What do you call it when a retired Air

Force general, one who once ran the most

notorious lab in UFO history, vanishes

from his house in broad daylight?

>> The general was involved with the

Pentagon's most advanced aerospace

research when the NASA material

scientist behind a breakthrough rocket

engine alloy disappears 30 ft from her

friend on a hike. She was right behind

them, 30 ft behind them, and then she

disappeared.

>> When one of MIT's top plasma physicists

is gunned down outside his own front

door.

>> This many top scientists getting killed

or going missing in just under a year

looks like a major red flag.

>> Who are the first people the Israelis

killed in Iran when they went in?

>> The first thing you do is kill your

scientists.

It's the kind of thing that sounds like

the Chinese science fiction book, The

Threebody Problem. A world where

scientists don't just make discoveries,

but become the front line of a war they

don't even know they're in. A world

where the future rests on some of the

most important minds on Earth. And those

minds start disappearing.

Except here, the names and the people

behind them are real. Gasillas went

missing after taking lunch to her

teenage daughter at a cafe in Towels

Plaza.

>> Some of them were very important people

and we're going to look at it over the

next special.

>> What we're looking at might not just be

geopolitics in the dark or pressure

coming from nation states, but from an

unseen force shaping our timeline from

somewhere above it and a hidden struggle

over who gets to control humanity's next

leap.

Or maybe none of these cases are

connected.

>> It's really sensitive stuff and I'm not

a big believer in coincidences.

>> So tonight, we're following the trail

through missing scientists, murdered

physicists, defenseworld gatekeepers in

this strange shadowland that forms

wherever advanced knowledge becomes too

dangerous to leave walking around.

There's a state that researchers called

hypnogogia.

That threshold between waking and sleep

where the brain is doing something

genuinely unusual. The kind of thing

that comes up in remote viewing accounts

or other outof body experiences and

honestly some of the most fascinating

conversations I've had on this show

since moving to Austin. Sleep is

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michaels. Michaelels with no a

The trail begins in Albuquerque, New

Mexico, in the shadow of Sandia

Mountains. It's February 27th, 2026, a

late Friday morning on Quail Run Court.

Neil McCassland, a 68-year-old retired

Air Force general, is at home in a quiet

neighborhood at the edge of the Sibola

National Forest. A repair man sees him

at the house around 10:00 a.m. Then

about an hour later, around 11:10 a.m.,

his wife leaves for a medical

appointment. At 12:04, barely an hour

after that, she's back home,

but her husband is gone. Left behind are

his prescription glasses, his phone,

which had been switched off, and his

smartwatch. All the things that would

make him trackable in the 21st century.

But what's missing is a red backpack,

his wallet, and a 38 caliber revolver

with its holster. Not the best

combination.

At 3:07, his wife Susan reports him

missing, and the official police

investigation begins. In a newly

released 911 call, she tells the

dispatcher he's been gone for about 3

hours.

>> I have some indication that he must have

planned not to be found. She said he

changed his clothes and appears to be on

foot since none of their cars or bikes

were missing. She also tells dispatch

that he's been dealing with some medical

issues and that both of them were seeing

a doctor for anxiety, lack of sleep, and

short-term memory problems. In fact, it

was the same doctor she had seen earlier

that day. But Susan chocked the health

issues up to garden variety things that

you face in old age. She never thought

that Neil would actually act in a way to

harm himself.

>> Saying if his brain and body keep

deteriorating, he didn't want to live

like that. But it seemed to me that was

just a man, I hate how this is going

kind of thing.

>> A comment like that would naturally

raise concerns about self harm. But

whether that was a real risk or just a

throwaway comment on an off day, we

don't actually know. When the police

asked about the weapons, she said that

her husband had a gun safe with multiple

pistols and rifles, but at that moment

couldn't tell whether anything was

actually missing. Although now we know

that one of his 38 calibers was in fact

gone. The next day, a silver alert goes

out. This is the kind of statewide alert

issued when authorities think a missing

person might be disoriented or

cognitively impaired. New Mexico state

statute doesn't require any kind of

formal diagnosis. Given what Susan had

already told the police, that was enough

to trigger it. But even with those

reported issues, McCasslin still doesn't

fit the profile of a man who just

wandered into a canyon.

>> Investigators say he's still highly

intelligent and capable.

>> Friends say that the week before he

disappeared, McCastlin cycled 60 m. He

hiked those very foothills. He biked

them. He knew every trail. This wasn't a

man losing his bearings, but the kind of

guy who could outsk most millennials.

This was also a town he knew by heart.

McCasten once commanded the Philips

Research Site at Kirtland, an Air Force

base notorious for hosting advanced

weapons research right nearby. He wasn't

a stranger to this place. It was

basically his backyard. His wife would

also issue another statement saying

McCasten had some risk, but not from

dementia. He was not confused and

disoriented, but a clear head didn't

make him any easier to find. The

Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office said

that they had surveillance footage from

both ends of his street and still

couldn't confirm his direction of

travel. They made public appeals for

doorbell cameras, dash cams, GoPros,

anything.

>> If you have any information where

McCasslin may be, contact BCSO's missing

person's unit. Within the span of a

week, the search expanded from the

sheriff's office to the FBI's

Albuquerque field office to the Air

Force Office of Special Investigations,

New Mexico State Search and Rescue,

Albuquerque Mountain Rescue, horseback

teams, three types of search dogs,

drones, helicopters, and neighborhood

canvasing. And despite living in an era

with enough cameras to catch almost

every delivery on the block in which he

lived, no footage of him ever surfaced.

Police accessed his electronic devices

and searched his usual hiking spots like

the Elena Gagos area into the Domingo

Baka Canyon, but there was still no

trace of him. After weeks, all they

could find was a gray Air Force

sweatshirt a mile east of his house. And

even after testing it, they couldn't

confirm it was Macassins. So, we're

talking about a regimented, physically

active military vet who vanished from

his house without leaving a single

digital or physical fingerprint behind.

That alone is strange, but it gets

stranger once you understand who

McCastand actually was and the world he

came out of.

>> General McCasslin, his disappearance was

discussed. UAPs were discussed. So, I

don't think this story is going away,

Jesse. This was a man who spent his

career deep in the black world of

American defense. When you read his

official Air Force biography, you

realize he had access to things that the

rest of us aren't even supposed to know

exist. The foundation for that kind of

clearance started when he graduated from

the Air Force Academy, earned a PhD in

astronomical engineering from MIT on a

Herz Foundation fellowship, and later

studied at Harvard's Kennedy School. He

went on to lead the space-based laser

project office, served as vice commander

of the space and missile systems center,

was the material wing director at the

Air Force Research Labs Space Vehicles

Directorate at Kirtland, and spent part

of his career in the National

Reconnaissance Office, the world of

black off thereord satellites.

His

career spanned everything from directed

energy to space weapons to nuclear

oversight.

You probably get the point. This was a

man who could outcred most presidents

and probably had more access than them,

too. And there are two jobs on his

resume that matter more than the rest.

From June 2009 to May 2011, McCasslin

served as director of special programs

at the Pentagon in the office of the

under secretary of defense for

acquisitions, technology, and logistics.

The title is a mouthful, but according

to the official Pentagon training

documentation, that office oversees

acquisition special access programs,

these programs are the ultimate category

of secret black projects. In fact, they

account for about 75 to 80% of all

special access programs in the

Department of War. These are the

programs built to protect the crown

jewels. Extremely sensitive research in

the process of building something like a

next generation weapons system or a

craft that doesn't officially exist.

