apparent doubling of fireball sightings in the year’s first quarter.
Can you, please, also quote how this sightings are tallied?
Is that an astronomical observation by same people or is that based on self-reporting citizens?
"People see more stuff in the sky" is a common sign for people getting more anxious about attacks from the sky. To my knowledge, first UFO reporting waves happened during cold war when people started to get paranoid about soviet spying.
Why would FBI ever announce that they are investigating something? Is it that time of the year where they have to convince budget makers about their importance?
Or are they trying to direct attention from something else? Epstein?
It is good that there is a proper investigation, and I think it’s likely just a statistical anomaly.
My personal opinion is that scientists should be off-limits for any military as
long as they are not directly involved in operational planning and execution in an active state of war.
That said, targeting and capturing scientists is a military policy with a long history.
Removing individual expertise may delay strategic asset acquisition, but targeting alone is unlikely to destroy a programme outright and could even increase a country’s desire to strengthen research and acquire even more expertise.
You can see good examples of this with how the Israelis fail horribly over and over, preventing Iran from acquiring weapons-grade nuclear material. They failed so hard that the President is telling the public that Iran was within weeks to have a functional nuclear weapon and has set the world economy on fire over this with millions all over the planet suffering right now as a direct consequence of that decision.
Just a few days ago, a Ukrainian electronics expert for drone tech was hit in his home with five Shahed drones by Russia.
The result of his survival will likely be that more Ukrainians want to learn what he does and result in an even stronger drone electronics programme to gain a further advantage over Russia even quicker, especially in the midrange strike capabilities of the Ukrainians. If he had died, the same effect would have likely occurred. So touching this scientist / engineer was a huge long-term strategic error by the Russians.
Just like when the Ukrainians car-bombed Alexander Dugin’s daughter https://www.kyivpost.com/post/23139, which resulted long-term strategically in a Ukrainian brain drain by bullets behind ears.
Regardless of my or your opinion on this, this practice will likely persist as part of the foreign policy toolkit for states aiming to prevent proliferation.
And if you allow the US and Israel, or Russia or the United Kingdom, who all did kill scientists, to follow this policy unpunished, you need also to respect that their adversaries have the same right to do so.
Which means US scientists will end up as targets. Reality is, it has never been easier to kill a person with drones without risking capture or even consequences for the assassin, so the US might get some of its own medicine, and the only one who can stop that is the average citizen by putting enough public pressure on this issue to force a policy change.
If you care about your scientists, start calling your representatives and make sure to tell them how unhappy you are with the US targeting acquisition and policy, and ask them what they are going to do about it if they want to deserve your vote.
> the concentration of deaths and disappearances within such a small, specialized field as defying ordinary probability.
The best conspiracy theory I've seen online is that top-secret energy/weapons plans were sold by a traitor, and these scientists were kidnapped to be the worker bees.
Terribly dark and implausible, but also, we are living through a storyline that writers wouldn't even consider a draft because it's too on-the-nose.
I imagine it is difficult to get good work out of scientists at the point of a gun. With physical labour you can tell if someone is doing a good job, but with intellectual labour its much harder to tell if someone is intentionally being slow or if its a hard problem that is difficult to solve.
Now that's a fun one, where did you hear that from? Other ones I've seen include; tit for tat revenge for the assassination of Iranian nuke scientists; a global conspiracy of illuminati/masons/"jews" (defined so broadly as to be useless); chinese interdiction (kidnapping, a-la the reverse of the subplot in nolan's the dark knight film - that is essentially what you said); bankers who own everything and subvert everything to their interests (which remains stickily plausible to me); of course we can't forget our favorite: ancient aliens been doing all of this from the beginning. Anything to absolve people of confronting their own DNA and the predator/prey dichotomy that rules most life forms.
They assassinate truckloads of people all the time too though, Mossad operations in the west are usually not even investigated or reported by western media, they just quietly release agents back to Israel if they ever accidentally caught them. Some info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_espionage_in_the_Unite...
