Our capacity for seeing patterns is absolutely critical.
It's easy to see how survival in a risky world could hinge on noticing clues in the environment, then putting them together correctly. The key, though, is the word correctly. When you have a built-in mechanism for interpreting sensory cues and recognizing danger, it can easily go awry. But -- and here's the most important point -- in general, the evolutionary cost of overreacting is almost always way less than that of underreacting. To use the oft-quoted example, for your average proto-hominin on the African savanna, it's better to hear a rustle in the grass, take fright and bolt, and have it turn out to be a fluffy bunny, than to shrug it off and stay put when it's a hungry lion.
Or, worse still, not to notice it at all.
This tendency remains with us, lo unto this very day, and it's astonishing how badly it can backfire. We look around us, assemble the information we have, and all too often put the pieces together wrong -- especially when the pattern that emerges is scary.
And especially especially when we're encouraged to do so by sensationalist media who make their money from clicks, and politicians who benefit by keeping their constituents frightened and distracted.
Take, for example, the current kerfuffle over all the scientists who have allegedly disappeared (or died) recently. They all, we are told, worked with classified secrets. The words "mysterious circumstances" have been thrown about. The implication -- sometimes, the explicit claim -- is that the scientists' fates are all linked, part of a massive conspiracy to silence "people who know too much," or (perhaps) who were about to blow the whistle on some even bigger conspiracy and implicate Important People.
The story hit the news when a retired United States Air Force general, Neil McCasland, left his house in Bernalillo County, New Mexico on foot in late February, and never returned. A search was conducted, but no trace of him was ever found. McCasland, they said, was "involved in UFO research," and this was somehow relevant to his disappearance. Then there's Monica Jacinto Reza, who was director of materials processing at NASA/JPL, who vanished while hiking in the Angeles National Forest in June of 2025. I'll admit her disappearance was odd; she was an experienced hiker and was accompanied by two other equally able friends, had been seen about ten meters back on the trail and had smiled and waved, but when her friends looked back shortly afterward, Reza was gone.
Once again, searchers came up empty-handed.
Carl Grillmair, an astronomer and exoplanet researcher at Caltech, was murdered in mid-February of this year. Nuno Loureiro, a plasma physicist at MIT, was shot and killed in December of 2025. Here are a few others that often get thrown into the mix:
- Amy Eskridge, died in June of 2022; Eskridge was an "anti-gravity researcher"
- Michel David Hicks, a planetary researcher at NASA/JPL, died in July of 2023
- Anthony Chavez, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, disappeared in May of 2025
- Jason Thomas, assistant director of chemical biology at Novartis, drowned in Lake Quannapowitt, Massachusetts in December of 2025
So the relevant question here is: does this make a pattern?
The answer is no. Not even close. Okay, McCasland and Reza are curious circumstances, to say the least; but McCasland had medical problems, and even his wife wrote a piece pleading with people to stop the "misinformation circulating about Neil and his disappearance." As far as Reza... well, I'm an experienced back-country hiker myself, and the wilderness is a big, big place. If you don't think it's possible someone -- even a dedicated backwoods-explorer -- could get inextricably lost and die out there, you haven't actually experienced what the back country is like.
How about the rest? Well, the police actually arrested the perpetrator of Grillmair's murder, and it was pretty clearly a burglary that went badly wrong. Loureiro's killer was almost certainly Cláudio Manuel Neves Valente, who knew Loureiro personally and seems to have had a grudge against him -- Valente had gone to college with Loureiro and graduated first in his class, but unlike Loureiro, his career never took off. Valente was described as "often unhappy or even angry," and eventually snapped; the day after killing Loureiro, he went to Brown University, killed two students and wounded nine others, then turned the gun on himself.
As far as the others, Eskridge wasn't a government employee at all, just a fringe-y pseudoscience content creator; she'd been in chronic pain for years, and it's nearly certain she committed suicide. Hicks died of natural causes from a chronic medical condition. Chavez wasn't a scientist, but a construction foreman, and hadn't worked for Los Alamos for years. Thomas, a medical researcher who had zero to do with space science, suffered from long-term depression, and his drowning death was ruled as an accident.
So what looked like a pattern turns out to be nothing much at all. But of course that's not calming anyone down. Karoline Leavitt, who hasn't been within hailing distance of reality for years and wouldn't recognize the truth if it came up and bit her on the ass, says there are "legitimate questions about these troubling cases" and that "no stone will remain unturned" in unmasking the conspiracy behind it all. Especially if it turns out to have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. Podcaster Walter Kirn goes further, saying "What is going on seems to be an enemy action... [The missing individuals were involved] in the most advanced realms of space-rocket propulsion and, you know, Air Force–NASA–type endeavors." House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said that "something sinister could be happening." Then Missouri Representative Eric Burlison got involved -- you may recall that last year, Burlison made a name for himself by claiming that the Nephilim were real, and the Smithsonian Institute was covering it up, so his grasp on reality is even more tenuous than Karoline Leavitt's -- and said the whole thing had to do with the fact that all of the victims, alleged and otherwise, knew classified stuff about UFOs.
And we're off to the races.
It's pretty clear that what we have here is a consortium of the usual kooks and conspiracy theorists teaming up with a bunch of politicians who are desperate to distract everyone from the fact that their policies have directly led to an economic disaster, and that the upper leadership was involved in a vicious sex trafficking ring, so they're putting 2 and 2 together and coming up with 54.
Like I said... as usual.
In any case, if you see anyone posting this nonsense as serious evidence of a huge conspiracy, I'd be much obliged if you'd set them straight. You can even send 'em a link to this post, if you think it'll help.
After all, we have enough real stuff to worry about at the moment. There's no need to make shit up.
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