This is where sensitive technology moves

from theory to prototype to something

that the military can actually fly. And

if you're wondering where UFO reverse

engineering programs would possibly

hide, this is the place. In the

classified world, McCastlin's office was

the motherloadde. His Wikipedia page

goes a step further, claiming that the

role made him executive secretary of the

special access program oversight

committee, the body that reviews and

approves every single special access

program in the Pentagon. But that's not

even the most interesting job on his

resume.

From 2011 to 2013, McCastlin commanded

the Air Force Research Lab, AFRL, at

Wright Patterson Air Force Base,

overseeing a $2.2 billion science and

technology portfolio. One of the largest

research operations in the entire

Pentagon, advanced material science,

future weapons, and of course, exotic

propulsion. And if you're familiar with

UFO lore, you also know that Wright

Patterson isn't just famous for Project

Blue Book. It's the alleged home of the

Roswell crash debris.

>> I called Curtis Lame and I said,

"General, uh, I know we have a room at

Wright Patterson

where you put all this secret stuff.

Can I go in there?"

I've never heard him get mad, but he got

mad in hell at me.

>> Depending on who you believe, this place

houses some of the most exotic materials

in the history of the US government.

It's the place where they get studied,

stored, reverse engineered, and

obsessively hidden from public view.

That's not even a conspiracy. This is

the place during World War II where the

US would reverse engineer advanced Nazi

tech and General Neil McCasslin ran the

entire thing.

But what really put him on the radar of

UFO World is that his name showed up

somewhere no one expected. In 2016,

Wikileaks published the hacked emails of

John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign

chairman and one of the most powerful

political operatives in Washington.

Buried in that email dump is an email

from Tom Dong to Podesta. The subject

line, General McCassland Dong writes, he

mentioned he's a skeptic. He's not. I've

been working with him for 4 months. I've

just got done giving him a 4-hour

presentation on the entire project a few

weeks ago. He tells Podesta that

McCassland just has to say that out loud

because he is very, very aware because

he was the man in charge of all of this

stuff. When Roswell crashed, they

shipped it to the laboratory at Wright

Patterson Air Force Base. General

McCassland was in charge of that exact

laboratory up to a couple years ago. He

not only knows what I'm trying to

achieve, he helped assemble my advisory

team. He's a very important man. Dong

was after UFO disclosure for the

American people. That's the whole point

of To the Stars Academy. General

McCasslin being involved in those early

efforts is a big deal. Some people try

to dismiss Tom Delong and say that he

was never in touch with Neil McCasslin.

After all, these leaked emails were

never publicly confirmed. But even his

wife Susan would come to acknowledge

that McCassland was caught up in the

Russian hack and had less contact with

Tom after the emails were released. Key

word here, less, not zero.

And she's implicitly admitting that they

were in close contact previously.

In fact, in that same email batch that

leaked, a calendar notification shows

that Susan herself accepted a Google

calendar invite for something called a

Dong Podesta meeting. So, at minimum,

Massland and his wife were in the room

for conversations about UFO disclosure.

We're not talking about a 4chan thread

here. We're talking about Podesta's

actual inbox. And as for Susan

McCasslin, she has a quite impressive

background herself. She's a PhD

astrophysicist, a colonel in the Air

Force Reserve. She was a NASA astronaut

semi- finalist, and had stints at both

Boeing and Rathon.

She might even have her own clearance

history.

After McCasslin disappeared, she told

the press that he only held commonly

held clearances since retirement. Maybe.

But a man who spent his career this deep

in the black world likely saw the full

portfolio. And you don't really unsee

that. Susan later made a statement on

Facebook. She wrote, "Neil does not have

any special knowledge about the ET

bodies and debris from the Roswell crash

stored at Wright Pad. Though at this

point, with absolutely no sign of him,

maybe the best hypothesis is that aliens

beamed him up to the mother ship.

However, no sightings of a mother ship

hovering above the Sandia Mountains have

been reported. Maybe this is just a

woman holding it together with dark

humor while the internet tears her life

apart. But it's undeniable that the

phrasing is odd. She doesn't say Roswell

material doesn't exist at Wright

Patterson. She just says McCasslin

doesn't have any special knowledge about

it. An event that mind you has been

reported on adnauseium in the open-

source world. So, she might just be

saying there's nothing that Neil

McCasslin knows about Roswell that you,

the public, don't already know. Now,

look, any reasonable person should be

hesitant to parse or speculate on the

words of a grieving wife. And Susan and

Neil deserve all of our thoughts and

prayers. But also to any reasonable

person, these words almost feel like a

cipher to decode, an invitation to

speculate just a little bit. and the

statement ended up provoking just that.

They spurred a lot of public

speculation. If anything, the internet

theorizing went into overdrive. I do

think that there are secrets that

obviously uh will not be um released

because we have technologies that other

nations don't and just see the

superiority of our forces right now uh

with Iran. Had McCasslin been quietly

folded into some continuity of

government program or taken into

protective custody in preparation for

the war with Iran? Had he been taken by

a foreign adversary that understood

exactly how valuable he was? People in

UFO world associate McCassland with the

Majestic 12, an elite and top secret

presidential advisory panel dating back

to Truman and Eisenhower that deals with

the UFO topic. There are a lot of

reasonable questions as to whether this

Majestic 12 committee ever really

existed. But perhaps the person deepest

on the UFO truth, at least from the

government perspective that we know

about over the last 70 years, is a guy

named Colonel John Alexander. And at one

point, he admitted that the Majestic 12

was basically just a cover for

continuity of government programs.

people in the military-industrial

complex where if the president and his

direct cabinet were incapacitated, they

would take over. To be honest, McCastlin

sounds like he squarely fits that

profile. Theories around his

disappearance kept multiplying, and the

timing of all of this didn't help

either. Are aliens real?

>> Uh, they're real, but I haven't seen

them. In the summer of 2025, the

mainstream Italian magazine Let Espresso

published an article from a confidential

source.

It claimed that President Trump was

wrestling control of special access

programs away from the Pentagon and

under the command of the White House, a

move that supposedly sparked tensions

between military leaders and some of the

president's adviserss. The article goes

on to mention Project Preserve Destiny,

a program involving communications with

non-human intelligence housed under the

National Security Agency or NSA. The

program involves some of the most

bizarre protocols and has some of the

most profound implications of anything

we've ever covered on this show. Just

listen to the experience of Air Force

Sergeant Dan Sherman. This is what he

was told the program was about.

>> The genesis of it was in 1947. and we

came in contact with an alien species

and in 1960 they started a a project. It

was called project preserve destiny and

um it was designed to genetically manage

fetuses, human fetuses so that they

would have the heightened ability to do

this particular thing that I was going

to school for. My mother was one of the

the selected targets or whatever you

want to call it. And on the night of

February 19th, 2026,

Trump announced on Truth Social that he

was directing the Pentagon and other

agencies to begin identifying and

releasing government files related to

aliens and the UAP phenomena. Trump is

always shooting from the hip. You don't

really get the sense that that post was

planned. And you have to think if the

UFO legacy program does in fact exist,

they were thinking deeply about their

most important personnel. Eight days

after that announcement, McCastlin

vanished from his neighborhood.