I'm surprised this article is gaining traction on HN when it's propping up such obvious conspiratorial drivel. For a counterpoint I would recommend this article [1], but I'll summarize the main points here:
- The investigation concerns somewhere between four and a dozen people spanning nearly half a decade. A dozen people dying or disappearing over the course of 4 years is hardly the statistical anomaly the articles claims it to be.
- Despite attempts to link these scientists together, there really is no common thread. One person was a biologist, not a rocket scientist; and two of the "scientists" weren't even scientists at all.
- Many of these purported "mysterious" deaths are hardly that mysterious. Two likely died of natural causes, one was murdered by a former classmate, and one disappeared while hiking. Most of the others appeared to have suffered from psychological distress.
And look, I don't want to minimize these people. These deaths and disappearances are all tragedies. The families and friends deserve closure. But dragging them into the conspiracy theory circuit is not going to do them any favors. If anything, it will likely make matters worse.
And as a scientist myself, the administration's "concern" about missing scientists feels like a slap in the face. This administration has been more hostile towards us than any other in modern history. I'll leave the article with the last word because I couldn't have worded it any better.
> Ironically, America doesn’t seem to need much help when it comes to disappearing scientists. About 1,000 employees have been laid off from NASA’s JPL in the past few years. One senior scientist who is still there told my colleague Ross Andersen last October that he’d never seen the place so empty and lifeless. In the meantime, the Trump administration has repeatedly proposed cutting NASA’s science research funding in half, a plan that would surely lead to further loss of staff at JPL, not to mention the abandonment of probes that have been sent into our solar system.
> And while the FBI looks into potential foreign involvement in professors’ deaths at MIT and Caltech, the Trump administration says that it intends to halve the budget of the National Science Foundation, which in recent years has furnished those two schools with hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. Already, more than 40 percent of the NSF’s scientific staff have left or been fired.
> This is just a subset of the harms that have been done to the U.S. research enterprise since the start of 2025. In response, some top scientists have been getting up and walking out the door. Their absence can’t be blamed on China, Russia, or Iran. Maybe the White House should look into it.
A lot of people are saying it’s disconnected, but even if it was, if a string of your country’s top rocket experts started disappearing, you wouldn’t just sit idly by
Could be nothing, or could be a new Havana Syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome
What's sad is, 5-10 years ago, no adversary would think simply off-ing American scientists was effective strategy, America was a new scientist generation machine.
Now thanks to Research funding falling off a cliff and massive immigration restrictions, this is no longer true.
Amy Eskridge - who publicly stated she was not suicidal before "committing suicide" reported to her friends that she received burns to her arms and hands through her window in an attack that sounded similar to this microwave/havana syndrome stuff. She was very vocal about the fact that she was being harassed over her work before she died.
Havana Syndrome seems to be a CIA psyop to soften the US public to warhawk policy. The proposed mechanism is... magic. Incredible stuff.
Lets say an American scientist in a strategic area was offered a boatload of money (or some other piece of mice) from China or similar. Legally probably he can move, though export control probably applies to the brain content too. How sure the said scientist would be that he isn't going to have a car accident? Gerald Bull would have a word on it. So, "disappear" may start to look like an attractive alternative. A related example - Russia has put a bunch of top hypersonic missile related scientists into prison for supposedly working with China (and may be they worked, though official charges have so far been obviously fabricated - like for publishing in a journal of an research article on a non-secret project with that article making all the typical rounds for months through peer-review, etc) as well as making a law giving FSB full control over any scientific interaction between domestic and foreign scientists and institutions.
I suppose the top AI talent may become subjects of a similar game.
It doesn't have to be China or Russia. As others have mentioned, the current political climate in the US is... "weird". At least, as an outsider, I just don't know how else to describe it. It's like watching/listening to gibberish.
