THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE DISAPPEARANCE OF RETIRED GENERAL WILLIAM NEIL MCCASLAND
A mysterious series of disappearances has struck US personnel related to UFOs along Gen. McCasland, and is scaring whistleblowers.
By Lucianna Henry
On February 27th 2026, 68-year old Retired Major General William Neil McCasland (whose services at the highest level of secrecy in the military makes him one of the most knowledgeable servicemen in the USA when it comes to the deepest and darkest secrets of the country, including the famous ‘Legacy program’, or program of retrieval and reverse-engineering of crashed non-human UAP/UFO’s), left his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, without his watch or phone, but with a backpack, a wallet and a .38-calibre revolver in its holster for a trail-run, and never returned.
His concerned wife Susan McCasland-Wilkerson contacted the police and the search was quickly afoot in the neighbourhood where the General used to go running. Having failed to find him, the search extended to over 600 homes in the neighbourhood, with all door cameras, dash cams, wildlife cameras looked at, yielding no result. A US Air Force sweat-shirt was found but it is unclear if it belonged to the General.
Horse-back riders and three different types of search dogs including cadaver dogs (human remains detection dogs) joined the search, as well as drones and helicopters, some of them equipped with infrared cameras. Unfortunately, the unusual heat on the day gave all the rocks a heat signature that made it impossible to distinguish a human body. A ‘silver’ alert was raised. It indicates that it is a person with medical issues, or a person over the age of fifty, or that the person needs medication. Some rumours attributed the disappearance to the General having dementia.
This was strongly denied by his wife. She insists that he is very fit, both physically and mentally. He is an experienced hiker, very familiar with the environment around Albuquerque. The police also confirmed he did not have any sort of dementia. However, he apparently reported that he was experiencing brain fog episodes. The police insist it does not mean in any way that he was mentally incapacitated, though. Yet, the release on April 2nd of Mrs McCasland-Wilkerson’s call to 911 adds another twist to the story as she mentions in her call that she and her husband had recently consulted a doctor due to him having physical and mental issues such as anxiety, short-term memory problems and lack of sleep. She suggests in the call that she thinks he doesn’t want to be found because he turned his phone off and left it at home.
It is also worrying that the General took a revolver with him when he does not normally do so to go hiking. The 911 call also reveals that McCasland mentioned he didn’t want to live with body and mind deterioration. Yet, his wife later insisted that the General was in no way in a suicidal frame of mind. And why no suicide note? You would think that a careful planner like him would leave some explanation for his family.
Investigative journalist Ross Coulthart was amongst the first to alert the general public to this puzzling affair. He deplored the fact that the mainstream media did not pay attention to the matter for a very long time, whereas they covered the case of the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of a well-known TV presenter very extensively.
They are now catching up with their own reporting, as has the UFO community. Coulthart considers the disappearance of the highest importance and gravity, and for good reason. General McCasland is not an ordinary US General.
As a young man, General McCasland studied in the United States Air Force Academy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Air War College, and Harvard university, where his high achievements were noticed and led him to be included in some very highly classified projects, usually reserved for people more mature in years and experience. The General’s pedigree is impressive but too long to summarise here, so here are only some of the highest profile posts he has occupied during his illustrious career:
A number of classified projects in his early years in the military
Director of mission planning for the Aerospace Data Facility
Head of the Space Based Laser Project Office at Los Angeles Air Force Base (LAAFB)
Systems Program Director and Chief Engineer of the Navstar GPS Joint Program Office, the controlling authority for the Global Positioning System for government, commercial, and consumer applications.
Materiel wing director, Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate
Commander of the Phillips Research Site at Kirtland Air force base, where he worked closely with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
Vice commander of the Ogden Air Logistics Centre
Vice commander of the Space and Missile Systems Centre.
Director of space acquisition within the Office of the Under Secretary of the Air Force
Director of special programs within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defence for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.
Executive secretary for the Special Access Program Oversight Committee (SAPOC), in charge of the oversight and review body with full purview of all of America’s most sensitive and secretive knowledge, capabilities, and programs.
Commander of Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, where he led billions of dollars in advanced materials sciences and future weapons research across one of the largest scientific centres in the Department of Defence.
Since retiring from the army, General McCasland has been the director of engineering in a firm called ‘Applied technology associates’, specialising in missile defence, directed energy weapons, cyber warfare and space warfare.
Knowing all this, it is no surprise that the FBI has been brought in to help local authorities resolve the issue, but what is more significant is the involvement of the Kirtland Air Force Space. This is unusual to say the least and it goes some way to reinforce the idea that Coulthart is not the only one worrying about something sinister to do with the General’s disappearance.