I'm not going to pretend I know what

this means, and I'm not saying that

Trump's announcement is the reason he

disappeared, but the timing is a data

point. There could be a few reasons why

that timing is important. Neil

McCasslin. I mean, you have to wonder

the timing. President Trump saying, you

know, I'm going to release these files

and then 6 days later, Neil McCasslin

goes missing.

>> If McCassland was involved in these

programs and felt he could be implicated

in any way, the release of these UFO

files could have been a pressure point,

maybe enough to make him crack and

disappear into the wilderness.

This also could have explained the deep

anxiety leading up to that moment. Maybe

the intense hiking and biking was to

relieve stress. What many online are

saying is the most simple explanation

for McCasslin's disappearance is that he

walked into the Sandia foothills with

his gun and that whatever was in his

head after a lifetime near the most

secretive programs in the country simply

became too much to carry, a burden too

great to bear. The fact that he changed

his clothes before leaving, making it

harder to identify what he was wearing,

adds to that theory. But after weeks of

searching terrain that experienced teams

covered repeatedly, they haven't found a

body. So, the opposite could also be

true.

This was a man who was already involved

with early disclosure efforts.

McCassland wasn't hiding from

transparency. If anything, he was

working toward it. And that makes him

quite dangerous and a liability to the

people who don't want disclosure.

To them, this is the last person you'd

ever want to put on the witness stand.

He was a man who saw behind the curtain

and knew exactly what was hanging there.

Harvard lawyer and civil rights activist

Danny Shehan, the constitutional lawyer

behind the Pentagon Papers, recently

went on the Third Eye Drops podcast with

my buddy Michael Phillip and described

what he calls the association. There has

arisen uh an insurgency group that have

uh occupied extremely high positions uh

in the defense department uh inside the

central intelligence agency uh inside

some of the private aerospace

corporations uh and uh inside the the

military services. Okay. And I happen to

know who they are. Okay. And what

they've done is they've formed an

association

uh and that they're working to try to

drag the program back into the

government. This is a covert circle of

24 retired highranking officials from

the DoD, CIA, and private aerospace. A

secret brain trust quietly working to

drag classified UAP programs back into

the light of government oversight and

towards transparency. They're all

retired and they all took their

rolodexes and credibility with them. So,

did Mccassland have his own little black

book? Was he one of those 24? We don't

actually know, but he does fit the

profile. Retired, credentialed,

connected, and sympathetic to

disclosure. And I've got their names,

too, here.

>> Right here.

>> Are those names Are those names private

or can those names

>> They're not public at all. They're not

public at all, but there's 24 of them.

After McCasslin hung up his uniform in

2013, his wife described him as a man

winding down, hiking the foothills,

enjoying a quiet life in the desert.

Technically, that's all true.

>> Dalbot power for 24 hours, end of day

comes our shower.

>> But that's not the full story. In fact,

after leaving his post in government,

he's listed as a founder of DBE

Consulting,

a New Mexico national security

consulting firm tied to James Technelia,

the former deputy director of DARPA and

the director of the Defense Threat

Reduction Agency. This agency, also

known as DITRA for short, is the

Pentagon's agency for countering weapons

of mass destruction. But it also might

have a thing or two to do with UFOs. the

person in charge of collecting all of

the information from Ditra dealing with

extraterrestrials and as he put it quote

unquote little green men happened to sit

next to me at my computer terminal and

began pulling all the documents on my

system and the systems in our skiff.

>> This consulting firm wasn't just two old

colleagues starting a fishing club. It

represents two aerospace gray beards

with connections way too deep to ever

really walk away. advising clients

across the Pentagon and Department of

Energy. Make of that what you will. In

2019, he joined the board of trustees at

Riverside Research, a nonprofit with

hundreds of millions of dollars in

defense and intelligence work on the

books. He was also the director of

technology at ATA, Applied Technology

Associates, one of those aerospace firms

with a deliberately vague name working

in sensitive areas in space systems and

directed energy. That doesn't sound like

a quiet retirement to me, but that's

exactly the kind of person who makes a

very specific set of people very

nervous. a potential whistleblower

operating in the dangerous margin

between intelligence agencies and

private contractors. Two groups with

their own distinct methods of making

problems disappear. And if you're in the

business of making problems disappear,

you make sure you give the public a

story they can wrap their heads around.

This is the fixer handbook 101, which

brings us back to a detail that doesn't

get enough attention. Just because

McCastlin's gun is missing doesn't mean

he was the one who took it. Think about

it. If you wanted to stage someone's

disappearance to read like a probable

suicide, what would you take? You'd take

a gun.

Not their phone or smartwatch. You'd

leave everything trackable with a GPS

chip, but take the one item with an

obvious narrative attached to it.

Ultimately, who knows what happened to

McCastling? What we do know is that a

man who knew more about America's most

classified science programs than about

99.9999%

of our population vanished from his

house without tripping a single camera.

And as of today, despite 700 homeowners

canvased, search parties, drones,

helicopters, fleer sweeps, K-9 units,

and the FBI, we have next to nothing. No

confirmed sightings, no scent trail.

He's just gone like a ghost.

For one of the most intensive searches

in recent New Mexico history, the

absence of evidence is bizarre. But it

might be a data point unto itself that

points to someone who's sophisticated,

who knows how to work the blind spots.

And McCasten isn't the first to vanish.

Congressman from Tennessee, Tim Burett,

has been trying to get answers himself,

but claims that some of our intelligence

agencies are actively stonewalling his

attempts to investigate why our top

researchers are disappearing at such a

high rate. He told the Daily Mail that

the numbers seem very high in these

certain areas of research. I think we'd

better be paying attention and I don't

think we should trust our government. I

had a t-shirt on my merchantfor

congress.com website that said more

people believe in UFOs than believe in

Congress and it sold out. So, I mean,

there's something going on out there,

brother.

>> But while Bett was looking for answers

in Washington, the internet was doing

its own digging.

After his story broke, an online manhunt

zeroed in on a potential smoking gun, an

exac account called TMBB spaceships. The

account posts about plasma propulsion

and spacecraft systems, but hasn't

posted since February 27th, the day

Macccasslin disappeared. I looked into

it. Its account claims that in 1991, its

owner was attending the University of

Texas as a US Air Force butterb bar

electrical engineer, which is slaying

for a newly commissioned second

lieutenant. Except Macland reached

second lieutenant on May 30th, 1979. and

by April 1991, he had reached Lieutenant

Colonel. His official Air Force

biography also puts him in Los Angeles

from 1988 to 1992, not Texas. The

account also mentions a brother-in-law

who spent 40 years in navigation and

started working for Texas Instruments in

the 1950s, but the only Maclin

brother-in-law we could actually verify

doesn't fit that profile. Based on these

posts, the user behind the account

doesn't appear to be McCasten. While the

internet was busy trying to unmask this

ex account, the real story was hiding in

plain sight.

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When you dig into the $2.2 billion

science and technology portfolio

Mccassland oversaw at the Air Force

Research Lab, you'll find a thread that

leads somewhere specific. And that

thread is metal. A super alloy of metal

co-invented by another missing

scientist, Monica Jasinto Resza. Monica

worked in one of the most brutal corners

of propulsion science. An age-old

limitation had kept advanced rocket

propulsion pinned down by the same ugly

problem. If you want to get heavy

satellites into orbit, you need a high

pressure oxygen-rich environment. The

metallic alloys strong enough to hold

the engine together in these situations

would go up in flames. And the alloys

that didn't catch on fire were too weak

to trust with the guts of an engine. So

the US military needed to find a sweet

spot, but nobody could find one. So we

were forced to rely on the Russian

RD-180 engine for sensitive national

security space launches. This meant that

during the Cold War, we were literally

stuck buying defense hardware for the

most sensitive missions from our biggest

geopolitical rival.