So I can imagine American allies recruiting scientists en-mass, to protect themselves from America. The US has currently demonstrated a desire to take over allies completely (Canada, Greenland), and I'm sure few know who may be next. Some scientists may have simply wished to move abroad, and also, have quite valuable skills which are restricted in some way, hence them "disappearing".
Or the scientists and engineers themselves are wanting out of the US and were offered secret offers to "dissapear" and live elsewhere under a new identity
We’ve just looped back to the first idea this brain dump came up with.
>to protect themselves from America.
not necessarily from America. The goal #1 of the US dominated NATO for example was to prevent Germany from getting nuclear weapons in exchange for protection by US. Now with US de-facto withdrawing, Germany would have to quickly get nukes (as well as missiles to carry them) - i don't see other option for Germany here giving the environment in Europe and MidEast. So they would also need such scientists. South Korea, Japan, Australia seem to be in the similar situation too. (and everybody understands that a nuclear weapons program can't be a long multi-year endeavor - somebody will try to stop you - and so it must be very fast once started, and thus you have to have ready-to-use skills and knowledge)
they probably torture them for secrets and kill them
> Research funding falling off a cliff
Where do you get this stuff?
Show me somewhere that says research funding has decreased? Not an article that says "we projected to increase funding by 100m but it was slashed to 50m". That's not decreasing funding, its slowing the growth. The only difference is that 50y ago US govt funded 80% of research and now funds 20%, but that's because you have private companies funding so much of it.
https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2022-09/Function_DN...
Awww your data drops off at 2023. You’re so smart.
True. Whether or not it's coincidental they have to look into it.
Unfortunately the people 'looking into it' have currently demonstrated that they are incapable of looking into anything in good faith.
You think the FBI won't investigate in good faith?
Remember, sarcasm on the internet is difficult. Do you think Kash "forgot his safety blanket" Patel will direct FBI in good faith?
Yes, I do, unless the whole thing is made up. Which I doubt.
No, I do not.
"Let's stop with the accusations. It was an old cat. He just happen to fall down while we were shooting." -- Adams aebler
it does not pass the smell test, because what's the purpose of communicating about this FBI ongoing investigation ? at best it won't harm the investigation. it's probably propaganda
> McCasland, 68, disappeared from his Albuquerque home on Feb. 27 of this year, leaving on foot with only a .38 caliber revolver. [...] Government contractor Steven Garcia, [...] disappeared from Albuquerque in August 2025, last seen on surveillance footage leaving on foot with a handgun.
Not american, so I can't judge if this is a common thing or irregular, but both were last seen carrying firearms as if they'd be thinking someone is after them.
Suicide by gun isn't uncommon either.
It is probably more uncommon that they leave by foot in New Mexico - I mean where are some 60-year old going to go by foot and shot themselves without their bodies being found.
I don't have the link but someone estimated the number of scientists working in the defense field (it's a lot) and the number of deaths per year you'd expect (over 100). There's probably nothing here. It probably doesn't hurt to have the FBI take a second look at any death of somebody who has a security clearance or is working on export-controlled tech, but OTOH that might be a lot of work.
Deaths and mysterious deaths are not at all the same. Mysterious deaths and vanishings become increasingly rare the higher up the socio-economic curve you climb.
It is not surprising that the FBI did not detect an actual pattern before now, considering the various ways that the entirety of it spent the entirety of 2025.
Dying while experiencing nature is "mysterious" but also not uncommon among upper-middle class people. I would bet that the average victim of a backpacking or cross-country skiing mishap is wealthier than average.
>Mysterious deaths and vanishings become increasingly rare the higher up the socio-economic curve you climb.
Is it? Or is there just more scrutiny when more important people die?
When someone who ain't worth shit OD's nobody takes allegations that they were murdered seriously. When someone who's worth a lot of money ODs, the "they only bought fine cocaine, their dealer never would have cut that shit" allegations get looked into because "more equal animals" is more of a scale than a binary when it comes to this particular issue.