There could however be a simple explanation like Kirtland base wanting to help find ‘one of their very own’, on account of his past services and out of loyalty and friendship to him. Incidentally, whilst at Kirtland Air Force base, McCasland had a close association with Michael Duggin, who was himself a UFO researcher for years, working as Project Blue book’s lead researcher J.Allen Hynek’s assistant.
Coulthart asserts that General McCasland, with his wealth of knowledge, could be extremely valuable for the USA’s adversaries, such as Russia and China in particular. Indeed, in the struggle for superiority in all fields but particularly in the space race, someone privy to the very latest space technologies and the reverse-engineering of crashed and recovered UFO’s is extremely valuable if they can be made to talk.
A week after The General’s disappearance, his wife Susan issued a statement saying that whilst her husband was in the Air Force, he had access to highly classified programs and information but it was years since he had access to that and it is unlikely he would have taken that with him, and also unlikely that somebody would have taken him because of it. Coulthart insists that although McCasland left the army in 2013, he carried on working with the department of defense and the Pentagon on secret defense projects. Mrs McCasland-Wilkerson said it was also true that he had a brief association with the UFO community through Tom DeLonge, founder of the organisation ‘To the Stars Academy’ (TTSA).
McCasland worked with him after he retired from the military as a consultant on technology and scientific matters but she doesn’t believe that connection with any of the UFO research would also be a reason to abduct him. She also said in her Facebook post : ‘Neil does not have any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash stored at Wright-Patt’ (Wright-Patterson air force base). Yet, this is in direct conflict with information learnt through the 2016 Wikileaks leaked emails, which led to Hillary Clinton’s defeat, when she had been expected to win the election against Donald Trump.
The emails revealed that General McCasland was very heavily involved in conversations and strategies to bring about UFO disclosure with Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta. Additionally, The leaked emails show that the conversations also included Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works former executive and vice President Robert F. Weiss, and retired Major General Michael Kerry. They were discussing and planning a cohesive disclosure project with the Defence Department, the National Intelligence Agency and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) for Clinton to divulge the truth about Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) to the American public and the world at large. Coulthart explains :
‘On the 24th of September 2016, there were recommendations from Neil McCasland for a White House memo, presumably to come from a future Hillary Clinton presidency, that would set out instructions for divulging information in coordination with the Defense Department, the Director of National Intelligence, and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.This sounds very much like General Neil McCasland was setting out a plan for UAP disclosure.
This was at the very very highest levels of the White House. It’s beyond doubt that this man is the single most important figure in the US to be so prominently involved in contemplating disclosure. He recognized the importance of having a controlled disclosure. He’s the guy who has disappeared. His disappearance should be of grave concern and I’m sure it is to the people in the US Air Force.’
One email in particular from Tom Delonge to John Podesta even mentioned how much McCasland had helped him with advice on bringing disclosure about and how he helped him put together the advisory team. It also mentioned that the General had worked for two years at the laboratory in Wright-Patterson where the remains of the Roswell crash were allegedly stored.
Tom DeLonge related to podcaster Joe Rogan that he met ‘the General’ (at the time he didn’t mention his name but we know from the emails leaked by Wikileaks that it was McCasland) who talked to him about UFO’s and aliens being real, and how there is a non-human-intelligence (NHI) engaging with this planet. He also revealed that during the cold war, the US army recovered a life form. Tom DeLonge stated that the General was briefing him and encouraging him to create TTSA in order to bring a level of awareness to the General public that there is a non-human intelligence engaging with planet earth.
In February 2026, Hillary Clinton, during a closed-door deposition in the US House Oversight Committee regarding Jeffrey Epstein, was asked if she was pleased that President Donald Trump directed to release all UFO files. She said she was, so long as files pertaining to national security matters remained undisclosed. She added it was an important matter to many people and ‘whatever can be disclosed should be disclosed’. She added that if she had been elected, she would have listened to John Podesta’s advice (on disclosure).
It has been suggested that perhaps the General’s wife is downplaying the amount of knowledge her husband has about the UFO/NHI in the hope it will keep him safer. But also, although she is presumably interested in the subject and in his work (she is herself an astro-physicist, a former astronaut candidate with NASA, lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force, and, according to Ross Coulthart in his book ‘In Plain Sight’, attended the secret UAP meetings with her husband, and of course she would know about the leaked emails), she doesn’t have the same clearance as her husband and therefore would not/should not have knowledge of everything he knows.
As divulged by a number of whistle-blowers such as David Grush in the 2023 UFO congressional hearing and Lue Elizondo (amongst others), the alleged keepers of the secret about the said NHI presence on earth have not stopped at anything - including murder - to avoid the matter entering public domain. Coulthart raises the fact that the disappearance occurred very shortly after president Donald J Trump’s directive on February 20th to release all UFO files. It follows that General McCasland, as someone who has previously been heavily involved in UFO secrets as well as being a key adviser in the UFO declassification project could be seen by those opposed to disclosure as someone to be silenced.