The stalemate finally shattered in the

1990s thanks to the hard work of Dallas

Hardwick and Monica Resza at the

Rockwell Science Center. They engineered

a nickel-based alloy tough enough to

survive the crushing pressure, but

stable enough to not go up in flames or

fracture in an oxygen-rich hellscape.

They named this super metal Mandeloy.

The first three letters of each of their

names fused into one. By 1999, the Air

Force Research Laboratory or AFRL began

co-unding their work. The same Air Force

Research Laboratory that was later

headed up by Neil McCasslin. Monica told

space news that over the next two

decades and after multiple Air Force and

NASA contracts, the metal she created

was eventually scaled into a family of

super alloys, Mandaloy 100 and 200, each

engineered for different temperature and

pressure conditions.

This was the vital national security

hardware that would allow us to stop

relying on Russia. Fast forward and

Mandeloy ends up in kerosenefueled AR1

engines, Rocket Dine's US-built

replacement for the Russian RD-180.

Then in May of 2011, none other than

Neil McCasslin came to write Patterson

as the new commander of the Air Force

Research Laboratory while the Mandeloy

program was still active. And Monica's

co-inventor, Dallas Hardwick, who had

been at Wright Patterson since the year

2000, was right there alongside him,

embedded in the lab's materials

directorate until her retirement in

2012. This was the exact place where

Mandeloy 200 was co-developed. In fact,

a national academyy's report shows the

Mandaloy partnership was shared between

the Air Force Research Laboratory and

Monica's team at Pratt and Whitney

Rocket Dine, which later became

Aererojet Rocket Dine. The Air Force

knew that mastering materials like

Mandeloy could shape the future. And at

Wright Patterson, cuttingedge science

has long been rumored to blur into the

unexplained. But there's a long and much

weirder history of exotic metallurgy

coming out of Wright Patterson. And this

is where the story goes somewhere

familiar. Some researchers connect

Mandeloy to a specific lineage of exotic

metal that goes all the way back to the

alleged Roswell crash of 1947. In an

interview with journalist Bob Pratt,

Jesse Marcel Jr., The Army Air Force

intelligence officer at the Roswell

crash site described some of the debris

as thin and foilike, and when he held a

lighter to it, it didn't burn. The

theory goes that whatever was recovered

at Roswell eventually became a

classified R&D seed program at Wright

Patterson's Air Force Research Lab. And

over decades, that seed inspired

families of advanced alloys designed to

mimic or exploit the same impossible

properties. shape recovery, extreme

strength to weight ratios, burn

resistance, not chemical clones of the

Roswell metal, but descendants of the

same research tree. You have to admit

it's a bit bizarre that Wright Patterson

had a contract with Battel Memorial

Institute in 1949

studying nickel titanium alloys long

before the material became associated

with memory metal.

memory metal extremely similar to what

Jesse Marcel described just 2 years

after he reportedly handled it. Then

fast forward to the 1960s at the Naval

Ordinance Laboratory and the world was

introduced to Nitanol, an alloy that

remembers its shape. It was seen as a

breakthrough in modern metallurgy. But

for anyone steeped in Roswell lore, it

looked eerily familiar. Now Mandalloy

lives in a very different metallurgical

neighborhood. Nitanol is about 45%

titanium. While Mandalloy has only small

amounts of titanium, about 1 to 4%. And

if you look at the actual science behind

Mandaloy, the exotic metal theory hits a

wall. Monica's patents for Mandalloy

mentions Hannes 214 and Monal alloy

K500. So is Monica's super alloy some

kind of Roswell starship derivative?

Maybe not. But who's to say these exotic

metal lineages didn't have a little

outside inspiration along the way.

You have to admit the optics are

bizarre. A scientist co-invents a super

alloy inside the same research portfolio

Macassland oversaw, and now they've both

vanished. If you look at the world they

came out of, intelligence agencies have

warned for decades that foreign agents

target America's space and defense

world. McCassland was practically a

walking hard drive, not for a single

piece of knowledge, but for the vault in

his head. The same way Monica's value

wasn't just Mandalloy. It was the person

behind it. A mind capable of solving one

of the toughest problems in American

rocketry is capable of solving the next

one, too. So, let's go back to June

22nd, 2025, when the woman who taught us

how to tame fire vanished.

The search is on for a 60-year-old woman

missing in the National Forest. Monica

Resza was last seen near Mount Waterman

yesterday at about 9:00 a.m.

>> The LA County Sheriff's Department's

Presenta Valley Station and Montro

search and rescue have been working

around the clock on this one. Search and

rescue scoured the area for 8 days by

land and by air, but found nothing other

than Monica's beanie, which photographs

from the day show was tucked into the

hip belt of her pack. The visor was

recovered about 400 yd off the trail the

day after her disappearance. When no

other evidence surfaced as is protocol,

the synthetic aperture radar mission was

concluded and the investigation was

handed off to the homicide bureau, the

missing person's unit. But Monica's

community had already mobilized,

organizing volunteer groups, including

expert mountain rescue teams who began

searching the areas outside the search

and rescue perimeter and would continue

to search by land and by drone when the

official search and rescue mission was

called off. Hikers have been known to

survive for two to three weeks in the

wilderness at times, but the weeks wore

on and the volunteer exhibitions kept

going out every few days. Hope of rescue

dimmed, but the goal was to at least

recover Monica's body. The organizers

begged for volunteers to keep deploying

until Monica's birthday in December, six

whole months after her disappearance.

The weeks turned into months, and still

no sign of Monica. She had vanished

without a trace. That fateful June

morning, Monica was well equipped with a

backpack, hiking boots, hiking pants,

and plenty of water. It's still unclear

if she had her cell phone on her. Some

theorized she could have been attacked

by a mountain lion or bear, but no dens

were found in the area. No remains. The

San Gabriels are mountain lion country.

The terrain is extremely rugged. There

are many giant boulders and cavelike

shelters that could obscure Monica from

the view of rescuers. Still, multiple

civilian searchers who descended the

ravine nearest to Monica's last reported

location described the terrain as steep,

but not steep enough to be fatal if

someone fell. Something about her

disappearance feels off. If someone had

wanted to kidnap Monica, it's

conceivable they could have intercepted

her on the trail and led her to a car

parked along a different section of the

highway. We may never know if her

disappearance was just a tragic twist of

fate, a crime of opportunity, or

something much more nefarious.

Beyond her invention of the Mandaloy,

the heatresistant coating for interiors

of rockets and satellites that allow for

entry and re-entry into our atmosphere.

Most importantly, we want to honor

Monica's life. The outpouring of prayer,

support, and resources from her family,

friends, and colleagues demonstrates how

deeply she is and will continue to be

missed. The last entry on the volunteer

Facebook group for Monica's search and

rescue efforts was on November 18th,

2025.

150 days after her disappearance, the

group was still planning a recovery

expedition that week. As disturbing as

Monica's disappearance is, 4 days later,

another woman disappeared.

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It's been nearly a month since anyone

has seen Melissa Casillas. Her

stepdaughter says a doorbell camera

showed Casillas walking a couple miles

away with a backpack and she was last

seen walking on a highway in Tal County

about a month ago. It was June 26th. A

family friend even saw her walking along

the highway. He turned around to see if

she needed help, but then all he saw was

a blue truck driving by. No Casillas.