So are you saying that each of these "experts" is not an actual top of field expert but merely one of hundreds of expert cogs (per field!) in a giant machine so vast that of course some of them will crashout, be kidnapped, blackmailed, die outright, agree to a global government psyop, etc? But that's so much less fun, especially when you consider the espionage angle.
I believe the probability to die or get missing for a middle aged person is extremely low.
So no, it's not expected that "some of a group of 5.000 Persons" would die or go missing.
This appears to be for investigating how many scientist have left the US sponsored by state powers. But this also seems like bad communication on the FBI and perhaps poor publishing.
I think there is some confusion that there are more people going missing and dying in the sector while not outlining that there are more people going missing AND dying.
Or I'm just completely wrong, the only reason why I am making such assumptions because there is more information about this in the ASML case where a whisleblower leaked that china has poached ASML engineers and have given them new identities to work in chip manufacturing sector in china.
11 people over 4 years doesn't seem like that much. Its not clear to me how big a population that is out of but if its government scientists i assume there are tens of thousands of those if not hundreds of thousands.
Still, FBI should be investigating every suspicious death of people with high level clearence.
Once I saw “James Comer” I knew I could ignore this.
Yeah. Even without that it feels like one of those things where people see something that looks fishy, but given the large number of potential people involved, it's not actually weird at all.
But Comer... oof, it's hard to take seriously anything he focuses on.
But who knows? Broken clocks, twice a day, etc.
This is one of those "That's weird. Why are you telling me?" stories.
James Coomey
From article:
James Richardson Comer Jr. (R-Ky.) ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Comer~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Comey
I read his autobiography. Surely that entitles me to one irrelevant crude sex joke.
Uhhh, the autobiography of which one though?
As for irrelevant crude sex jokes, go for it if makes any contribution here, I won't be offended, whenever you're ready.
James Coomey
It reminds me of The Three-Body Problem novel/series. At the beginning, the police is investigating on multiple suicides by scientists.
I think its a fairly common plot. Its also the plot of So many steps to death by Agatha Christie.
Of those who are missing and not dead, I wonder if they are largely not US citizens, or citizens who have strong/stronger ties outside the US. It would not surprise me if people like that have decided to take their talents elsewhere, given the current state of anti-intellectualism in the US.
Surprised they don't mention any of the scientists and engineers that were on flight MH370 (disappearance still unsolved) from Freescale
I'm sure there's something behind deaths and disappearences of key rocket, defense, and nuclear scientists in Iran. Has been going on for a while.
For the US, my money is on "more evidence is needed". I could imagine the more "diverse" among the scientists deciding it's time for a career/employer change over the past year or so, though.
Odd, I saw this bubble up on social media this week as a tinfoil hat curiosity. I don't know what's real anymore.
There's good news and bad news. Unfortunately they're the same news. Given the rapid dissolution of any sort of publicly verifiable 'news' outlet, and the abject commercialization of media, plus the doublespeak of politicians and businesses, the PR industry, self-censorship in response to cancel-culture and other divisive popular behavioral trends, and the replication crisis in science - it's not just you. It's everyone.
>Given the rapid dissolution of any sort of publicly verifiable 'news' outlet
When was the news ever publicly verifiable? If Walter Kronkiue said that the North Vietnamese shot at our naval vessels you had no way of even accessing alternative viewpoints, you just had to trust him.
Today with all the contrarians and competing alternate sources it's arguably better because if there's some smoking gun that something is BS it almost certainly will get talked about.
And how would you be able to publicly verify the competing alternate sources and the smoking gun? It's no different than the situation with old media, except there's more noise and disinformation. Unless you personally are physically there with whatever necessary field expertise exists to run experiments or interrogate witnesses, you just have to trust either way.
One more addition to the conspiracy theories:
... <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/science/march-fireballs-m...>Can you, please, also quote how this sightings are tallied? Is that an astronomical observation by same people or is that based on self-reporting citizens?