So McCasland might be wanted to talk, or to be silenced, and both scenarios put him in grave danger.
The plot thickens when you also consider that Monica Jacinto Reza, a rocket scientist who created and patented a ‘super-alloy’ involved in the construction of high oxygen-rich rocket environments whilst in the Air Force Laboratory headed by McCasland, disappeared in June 2025 in the Angeles mountains in California. The odd thing is that whilst the search parties were still going on, someone who still remains anonymous and unknown today posted a death notice that she had died on the day she disappeared. There has never been any formal obituary or death certificate because her body has never been found.
Just four days after Reza’s disappearance, Melissa Casias, scientific adviser and administrative assistant at Los Alamos National laboratory (LANL), who worked closely on US aerospace research with General McCasland, also vanished.
On February 16h 2026, Carl Grillmair, a renowned astrophysicist who reportedly worked on telescope projects powered by military technology, and credited for finding water on a distant planet, was shot dead at his home in California. General McCasland oversaw his work…
These cases ignited discussions and parallels with other deaths and disappearances that occurred prior to them. It should be noted that all together, nine scientists are concerned. All worked on high-level space projects, or nuclear research, and/or UFO related research.
Below is a time-line of the disappearances or death. Notice the recurrence of JPL and Los Alamos laboratory…
On July 30, 2023 at the age of 59, Michael David Hicks, a research scientist at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who was credited with publishing over 80 scientific papers and was part of multiple teams helping NASA understand the physical properties of comets and asteroids, died. The cause of death was never made public, and no record of an autopsy being performed could be found. Hicks was involved with the DART Project, NASA’s test to see if humans could deflect dangerous asteroids away from Earth. He also worked on the Deep Space 1 Mission, which tested new spacecraft technology that Carl Grillmair at JPL.
On July 4th, 2024 – Frank Maiwald, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory researcher died in Los Angeles at age 61, with no cause of death disclosed. His untimely death seems to have gone unnoticed by the mainstream media and the general public until now.
On May 4th, 2025 – Anthony Chavez, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory employee vanished during a walk and was never found.
June 22nd, 2025: Monica Reza: see above.
June 26th, 2025: Melissa Casias: see above
December 12th, 2025: Jason Thomas, a researcher at Novartis went missing on a hike. His body was recovered from a lake on March 17, 2026. No cause of death was found.
December 15th, 2025 : Nuno Loureiro, the head of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center was fatally attacked at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts.
February 16th, 2026 – Carl Grillmair: see above
February 27th, 2026 – William Neil McCasland, main subject of this article.
Coincidences or pattern? As always, one must not jump to conclusions but keep asking questions, as does Congressman Tim Burchet, who sees a clear pattern in these seemingly unrelated deaths and disappearances, and notes that the work several of them were doing has been linked to theories about extraterrestrial spacecraft.
Congressman Eric Burlison, member of UAP Causus, who leads the charge for greater UAP transparency in congress, has asked the FBI to investigate a possible link. His questions are informed by murders disguised as suicides amongst people intent on whistle-blowing in the circles of UFO research.
Rep Tim Burchett, who sits on the House Oversight Committee investigating UFO reports, declared : “Something dark is going on. I know these scientists and researchers. They have testified. We’ve got to get to the bottom of it,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s just too much, too much is going on right now, and by the way, I’m not suicidal. 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.” Burchett also stated that he was told by various sources that McCasland was the gatekeeper for UFO stuff. He also said that the fraternity of scientists working on the subject is very small and when something happens to one, they all pay attention. He says they are all very nervous at the moment. ‘This has had a real chilling effect. People don’t want to talk about this issue of Unidentified Flying Objects anymore. They are afraid, and probably rightfully so’.
When questioned about the possible link between those events, the police were unable to confirm there was one. However, former FBI assistant director Chris Swecker declared : ‘The FBI can’t have these examined in isolation and compartmentalise them as individual missing persons’. The Bernalillo County Sheriff Office also mentioned that they knew about the allegation of foul play in connection with the UFO matter and said : ‘Just because it’s crazy doesn’t mean it’s not true, but we have to look into the realities’.
They also said that they can neither state that the General was or was not abducted, or did or did not commit suicide. In fact, they have no clue as to what happened to the General…
Finally, asked if remote viewers had been tasked at some point to locate McCasland, Ross Coulthart said that he had two viewers contacting him with two different locations. One of them could see possible military buildings in an area a long way away from Albuquerque. He passed the information on to the Bernalillo sheriff office but as yet, he has not heard back them.
Sentinel News will keep you updated with the latest news on this subject. The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to questions at the time of writing.