Her family thinks she got into that

truck. Her family says her personal

belongings are all still at home,

including her phone, which had been

factory reset.

>> This time, an hour from Los Alamos

National Laboratory in Ranchos Deeos.

Melissa Casillas is a 53-year-old

administrative assistant at Los Alamos

National Laboratory, one of the most

secretive research sites on Earth and of

course the original home to the

Manhattan Project where the first atomic

bomb was developed under Oppenheimer. On

the morning of June 26th, 2025, around

6:15 a.m., Melissa dropped her husband

Markoff at the campus. He worked at the

lab as a superintendent and said he

watched Melissa swipe her badge at the

gate. But instead of heading to work,

Melissa drove an hour back home, telling

her daughter Sierra she'd forgotten her

badge and was going to work from home

instead. Sierra didn't think anything of

it and left for her own job. Around

12:30, Melissa dropped off lunch for her

daughter at her work. Everything seemed

normal, but around 1:30, Mark got a call

from Melissa's boss. She never showed up

at work. He texted Sierra, who sent a

text to her mom, and it was quickly

marked as red. But by 2:30, her second

text wouldn't deliver at all. Around

2:15, doorbell cameras caught Melissa

walking along State Road 518 in a

turquoise shirt, blue jeans, and a

maroon sweatshirt around her waist.

Heading in the direction of Carson

National Forest about three miles from

her house. Back at the house, her

daughter came home to a locked door and

Melissa's car in the driveway. Inside,

she found her mom's purse, wallet, keys,

and both her work and personal phones.

When she picked one of the phones up,

she realized it had been factory reset.

A check she was supposed to cash was

sitting there, too, next to a few dollar

bills. Her daughter searched through her

things and realized she might have taken

a toothbrush, a hair iron, and other

personal items. A witness later reported

that around the same time Melissa was

seen on surveillance footage, they saw a

blue Dodge truck following her. They

also said she was walking like she was

hurt or intoxicated. The family later

disputed it, saying that the witness

described a woman in a white shirt, not

turquoise, which was what Melissa was

wearing. Either way, Melissa was gone.

When her family, Sierra and Mark,

compared notes, the stories didn't match

up. Melissa told her daughter she came

home because she forgot her badge, but

Mark said he watched her swipe in with

it. Either one of them was wrong or

Melissa wasn't telling the truth. After

going through her things, Sierra

realized that her mother was under

enormous pressure. On an interview with

Deline, she said that there was a lot

crumbling down on her that we didn't

know about. Melissa was also feeling

financial stress. Her husband said that

after their daughter Sierra was in a bad

car accident, there was supposed to be a

settlement, but it fell through. Her

2022 GoFundMe mentions that the accident

left her family with medical costs most

could never fathom. As Sierra and her

father started piecing things together,

they began suspecting Melissa might have

left on her own. And when you look at

the items she took, like a toothbrush

and hair straightener, it tells us a few

things. Abductees don't usually take

their hair straighteners, and a suicidal

person doesn't care about frizzy hair.

This behavior describes someone who

might be expecting to go somewhere with

running electricity, a mirror, and maybe

even someone to see. The factory reset

phones left at home are another clue. If

she had left voluntarily, she might have

wanted to wipe her message history and

make herself harder to track down. The

Los Alamos connection, of course, put

Melissa on everyone's radar. And even

though administrative roles can overlap

with classified material, we don't know

what her position entailed. And when you

add in the confusion about the badge,

the factory reset phones, the personal

items she took, and the financial

stress, this starts to look like someone

who made a decision to disappear on her

own terms. Maybe she saw something she

wasn't supposed to at the lab. And her

phone and hair appliance were a neat

cover story for somebody who didn't want

her to speak out. Whatever happened,

Melissa's still missing and her family

is still looking. Her parents have set

up a GoFundMe offering a $5,000 reward

for any information that brings her

home. But not every disappearance near a

sensitive facility is foul play. The

evidence looks like it points somewhere

more tragic and personal than a sinister

conspiracy. We're including her because

she deserves to be found, but we're not

including her as evidence of something

darker.

For that, we have to look 700 miles west

at what was happening under the stars

just outside Los Angeles. A man shot and

killed 3 days ago at his home in the

Analopee Valley community of Lano has

been identified as Carl Grill Mayor. He

was a Caltech scientist. Colleagues say

the 67-year-old made groundbreaking

discoveries in astronomy and will be

greatly missed.

>> On February 16th, 2026, about 30 mi

northeast of Waterman Mountain, where

Monica Resza disappeared, another

colleague from Caltech and JPL would

meet an equally tragic and suspicious

end. the great astronomer Carl Gilmare.

In the small unincorporated community of

Lano, tucked away near the Los Angeles

and San Bernardino County line, a

worldclass astronomer had built his own

observatory on a remote stretch of land.

He chose to set up shop in the secluded

Analopee Valley, 20 m east of Palmdale,

precisely because of how thinly

populated it was. Carl Gilmare wanted

the darkest night skies possible with

the least amount of light pollution.

Carl Johan Gilmare, born in Calgary,

Alberta in 1959, dedicated his life to

studying galactic astronomy in distant

planets. His work focused on mapping the

structure of the Milky Way, identifying

stellar streams, remnants of smaller

galaxies or clusters torn apart by

gravitational forces. These incredibly

faint, stretched out ribbons of stars

drift through our Milky Way and tell the

story of what was left behind. Modern

science sometimes suffers from hypers

specialization. But Carl Gilmare did

not. Within astrophysics, he was a

renaissance man, a polymath with

research interests at every scale. From

the research of our own solar system to

giant galaxy clusters to the search for

extraterrestrial life. Grilmare

discovered the leafy stream, a vast

river of stars yanked into the Milky Way

from nearby globular clusters. Using the

Sloan Digital Survey or SDSS, Grilmare

tracked subtle disturbances in the paths

of these stellar streams, leading to key

insights into dark matter, a mysterious

missing mass which forms a cosmic glue

that holds galaxies in their clusters

together. Stars, galaxies, planets, and

matter as we know it are only 5% of the

observable universe. Think of them as

the foam on an incoming wave crashing on

the beach. Dark matter forms much of the

rest of the ocean. A vast halo of dark

matter envelops the Milky Way. Its

immense gravity would disturb the path

of incoming stellar streams by tugging

on them and changing their paths. And by

tracking these changes, Gilmare was able

to make profound insights into one of

the universe's biggest mysteries. What

is most of it made out of? Through his

comprehensive study of stellar streams,

Gilmare helped reshape our understanding

of how galaxies evolve. And his work

with exoplanets was arguably even more

profound. Using the Spitzer Space

Telescope, Gilmare did pioneering work

studying the atmospheres of exoplanets,

breaking down light passing through

distant worlds to search for molecular

fingerprints that tell us what they're

made of. In 2007, Gilmare was part of

the team that discovered the first ever

instance of water vapor in an

exoplanet's atmosphere. Today, the

techniques he pioneered are proving

pivotal in the scientific search for

alien life. As the same capabilities can

now probe the atmospheres of habitable

planets for bio signatures, footprints

of living ecology altering the planet's

chemical balance. His colleague at

Caltech, Sergio Fiardo Aosta, described

his approach to exoplanets and galactic

structures as truly detective work. Carl

Greamer is an extremely uh was an

extremely uh renowned scientist and I

would say he still is because his legacy

will keep on

>> and it becomes the consensus reality in

conventional astronomy that we're not

alone. We'll owe a lot of that paradigm

shattering insight to Dr. Gilmir's

groundwork. But Gilmare also studied

celestial bodies much closer to home. He

worked closely with Neoise, an

instrument which serves as planetary

defense. You heard me right. Neoise

could be the first line of defense

against humans going the way of the

dinosaurs. So, Gilmir had as front line

of view as you can get when it came to

the potential for Earth's extinction.