"People see more stuff in the sky" is a common sign for people getting more anxious about attacks from the sky. To my knowledge, first UFO reporting waves happened during cold war when people started to get paranoid about soviet spying.
Homestuck is finally happening?
The scientists are being killed by space fireballs!? This is conspiracy bigger than I thought!
The article doesn't seem to reveal the source of its information about these alleged disappearances. Is it the letters from the members of Congress?
Also, what interest would a foreign power have in planetary defense against asteroids? Is there some dual-use technology in that?
Intercepting a meteor falling to Earth may be not too unlike intercepting a ballistic missile in its terminal descent from high altitude.
> Later on Monday, Comer said the string of deaths was unlikely to be a coincidence.
Release the rest of the Epstein files. This seems the kind of conspiracy that could be found there.
Is there a polymarket bet that they have been abducted into some billionaire's lair? There is a lot of Bond-type villain vibe going around there.
Also, some plasma/antigravity researches like the Chinese-origin one in America, among others.
Came here looking for the SC comments, was disappointed. (doorbell rings)
Why would FBI ever announce that they are investigating something? Is it that time of the year where they have to convince budget makers about their importance? Or are they trying to direct attention from something else? Epstein?
It is good that there is a proper investigation, and I think it’s likely just a statistical anomaly.
My personal opinion is that scientists should be off-limits for any military as long as they are not directly involved in operational planning and execution in an active state of war.
That said, targeting and capturing scientists is a military policy with a long history.
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/alsos-mission/
The United States and Israel have allegedly carried out the most attacks on (nuclear) scientists after WW II.
There is a rather extensive scientific discussion about the legality and morality of this kind of targeting.
https://www.legitimacyasatarget.com/books/drones/
The overall conclusion in the broader scientific context, though, is that this approach is not effective.
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501760341/all-...
Removing individual expertise may delay strategic asset acquisition, but targeting alone is unlikely to destroy a programme outright and could even increase a country’s desire to strengthen research and acquire even more expertise.
You can see good examples of this with how the Israelis fail horribly over and over, preventing Iran from acquiring weapons-grade nuclear material. They failed so hard that the President is telling the public that Iran was within weeks to have a functional nuclear weapon and has set the world economy on fire over this with millions all over the planet suffering right now as a direct consequence of that decision.
Just a few days ago, a Ukrainian electronics expert for drone tech was hit in his home with five Shahed drones by Russia.
https://united24media.com/latest-news/russian-shahed-drone-h...
The result of his survival will likely be that more Ukrainians want to learn what he does and result in an even stronger drone electronics programme to gain a further advantage over Russia even quicker, especially in the midrange strike capabilities of the Ukrainians. If he had died, the same effect would have likely occurred. So touching this scientist / engineer was a huge long-term strategic error by the Russians.
Just like when the Ukrainians car-bombed Alexander Dugin’s daughter https://www.kyivpost.com/post/23139, which resulted long-term strategically in a Ukrainian brain drain by bullets behind ears.
https://acleddata.com/report/personal-payback-assassinations...
Regardless of my or your opinion on this, this practice will likely persist as part of the foreign policy toolkit for states aiming to prevent proliferation.
And if you allow the US and Israel, or Russia or the United Kingdom, who all did kill scientists, to follow this policy unpunished, you need also to respect that their adversaries have the same right to do so.
Which means US scientists will end up as targets. Reality is, it has never been easier to kill a person with drones without risking capture or even consequences for the assassin, so the US might get some of its own medicine, and the only one who can stop that is the average citizen by putting enough public pressure on this issue to force a policy change.
If you care about your scientists, start calling your representatives and make sure to tell them how unhappy you are with the US targeting acquisition and policy, and ask them what they are going to do about it if they want to deserve your vote.
Turns out scientists die too?
