At least 10 scientists tied to sensitive US research have died or disappeared in recent years, sparking federal investigation

It always amazes me that if you describe something bad that trump did but tell them Biden did it, MAGAs get all enraged but then you reveal that it was actually Trump that did it and suddenly they flip their stance and are totally ok with it. Every time.

This is what a cult does. They care more about supporting their leader than truth

Your parents are imbeciles.

Elon and his cronies were given free rein of the entire government's systems and were installing their own networking equipment and all sorts of blatantly illegal shit. At this point you can probably safely assume that if the US government held any data about you that it's out in the open.

This. Not enough people can picture a scene.

People have largely forgotten about the Helsinki meeting. The CIA-asset-death-montage that followed was in and out of the world’s consciousness within a month.

Hopefully we don't get invisible nano garrottes

And "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie).  Such an underrated movie. 

I doubt there is that much Sci-Fi actually happening here…but yea, I see it. 

Also every episode of The Blacklist.

I feel like Ive heard people say this in response to numerous “people have mysteriously died” comments with different mysterious dying scenarios

... And many other sci-fi movies or just about any conspiracy theory. Have the people on the list are far from scientists. The other half have a very questionable field.. borderline pseudoscience like that "anti gravity researcher" the UFO subs like to talk about.

Sounds like the curse of Tutankhamen, where everyone involved in the excavation died of relatively common causes many years afterwards.

Good points. One small addition to what you mentioned, “Disappeared hiking” only sounds mysterious to someone who has never been hiking. A bunch of republicans announce some totally really super serious conspiracy, that they are definitely going to get to the bottom of. Unrelated to midterms or the decaying level of trust in national law enforcement agencies. 

Aeronautics, nuclear science, astronomy how many people work on or have worked in these fields even tangentially. Because that’s the group of 10 refers to  Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?  What’s the death rate for a hundred thousand Americans a year? This took place over years. This group would also be older since not to many 4 year olds are involved in aerospace research. Probably skew to men  How many people is that? Hundreds?  What percentage of that will appear strange?  This really doesn’t seem significant 

Thank you! This “list of suspicious scientist deaths/disappearances” thing has been a common conspiracy theorist motif for decades. The government is probably giving it credence rn because it is a distraction, and importantly, it lets their base point to it as “proof” of the Trump government’s “transparency”

Or that the institutions they work for have roughly 25,000 employees total? In a group that large, there's going to be *somebody* who meets an untoward fate.

Can you credibly source this? Credible sourcing requirements don't discriminate between conspiracy theorists and debunkers. I'm the latter.

Yeah this whole thing is ridiculous. Ten people dying out of thousands of employees over a three year period isn’t a conspiracy, it’s statistics.

As Hegseth?

I’ll see you in Gomorrah, brother.

I don’t have the caps to get on the strip

Oooh something tells me that they aren't friends. A little too much melanin for old Keggy.

If there's anybody in the world I can look at and just tell they love cocaine, it's definitely that guy

Also, even if all of these people had a Top Secret clearances — and they didn't — the number of people with TS clearances in the US is over 1.25 million (as of 2019). In a sample set that large you are bound to get deaths, disappearances, suicides, etc. over a period of years. Even if they were all Q Clearance holders, that's still [on the order of 100,000 people](https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2021/11/12/how-many-people-have-q-clearance/) and over time you'd expect to see some "unusual" deaths (the suicide rate in the USA is something like 14 per 100,000 per year, as just one benchmark). But if the bar is just "a person who has some connection to US national security or a professor whose job includes the word 'nuclear' in the title" then that is going to be a lot of people. (The fact that these people are not joined by any a well-defined category here — a peaceful fusion researcher, a general, a construction foreman — makes it all the more sus.) The current cabinet of the US government is full of bonafide conspiracy theorists. This is what you get when you have conspiracy theorists running things. It is not only a distraction, it is very dangerous: these are people who lie through their teeth and chase noise to score political points. You can't disprove conspiracies to conspiracy theorists; if they decide everything is a big web, then that's what it'll look like. If they decide to use this kind of thing as a justification for some awful policy, facts won't save you.

It seems the administration is happy to play along with this because it distracts the conspiracy minded crowd away from the Epstein files. Trump's team has used conspiracy to their political advantage in the past with Q drop, "alien ships" that were likely drone warfare exercise in and around NJ in 2024, as was the aforementioned Epstein files before that one backfired on him. This feels like a very forced distraction more than anything to me.

It absolutely is, the fact it's been spun up out of nothing and now reported as fact at the same time the government cares about it is wild. This is a marketing campaign

Really the biggest consistency here is that the US clearly needs a better healthcare system since so many of these folks were driven to suicide. They very much weren't getting the mental health care that they needed

Wouldn't it be wild if one of them was actually abducted by foreign agents or something and they connected their disappearance to the other unrelated deaths so that nobody investigates it that thoroughly?  That sounds like the plot of a Monk episode.  Probably isn't true, though. 

> This is just like all the folks who started paying attention to... This also happened a few years ago with both weather/spy/whatever balloons, and again with train derailments. It's frequency illusion.

Same sort of thing with the drone insanity awhile back. People start paying attention to something without any context and make massive leaps of logic based on their own ignorance.

It often is in remote places. Depends where she went.

Sounds legit.

I mean, I am actually a scientist but the main reason I know this is BS is that The Atlantic just ran an excellent article picking apart all of the problems with this investigation. “The Single Dumbest Conspiracy Theory of 2026,” by Daniel Engber. It lays it all out using verifiable reporting.

Also, only like 2 of them are nuclear scientists. The others include a construction worker and an HR person.