He's published extensively and his

research has earned him a number of

accolades, including NASA's exceptional

scientific achievement medal in 2011.

Recently, Gilmare had begun work on a

new project, testing new instrumentation

at Caltech's Palomar Observatory to

monitor for meteor impacts on the moon's

surface during an upcoming lunar

eclipse. Another colleague,

collaborator, and lead scientist, Joe

Masiierro, said, "It is a really

exciting project, and I know Carl was

looking forward to seeing what we could

learn about the near space environment

from that. It made perfect sense that

someone so passionate about the night

skies would build a home outfitted with

his own observatory. And what makes no

sense is why a neighbor would seemingly

stalk him on his property in December

and returned to kill him in February. On

December 20th, 2025, according to

sheriff officials in court records, Carl

Gilmer called the police to report

someone trespassing on his sprawling lot

in Lo. Deputies were dispatched and when

they arrived, they found 29-year-old

Lano resident Freddy Snyder wandering

the rugged landscape nearby carrying a

loaded unregistered rifle. Snyder

claimed he was just headed to the post

office and carried the weapon for

self-defense against wild animals. But

the LA Times uncovered Snyder's property

records, indicating the post office was

in the opposite direction of his and

Gilmare's home. The sheriff's arrested

Snyder on a felony weapons charge and

booked him at the Palmdale Station Jail,

where he was accused of attempting to

escape before his court appearance. When

Snyder showed up at court, the judge

told him to complete a gun safety

course, citing his lack of past criminal

record and an unnecessary prosecutions

law as the reason for his leniency.

Snyder was released from jail on his own

recgnissance. Things calmed in the new

year, at least temporarily, until

another 911 call came in on February

16th. At 6:10 a.m., deputies responded

to a 911 call for assault with a deadly

weapon. Carl Grilmare had been shot on

his porch. Paramedics pronounced him

dead at the scene. While the deputies

responded to the 911 call at the

Grillare residence, another call came

in. A carjacking had occurred just down

the road. Freddy Snyder was arrested for

the carjacking and was subsequently

linked to Gilmare's shooting. Snyder,

the man who was released from custody

for lacking a criminal record, was now

charged with several felonies, including

burglary, carjacking, and murder. This

time, his bail was set at just above $3

million. Investigators have yet to

uncover a motive, and they've found no

evidence that Snider and Grillare were

acquainted. No one has an explanation

for why this man suddenly went on a

crime spree that began and ended with

Carl Gilmare. And Freddy Snider's

arraignment was postponed from March

26th to April 29th. So, it may take many

months to uncover just what happened

here. Could Grill have stumbled upon

something he wasn't supposed to? Was

Snider being controlled by darker

forces? Was he just a pathy or an

extension of something deeper? Recently,

Dr. Grilmare had been working on the

revolutionary Vera Rubin Observatory, an

observatory which saw its first light

mere months before his untimely death.

The Vera Rubin Observatory is one of the

largest scale surveys of the sky ever

undertaken. It produces over a thousand

images every night covering the entire

southern hemisphere from horizon to

horizon. And it promises to

revolutionize the search for

interstellar objects. Currently, we've

only ever detected three objects

confirmed to be entering the solar

system from beyond, but astronomers

estimate Vera Rubin will discover 50 by

the time its run is over. It will show

us our own solar system in unprecedented

detail. On its first act of night, it

revealed over 2,000 previously

undiscovered asteroids. Here's where

things take an interesting, albeit very

speculative, turn. In 2017, we

discovered Amua Mua, the first ever

interstellar object to visit our solar

system. It had some very strange

properties, especially the way it

accelerated without any visible

commentary tail, leading past American

alchemy guest and Harvard astrophysicist

Avi Lobe to speculate that it may be a

spacecraft or alien artifact. It was

given the name of Mua Mua because it

means in the Hawaiian language a scout

>> uh a messenger from far away.

>> All the proposals that were put on the

table to explain the anomalies of Amua

Mua invoked a rock of a type that we've

never seen before. With Reuben now

online, we're poised to discover many

more Umua Muas. Which is why Vera Rubin

is now motivating mainstream SETI

researchers to start scanning our solar

system for more anomalies which could be

alien spacecraft or probes. If our solar

system is in fact filled in

extraterrestrial spacecrafts and

artifacts from visiting civilizations,

Reuben is perfectly poised to pick them

up. But there's also a big limitation.

All of Reubin's imagery has to be

approved by the Pentagon. This is not a

conspiracy theory. It's a publicly known

fact as reported in this article from

The Atlantic. Every image gets reviewed

by the intelligence agencies before the

scientific community is allowed to see

it. As The Atlantic article reports, a

government agency would chip in $5

million for the construction of a

dedicated network for moving sensitive

data. Each time the telescope were to

take one of its 30-second tile images of

the sky, the file would be immediately

encrypted without anyone looking at it

first and then sent to a secure facility

in California. Next, an automated system

would compare the image with previous

images of the same tile. It would cut

out small postage stamp pictures of any

new object it finds, be they asteroids,

exploding stars, or spy satellite. It

would filter out the postage stamps that

might depict secret US assets and one

minute later send all the rest together

with their coordinates to an alert

service available to astronomers

worldwide. This level of intense

intelligence community oversight over

what you might expect to be a

conventional astronomical tool is not

unprecedented. A much smaller all sky

survey called Pan Stars, the same one

which discovered AmuA Mua, underwent

massive censorship from the Air Force

with swaths of imagery redacted or

blacked out. Astronomers complained that

these redactions often got in the way of

their work. Now, what if you were to

spot a UFO on one of these things? Of

course, the publicly stated reason for

this has nothing to do with UFOs and

everything to do with classified spy

satellites and military space assets.

Most of the time this is probably true,

but it does have other implications.

Past American alchemist Dr. Beatatrice

V. Riel discovered a possibly vast

population of unknown objects orbiting

the Earth. She found tens of thousands

of transients, light reflecting

mirrorlike objects orbiting the Earth.

and she found them on astronomical

plates from 1949 to 1957

before Sputnik or any American

satellites were up in space. She also

found them on astronomical plates from

the Palomar Observatory, the same place

associated with Carl Grilmare. Voral is

currently working on replicating her

results. And if I had to guess, I think

we're going to find some interesting

corroboration for them.

>> I've been working with transients for a

while. I think a lot of people know

about this transient work where where we

have been looking for like multiple

transients in images. Sometimes you can

see multiple of them appearing and

vanishing within half an hour.

>> So if there truly is a population of

UFOs surrounding the Earth, the Reuben

telescope, Grillare's pet project at the

end of his life would certainly catch

them. But again, anything it sees would

have to get a Pentagon stamp of approval

before ever reaching the general public

and scientific community. Now, this is

definite speculation, and I want to make

the disclaimer that there's no direct

evidence suggesting this, but the

question has to be asked. Did Grillare

potentially see something in the Reuben

data that wasn't meant for public

release? He might have seen something

classified, but why would he want to

report on that? If he saw something more

anomalous, it would be hard to tell him

in good faith as a scientist to not tell

the public. We may never know, but Dr.