> the concentration of deaths and disappearances within such a small, specialized field as defying ordinary probability.
The best conspiracy theory I've seen online is that top-secret energy/weapons plans were sold by a traitor, and these scientists were kidnapped to be the worker bees.
Terribly dark and implausible, but also, we are living through a storyline that writers wouldn't even consider a draft because it's too on-the-nose.
I imagine it is difficult to get good work out of scientists at the point of a gun. With physical labour you can tell if someone is doing a good job, but with intellectual labour its much harder to tell if someone is intentionally being slow or if its a hard problem that is difficult to solve.
Now that's a fun one, where did you hear that from? Other ones I've seen include; tit for tat revenge for the assassination of Iranian nuke scientists; a global conspiracy of illuminati/masons/"jews" (defined so broadly as to be useless); chinese interdiction (kidnapping, a-la the reverse of the subplot in nolan's the dark knight film - that is essentially what you said); bankers who own everything and subvert everything to their interests (which remains stickily plausible to me); of course we can't forget our favorite: ancient aliens been doing all of this from the beginning. Anything to absolve people of confronting their own DNA and the predator/prey dichotomy that rules most life forms.
Israel just lobbies with money, it's far more effective.
They assassinate truckloads of people all the time too though, Mossad operations in the west are usually not even investigated or reported by western media, they just quietly release agents back to Israel if they ever accidentally caught them. Some info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_espionage_in_the_Unite...
Struggling to tell if you’re trolling,
or just often on a good one at this hour,
based on your other comments.
Anyway, did you fix the hiccups?
Something about ufo conspiracy theories.
I'm surprised this article is gaining traction on HN when it's propping up such obvious conspiratorial drivel. For a counterpoint I would recommend this article [1], but I'll summarize the main points here:
- The investigation concerns somewhere between four and a dozen people spanning nearly half a decade. A dozen people dying or disappearing over the course of 4 years is hardly the statistical anomaly the articles claims it to be.
- Despite attempts to link these scientists together, there really is no common thread. One person was a biologist, not a rocket scientist; and two of the "scientists" weren't even scientists at all.
- Many of these purported "mysterious" deaths are hardly that mysterious. Two likely died of natural causes, one was murdered by a former classmate, and one disappeared while hiking. Most of the others appeared to have suffered from psychological distress.
And look, I don't want to minimize these people. These deaths and disappearances are all tragedies. The families and friends deserve closure. But dragging them into the conspiracy theory circuit is not going to do them any favors. If anything, it will likely make matters worse.
And as a scientist myself, the administration's "concern" about missing scientists feels like a slap in the face. This administration has been more hostile towards us than any other in modern history. I'll leave the article with the last word because I couldn't have worded it any better.
> Ironically, America doesn’t seem to need much help when it comes to disappearing scientists. About 1,000 employees have been laid off from NASA’s JPL in the past few years. One senior scientist who is still there told my colleague Ross Andersen last October that he’d never seen the place so empty and lifeless. In the meantime, the Trump administration has repeatedly proposed cutting NASA’s science research funding in half, a plan that would surely lead to further loss of staff at JPL, not to mention the abandonment of probes that have been sent into our solar system.
> And while the FBI looks into potential foreign involvement in professors’ deaths at MIT and Caltech, the Trump administration says that it intends to halve the budget of the National Science Foundation, which in recent years has furnished those two schools with hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. Already, more than 40 percent of the NSF’s scientific staff have left or been fired.
> This is just a subset of the harms that have been done to the U.S. research enterprise since the start of 2025. In response, some top scientists have been getting up and walking out the door. Their absence can’t be blamed on China, Russia, or Iran. Maybe the White House should look into it.
---
[1] "The Single Dumbest Conspiracy Theory of 2026." The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/04/missing-scientis...
How many of the disappearances were defections?
Doesn't seem connected, but makes a nice film. I think ignorance is bliss and due to the current climate, many people checking out...