Gilmare's targeted killing leaves many

questions unanswered. Snider's bizarre

lenient treatment. The disappearances of

General McCass, Monica Resza, and

Melissa are all notable because of the

access they had to top secret

intelligence and technology produced at

our nation's premier space, science, and

defense facilities. The murder of Carl

Gilmare, if premeditated and

intentional, would represent a

terrifying escalation in this attack on

science. A mind like Gilmar's doesn't

come along very often. A senseless act

of violence is always a tragedy. But

when the expertise of an astronomer like

Carl is wiped off the planet, we can

leave no stone left unturned. Which

brings us to another shocking and

senseless act of violence that took out

another of the world's preeminent

scientific minds. This time, an expert

on nuclear fusion.

Nuno Felipe Gomez Lurero was born in

1977 in Visu, a city in central

Portugal. Even as a little boy, he

always knew he wanted to be a scientist.

In a 2018 MIT profile, Nuno recalled how

everyone else wanted to be a policeman

or a fireman. He couldn't quite place

the origin of his scientific interest.

He followed that passion to Lisbon where

he received his undergraduate and

master's degree at the Instituto

Superior Technico in Lisbon. Nuno then

went on to attend Imperial College in

London, earning a doctorate in physics

in 2005 with a dissertation on tearing

modes in plasma. After graduating, Nuno

arrived in the United States to join

Princeton University as a postdoctoral

researcher at the plasma physics lab in

2005.

From 2007 to 2016, Nuno worked in a

laboratory for the UK Atomic Energy

Authority and as a researcher at the

Plasma and Nuclear Fusion Institute in

Portugal. In 2016, Lura returned to the

United States, joining the faculty at

MIT as a professor in fusion scientist.

>> I'm Nuno Lorero. I'm a professor at MIT.

Uh I'm an appointment in nuclear science

and engineering. He flourished at MIT

and by 2022 became deputy director of

MIT's largest lab, the plasma science

infusion center,

>> which is an umbrella research center at

MIT

for all the plasma and fusion related

activities that we do on campus.

And in January 2025, President Joe Biden

presented him with the Presidential

Early Career Award, the highest US

government honor for young scientists.

To say Nuno was a renowned physicist

would be a massive understatement. He

was a leading expert in plasma physics.

The work Nuno was conducting at MIT was

attempting to solve the hardest problems

in nuclear fusion.

problems that would unlock our

capabilities in clean fusion power,

potentially solving the world's energy

crisis forever. For those unaware,

nuclear fusion would be the ultimate

clean energy dream, bringing the sun to

the earth and powering our whole

society. No fossil fuel pollution or

Chernobyl style meltdown necessary.

Wielding fusion power would dramatically

reduce the human need for fossil fuels.

And with that, we might be able to avoid

a lot of the geopolitical escapades

we're seeing happening today.

But there's one great challenge. Plasma

is a chaotic soup of charged ionized gas

which behaves in wildly unpredictable

ways. To contain it and to force the

atoms to fuse demands a special magnetic

field, one which binds the plasma up

into just the right geometry and under

just enough pressure to force the atoms

to merge despite the immense repulsive

force between them. There are many

challenges to nuclear fusion, but

perhaps the greatest is the problem of

the containment field. It is no simple

task, but it's where Nuno Lero excelled.

His research was especially focused on

one of the greatest challenges in plasma

containment fields, magnetic

reconnection.

Consider the loops of plasma we see on

the sun. Plasma gets trapped in arcs of

opposite magnetic force. It usually gets

trapped in tubes of electromagnetic

energy. Hot particles rising out of the

sun's surface and falling back in.

Sometimes, like a rubber band that's

been stretched too much, it snaps. The

field lines break. All the energy stored

in the field bursts out as the particles

heat up and accelerate out. Then the

field reconnects. This process causes

solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

The kind of events that could one day

fry our entire grid with an

electromagnetic pulse or EMP. Nuno was a

real blue sky researcher studying the

phenomenon of magnetic reconnection

itself.

But his work had extremely practical

applications. Because just as

reconnection causes flares from the sun,

it's also a major factor in our attempts

to bring the sun's power down to Earth

and do so in the form of real nuclear

fusion. Giant donut-shaped tokamac

reactors use powerful magnets to contain

superheated plasma. And magnetic

reconnection is one of the greatest

obstacles to sustained nuclear fusion.

Just like plasma ejections from the sun,

often with fusion, a leak gets created

leading to rapid cooling and pressure

loss. This effectively stops the fusion

process dead in its tracks. Nuno Lurero

was one of the world's experts in

understanding the intricacies of exactly

how and why these magnetic reconnection

leaks happen. We don't know if Nuno came

close to solving the problem of magnetic

field line breaks, but we do know he was

probably as close as anybody. And at 47

years old, it's safe to say he had many

impressive decades of discovery and

invention ahead of him. Except on

December 15th, Dr. Nuno Lorero was

gunned down inside his Brookline,

Massachusetts home.

Nuno Lorero was a husband, a father, an

award-winning scientist, an expert in

his field. He was shot in the foyer of

his apartment while his wife, mother,

and daughters played a card game inside.

The only other person who saw his killer

was his 12-year-old daughter, who first

answered the door for what she thought

was a delivery man. Later, authorities

would report that Clauddio Emanuel Neves

Valente, the Portuguese national and top

suspect in the shooting at Brown

University that had occurred just 2 days

prior, was likely also Nuno's killer. In

some ways, this seemed very plausible.

Nuno and Cladio had both studied physics

together 20 years ago at Portugal's

Instituto Superior Technico. Physics

programs are tight-knit. They're also

highly competitive. The men certainly

knew each other and were part of the

same graduating class, but Nuno was

actually an average student in

undergrad, whereas Clauddio was tied

with another student for top of his

class. Claudio had his heart set on MIT

for graduate school, but as a surprise

to everyone, he didn't score very well

on his graduate school admissions test,

making MIT a reach. He ultimately didn't

get in. Clauddio Valente was accepted to

Brown University instead, but felt let

down by a lack of academic rigor in

their physics program, insisting his

classes were too easy, covering material

he'd already learned in undergrad.

Claudio is described as egotistical and

combative by his classmates at Brown. He

only made it a year into the program

before taking a leave of absence.

Eventually, he dropped out of the

program entirely and returned to

Portugal. That year, he posted a

disgruntled note online. Happy now? And

some now believe Valente harbored deep

resentment for his former classmate Nuno

Lorero, whose massive success would have

been assault in the wound.

Back in Portugal, tail between his legs,

Valente worked at an internet company

called Sappo or SAP OO. His colleagues

described him as highly competent and

rigorous, polite, but aloof. His closest

friend at work, Sergio Bastos, who

worked with him for 7 years, insisted

Valente was an extraordinary

professional. He did things that few

people were capable of doing, but

admitted that he was very lonely. I

think one of the great regrets he had

was that he couldn't create his own

family. Mr. Basau said he had few social

skills, and I don't think he had any

girlfriends in the years we worked

together.

One day in 2013, Valente reported to

work. He declared it would be his last

day. He turned in his laptop and he was

never seen again.

Basos tried in vain to reach out, but at

this point, no one from Valente's former

life could make contact, including his

own family. In 2017, Valente applied for

and was awarded a visa to the United

States. He settled in Miami, Florida,

where authorities are still trying to

piece together how exactly he spent his

time. What we do know is that for the

past 3 years, Valente rented a storage

unit in Salem, New Hampshire, and

returned to Providence numerous times to

conduct surveillance on the Brown

campus.

Investigators eventually traced Valente

to Boston as early as November 17th,

2025.

By late November, he had checked into a

Boston hotel and began making repeated

trips to Providence.

A janitor at Brown saw a masked man

matching Valent's description inside the

Baris and Holly engineering building on

November 28th and again on December 1st.

On December 1st, Valente rented a blueg

gray Nissan Sentra with Florida plates.

That car was seen repeatedly around

Brown between December 1st and December

12th. The picture was clear. This was

pre-operational reconnaissance.

Valente executed his plan on Saturday,

December 13th, 2025. He barged into an

open lecture hall in the Bareris and

Holly building, the home of the physics

department where students were taking

final exams before their winter holiday.

Around 400 p.m., Valente opened fire

with a 9mm pistol, killing two students

and injuring nine others.

Valente would leave a confessional video

behind. It was filmed in his storage

unit as a massive federal and state

manhunt was still underway. He confessed

that he had spent six semesters planning

his attack at Brown. After the shooting

on December 13th, Valente successfully

evaded law enforcement for two full days

using a burner phone with a European SIM

card, as well as swapping out credit

cards and the license plate on his

rental car. His identity remained a

mystery. Valente might have gotten away

with his crimes, except for the fact

that he had one more act of violence

planned. At some point between Saturday

and Sunday, Valente drove back to

Boston. And on Monday, December 15th,

Valente spent the day pacing around

Commonwealth Avenue. Maybe Valente saw

Lorero as a representation of everything

he couldn't amount to. a successful

academic, a family man, a leader in his

field of physics, a successful immigrant

to America. This may have just been a

modern physics-based rendition of an

age-old Shakespearean play, but still,

there's something both strangely

calculated and apprehensive about

Claudia Valente's actions leading up to

his confrontation with Lurero.

Authorities have much more information

about Valente's whereabouts in

Providence prior to his Brown shooting.

After that, he kind of goes dark and for

the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday,

Valente seems to drop off the map. On

Monday, December 15th, Providence police

were still circulating surveillance

clips from Brown. They were also still

interviewing survivors. The shooter had

not been identified. That same evening,

at about 8:30 p.m., Lora was shot at his

home on Gibb Street in Brooklyn,

Massachusetts. Earlier that day, the

familiar Nissan made its first

appearance parked on Babcock Street

around 8:00 a.m., five or six blocks

from Lurero's home. Then, starting

around 1:20 p.m., police say security

cameras recorded a masked person at

different points along Commonwealth

Avenue. Nuno reportedly got home from

overseeing PhD qualifying exams at MIT

that day around 6:00 p.m. At 8:23 p.m.,

a camera records the suspect, now masked

and wearing a vest over his darker

clothing. At 8:30 p.m., the doorbell to

Lero's apartment rings repeatedly. His

youngest daughter opens the front door

and peaks into the foyer.

She sees through the glass a man

standing inside of the building, but on

the other side of the foyer door. Her

description of the man's clothing is

mostly in line with the footage

revealed, but she adds that the yellow

vest he wore had some gray stripes.

There are a few discrepancies in her

observations compared to the footage

seen of the suspect that day. She even

describes the shooter as having short

facial hair, which suggests that he's

not wearing a mask. And according to

her, he's also wearing a winter hat and

carrying a cardboard package about the

size of a dictionary. She thinks he's a

delivery man because the package has a

barcode on it. Lorero's daughter returns

to the living room as Nuno replaces her

at the front door to deal with the

visitor.

The whole family hears gunshots and

rushes to Lorero, who is wounded in the

upper left chest, upper abdomen, right

thigh, and has a graze wound through his

left thigh. The daughter sees the

shooter run to a blue or gray car parked

across the street. At 8:35 p.m., the

cameras outside a Boston University

Police Department record a Nissan

operated by someone wearing a high-rise

vest. Minutes later, another camera

records the vehicle heading out of the

city. If we're to believe that the

shooter was Valente, it seems clear that

once Lorero was shot, he immediately

went into hiden. He switched the rental

car's plates to an unregistered plate

from Maine, then drove to his storage

facility in New Hampshire. Investigators

said Valente entered that facility about

an hour after the Brooklyn shooting. The

Department of Justice transcript of the

videos that Valente later recorded in

that storage unit adds a very grim layer

to the story. In these recordings,

Valente said he had planned the Brown

attack for a long time. The language

Valente uses implies that both of the

attacks were intentional, but it still

leaves the reason for targeting Lorero

maddeningly vague. Yes, the two men had

studied in the same university in the

1990s, but there's no evidence of a

recent dispute, direct contact, or a

concrete grievance tied to the Brooklyn

attack. A second anomaly is the mismatch

between planning and execution. Valente

seems to have surveiled Brown

repeatedly. He would return constantly

to the same building. He rented both a

car and storage unit in advance. Yet his

own post crime confession depicts the

actual Brown shooting as totally

botched. He said he never wanted to do

it in an auditorium. He even suggested

that people could have escaped via an

emergency exit. He also complained about

his eye injury and described the whole

thing as quote a little incompetent. A

third anomaly is the timeline gap

between the two attacks. Where exactly

was Valente in the roughly 48 hours

before Lero was shot? Where was he

staying? How did he locate Lorero? How

could he even be sure Lurero was home?

Nuno had only just returned from a trip

to DC. Was he being tracked somehow?

Valente's videos hint that the second

slang was also intentional, but not how

far back the planning went. Detectives

arrived on the scene to find Lorero

distressed, but consciously alert. As

he's transported to the hospital, one

paramedic says he doesn't say anything.

She believes he was in shock. He answers

questions by shaking his head, but at

the hospital, he was able to provide his

name and information. If Lorero had

recognized his possibly unmasked killer

as his former classmate, would he have

said anything? Tragically, Nuno Lurero

went into surgery that evening, but did

not survive. He was pronounced dead the

following morning.

In the days that followed, they spoke to

the MIT professor's family and

colleagues, and they said that there was

no threat present, and they still have

no motive. Everything about this case is

shocking, but particularly Valent's

combination of caution and sloppiness.

He went to great efforts and lengths in

Providence to wipe any trace of his

movements, keep his identity hidden, but

then he arrives in Boston and paces back

and forth in public locations that would

obviously have security cameras. It

almost seems as if he was having cold

feet. Or maybe he was awaiting

instruction, subliminal or conscious

instruction.

As we've covered on this show, the

horrifying ability to program assassins

is remarkably easy, and it's been

demonstrated by governments globally and

employed to take out targets at the

highest level. What remains unresolved

is why Lurero was chosen. what exactly

happened in the two days between the

Brown massacre and the Brooklyn attack

and whether Lorero had been a

long-standing target or simply became

one after the Brown shooting was already

underway. What we do know is that Nuno

Lorero's loss is devastating. He wasn't

just the head of MIT's plasma science

infusion center. Nuno was still an

active professor, training the next

generation of top scientific minds to

push us farther in harnessing the power

of our sun and creating clean energy on

Earth. He was twice awarded the MIT

Department of Nuclear Science and

Engineering Outstanding Professor Award.

He was given this for the beloved